WW II vet held in Nazi slave camp breaks silence: 'Let it be known'

[Sequoia]

LOMA LINDA, California (CNN) -- Anthony Acevedo thumbs through the worn, yellowed pages of his diary emblazoned with the words "A Wartime Log" on its cover. It's a catalog of deaths and atrocities he says were carried out on U.S. soldiers held by Nazis at a slave labor camp during World War II -- a largely forgotten legacy of the war.

Acevedo pauses when he comes across a soldier with the last name of Vogel. "He died in my arms. He wouldn't eat. He didn't want to eat," says Acevedo, now 84 years old. "He said, 'I want to die! I want to die! I want to die!' "

The memories are still fresh, some 60 years later. Acevedo keeps reading his entries, scrawled on the pages with a Schaeffer fountain pen he held dear.

He was one of 350 U.S. soldiers held at Berga am Elster, a satellite camp of the Nazis' notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. The soldiers, working 12-hour days, were used by the German army to dig tunnels and hide equipment in the final weeks of the war. Less than half of the soldiers survived their captivity and a subsequent death march, he says.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/11/11/acevedo.pow/index.html

Acevedo's story is one that was never supposed to be told. "We had to sign an affidavit ... we never went through what we went through. We weren't supposed to say a word," he says.

[JonQ]

1. Why did they make them sign an affidavit

to not talk about it? It doesn't seem like we were too worried about making nazis look like the bad guys.

[Xipe Totec]

2. Probably didn't want American soldiers to go on a revenge spree

in occupied Germany.

[JonQ]

4. A valid point

but I have to think at that point there weren't too many in the military who didn't know about these sort of things. Obviously the holocaust was well known after the war ended. But even with a signed affidavit, we had enough released POWs (US, British, Canadian, etc) that word would have gotten out about it.

[KurtNYC]

3. I'm going to guess that it was bc we immediately needed to stabalize

Western Germany and make them allies against the USSR.

[Bluzmann57]

5. The nazis were the bad guys

I don't think anybody had to make them "look like the bad guys" at all.

[JonQ]

7. That was a little bit

tongue in cheek.

[YOY]

6. I bet you he wasn't too fond of Hogan's Heroes.

His experience in reality surely makes laughing at Shultzie pretty hard.

[lunatica]

8. And that was "The Good War"

They violated the Geneva Conventions and the US Army kept it a secret.

And Bush did too. Yet people still rationalize war as something honorable or as something humans have buried in our DNA and that we'll always make war because, well, we can't help ourselves. That's hogwash.

How many people actually make war? And how many ordinary people kill before and after they've been in a war? It's a myth that men are so warlike that it's just inevitable that we'll always have war. If that were so then we would all seek war in our neighborhoods and with anyone who we didn't agree with.