In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured previous at the Fight from the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were designated from the Nazis because they were Jews or were thought to resemble Jews. They were transferred in cattle cars to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and place to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a well planned underground synthetic-fuel manufacturing plant. This was the only event of its kind during World War II.

Starved and brutalized, the GIs had been denied their legal rights as about Military and Slaves: American POWs Trapped from the Nazis’ Last Gamble prisoners of war, their ordeal culminating within a death march that was halted by liberation near the Czech border. Twenty percent of the soldiers-more than seventy of them-perished. After t_he war, Berga was practically forgotten, partly since it fell under Soviet domination and partly because America’s Cold War priorities quickly transformed, and the encounters of these People in america were buried.

Now, for the very first time, their tale is told in all its blistering detail. This is the tale of hell in a small place over an interval of nine weeks, at the same time when Hitler’s Reich was crumbling but its killing machine still churned. It really is a tale of madness and heroism, and of the failing to deliver justice for the actual Nazis do to these Us citizens.

Among those involved: William Shapiro, a medic through the Bronx, hardened in Normandy fights but, like a prisoner, unable to help the Nazis’ wasted slaves, whose bodies became as insubstantial as ghosts; Hans Kasten, a defiant German-American who enraged his Nazi captors by demanding, in vain, that his fellow U.S. prisoners become treated with mankind, therefore committing the unpardonable sin of betraying his German roots; Morton Goldstein, a garrulous GI from New Jersey, shot dead with the Nazi in charge of the American prisoners within an incident that would spark intense issue at a postwar trial; and Mordecai Hauer, the orphaned Hungarian Jew who, after surviving Auschwitz, stumbled on the GIs amid the Holocaust at Berga and despaired at the view of liberators become slaves.

Roger Cohen uncovers exactly why the U.S. federal government did not aggressively prosecute the commandants of Berga, why there is no particular acknowledgement for the POWs and their harsh treatment in the postwar years, and why it took decades to allow them to receive proper compensation.

Soldiers and Slaves is an personal, intensely dramatic tale of battle and of a largely forgotten chapter from the Holocaust.