Month: May 2019

Several of my prior blog posts have addressed the experiences of Jewish prisoners of war, either directly – through first-person accounts of capture and captivity – or indirectly – within the larger context of posts focusing upon specific historical events, or, biographies of specific Jewish servicemen.  While the topic of POWs naturally; inevitably, arises from study of any military conflict, it’s particularly significant in the context of the Jewish POWs of the Third Reich, given the ethos, ideology, and goals of Nazi Germany. 

This post, respectively covering an essay and letter from Ex-POWs Norman Fruman and Sydney Thomas, provides further insight into this subject.

Norman Fruman, a Second Lieutenant (0-553210) in the 232nd Infantry Regiment of the 42nd Infantry Division, was captured on January 5, 1945, and interned at Stalag 5A (Malsbach / Ludwigsburg) and eventually Stalag 7A (Moosburg). 

Born in December of 1923, Norman was the son of Minnie Fruman of 1590 East 172nd Street in the Bronx, while his sister, Dolly F. Epstein, resided at 1225 White Plains Road (also, the Bronx!). 

Postwar a professor of English at the University of Minnesota, he penned an essay that was published in Times Literary Supplement on May 5, 1995 (transcribed below), concerning his POW experiences, but equally reflecting upon the changes in American society in the four decades since the war’s end.  He passed away in January of 2012.

Other information about Norman’s experiences is found in E.T. Levy’s comment, in the context of Bob William’s “On the Air” New York Post column of October, 1957, covering “The $64,000 Challenge”.  Mr. Levy noted that, “In the German POW camp where we were all incarcerated, Lt. Norman Fruman maintained our morale under terribly adverse conditions, organized and led a successful prison escape, was recaptured a second time and underwent privation until liberated at the end of the war … [he was] broken in body, [weighing] less than 100 pounds, and [had] lost his hearing.”  You can view the full Williams’ article – found via FultonHistory, – below:

On The Air
By Bob Williams

New York Post
October 7, 1957

Viewer’s View:

Norman Fruman added $4,000 to his $64,000 bankroll on The $64,000 Challenge last night as a ”general knowledge” expert.  Writes E.T. Levy of 1205 Av. R, Brooklyn:

“You may be interested to know that [he] was my company commander in the Battle of the Bulge and he became a legendary hero to all of us who were captured along with him.

“In the German POW camp where we were all incarcerated, Lt. Norman Fruman maintained our morale under terribly adverse conditions, organized and led a successful prison escape, was recaptured a second time and underwent privation until liberated at the end of the war … [he was] broken in body, [weighing] less than 100 pounds, and [had] lost his hearing.

“For years he received rehabilitation help … partially recovering his hearing … taught English literature at Columbia and City College and is about to complete his Ph.D. at NYU.  He has written articles for encyclopedias and is one of the foremost authorities on symbolism in Coleridge’ (the English poet).

“It was surprising to me to hear [him] referred to on the $64,000 Challenge as a ‘comic book writer,’ which is the least of his attributes.  Is CBS trying to keep him incognito?

The Times Literary Supplement article includes a photograph showing Norman immediately upon entering his mother’s home, after his return from captivity.  According to the caption, the waving hand in the foreground is that of his mother, Minnie.  What the picture lacks in focus and contrast (well, even in the original issue of TLS – the image in this post is a scan of a photocopy of that periodical – the picture isn’t of the best quality) it more than makes up for in spontaneity and symbolism.

Herewith, Norman’s article:

Last Days at Stalag 7A

NORMAN FRUMAN

Times Literary Supplement
May 5, 1995

We stood there at the edge of a rural airfield, about a dozen of us, our filthy, lice-infested clothes hanging from our emaciated bodies, anxiously scanning the skies for the aeroplanes we’d been told would fly us back to France or England, to medical attention, nourishing food and, at last, safety.  Nine days before, on April 19, we’d awakened to find that during the night our guards had abandoned Stalag 7A, the huge prisoner-of-war camp near Moosburg in south-eastern Germany, which, it was said, housed as many, as 100,000 Allied prisoners from all over Europe and the Soviet Union.  Although the Nazi armies were in retreat on all fronts, unconditional surrender would not necessarily come soon.  The Germans had been declared beaten in December of 1944, and then came the Battle of the Bulge.  The German attack was no sooner contained in the north than a three-division offensive in the Strasbourg area shredded the thinly drawn American lines.  As far as I was concerned, the war was very much
on.

Until American tank troops arrived later in the day on April 29, conditions in Stalag 7A were chaotic.  With no system of discipline in place, famished prisoners pillaged whatever stores of food could be found in the kitchens.  Others, especially the Russians, according to the rumours which flew about wildly, broke out of the camp and smashed down doors in the nearby village, raping and looting.  I was skeptical about the raping.  Experience had demonstrated alarmingly that after just two weeks on starvation rations, sexual desire vanished.

Our liberators, fortuitously, proved to be from my own 42nd Infantry Division, widely known as the “Rainbow”.  The intelligence officer of my regiment, having heard that a dozen or so officers from the Rainbow were in the camp, hastened over with two satchels of Scotch and bourbon, the last things in the world we hungry POWs needed or wanted.  (There was almost complete ignorance in 1945 about how to treat people who had been starved for a long time, an ignorance that was to have widespread and serious consequences.)

Naturally, now that we were liberated, we wanted to get back home as soon as possible.  Above all, we wanted to get the hell out of Germany and flee the possibility of being killed at any moment.  I had been freed once already, just one month before, when a powerful tank force sent by General Patton in a now hotly controversial action plunged fifty miles behind Germany lines to liberate Oflag 13B, a POW camp for American and Serbian officers near Hammelburg, in the Rhone Valley leading to Bavaria.  The tank force, expecting to rescue 200 American officers, in fact found almost 1,500.  During the night-time dash back to American lines, we were attacked several times at German roadblocks, and suffered heavy casualties, mainly to the prisoners clinging precariously to the vehicles.

As dawn approached, our erstwhile liberators had doubled back to a hill a few miles from the Oflag, which was burning furiously in the distance.  The tankers advised us to march back to the camp under a white flag and wait there in safety for the arrival of the main American forces which, they assured us, could only be a few days away.  They, conversely, would have to fight their way back, and couldn’t do so effectively while encumbered with us.  Even after fifty years, the memory of that moment remains intense.  Twelve hours before, we “kriegies” (from Kriegsgefangener, prisoner of war), as we called ourselves, had been in a state of euphoria.  “Eggs for breakfast!” we shouted as we clambered aboard the tanks and troop-carriers – a phrase that had come to stand for everything normal and good in life.

Most of the POWs trooped wearily off towards the camp.  A few of us decided to risk making it back to the American lines fifty miles away on our own.  As it happened, hardly was the column of prisoners out of sight when the American force was attacked by a cluster of German Tiger tanks.  In the brief but fierce battle that followed, the American unit was destroyed.  Understandably, many military historians have condemned Patton for sending this force on so problematic a mission and accused him of doing so only because his son-in-law was a prisoner in the camp.

I and four fellow kriegies reached the nearby woods moments after the battle began and staggered as far as possible from the gunfire before dropping exhausted.  For the next five nights, we plodded westward, sleeping during the day, and coping as best we could with dysentery, exhaustion, bleeding gums, and the oedema that resulted from months on a diet mainly of two watery soups a day.  The Geneva Convention stipulated that as captured officers we were not required to work, and this the Junker command at Offizierslager 13B observed scrupulously.  The result was that 13B was on the lowest food ration in Germany outside the death camps.  Almost all of us there lost one-quarter of our body weight during the first month.

After five days behind German lines, we were recaptured and sent by boxcar to camps deeper into Germany.  Almost every day, Allied fighter planes strafed us.  Once, moments after we reached Ingolstadt, the city was attacked by a vast fleet of Flying Fortresses.  The ground heaved, shuddered and rocked under the bombardment, as we crawled frantically into whatever hollow in the earth might give protection.  After watching the Fortresses fly in tight formation through a flak-pocked sky, some to explode in spectacular balls of flame, none of us was ever afterwards inclined to complain about how much better the guys in the Air Corps had it, what with their hot showers at night and dancing with the local girls in USO clubs after the day’s mission, while we were lucky to have a dry foxhole.

I thought about all this a month later, while waiting with increasing impatience on that makeshift airfield near Stalag 7 A for the planes to arrive.  The previous nine days had been a succession of mounting frustrations.  We began every day feeling confident that transport would arrive to take us away.  And every day ended in gloom.  What was taking so long?  Rumours flew about wildly.  Hitler was dead, not dead.  The German High Command was negotiating surrender.  Not true.  Vague rumours about a nearby camp named Dachau where the liberators had seen terrible, unspeakable horrors.  And some strange things were happening at 7A.  When trains arrived from the east to take the many thousands of Russian prisoners back to the Soviet Union, there had been some rioting.  Unaccountably to us, many of the Russians did not want to go back home!  Years passed before I understood the meaning of this.

Suddenly a plane appeared in the distance, its shape unfamiliar.  Someone groaned, “Jesus, it doesn’t look like one of ours…  It could be a Kraut!”  We froze, but only for an instant.  It was German, all right, but not a fighter plane, and within a moment we made out that it was trailing a long white sheet, doubtless signifying surrender.  It quickly landed and taxied to a bumpy halt near us.  Out stepped the pilot, throwing up his arms, smiling, to be immediately followed by a young woman clutching a small pig.  “Alles kaput!  It’s over!  The war’s over!” he shouted in German.  “The high command has surrendered!”  “Thank God”, said the woman.

I felt a deeper sense of weary relief than joy.  The war might be over for them but not for me.  Though we knew nothing of the savage carnage at the recent battle for Iwo Jima, we were certain that the Japanese, like the Germans, would fight fanatically long after any rational hope of victory was gone, and would not surrender until their home islands lay in smouldering ruins.  I fully expected to participate in the invasion.  None of us, of course, had an inkling that in three months the atomic age would begin with the instantaneous obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

An hour or so later, transport planes arrived to fly us to Le Havre, where we were deloused, showered, issued with new uniforms, underwear, socks and boots – our first change of clothes since becoming prisoners.  Within days, I was on a luxury liner converted to a hospital ship and among the very first troops to return from Europe after VE-Day.  Thus our arrival in New York harbour was greeted by scores of ship whistles and foghorns, huge arcs of water thrown up by fire-ship hoses, and wild cheering from the milling crowds on the docks.

I was a few months past twenty-one years old on VE-Day, and when I think back on that day I am struck once again, and more than a little dismayed, by how little sense I had in 1945 of a future whose horizons might be radically different from the ones any of us had imagined for ourselves.  When the war in Europe began in 1939, the United States was in the tenth year of a crushing depression.  Hard times seemed to be the normal condition of economic life.  It wasn’t until well into President Eisenhower’s second term (1956-60), after more than a decade of booming prosperity, that Americans began to feel that happy days were not only here again, but maybe here to stay.  Memory of the Depression faded.  The young began to take for granted that their lives would be far more prosperous, secure and full of exciting choices than their parents could ever have imagined.

The great, transforming agency of social change, which was to alter the United States in ways whose consequences have yet to be determined, came about as a result of a wartime law universally known as the “GI Bill”.  It guaranteed to every veteran a month of free higher education for every month of service, plus a full year bonus for the first three months, up to a limit of four years, together with a monthly stipend sufficient for living expenses.  (That stipend, $75 a month, permitted me to live quite well in Paris as a graduate student at the Sorbonne in 1950 and 1951.)

Passage of the GI Bill represented another kind of VE-Day – a Victory for Education.  This act was to demonstrate the incalculable value to a nation’s economic life of an educated public, a lesson only now being learned in many countries.  Between 1955 and 1965, there was built somewhere in the United States, on average every two weeks, an institution of higher learning at least the size of a junior college, and this happened at the same time that the vast majority of colleges and universities were expanding at a frenzied pace.  To everyone’s astonishment, there was no pause in the swelling tide of incoming students after the first waves of veterans passed successfully through college life.  Intoxicated with the idea of universal higher education, legislatures in state after state voted that anybody with a high school diploma was entitled to enter college.  Within a single generation, “Open Enrollment” arrived, whereby students unprepared for college work, sometimes drastically so, were admitted anyway.  “Remedial” courses proliferated.  Grade inflation soon undermined the meaning of graduating with honours.  Once again, the perverse law of unintended consequences had dripped its poison into the chalice of utopian visions.

On May 8, 1945, when that German couple told us that the war was over, who could have predicted that fifty years later defeated Germany and Japan would again be among the most powerful nations on earth, that Europe would lose its colonies, the British Empire shrink to the shadow of its former self, the Soviet Union disappear, Communism be repudiated almost everywhere?  Or that men would walk on the moon, that the population of the world would more than double despite the arrival of a safe birth-control pill, which would itself make possible the most revolutionary change in sexual mores ever known, that millions would take for granted unheard-of technologies like television, computers, video recorders, faxes and compact discs, that the women’s movement would metamorphose millennia-old relations between the sexes – and that those fifty years would witness vicious wars large and small in every corner of the globe, and that our naive hopes of a United Nations that would keep the peace everywhere would be utterly dashed?

To reflect on VE-Day is to realize how pitifully limited is our capacity to predict the future.  Experience thus warns us against both optimism and pessimism.  The past fifty years of astonishing progress and appalling retrogression confirm yet again that Pope was right to describe our species as “in endless error hurled; / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world”.

Norman Fruman is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota.  He is the author of Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel, 1972, and is preparing an edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.

______________________________

Though his name is listed in the 1947 compilation American Jews in World War II (on page 316 of Volume II, to be specific) Norman’s essay – unlike that of Rabbi Leonard Winograd – despite its detail, depth, and literary quality, lacks either mention of allusion to any aspect of having been a Jewish infantry officer in combat against the Third Reich, and, a Jewish POW in German captivity.  The reasons for the curious “absence” of these topics – a literary kind of “dog that didn’t quite bark”, let alone growl! – are open to conjecture…    

This is unfortunate, for a reading of his article reveals that Dr. Fruman manifested the invaluable ability to view events – events personal; events collective – in the context of a time span beyond their immediacy.  This is especially evident in terms of the article’s last five paragraphs, which focus upon the enormous changes that have ensued in the United States in particular, and the world in general (well, at least the now deliberately-self-atrophying “West”) in the then fifty – and now in 2019 seventy-four – gad, is it seventy-four? – years since the war’s end in 1945. 

The central and overlapping “take-aways” that emerge are a deep and obvious sense of disillusionment about the post-WW II emphasis on the centrality of the chimera otherwise known as “higher education”; the effects of the enormous sociological changes that have eventuated and continue so, at an unrelenting pace – from scientific and technological developments (particularly in terms of the relationship between the sexes, and ensuing economic and sociological changes in society); ultimately, a sense of humility in terms of mans’ “limited capacity to predict the future”. 

This trio of realizations is anticipated in two newspaper articles – from 1959 and 1995 – (via Fulton History) quoting Dr. Fruman’s opinion about I.Q. tests, (“They do NOT evaluate creativity, reasoning power, or judgement.”), and, the imperative to study and evaluate literature as art, rather than viewing texts through the ideological prisms of “race, class, and sex.”

These two articles follow: 

This Week
August 23, 1959

Question 5: “What do I.Q. tests really measure?” Mrs. Perry Davis of Wapello, Iowa, writes.

Answer: Norman Fruman, professor and quiz-show winner: I.Q. tests measure acquired knowledge in certain academic areas.  Unfortunately, such an examination does not mirror certain mental traits which may be much more important than academic learning and ability to memorize.  They do NOT evaluate creativity, reasoning power, or judgement.

Incidentally, one team of intelligence researchers rates about 2.2 per cent of the American population as “very superior” in intellect.

Professors Reject Political Correctness

Richmond County Daily Journal & Moore County Citizen News-Record
September 20, 1995

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – English professor Norman Fruman is fed up with the kind of literary criticism that reduces Shakespeare to an apologist for European hegemony and sees a lesbian subtext in every Emily Dickinson poem.

Fruman, a University of Minnesota English professor emeritus, just wants to read, analyze and talk about literature as art.  He’s sick of analyzing novels and poems for what they say about the politics of race, class and sex.

So Fruman and like-minded colleagues have formed an organization that aspires to promote literature as fine writing foremost.

The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics holds its first conference this weekend in Minnneapolis.  The group was formed in February 1944 and has more than 1,300 members.

For those of us who entered teaching because we had fallen in love with literature, nothing is more urgent than a return to an open, rather than a close, reading of stories and poems and plays that convey the very stuff of human life,” Roger Shattuck of Boston University, a member of the association, write in a recent article about the group in Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress.

Shattuck recalled a student in his sophomore humanities course who presented an Emily Dickinson poem on bird hopping, feeding, pausing and taking flight as a metaphor for a lesbian sexual encounter.  When asked about the versification and literal meaning, the student had nothing to add, he said.
Taught from a political point of view, Shakespeare is not the bard of Avon but a cheerleader for the British Empire, complained Professor John Ellis of the University of California, Santa Cruz, secretary-treasurer of ALSC.

Teachers “think that’s the most important thing you can say about Shakespeare, is that he was an apologist for European domination,” Ellis said.  “Why would one bother to make statements about Shakespeare that you could make about any Elizabethan?”

Fruman said association members want to “get back to the feeling about literature that made them readers in the first place.”

Politics Not Literature

“If you take ‘Moby Dick’ and spend a lot of time on why there are no women in the book, then you’re talking politics and not the book,” Fruman said.

“The question is a very interesting one in general, but once you’ve made the statement, how long does it take to deal with it?”, he said.  “To make that a major issue might be appropriate in a course on sociology or social studies, but it’s a perversion of literature to deal with such matters extensively.”

If this was foresight and wisdom in 1959 and 1995, how much more so is it in 2019?  And, beyond?

Other Jewish prisoners of war captured on January 5, 1945, include:

United States Army

PFC Saul E. Lipnick (1110175), 42nd Infantry Division, 232rd Infantry Regiment, Silver Star, Purple Heart
Stalag 5B (Villingen)

Pvt. Milton M. Roth (13185360), 35th Infantry Division, 134th Infantry Regiment
Stalag Lust III (Sagan)

PFC Morris Weiner (36752698), 1st Infantry Division, 16th Infantry Regiment
Stalag 11B (Fallingbostel)

(Oddly, I’m unable to find any information about the capture of an “E.T. Levy”, quoted in the Post article of 1957.)

Royal Canadian Air Force

Flight Officer David Elkin (J/39299), Navigator, No. 408 Squadron, on 28th mission
Born Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, July 1, 1923
Mr. S. Elkin (father) and Pvt. Eugene Elkin (brother), 4587 Marcil Ave., Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Crew member of Halifax III NR209, EQ * A, piloted by F/Lt. Andrew F. Scheelar, shot down by Ju-88 during mission to Hannover, Germany at 19:50 hours.  Aircraft crashed near Hohlstedt (Hollenstede?), about three miles (2 km?) south of Furstenau, Hannover. 

Three survivors from crew of seven: Besides F/O Elkin, these comprised F/O Fred Alfred Winter (air bomber) and air gunner (tail gunner?) F/O William Albert Baker

According to F/O Elkin’s biographical entry in Canadian Jews in World War II, “…the pilot [F/Lt. Scheelar] and flight engineer [Sgt. John Daly] … sacrificed their lives by holding the plane steady while the others parachuted out.  After two days of freedom F/O Elkin was captured by the German S.S., and interned at Luchenwald.” 

Flight Lieutenant Andrew F. Scheelar, J/13449, from his military Service File, available within the database “Canada, WWII Service Files of War Dead, 1939-1947”, at Ancestry.com.   Born in Kimball, Minnesota, and residing at Strome, Alberta before joining the RCAF, he is buried at the Sage War Cemetery, in Germany. 

The last report about Halifax NR209, also from F/Lt. Scheelar’s Military service file.  Note that every crew member had completed more than twenty “trips”.   

Given that neither duckduckgo nor the search engine headquartered at Mountain View (y’know, where it’s asserted that “the moral arc of history bends toward progress” (1) … oops, I digress!) yield records for a POW camp by the name of “Luchenwald”, could F/O Elkin actually have been imprisoned at Buchenwald? 

I do not know, but the phonetic coincidence is intriguing.    

In any event, F/O Elkin returned to the United Kingdom on May 14, 1945.

______________________________

Sidney Thomas’ letter to the New York Review of Books in April, 1990, in response to Istvan Deak’s ‘The Incomprehensible Holocaust’: An Exchange” (2) is far shorter than Norman’s essay (but of course – it’s a letter!).  Its central focus is a discussion of the reasons for the survival of Jewish POWs of the Third Reich – specifically Jewish POWs from the armed forces of the United States and British Commonwealth (and perhaps by implication, other “western” nations) – within the larger context of the Shoah.  Though not mentioned by Deak, this is especially notable in comparison with the fate of Jewish POWs in German captivity, who were members of the armed forces of Poland and the Soviet Union. 

Sidney attributes this – I think quite correctly – to self-interest on the part of the mens’ captors, who did not wish to place themselves in postwar jeopardy as war criminals, given the realization (albeit not to all) of an eventual Allied victory.

Here’s Sidney’s letter:

IN STALAG VIIA

New York Review of Books
April 12, 1990

To the Editors:

May I add a footnote to Istvan Deak’s statement [“’The Incomprehensible Holocaust’: An Exchange,” NYR, February 1] that “German fairness towards Allied prisoners of war was even extended to Jews in British or American uniform: they alone of all the Jews in Nazi captivity had little to worry about.”  As a Jew and an American prisoner of war in Stalag VIIA at Moosburg, near Munich, where I arrived on December 15, 1944 in transit from a processing camp at Ludwigsburg, I encountered no overt discrimination for several months.  However, early in 1945 (I am not certain of the exact date) an order came down from the camp administration segregating all Jewish prisoners and forbidding them to go into Munich on work details with the other prisoners.  Whether this was meant as a first step in future measures against Jewish prisoners, we never learned.  Fortunately, nothing further came of this order, and after some time, as I recall, we were able to take part, once again, in the regular routine of the camp.  I would assume that this abortive attempt at special treatment of Jewish prisoners had its origin in a directive from higher Nazi authority and was not confined to Stalag VIIA.  If we “had little to worry about,” it was not, in my opinion, because of “German fairness” but because of Nazi fears, certainly in the lower echelons, at a time when Germany was clearly losing the war, of future punishment as war criminals.

Sidney Thomas
Syracuse, New York

 _____________________________

Sidney’s supposition about the early-1945 order for the segregation of Jewish POWs at Ludwigsburg having been issued from a “higher Nazi authority” may have very solid basis in fact.  The segregation of Jewish POWs at Stalag Luft I (Barth), and, Stalag 9B (Bad Ord) (from which 350 American POWs, including 77 Jewish soldiers, were sent to the Berga am Elster slave labor camp) transpired during the same time-frame in mid-January of 1945: At Stalag Luft I on January 10 (according to Mozart Kaufman), and at Stalag 9A, during the evening of January 18-19 (according to Sydney Goodman).  This suggests that orders for the segregation of American Jewish POWs emanated from the same level or body within the German military hierarchy. 

Though his name does not appear in American Jews in World War II (akin to innumerable American Jewish servicemen whose names should have appeared therein), I believe that Syracusan letter-writer Sidney Thomas was a PFC (32788833) in the 399th Infantry Regiment of the 100th Infantry Division, and was captured on November 21, 1944.  If correct (I think so…) his status as a liberated POW was noted in the Long Island Star Journal on June 19, 1945, where his wife was listed as Rae Thomas, at 73-12 35th Ave., in Jackson Heights, New York. 

Other Jewish prisoners of war captured on November 21, 1944, include:

United States Army

S/Sgt. Jacob Eines (32787009), 47th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division
Stalag 12A (Limburg an der Lahn)

PFC Isaac Geller (32894672)
Stalag 2A (Neubrandenburg)

PFC Jack Rubin (34543743), 334th Infantry Regiment, 84th Infantry Division
Stalag 11B (Fallingbostel)

Pvt. Ira S. Shulman (32645751), 406th Infantry Regiment, 102nd Infantry Division
Stalag 12A (Limburg an der Lahn)

PFC Charles Soloff (34493463), 143rd Infantry Regiment, 36th (“Texas”) Infantry Division
Stalag 7A (Moosburg)

United States Army Air Force (8th Air Force)

T/Sgt. Albert Miller (33777588), Radio Operator
359th Bomb Squadron, 303rd Bomb Group
Hohe Mark Hospital

S/Sgt. David Levy (16078484), Tail Gunner
603rd Bomb Squadron, 398th Bomb Group
Stalag Luft IV (Gross-Tychow)

1 Lt. Matthew I. Radnofsky (0-717500), Navigator
423rd Bomb Squadron, 306th Bomb Group
Vechta; Stalag 11B Lager Lazaret Fallingbostel

861st Bomb Squadron, 493rd Bomb Group (Auerbach and Edgar)

S/Sgt. Merle Auerbach (36760072), Waist Gunner
Stalag Luft IV (Gross-Tychow)

2 Lt. Richard Edgar (0-886467), Navigator
Stalag Luft I (Barth)

2 Lt. Harold Scheer (0-694733), Navigator
359th Bomb Squadron, 303rd Bomb Group
Stalag Luft I (Barth), North Compound 3

2 Lt. Marvin Laufer (0-710281), Bombardier / Navigator
603rd Bomb Squadron, 398th Bomb Group
Hohe Mark Hospital

References

Canadian Jews in World War II – Part II: Casualties, Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1948, p. 121

Chorley, W.R., Royal Air Force Bomber Command Losses of the Second World War – 1944 (Volume VI), Midland Publishing, Hinckley, England, 1998, p. 34

Kaufman, Mozart, Fighter Pilot – Aleutians to Normandy to Stalag Luft 1, M&A Kaufman Publishers, San Aselmo, Ca., 1993

Dublin, Louis I., and Kohs, Samuel C., American Jews in World War II – The Story of 550,000 Fighters for Freedom, The Dial Press, New York, N.Y., 1947

Goodman, Sydney L., Private, 36889334, M Company, 110th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division, Prisoner of War at Stalag 9B and Berga-am-Elster, Diary covering events from December 16, 1944, through March 16, 1945.

Comments

(1) The combination of hubris and shallow thinking inherent in such a belief is as frightening as it is staggering.

(2) Contemplated through the overlapping perspectives of Eliezer Berkovits, David Birnbaum, Hyam Maccoby, William Nicholls, and Robert S. Wistrich, the Shoah is not nearly as incomprehensible, mysterious, or perplexing as once – and perhaps still? – assumed.