Jewish Troops and Jewish Victims: soldiers encounter the Holocaust

Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitness, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored. [publisher summary]

“After years of lobbying, the British government finally agrees to send a brigade of 5,000 Jewish volunteers from Palestine to Europe to fight the German army in November 1944. As the war ends , these soldiers witness firsthand the horrors their people have suffered in the concentration camps, the men … form secret squads to identify, locate, and kill Nazi officers in hiding. …[But] a fortuitous encounter with an orphaned girl sets the men on a [different ]course of action—rescuing Jewish war orphans and transporting them to Palestine—that will … change their lives but also help create a nation and forever alter the course of world history.” [from publisher summary]

In February of 1945, 350 American POWs, selected because they were Jews, thought to resemble Jews or simply by malicious caprice, were transported by cattle car to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany. Here, the soldiers were starved and brutalized; seventy of these soldiers were worked to death in this meeting between Americans and Hitler's Final Solution.
This is one of the last untold stories of World War II, and Roger Cohen re-creates it in all its blistering detail. Ground down by the crumbling Nazi war machine, the men prayed for salvation from the Allied troops, yet even after their liberation, their story was nearly forgotten. This book recounts … the U.S. government’s failure to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes and to compensate or even recognize the victims for decades after the fact.
Even with Gen’l Eisenhower’s aggressive efforts to document all aspects of the Nazi camp system, this Holocaust experience of American Jewish troops was buried in what Roger Cohen demonstrates was purposeful neglect, if not cover-up.
[some material originally published in Library Journal review, December 2004; Kirkus Review, January 2005]