Manfred Steinfeld

MANFRED STEINFELD

JOSBACH, GERMANY

82nd Airborne, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment

Operation Market Garden

In the photograph above, Steinfeld (right) meets the Russians in Grabow, Germany, 1945.

Manfred Steinfeld lived in a small village of four hundred with six Jewish families. The oldest of three siblings, Steinfeld left Germany on the Kindertransport in the summer of 1938 and arrived in Chicago a few months later. Inducted nearly one year after finishing high school, after his basic training, Steinfeld was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program and then to Camp Ritchie for additional army intelligence training. At the time of the invasion of Normandy, he volunteered for paratroopers and was assigned to the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, G-2 Section, of the 82nd Airborne. His first action was in Holland.

I was born in Josbach, located one hundred kilometers north of Frankfurt. In Le province where I was born, 492 communities had Jewish residents in 1933. This was in a province that is 100 miles by 100 miles, and they had been there since 1650, 1700, and some even before that. In World War I, most Jews were sent to the infantry and the number of fatalities among Jewish participants was twice as high as any other ethnic group. From my own family, one of my father’s and one of my mother’s brothers were killed. My father served in Macedonia.

We had a semi-successful general store and made a modest living. We lived in a town with six Jewish families. At the turn of the century, there were twelve Jewish families. The Sabbath was observed and they were all orthodox, but they also felt they were good Germans. I distinctly remember the election in 1933; Germans who fought in World War I all came to the election with their medals on because they had served in the war and felt as though nothing was going to happen to them.

I am sometimes amazed that we did not have radio or television, and yet information was quickly and widely disseminated by mouth. We knew what was taking place because some of the men were arrested, and they came back after severe beatings or after having been confined for six weeks to two months. In 1933 I was nine years old, my little brother was seven, and my sister was eleven. When the United States adopted a quota for the amount of Germans to be accepted in 1938, my mother applied for a quota number that indicated we would be able to get out by 1940 or 1941. She then decided to register me with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) that was responsible for getting children out, and in July 1938 I left with twelve other German Jewish children. At the same time she had registered my younger brother, Herbert, to go to Palestine, and he left in November 1939. My mother was more interested in saving her children. In fact, my sister was in Hamburg the day war broke out. She was supposed to go to England on the Kindertransport but she did not get out.

I arrived in New York, but traveled on to Chicago to join an aunt and uncle already living there. I certainly had to have been impressed by what I saw. I adapted very well and found part-time jobs while going to school. I was put in the eighth grade, graduated from primary school in 1939 and graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1942. All of my friends were American Jewish kids, though in Hyde Park there were many German Jews.

I realized in 1941 that when America entered the war that I, was resident of the United States, was subject to the draft. I entered the service in March 1943.

I was certainly very anxious to do my part, and for the Allies to have a victory. I was sent to Scott Field, Illinois, and then to Camp Roberts, California, for basic infantry training. From there I went to the Army Specialized Training Program at the City College of New York. In January 1943, I went to Military Intelligence School at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. I completed a first course in interrogation of prisoners of war (IPW) and went on to become an order of battle specialist.

I became an expert in the German Army. In school we had American instructors speaking German and dressed up in German uniforms, and that was our only exposure to the German army until we got to Europe. My responsibility was to make an assessment based on the information we were getting from the POWs—for example, the breakdown of weapons, equipment, commanding officers, and the type units we were opposing. I found this quite easy because it was the same breakdown in the U.S. Army. It went as follows: squad to the platoon, platoon to company, company to battalion, battalion to regiment, regiment to brigade, brigade to division, and so on.

I sailed to Southampton, and then on to London to Military Intelligence headquarters, which was located at 40 Hyde Park Gate. The British were very accommodating, receiving us with open arms. My immediate assignment was to receive reports from the French underground, obtained by inmates of the brothels the Germans had established. With the usual German efficiency, every dog tag of a German soldier had name, rank, serial number, and the unit assignment. As these soldiers patronized the house of prostitution, all of these names were marked down by members of the French underground and sent to intelligence headquarters. Based on that information, we were able to make some assessment on the units we were facing on the coast of France.

At the same time the invasion was taking place, they requested volunteers for the airborne units, and I volunteered for the paratroopers, 82nd Airborne Division. This was exciting for a nineteen-year-old to jump out of airplanes. I was also patriotic and wanted to do my duty and win the war. Jump school was in England. We all had to be physically fit, which took about a week. It consisted of one hour of double time in the morning, stretching, landing, and then another evening of double time (full pack). It was total exhaustion. We also had to learn to climb ropes.

The first jump was on Monday, the second was on Tuesday, third was Wednesday night, the fourth was Thursday, and the fifth was on Friday.

Then I graduated from school on Saturday as qualified parachutist. I distinctly remember that I was the last man waiting to jump when the jump master came up to me and said, “Steinfeld, give me your wallet and watch. One out of every hundred parachutes won’t open, and yours might be it.”

I was trembling, but the chute opened automatically after he took my personal possessions and pushed me out of the plane. Certainly the next jumps were easier because I knew what to expect. When we got jump training we were jumping from fifteen hundred feet, so the total exercise from the time we were out of the plane until we landed was two minutes, so we wouldn't be an easy target on the way down.

I was assigned to the G-2 Section, as part of the order of battle team, number 16, which was commanded by Lieutenant Able, Sergeant Wynn, and me. Both of these soldiers did not speak German, so I had an advantage over them in carrying out certain responsibilities. We were responsible for all of the intelligence on which we based our campaign strategies.

The one campaign I was involved in from the beginning planning stages was the one in Holland. We were stationed in Leicester, England, and the campaign was announced fifteen days before the jump. It was hurriedly planned and I was involved from the beginning to the invasion, which was September 17, 1944. The 82nd jumped at Nijmegen, the 101st jumped at Eindhoven, and the 1st British Airborne jumped at Arnhem. The strategy was to seize all of the bridges over the Rhine and Waal River, and then make a shortcut into Germany.

Today, that campaign is considered one of the biggest military blunders. The 1st British failed at Arnhem. We remained at Nijmegen from September 17 to November 15, holding that part of the lines while the 1st British Airborne was wiped out. The Polish Brigade, which jumped five days later to assist the British, was also wiped out. The total campaign’s casualties were about fifteen thousand.

I came in by glider. Normally, a unit would decide who was to jump and who would come in by glider. I was sitting in a jeep (in the glider) with Lieutenant Able, the chaplain of the 82nd Airborne, and we crashed. We all got hurt badly because the glider was totally demolished. I landed about fifty feet from the point of impact. There were more casualties caused by the glider landings than parachute jumps in Normandy and Holland. Jumping was comparatively safer than landing in a glider.

I was taken to a first aid station because I was banged up quite badly, with cuts and bruises. I finally made it to the G-2 Section on the day after D-Day. General Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, insisted those in headquarters live the same way as the soldiers on the frontlines. I lived in a foxhole for two months. We were not allowed the comfort of taking over buildings.

We did have the first Yom Kippur services in Holland, very close to the German border, in 1944.

I was in Holland until the middle of November. After being relieved from the frontlines, I was sent to a base camp in France until the Battle of the Bulge on December 18.1 was responsible for posting the military situation map every day, as we received information from Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). I remember in the middle of December, we knew that the Germans were planning something. We knew there was a huge concentration of German forces and equipment, but no one was expecting anything.

We went by convoy to the Ardennes through the snow in the cold weather. Those nights during the bulge were quiet and terrifying. There were German soldiers infiltrating our lines dressed in American uniforms. I remember emptying a magazine into the night when I thought I had heard something. The next morning, I realized that I wasn’t shooting at anything. My first actual contact with the enemy was during the bulge, when I interrogated a prisoner who was born and lived in the town next to my birthplace. Unless he was a member of the fanatical SS, the typical German soldier was glad to be captured.

After the German counteroffensive stopped, we were sent back to base camp in France. In the middle of March, we were assigned to the newly formed U.S. Ninth Army, then holding the west bank of the Rhine in the vicinity of Cologne. We were there until the middle of April, when the 82nd Airborne established the last bridgehead along the Elbe River.

On May 2, 1945, I was on the reconnaissance patrol that contacted the Russians. At the same time, I was involved in translating the unconditional surrender document; the 82nd Airborne Division accepted the surrender of about four hundred thousand Germans facing our sector on May 3, 1945. We also came across the Woebblin labor camp, a sub-camp of a larger Neuengamme concentration camp. I was certainly emotionally distraught in the camp, because there was always the possibility of seeing my mother and sister among the dead or half-dead. That was one fear I had. When we found the bodies in the camp, we decided to bury them in the nearby town square. I made the funeral arrangements and the American chaplain gave the eulogies. The Germans, of course, felt that we were doing an injustice to them by accusing them of these crimes, even though they lived only three miles away. They swore they had no knowledge of the atrocities. “We didn’t know” was the typical German excuse.

When I was military governor of a town called Bossenberg in June, a woman came up to me in a concentration camp striped dress. She informed me that a man walking across the street was a criminal, and we arrested and interrogated him. It turned out that his name was Ludwig Ramdower and he was the assistant commander of the infamous Ravensburg concentration camp for women, where this woman was an inmate. We took him out for target practice and threatened him with our pistols before turning him over to the British military tribunal on June 10. He had a military trial and was hanged by the British three years later.

The interesting aspect of that incident is that the woman who came up to me was the former daughter-in-law of Martin Buber, the famous Austrian Jewish philosopher. Her name was Margarete Buber-Neumann; she divorced Professor Buber’s son in 1930 and married Heinz Neumann, the head of the German Communist Party (he was executed in the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1937). When the war started, she was repatriated to Germany where she spent 1939-1945 in a camp.

By May 15, 1945, we knew what had taken place in the camps. When we moved back to France in June 1945, I received permission to go to my hometown. I arrived in Josbach on a Sunday morning and went to the burgermeister’s (mayor's) office. News of my arrival came as people were leaving church. I soon found out the tragic fate of my mother and sister; they were deported in October 1941, sent to the Riga Ghetto until October 1944, when they were sent to Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. My mother died December 30, 1944, and my sister died January 15, 1945.

When the war ended, the 82nd Airborne was selected to be the occupational force in Berlin. We entered Berlin in July and remained until October 15. I was discharged on October 29 from Camp McCoy in the United States.

Manfred Steinfeld is a philanthropist and the cofounder of Shelby Williams Furniture. With his wife, Fran, he most recently founded the Danny Cunniff Leukemia Research Laboratory at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, in memory of their grandson, Danny Cunniff, who died of leukemia in 1997.

The above content is from "The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II" by Steven Karras. Steven has given us permission to reproduce the chapters in their entirety. All content is copyright Steven Karrass and ‎ Zenith Press. No reproduction without permission.