A potrait by Rudolf Menge, drawn sometime between 1945 and 1946 at a camp for defeated German soldiers and run by the U.S. military near Stuttgart. Many of the portraits are not identified. (Nancy Montgomery / Stripes)
A potrait by Rudolf Menge, drawn sometime between 1945 and 1946 at a camp for defeated German soldiers and run by the U.S. military near Stuttgart. Many of the portraits are not identified. (Nancy Montgomery / Stripes)
Summer in the prison camp? One of some 60 sketches and drawings by Rudolf Menge showing his time at a camp. (Nancy Montgomery / Stripes)
A potrait by Rudolf Menge, drawn sometime between 1945 and 1946. Many of the portraits are not identified. (Nancy Montgomery / Stripes)
European edition, Sunday, May 18, 2008
HEIDELBERG, Germany — No one’s quite sure how long he was a prisoner or exactly how he’d come to be confined at the former Stalag V-A.
What is known is that Rudolf Menge was one of hundreds of thousands of "disarmed enemy forces" after Nazi Germany surrendered to Allied Forces in 1945. That he, then a sergeant, was interned by U.S. forces in a camp at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, which during World War II had held Soviet, French, Belgian, British and American troops. That he survived his time there sometime in 1945 and 1946 and later prospered.
And that, his nephew recently told U.S. officials, Menge had held his American captors in high esteem.
"He was treated well by the Americans during these difficult times," wrote Doris Koeglmayr-Schwaighofer at the U.S. Forces Liaison Office for Bavaria and Saxony.
Which is why U.S. Army Europe is now in possession of some 50 drawings that Menge — an art student before the war and artist and teacher later on — made while at the camp.
The donation came last month from a nephew, Helmut Schoen, who told officials that he believed his uncle would have wanted Americans to have the drawings of his time at the prison camp. Schoen contacted the U.S. Consulate in Munich, which in turn contacted USAREUR.
"I jumped on it," said Gabriele Torony, the USAREUR curator. She went to Munich to have a look, and knew those were valuable historical artifacts.
But there is no USAREUR museum. So Menge’s drawings can’t yet be viewed by the public.
"At some point, we’ll be able to show them," Torony said. "Right now, we just don’t have a place."
And at this point, U.S. Army historians don’t have a lot of information to go with the drawings. "We’ve got practically zero information on the camps," said Andrew Morris, deputy USAREUR historian.
Nearly 20 years ago, a controversial book published in Canada and a best seller in Germany, concluded that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower purposely starved German prisoners of war to punish Germans for a war that killed so many millions, including the murder of most of Europe’s Jews.
But historian Stephen Ambrose called the book "worse than worthless." Germany’s post-war situation was ruin, hunger, displacement and chaos, he wrote, with 13 million civilians fleeing west to escape the Soviets, 5 million surrendered German soldiers and more than 2 million liberated slave laborers — all of them Eisenhower’s responsibility. No one in central Europe was getting much to eat in 1945, Ambrose and other historians have noted.
Still, he noted, "There was widespread mistreatment of German prisoners in the spring and summer of 1945. Men were beaten, denied water, forced to live in open camps without shelter. … Men did die needlessly and inexcusably."
"I think they show the prisoners were treated very well, and with respect and decency," Torony said. "I think it’s a neat story to tell."
