Word: cohens
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...American prosecutors—who called not a single survivor as a witness, even though many GIs had volunteered to testify—both SS guards were convicted and sentenced to death. The sentences were later commuted, and U.S. officials hushed up the results of the investigation. According to Cohen, the U.S. wanted to avoid a backlash against West Germany, which by then had become an ally in the rapidly developing Cold...
...riveting new book, “Soldiers and Slaves,” Cohen takes up the questions that were left unanswered six decades ago. How did these Americans, swept up into the conflicts of a Europe they didn’t understand, react to their situation? How did the degrading incarceration of these troops intersect with broader Nazi racial policies? They are questions well worth grappling with, and they provide valuable new insight into the field of Holocaust studies—a field already seemingly saturated with information...
...Cohen discovered his subject matter while serving as the Times’ bureau chief in Berlin. There, he met a filmmaker working on a documentary about the men imprisoned at the Berga concentration camp. This chance encounter was a fitting beginning for the narration of these GIs’ story—a tale of young men caught by chance in a menacing web beyond their comprehension, beyond anyone’s comprehension, really...
...Cohen masterfully illustrates this unexpected intersection of the collective Jewish narratives on both sides of the Atlantic. Within the text, he weaves together the stories of these Americans—from the time of their capture around the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 to their eventual release from or death at the hands of the Nazis—with that of Mordecai Hauer. Today, Hauer lives in Queens—barely 10 minutes from this reviewer’s home. But back then he was a young Talmud student from the town of Goncz in northeastern Hungary, whose...
...Brooks told Cohen, “that there was a holocaust going on, that this was a work-to-death program, and that you, an American soldier, were in it with the Jews of Europe, these were things that in the midst of a crazy, mixed-up war were impossible to comprehend...