PURELY COMMENTARY
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor Emeritus
Recapitulating Human Challenges Of DP Era
T
he many thousands
of books and manu-
scripts devoted to re-
taining the memories of the
bestialities perpetrated by
the Germans, preserving the
records and serving as ad-
monitions never to forget, will
continue to increase. It is a
compulsion. Another few
years and those with living
memories will no longer be
here.
Why, then, has the record of
those who were rescued, the
tens of thousands who were
freed after the defeat of the
Nazis who pleaded for our
sympathies and help and
were provided compassion as
displaced persons are now just
about forgotten? They were
the DPs who suffered another
type of humiliation under
miserable conditions, until
their redemption by our
American troops.
Now being recalled by one
of the rescuers, the informa-
tion must be treated not only
with respect for the preserv-
ing of a historic experience in
the life of many, but also with
gratitude for such preserva-
tion of an important record in
a great human drama and the
challenges to humanity that
accompany it.
Albert A. Hutler, who now
is in retirement in San Diego,
Calif., after a long record of
leadership in United Jewish
Funds and federations in San
Diego and Chicago, brings us
back to the DP struggles in
Agony of Survival. It was co-
authored by Marvin J.
Folkertsna, a political
scientist.
It is of added interest to this
community that publication
of this book was encouraged
by Mary B. Keene, who is the
daughter-in-law of Sam
Keene, long-time Detroit at-
torney. She is president of
Glenbridge Publishing Ltd.
which is the publishing spon-
sor of the book.
Agony of Survival gains im-
portance as a comment on the
agonizing conditions that
marked the emergence of the
DP problem. In author
Hutler's notes in the prologue
is this introduction of himself:
From late March through
October 1945, I served as
the displaced persons of-
ficer for the region sur-
rounding Mannheim, Ger-
many. For eight furiously
intense months my small
staff and I returned nearly
a quarter of a million
displaced persons to their
Is Misspelling
Embarrassing?
lbert A. Hutler him-
self brings up the
question whether
misspelling his name is cause
for embarrassment. In his
Agony of Survival on page 22
we read:
Even minor matters
caused alarm, and
sometimes wry amuse-
ment. For instance, when I
first affixed my name, title,
and responsibilities on my
office door — Lieutenant
Albert A. Hutler, Section
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Vol. XCVII No. 22 July 27, 1990
2
FRIDAY, JULY 27, 1990
Chief, Displaced Persons
and Public Welfare Sec-
tion, American Military
Government — people stop-
ped and stared at it for a
while, their faces express-
ing a mixture of curiosity,
fear, and incomprehension.
I couldn't understand
this reaction until someone
explained to me the uncan-
ny resemblance between
my name and that of the
former dictator of the
Third Reich. I was told that
if an umlaut were placed
above the "u"in Hutler, the
German pronounciation of
my name would be very
similar to that of "Hitler."
This bizarre incongruity
was lost on no one and in-
itially was the subject of
some grim, although
perhaps misplaced, humor.
That a man with the name
of A. Hutler should be put
in charge of salvaging the
lives of those who had sur-
vived the death camps and
labor brigades of A. Hitler
was an astounding coin-
cidence, a gratuitous
irony. ❑
home countries. We receiv-
ed the homeless from all
the nations of Europe, and
they arrived to us in a
variety of ways — off
trucks, trains, planes,
buses, even walking or
riding bicycles or motor-
cycles. Pitiful creatures
they were: haggard,
emaciated, and hollow-
eyed, still stunned by the
war. Some of them were
barely alive, straggling in-
to the city on foot or weari-
ly shuffling off a metallic,
Albert Hutler
diesel-powered monster
designed to haul freight or
cattle. All they knew was
that the war was over and
a new set of authorities
was in charge of their lives.
I was one of those
authorities, serving in the
Seventh Army American
Military Government Euro-
pean Civil Affairs Regi-
ment. My unit deloused,
fed and clothed them, pro-
vided shelter for overnight
stays or for longer periods
of time (sometimes stret-
ching into months), and
shipped them out again,
usually the next day, for
their homelands in Europe.
Most of the homeless
returned, happy to rebuild
their lives. But many of
them had no homes left to
return to, or no country
that wanted them, or they
preferred death to
repatriation. Those cases
were the ones that made us
cry, helplessly.
Agony is the central theme
of the Hutler chronicle of
events about the half million
survivors of the German
atrocity. An introductory
essay to the Hutler indict-
ment of the indifferences to
the sufferings summarized
the theme. Dr. Abraham L.
Sachar, chancellor and former
president of Brandeis Univer-
sity, himself a historian of
note, took into account the ac-
cumulated miseries. In one
portion of his essay he called
attention to these facts:
Hutler was at pains also
to carry a message of
forbearance to his camp
charges, "my Jews:' He
asked them to remember
that the occupation
authorities were over-
whelmed by the complex-
ities of governing a
fragmented, defeated coun-
try, caught in the toils of
one of the great migration
movements of the postwar
period. Even essential ser-
vices were everywhere
almost totally inoperative.
It did not help that most of
the minor officials who
dealt on the operational
plane with the survivors
were young and
inexperienced.
These officials had
replaced veterans of the
long war and knew little
about the horrors of the
Holocaust, about what the
survivors had endured.
Often, therefore, irritation
did not represent hostility;
it represented tensions
that were inevitable as
millions of demobilized
Germans returned from
the battlefields.
Hutler, as a conciliator,
was remarkably suc-
cessful. He earned the ap-
preciation of many top of-
ficials, including General
Eisenhower, and Dean Earl
Harrison, President Tru-
man's investigating deputy.
In fact, when Eisenhower
toured the camp in Stut-
tgart, accompanied by
Hutler, he commented that
it was the best organized
DP center he had seen in
Germany.
There were the tragedies in
the Hutler reporting of the
survivors of the Nazi inferno
who were gathered with hope
for rehabilitation. They met
with new hatreds from the
German villagers who sur-
rounded the DP camps. Even
among the Americans in the
rescuing army personnel
there were those who suc-
cumbed to admiration of the
Nazis rather than retaining
contempt for their in-
humanities. In the earliest
pages of his book, Hutler
described the horror of the ac-
cumulated agonies in the
following:
Much of the time we
listened to people, discuss-
ed our alternatives, and
ordered things done.
Sometimes we even wept;
other times we were too
stunned and tired to weep
Harry Truman
or to react at all. We listen-
ed to impassioned stories
in a dozen or so languages
from individuals who
pleaded with us to move
them east, west, north, or
south, or not to move them
at all. I listened to accounts
from Germans who said
they knew nothing of the
Holocaust and from Jews
who begged us to protect
them from the hatred of
those very same Germans.
I marveled at how many
of our soldiers showed
more compassion, respect,
and understanding for the
defeated enemy than they
did for the Germans'
helpless victims. One mo-
ment I sat speechless
pondering the nature of a
people capable of tending
flower gardens as well as
building crematoria only
to face, the next moment,
the arrogance of a heel-
clicking Prussian who in-
sisted that the Americans
should join what was left of
the German army to fight
the Russians.
In short, I was often
astonished by what was
going on around us, by the
requirements of my duties
and those of my staff, and
by the obstacles in our
way. Unusual, sometimes
traumatic events pervaded
our lives, our work. Sur-
prises became common;
the extraordinary, part of
our routine.
Yet there was compassion,
else the mission might not
have been accomplished. As
the survivors arrived in the
DP camps the hard-boiled
American soldiers were mov-
ed to compassion; learning to
care for babies and provide
immediate life-saving
assistance.
Hutler's record shows that
only in exceptional cases —