Germans drive prisoners on 500-mile trek of death
Starving survivors freed by Ninth Army – American forced to march with bullet in leg
By Clinton B. Conger, United Press staff writer
HANNOVER, Germany – The pitiful survivors of a Nazi-enforced 500-mile march of starvation were liberated today by the U.S. Ninth Army.
The liberated war prisoners told of their trek across Germany which resembled Bataan march of death.
The weak and starving men, prisoners and slave workers, included Americans, British, French, Poles and Russians.
An American paratrooper, a prisoner of only 16 days since the Wesel airborne operation, told how he was forced to march 75 miles with a bullet in one leg.
Some of the prisoners were captured in Africa, Dunkerque or even the Lowlands and France in 1940.
They were driven more than 800 kilometers from a work camp near Breslau to avoid the Russian advance.
A British Commando, now a ghastly scarecrow, showed us a peace-time picture of himself as fat and healthy. He said:
They drove us with rifle butts, slugging us with them when we stopped or slowed down.
Men died on the road and they were buried where they fell.
We got there last Thursday night and were weak as kittens. The main trouble was our legs – they call it beriberi. But Friday morning they made us go out and work in the railyards.
We couldn’t even lift the shovels, let alone the rails, and when we fell down and couldn’t get up they beat us again with rifles.
One man died last night just before that heavy artillery barrage of yours. Then a German corporal who’s been decent – the only white German I’ve ever met – armed us against his own people.
The men were dirty, ragged, unshaven and most of them complained of dysentery. They said they had not had a good meal for months – the Russians, in some cases, in years.
Most were covered with lice.