Or maybe some of you never knew.
I'll start out with concentration camp survivor, Bruno Sieg. In researching the 1945, the year of devastation, I found this account in a US Army communication to staff HQ in Germany after the war. It was a prime directive that the German populace not only know about the holocaust through pictures, but also to hear from some of its victims. This was particularly true for the German Wehrmacht (army, navy and air force). When they were being processed out of POW camps, they often listened to a speaker. He was a persecuted Christian Democrat (political party) and had been imprisoned for years within Buchenwald.. His impassioned speech hit me in the gut. I've read it nowhere else in any historical writings and you won't find his name on the internet and that is an utter shame.
Sometimes history is lost, but I've determined to mention Mr. Sieg as often as I can. This is an exact transcript from a document I found at the Eisenhower Presidential archive in Abilene, KS.
MEMORANDUM
MII TEAM 440 – G
18 JUNE 1945
SUBJECT: Speech to German PWs by former BUCHENWALD inmate
TO: A.C. of S.,G-2, 5th Armored Division
This afternoon I organized a meeting in the Discharge Center in this town of as many Pws as would fill the hall to hear Mr. BRUNO SIEG, former Social-Democrat of DANZIG, who spent four years of hell in BUCHENWALD and other concentration camps.
In introducing the man, I said: “It seems to us that a great many of you do not believe the stories of concentration camps which were uncovered by our armies. I am therefore introducing to you your friend Bruno Sieg, who is from Danzig, and who spent four years in those camps. He was incredibly lucky to be here to-day and got a new chance to live. Many thousands of his - and our – comrades did not survive this ordeal, and they cannot be with you now.
“The whole German people existed during the past twelve years under this “New Order” of Hitlerism. Your lives for those years were based on murder and brutality of a kind never imagined before. You could not have lived the way you did without this murder and without those camps – that is the fact that makes you all equally guilty, though you may never have killed a man yourselves.”
Bruno Sieg then read his piece from notes that sounded most genuine because it was obviously the language of a simple workman. He illustrated the different tortures he described by gestures, and ended his half-hour speech by saying: “There are probably those among you, who still don’t believe what I said. Well, I’ll tell you ; You bastards are just as guilty for this war as Himmler himself.”
After he finished I just said: “I don’t think there is anything else to say. You can go.” And the audience, about 400 strong, left as silently as they had stood throughout the meeting. The moment the crowd was beginning to dissolve, there was an undertone of murmurs and discussions, and around 20 to 30 PWs crowded around Sieg to talk to him personally.
The PW’s “forman,” German Captain SCHMIDT, was forced by me to sit on the rostrum while Bruno Sieg was introduced. He obviously hated it, and squirmed like a worm on a hook…..
Peter J. Blake
2nd Lt. NIS
*Eisenhower Presidential Library Stamp
