January 5th, 1945 >> >> Stalag IX-B, a German prisoner of war camp near the town of Bad Orb in Hesse, 3 weeks after the worst of the fighting in the Ardennes has finally begun to slow. The camp holds several thousand American enlisted men captured during the German counteroffensive, most of them taken in the first chaotic days of the attack when entire companies were overrun before they understood what was happening to them.
The barracks here were built for a fraction of the men currently packed into them. The wood stoves burn green timber that produces more smoke than heat. The morning roll call takes place on a parade ground of frozen mud in temperatures that have not climbed above freezing in 11 days. And on this particular morning, the German camp staff has added something new to the routine.
A German officer stands at the front of the assembled prisoners with a clipboard and an interpreter and announces, in German first and then in translated English, that all men of the Jewish faith are to identify themselves and step forward immediately for separate processing. He says this in the flat administrative tone of a man reading a routine instruction.
600 American soldiers stand in the freezing mud and say nothing. Then, from somewhere in the middle of the formation, a single voice answers him. It does not say what the officer expects to hear. Master Sergeant Daniel Reardon was 31 years old, the senior non-commissioned officer among the American prisoners at Stalag, a career infantryman from Butte, Montana, who had enlisted in 1936 at the age of 22 looking for steady work in a county where the copper mines that had employed his father for 30 years were laying men
off faster than any other industry in the state. He was not Jewish. He had grown up Catholic in a mining town with a small Jewish merchant community that had settled there in the 1880s. and that he had known mostly as shopkeepers and neighbors, ordinary fixtures of a small western town who did not occupy any particular place in his thinking until the war put him in a position to think about it directly.
He had been captured on December 17th, 1944, the second day of the German offensive, along with most of the remainder of his battalion after their position near Schnee Eifel was overrun by two German divisions in a single afternoon. He had spent 19 days since then learning the specific administration of captivity, the roll calls, >> >> the rationing, the cold, the small daily negotiations between prisoners and guards that determined whether a camp was merely miserable or actively lethal.
He had been informally recognized by both the other prisoners and the German camp staff as the ranking American present, which under the Geneva self-administration gave him a specific recognized authority to speak for the men under his command, an authority that German camps generally respected because it made their own administrative work easier.
He had heard in the days before January 5th the same rumors that had been moving through the barracks since the first transports arrived that camps further east were treating Jewish prisoners differently, segregating them, sending them to facilities that were not run under the same rules as ordinary prisoner of war camps.
He did not not know on the morning of January 5th exactly what was waiting on the other side of the order being read to him. He knew enough to understand that the order was not routine regardless of the tone in which it was delivered. Hauptmann Friedrich Bauer was 46 years old, >> >> the camp’s senior administrative officer, a former school teacher from Kassel who had been commissioned into a rear area security role after a training injury removed him from frontline service earlier in the war.
By the account of prisoners who dealt with him across the winter of 1944 and 1945, a meticulous and unremarkable administrator, neither sadistic nor especially humane. A man who processed the camp’s daily operations with the careful indifference of someone executing policy that originated well above his own authority and that he had no apparent inclination to question.
The order to identify and separate Jewish prisoners had arrived from regional SS liaison authority 3 days earlier. Part of a broader directive being applied across multiple camps holding American prisoners captured in the Ardennes Offensive, a directive whose stated purpose was administrative reclassification, but whose actual function, as several camp commandants understood from prior coordination with the SS, was to identify Jewish-American servicemen for transfer to slave labor facilities operating under conditions
that fell entirely outside the protections the Geneva Convention extended to ordinary prisoners of war. Bauer had read the directive. He had not personally devised it. He intended to execute it with the same procedural thoroughness he brought to every other instruction issued to him, and he had no particular expectation, >> >> standing on the parade ground that morning with his clipboard, that the instruction would produce anything other than the orderly compliance it had produced at every other camp where it had already
been issued. By January 1945, the segregation and transfer of Jewish-American prisoners of war to slave labor camps under SS administration had already occurred at several facilities holding men captured during the Ardennes Offensive, a deliberate and documented departure from the protections of the Geneva Convention that exposed an unknown number of American servicemen to conditions of forced labor, malnutrition, and physical brutality that camps for ordinary prisoners of war did not impose.
The directive relied on a simple mechanism to function. It required prisoners to self-identify using dog tags that in many cases marked religious affiliation with a stamped letter. >> >> And it depended on ranking American officers and non-commissioned officers with the order or finding some means of resisting it within the narrow dangerous space available to a captured soldier with no leverage beyond his own willingness to accept personal risk on behalf of men under his command.
Several American officers across different camps faced with this same order in the same winter made different choices in the seconds available to them to decide. The choice made at Stalag on the morning of January 5th has been documented since the war’s end and through the testimony of multiple surviving prisoners and the official recognition later extended to the man who made it.
Bauer finished reading the order and waited. The interpreter repeated it in English a second time, more slowly, in case the translation had been unclear. Nobody moved. Bauer looked across the formation and said, this time without the interpreter, that he required the senior American present to ensure compliance.
And that he was addressing this requirement directly to Master Sergeant Reardon whose position he was, of course, fully aware of. Reardon stepped forward out of the front rank, came to attention in front of Bauer, and said in a clear voice intended to carry across the formation that all of the men present were Jews.
Bauer looked at him for a long moment with an expression that several witnesses later described as genuine confusion >> >> rather than anger. The expression of a man encountering a procedural obstacle he had not anticipated and did not immediately know how to categorize. He said that this was clearly false and that Reardon understood it to be false.
Reardon said that under the Geneva Convention >> >> he was required to provide his own name, rank, and serial number and nothing further. And that he was doing exactly that. And that the men behind him were prepared to do the same. Bauer said if Reardon did not comply he would be removed from the formation and the consequences would fall on him personally rather than on the men he was attempting to protect.
Reardon said that he understood this. He did not step back. He did not turn around to consult the men behind him. Bauer drew his pistol and held it not raised but visibly at his side and repeated the order a third time addressing the formation directly now rather than Reardon alone >> >> instructing the Jewish soldiers among them to step forward immediately.
600 men stood in the frozen mud and did not move. Bauer looked at the formation for several seconds. Then he looked back at Reardon. He said in a voice that several witnesses described as quieter than his previous statements that he could not march 600 men away. To his holster, told the interpreter the order was suspended pending further instruction and walked back toward the administration building without addressing the formation again.
He did not raise the matter a second time during the remainder of his tenure at the camp. Daniel Reardon survived the remainder of his captivity at Stalag which was liberated by American forces >> >> in late March 1945 and was repatriated to the United States in April of that year. He returned to Butte, Montana where he worked for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company for 31 years eventually rising to a supervisory position in the same operation his father had worked for three decades earlier.
He married in 1947 and raised four children in Butte. He spoke rarely about his captivity and when he did, according to his children’s later recollections, he generally described the cold and the food rather than the events of January 5th, which he mentioned only a handful of times across his entire post-war life, usually in response to a direct question rather than as something he volunteered.
He was recognized in 1980 by a survivors former prisoners of Stalag several of whom had independently submitted written testimony describing the events of that morning compiling oral historians of American prisoners of war in the European theater. >> >> He attended one reunion of former camp prisoners in 1983, at which several men he had not seen since 1945 approached him specifically to thank him in terms that made clear they had spent nearly four decades carrying the memory of what he had done
on their behalf. He died in 1994 at the age of 81. His Bronze Star citation awarded for actions during the Ardennes >> >> fighting prior to his capture made no mention of January 5th because no formal mechanism existed within the military honor system at that time to recognize an act of resistance performed entirely inside a prisoner of war camp with no weapon, no rank advantage over the man giving the order, and no available evidence beyond the testimony of the men who were there.
Friedrich Bauer remained at his administrative post at Stalag IX-B until the camp’s liberation in March 1945, at which point he was taken into Allied custody along with the remainder of the camp’s German staff. He was processed through the standard denazification system and was not referred for formal war crimes prosecution.
His case file noting that he had not been the originating authority for the segregation directive and that his actual conduct in implementing it had been in the specific instance documented at Stalag incomplete. He returned to civilian life in Kassel and resumed teaching in 1949 after his denazification classification was cleared.
He gave no public interviews about his wartime service. He died in 1977. A former prisoner who had been present in the formation on January 5th, interviewed decades later for an oral history project, was asked what he remembered of Bauer specifically. He said he remembered very little about the man himself.
That Bauer had been in his recollection almost entirely forgettable in every other respect and that the only thing he had ever been able to say with certainty about him was that on one specific morning >> >> he had given an order, been refused, and had chosen for reasons the prisoner could not explain and Bauer himself apparently never explained to anyone not to insist.
Some historians who have studied the segregation of Jewish American prisoners of war during the final winter of the European conflict have noted that the outcome at Stalag was not the outcome at every camp where the same directive was issued that winter and that an unknown number of Jewish American servicemen captured during the Ardennes offensive were in fact separated, transferred, and subjected to forced labor conditions that several survivors described decades later as comparable in severity to
conditions inside the concentration camp system itself. They argue that the actions of individual ranking prisoners, rather than any institutional safeguard, determined which Jewish American soldiers were protected and which were not during that specific winter, a fact that places an enormous and largely unrecognized weight of consequence on decisions made by individual men in a span of seconds with no time to consult anyone and no certainty about what the cost of resistance might be.
Others have focused on the broader question of what the episode reveals about the limits and the unexpected resilience of the Geneva Conventions protections under direct administrative pressure to violate them, arguing that the formation’s collective refusal at Stalag IX-B >> >> demonstrates that the Convention’s protections, however imperfectly enforced across the full range of camps operating that winter, were not merely paper guarantees, but could function as genuine protection when enough men, prisoner, and even
occasionally captor chose to treat them as binding regardless of the directive arriving from above. What is certain is that on the morning of January 5, 1945, in the frozen mud of a prisoner-of-war camp in Hesse, a German officer asked 600 American soldiers to identify which among them were Jewish, >> >> and every single man in the formation gave him the same answer.
If you had been standing in that formation in temperatures that had not risen above freezing in 11 days with a German officer’s pistol visible at his side, what would you have said when he asked? Leave your answer in the comments. And if you believe the men who answered that question with their silence and their unity deserve to be remembered exactly as they were, subscribe because this winter still has mornings in it that have never been fully told.
A German Officer Ordered Jewish Soldiers Forward—600 American POWs Took One Step Together
January 5th, 1945 >> >> Stalag IX-B, a German prisoner of war camp near the town of Bad Orb in Hesse, 3 weeks after the worst of the fighting in the Ardennes has finally begun to slow. The camp holds several thousand American enlisted men captured during the German counteroffensive, most of them taken in the first chaotic days of the attack when entire companies were overrun before they understood what was happening to them.
The barracks here were built for a fraction of the men currently packed into them. The wood stoves burn green timber that produces more smoke than heat. The morning roll call takes place on a parade ground of frozen mud in temperatures that have not climbed above freezing in 11 days. And on this particular morning, the German camp staff has added something new to the routine.
A German officer stands at the front of the assembled prisoners with a clipboard and an interpreter and announces, in German first and then in translated English, that all men of the Jewish faith are to identify themselves and step forward immediately for separate processing. He says this in the flat administrative tone of a man reading a routine instruction.
600 American soldiers stand in the freezing mud and say nothing. Then, from somewhere in the middle of the formation, a single voice answers him. It does not say what the officer expects to hear. Master Sergeant Daniel Reardon was 31 years old, the senior non-commissioned officer among the American prisoners at Stalag, a career infantryman from Butte, Montana, who had enlisted in 1936 at the age of 22 looking for steady work in a county where the copper mines that had employed his father for 30 years were laying men
off faster than any other industry in the state. He was not Jewish. He had grown up Catholic in a mining town with a small Jewish merchant community that had settled there in the 1880s. and that he had known mostly as shopkeepers and neighbors, ordinary fixtures of a small western town who did not occupy any particular place in his thinking until the war put him in a position to think about it directly.
He had been captured on December 17th, 1944, the second day of the German offensive, along with most of the remainder of his battalion after their position near Schnee Eifel was overrun by two German divisions in a single afternoon. He had spent 19 days since then learning the specific administration of captivity, the roll calls, >> >> the rationing, the cold, the small daily negotiations between prisoners and guards that determined whether a camp was merely miserable or actively lethal.
He had been informally recognized by both the other prisoners and the German camp staff as the ranking American present, which under the Geneva self-administration gave him a specific recognized authority to speak for the men under his command, an authority that German camps generally respected because it made their own administrative work easier.
He had heard in the days before January 5th the same rumors that had been moving through the barracks since the first transports arrived that camps further east were treating Jewish prisoners differently, segregating them, sending them to facilities that were not run under the same rules as ordinary prisoner of war camps.
He did not not know on the morning of January 5th exactly what was waiting on the other side of the order being read to him. He knew enough to understand that the order was not routine regardless of the tone in which it was delivered. Hauptmann Friedrich Bauer was 46 years old, >> >> the camp’s senior administrative officer, a former school teacher from Kassel who had been commissioned into a rear area security role after a training injury removed him from frontline service earlier in the war.
By the account of prisoners who dealt with him across the winter of 1944 and 1945, a meticulous and unremarkable administrator, neither sadistic nor especially humane. A man who processed the camp’s daily operations with the careful indifference of someone executing policy that originated well above his own authority and that he had no apparent inclination to question.
The order to identify and separate Jewish prisoners had arrived from regional SS liaison authority 3 days earlier. Part of a broader directive being applied across multiple camps holding American prisoners captured in the Ardennes Offensive, a directive whose stated purpose was administrative reclassification, but whose actual function, as several camp commandants understood from prior coordination with the SS, was to identify Jewish-American servicemen for transfer to slave labor facilities operating under conditions
that fell entirely outside the protections the Geneva Convention extended to ordinary prisoners of war. Bauer had read the directive. He had not personally devised it. He intended to execute it with the same procedural thoroughness he brought to every other instruction issued to him, and he had no particular expectation, >> >> standing on the parade ground that morning with his clipboard, that the instruction would produce anything other than the orderly compliance it had produced at every other camp where it had already
been issued. By January 1945, the segregation and transfer of Jewish-American prisoners of war to slave labor camps under SS administration had already occurred at several facilities holding men captured during the Ardennes Offensive, a deliberate and documented departure from the protections of the Geneva Convention that exposed an unknown number of American servicemen to conditions of forced labor, malnutrition, and physical brutality that camps for ordinary prisoners of war did not impose.
The directive relied on a simple mechanism to function. It required prisoners to self-identify using dog tags that in many cases marked religious affiliation with a stamped letter. >> >> And it depended on ranking American officers and non-commissioned officers with the order or finding some means of resisting it within the narrow dangerous space available to a captured soldier with no leverage beyond his own willingness to accept personal risk on behalf of men under his command.
Several American officers across different camps faced with this same order in the same winter made different choices in the seconds available to them to decide. The choice made at Stalag on the morning of January 5th has been documented since the war’s end and through the testimony of multiple surviving prisoners and the official recognition later extended to the man who made it.
Bauer finished reading the order and waited. The interpreter repeated it in English a second time, more slowly, in case the translation had been unclear. Nobody moved. Bauer looked across the formation and said, this time without the interpreter, that he required the senior American present to ensure compliance.
And that he was addressing this requirement directly to Master Sergeant Reardon whose position he was, of course, fully aware of. Reardon stepped forward out of the front rank, came to attention in front of Bauer, and said in a clear voice intended to carry across the formation that all of the men present were Jews.
Bauer looked at him for a long moment with an expression that several witnesses later described as genuine confusion >> >> rather than anger. The expression of a man encountering a procedural obstacle he had not anticipated and did not immediately know how to categorize. He said that this was clearly false and that Reardon understood it to be false.
Reardon said that under the Geneva Convention >> >> he was required to provide his own name, rank, and serial number and nothing further. And that he was doing exactly that. And that the men behind him were prepared to do the same. Bauer said if Reardon did not comply he would be removed from the formation and the consequences would fall on him personally rather than on the men he was attempting to protect.
Reardon said that he understood this. He did not step back. He did not turn around to consult the men behind him. Bauer drew his pistol and held it not raised but visibly at his side and repeated the order a third time addressing the formation directly now rather than Reardon alone >> >> instructing the Jewish soldiers among them to step forward immediately.
600 men stood in the frozen mud and did not move. Bauer looked at the formation for several seconds. Then he looked back at Reardon. He said in a voice that several witnesses described as quieter than his previous statements that he could not march 600 men away. To his holster, told the interpreter the order was suspended pending further instruction and walked back toward the administration building without addressing the formation again.
He did not raise the matter a second time during the remainder of his tenure at the camp. Daniel Reardon survived the remainder of his captivity at Stalag which was liberated by American forces >> >> in late March 1945 and was repatriated to the United States in April of that year. He returned to Butte, Montana where he worked for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company for 31 years eventually rising to a supervisory position in the same operation his father had worked for three decades earlier.
He married in 1947 and raised four children in Butte. He spoke rarely about his captivity and when he did, according to his children’s later recollections, he generally described the cold and the food rather than the events of January 5th, which he mentioned only a handful of times across his entire post-war life, usually in response to a direct question rather than as something he volunteered.
He was recognized in 1980 by a survivors former prisoners of Stalag several of whom had independently submitted written testimony describing the events of that morning compiling oral historians of American prisoners of war in the European theater. >> >> He attended one reunion of former camp prisoners in 1983, at which several men he had not seen since 1945 approached him specifically to thank him in terms that made clear they had spent nearly four decades carrying the memory of what he had done
on their behalf. He died in 1994 at the age of 81. His Bronze Star citation awarded for actions during the Ardennes >> >> fighting prior to his capture made no mention of January 5th because no formal mechanism existed within the military honor system at that time to recognize an act of resistance performed entirely inside a prisoner of war camp with no weapon, no rank advantage over the man giving the order, and no available evidence beyond the testimony of the men who were there.
Friedrich Bauer remained at his administrative post at Stalag IX-B until the camp’s liberation in March 1945, at which point he was taken into Allied custody along with the remainder of the camp’s German staff. He was processed through the standard denazification system and was not referred for formal war crimes prosecution.
His case file noting that he had not been the originating authority for the segregation directive and that his actual conduct in implementing it had been in the specific instance documented at Stalag incomplete. He returned to civilian life in Kassel and resumed teaching in 1949 after his denazification classification was cleared.
He gave no public interviews about his wartime service. He died in 1977. A former prisoner who had been present in the formation on January 5th, interviewed decades later for an oral history project, was asked what he remembered of Bauer specifically. He said he remembered very little about the man himself.
That Bauer had been in his recollection almost entirely forgettable in every other respect and that the only thing he had ever been able to say with certainty about him was that on one specific morning >> >> he had given an order, been refused, and had chosen for reasons the prisoner could not explain and Bauer himself apparently never explained to anyone not to insist.
Some historians who have studied the segregation of Jewish American prisoners of war during the final winter of the European conflict have noted that the outcome at Stalag was not the outcome at every camp where the same directive was issued that winter and that an unknown number of Jewish American servicemen captured during the Ardennes offensive were in fact separated, transferred, and subjected to forced labor conditions that several survivors described decades later as comparable in severity to
conditions inside the concentration camp system itself. They argue that the actions of individual ranking prisoners, rather than any institutional safeguard, determined which Jewish American soldiers were protected and which were not during that specific winter, a fact that places an enormous and largely unrecognized weight of consequence on decisions made by individual men in a span of seconds with no time to consult anyone and no certainty about what the cost of resistance might be.
Others have focused on the broader question of what the episode reveals about the limits and the unexpected resilience of the Geneva Conventions protections under direct administrative pressure to violate them, arguing that the formation’s collective refusal at Stalag IX-B >> >> demonstrates that the Convention’s protections, however imperfectly enforced across the full range of camps operating that winter, were not merely paper guarantees, but could function as genuine protection when enough men, prisoner, and even
occasionally captor chose to treat them as binding regardless of the directive arriving from above. What is certain is that on the morning of January 5, 1945, in the frozen mud of a prisoner-of-war camp in Hesse, a German officer asked 600 American soldiers to identify which among them were Jewish, >> >> and every single man in the formation gave him the same answer.
If you had been standing in that formation in temperatures that had not risen above freezing in 11 days with a German officer’s pistol visible at his side, what would you have said when he asked? Leave your answer in the comments. And if you believe the men who answered that question with their silence and their unity deserve to be remembered exactly as they were, subscribe because this winter still has mornings in it that have never been fully told.
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