US warehouse:
The view into the barracks of a prisoner of war camp in the south-east of the USA shows the living conditions of the men there (1944)
Photo:
akg images
It was April 30, 1945, shortly before the end of the war, the day Adolf Hitler took his own life in Berlin.
But Captain Siegfried Käss doesn't know anything about that yet.
He is a prisoner of war in the USA and looks back on his involvement in Hitler's Russian campaign.
The »extermination of the Jews«, so Käss tells his cellmate Mewes, he saw early on: there was a poster saying that the Jews were to be resettled.
"Then they passed us, head over heels, there were about 40,000 in Kharkov," says Käss.
"And then, under the supervision of us, people from our battalion, Russians from Kharkov had to dig huge holes."
I didn't find out more, but it was clear to me how things would go.
And that's when I got my first big shock.
That was 41."
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