Steven Karras

by The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military

  We knew that we were preparing for invasion. Although we didn’t know when that would be, we could see all the signs indicating that we would soon be leaving. In June 1943, after finishing our courses, we went on Louisiana maneuvers where they gave us simulated ranks. I was an acting master sergeant. After Louisiana maneuvers, which ended toward the end of July, most of us got the acting ranks confirmed back at Camp Ritchie, and I would be a master sergeant for most of the war. We were initially a six-man team attached to any given unit. That was cut down to four men, and some of our officers moved on, so I was in line to get a field commission. (Due to that fast forward movement, however, it wouldn’t catch up with me until April 1945.) After Ritchie we were then sent to Fort Myers, outside of the Pentagon in Washington. There we were stationed waiting to go overseas, and they thought that we were important enough to fly us to Great Britain. That was quite an exciting trip that very few GIs got to take.

  On September 14, we landed in Scotland and took a train to London. That, too, seemed like a great adventure. The bombing of London had diminished since I had been over there, but I could still hear the rumble of it and the sirens, which added a certain air to it that was, to a young man, quite exciting at the time. To meet and form friendships with the population who were quite friendly toward us was also exhilarating. In that sense, it was a great adventure, aside from our military duties. I realized that it took me places that I could not have traveled to at that time and I appreciated that.

  After staying in London for a couple of weeks, we went to a pool, which was located in another camp in the Cotswolds. Again, we were split into teams or stayed in the teams to which we were originally assigned. From there, they assigned us to the various units in Britain. I was assigned to the 5th Infantry, which was stationed in Northern Ireland. I joined it in October 1943 and spent the following nine months with the 5th until the invasion in Northern Ireland.

  I HAD ONE ROSH HASHANAH IN OXFORD, which was in a beautiful synagogue. I also had occasion to visit some relatives who lived in England at the time. I had a first cousin who lived with her English husband outside of London. Another more distant couple, who I had known in Germany quite well and had spent an unforgettable summer with them, lived in Chilton, which was very close to the camp I first went to in England.

  While we were still in England, we went to a POW camp where we practiced interrogating real German prisoners. This experience gave us a little more of an inkling of what we would be up against once we were in the field. Two or three of us went into the interrogation room at a time. We were told not to have any short arms with us, because the prisoners could overpower us and use them against us, so we went in there without any weapons. It was sort of a funny feeling to be in there without being armed, but we got used to that.

  Then we started to interrogate them. Some of them had been interrogated before, so they knew what to expect and would very often digress into something else. I remember one in particular because the digression happened to be in the field of my civilian endeavor of printing; one of them gave me a whole lecture on a typesetting machine and described every part just to detract from the other question I was going to ask him. I did cut him short and finally got to the point of the matter. Furthermore, they felt fairly secure in their position as prisoners. Some of them would answer quite easily. I found this quite funny: they would cooperate with us, but then, for example, would ask if we could end the interrogation by a certain time because they wanted to see a British film playing later and they didn’t want to miss it.

  During interrogations, it was quite a bit like what courtroom lawyers do: do not ask any leading questions, sort of circumscribe and get to the point in many other ways until they reveal something. This method doesn’t seem as threatening to them.

  I was always mindful of the fact that I would show my emotions, but I was able to control them sufficiently to do the job that I was meant to do and didn’t let my personal feelings about them interfere with the interrogation. What I thought of those prisoners was quite another matter, especially when I encountered the SS. We knew whether the prisoner had been in the SS even if he tried to hide it, because under their arms there was the SS tattoo—that was of course the giveaway. It wasn’t known in full detail, but we knew enough to know that they were the worst of the bunch.

  I was still in Northern Ireland waterproofing our jeep, which was a long, drawn-out process that took a week to accomplish. We had to put a special compound on all the wires in the jeep, because it was expected that we would not land on dry land and the jeep would have to go through water. This process is what stands out most in my mind. After that, they shipped us to a staging area near Liverpool in Salisbury, and from there we embarked on our trip to Normandy.

  We had heard how tough it was in the beginning, and it was a very precarious situation, but then after a few days it stabilized. Although the units were stuck in the beach not far from where they landed, they were dug in and fighting for short stretches of land. It was from one hedgerow to another. By the time we arrived, there was still an occasional German plane, but the artillery had been knocked out well before then.

  I landed late in June on Utah Beach and we relieved the 1st Infantry by taking over the positions it had held. We dug in there in foxholes and there was not much movement until the big breakthrough at St. Lo, the day when a thousand bombers came over and blazed the way for the infantry to go forward in the armor.

  I was attached to the 2nd Infantry of the 5th Infantry Division. We were with the regimental headquarters. I had a carbine and a pistol, a .45. At one time, I also had a Browning semiautomatic rifle (BAR). One of the first places my unit was sent was about two hundred yards from the frontline, but we had to get out of there in a hurry when Germans spotted us and began a mortar barrage, which could be very deadly.

  The most nerve-racking thing about being entrenched anywhere was the artillery barrages—the noise, the sweating out of where they would fall. You would hear the whistle and would never know exactly where they were going to hit, and when you were exposed to that at great lengths of time, it could get on your nerves. I saw a few of our guys start to crack, but never completely. Some of them certainly showed signs of that stress.

  German prisoners were being taken right from the start. It was our job to find out what units they had come from because it was important to determine what units we were facing. We would ask if there were, in fact, several units that had been put together, as this would show a certain weakness on their part, whether they had taken remnants from all over and put them together; what their strength was and armor was. We tried to find out as much as we could.

  In the beginning, they all in varying degrees assisted in interrogation, but we had ways of soliciting information by telling them that somebody else had told us something that we suspected, and then have them confirm it. We would also threaten that, since we knew what the facts were, they had better not lie to us. Later on, during the French campaign, we would resort to some tricks. For example, prisoners who refused to give any information at all would be segregated from the others. Then we would hang signs on them with big red letters that said, “I am being turned over to the Russians.” In other words, we played psychological warfare on them.

  Above all, they dreaded falling into the hands of the Russians. As we were to find out when we joined up with the Russians, they would hold out against the Russians much longer because they definitely didn’t want to fall into their hands. The Germans knew what they had done to the people in Russia and how the Russians dealt with them, as opposed to the American troops who were much more lenient. The Americans would stick more to the rules of the Geneva Convention, with which the Russians were not too bothered.

  Some prisoners would ask where we learned to speak such good German. The joke among the members of my unit was that some of them would say they had taken a blitz course from Berlitz. I once interrogated an officer who claimed that he had played tennis with me in Vienna, which
of course was not so because I had never been in Vienna.

  In the end, I would try to get as much information as possible without bringing a lot of personal emotions into it. I wouldn’t say that it would have been wrong to bring it in. In retrospect, it might have had a stronger effect, but that was just my mode of operation at the time.

  I enjoyed seeing Germans as prisoners because now the shoe was on the other foot. To see them bedraggled and kind of desperate to get out of the war felt very good. When I lived in Germany, they had the decision of life or death over us, and we could only stand with our hands tied. Now to see them in that state felt very good.

  AT ONE TIME, we moved very fast with the advance; we were attached to Patton’s Third Army, and his tanks moved quite rapidly. First, we spent some time at the French/German border, when we were bogged down and the tanks had run out of gas, which wasn’t replenished right away because there was a shortage. After that, we took the town of Verdun, which was a significant city where a World War I battle took one of the heaviest tolls of the war. From there we went to Metz, which at one time had been German, but by the time we got there it was French though German-occupied. That’s where we were bogged down because of the forts that surround the city. It was probably a tactical mistake to stay there and wait for the surrender of the forts, because we could have bypassed them, which might have required a detour, but the forts would have been ineffective. Somehow, though, it was decided that those forts had to be taken, and we spent an undue length of time in Metz because of that. I was instrumental as an interpreter in the surrender of Fort Driant, which was one of the major forts and had command of the roads that lead out of Metz.

  I had to meet the German colonel and his officers and arrange for their surrender. Again, it was somewhat an odd feeling going in there unarmed, not knowing what they were still capable of doing, because even if they wanted to surrender, some were still quite upset that they were surrendering. I remember one of their sergeants who, after the surrender, had put his communications system out of commission. Unfortunately he had already left me by that time, but I had to stay where I was, so I couldn’t reach him anymore. Once we found their message center and found that it had been decommissioned, I really wanted to get a hold of him for what he had done.

  What really got me was that once they surrendered they were quite willing and, in fact, tried to get us to agree, to go against the Russians. I remember some high officers telling us that.

  One time, I was walking outside of the fort with a German officer. We were going across the expanse around the fort and many horses had been hit. He expressed his regret that these poor animals had to die. I asked him if he had any regret that so many human beings died. I also asked him whether he had any regrets over what the Germans had done to the Jews. He gave me some nondescript answer, saying that there was always loss of life in any war and he had been trained to expect that.

  AFTERWARDS, WE WENT TO ALSACE, which had constantly changed hands between Germany and France after every war. Now it was German again, and we moved into Alsace, but then when the Battle of the Bulge began, we were quickly pulled up north. It was quite a feat of logistics to move us as fast as they did. We went to Luxembourg to bolster our defenses and reinforce the units that were under siege there.

  We left Luxembourg once the danger had been removed after the Battle of the Bulge. We went into Germany by way of Bitburg and then to a place near Trier, which was one of their major cities. At that time, I believe the Remagen Bridge had been found intact, but the 5th Division actually crossed the Rhine in a town called Nierstein, where our engineers had put up a pontoon bridge.

  From there, we went south again and by 1945 we took the major town of Frankfurt. We then went into reserve and stayed there for at least a week or two. This break afforded me a chance to look for a cousin of mine who had lived in Frankfurt and whose wife was not Jewish, so I had some hope of finding perhaps the whole family, but if not, at least members. I was successful in locating his wife and two children, who were living on a farm twenty-five miles outside of Frankfurt. Some people began to filter back into Frankfurt after we took it; they were mostly members of mixed marriages, which was how they survived. I was able to find a place in Frankfurt for my cousin’s family, which was at least one thing I could do.

  My cousin’s wife was immensely grateful that I had taken the trouble to track her down and was able to make life a little bit easier for her. Unfortunately, my cousin, late in the war, had been sent to some concentration camp, and she was doubtful of his fate. She hadn’t given up hope, but she didn’t know exactly what had happened. He was a doctor and presumably died on a death march in March 1945, so close to the end of the war.

  It was an odd feeling to be back on German soil, but at the same time gratifying to be part of the American troops and be in power. At the same time, I was mindful of the great losses that we had personally sustained. So it was not unalloyed joy that I felt when I came back, because nothing was the same as it once had been. Nevertheless, it was better to be back in that capacity than the alternative possibility. I had a deep appreciation for the sacrifices that other GIs from remote areas in America—who had very little contact with European—had made in the name of defeating this tremendous evil.

  THE WAR WAS OVER ON MAY 8, and after the city of Frankfurt, we advanced to the Czech border to the so-called Sudetenland, which was populated by Germans. Hitler had made the case of taking over Czechoslovakia because he considered that German territory, but it was just a pretext. I found it was odd to be in the place that he had used to start the war.

  I was stationed in Bavaria after the war was over. I would scout the countryside after receiving some tips on where to find Nazis and jail them. It was not up to me to de-Nazify anyone that early in the game, it was done by other authorities, usually military governments, with which we worked closely, but that was not my domain.

  Once we reached the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia, I happened to have what I call my rendezvous with destiny. We came across a group of what had been slave laborers, young Jewish women from Poland and Hungary. They had been abandoned by their SS guards in the town whose surrender we had taken just days before the end of the war. We had heard about them and knew we had to go there reinforced by our medical battalion and render some aid.

  Once I walked into the factory where the SS had locked them up, I met a young woman who was standing at the entrance and who took me inside when I asked her. She left quite an impression on me. She was at the end of her strength and collapsed once. Our medics took them all to the field hospital that we found in town. Out of that encounter evolved a friendship with a person of rare caliber, which developed further and one year later we were married in Paris.

  Now this makes me reflect on the fact that I had gone to Europe to fight the Nazis with hatred in my heart for all they had inflicted so gratuitously on Jews and the world. I had to witness the results of what they had done to my people. Also, I was 95 percent sure that my parents could not have survived the war. While all of that was true, for me personally the key to my own future was being able to go to back and be in that place at that time, which was connected to me by a tenuous thread.

  If I had been born one day earlier none of this story I have told would have ever happened. When the war began, America had the first draft, and a while later it had the second draft that would take men of a certain vintage and it had a cutoff point of June 30 or July 1, 1938. I was born July 2, so I missed the second draft and was in the third draft instead. None of this would have happened if I had been in the second draft.

  So you see how destiny can play tricks on us, but I am immensely grateful for this trick. We have always considered ourselves lucky that we met in the fashion we did. We supported each other in coming to terms with the losses we had sustained and felt that we could have continuity within our respective families by having children and grandchildren—in our case now a family of sixteen.

  Being in the ar
my proved to me that I could face tough situations and handle them adequately, which imbued a certain sense of self-assurance. Before going into the army, I could not know what I would run up against or how I would conduct myself, but I was glad to see how it affected me. Aside from serving, a great deal of army life is waiting around for something to happen. In that sense, during those periods, the army afforded me chances to see places and get to know people I would never have met otherwise. Even the Camp Ritchie experience was an extraordinary one. I was thrown together with people who were utterly fascinating to me, and I was able to form some friendships. It was certainly a relief from the routine of making a living back home. For me, it was somewhat akin to going to college, because I also formed a bond with the people with whom I was thrown together. Some of them lasted a lifetime, while others were of a temporary nature.

  I felt proud that I could serve the United States in the capacity that I did. Nothing made me happier than being of some use to America after what it had given me, which was the idea that I could live in freedom. I live with the regret that my parents could not make it out, otherwise my happiness could have been complete.

  Kurt Klein brought his wife, Gerda, home with him to Buffalo, New York, and worked for many years in the printing business. Gerda Klein’s account of being liberated by her future husband was the subject of an Academy Award–winning documentary film, One Survivor Remembers, and both became internationally known humanitarians and public speakers. Kurt Klein died in Guatemala while on a lecture tour in April 19, 2002.

  Chapter 26

  HARRY LORCH

  DIEBURG, GERMANY

  29th Infantry Division

  Hans “Harry” Lorch was born in 1921, fifty miles from Frankfurt, Germany, in a small town called Dieburg. There were fifty-five Jewish families out of a town of six thousand people. Lorch was kicked out of high school in 1934, and two years later he left for Holland where he lived before leaving for New York in 1939. He returned to Europe in 1944 as an infantry replacement in the 29th Infantry Division, 115th Regiment, D-Day plus-one. He remained with the division until it reached the Elbe River in Germany. After V-E Day, Lorch was reassigned to Military Intelligence Services and sent to Norway to work in postwar Denazification. He is pictured above in Germany, 1945.