Berga concentration camp

Berga an der Elster was a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp. The Berga forced labour camp was located on the outskirts of the village Schliben. Workers were supplied by Buchenwald concentration camp and from a POW camp, Stalag IX-B; the latter contravened the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention and the Hague Treaties. Many prisoners died as a result of malnutrition, sickness , and beatings, including 73 American POWs. The labor camp formed part of Germany's secret plan to transform, via hydrogenation, brown coal into usable fuel for tanks, planes, and other military machinery. However, the camp's additional purpose was Vernichtung durch Arbeit , and prisoners were intentionally worked to death under inhumane working and living conditions, and they suffered from starvation as a result. This secondary purpose of extermination was carried out until the war's end, when the prisoners were subjected to a forced death march in order to keep ahead of the advancing allied forces.
POWs were put to work, together with concentration camp inmates, digging 17 tunnels for an underground ammunition factory, some of them 150 feet below ground. As a result of the appalling conditions, malnutrition and cold, as well as beatings, 47 prisoners died. The U.S. military authorities never acknowledged the incident.

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