Wintergreen
Suppressed Murders
Anna Elisabeth Rosmus
Translated from the German by Imogen von Tannenberg
After the Second World War, local officials in and around the German city of Passau
were forced to mark the graves of some victims of Nazi terror in commemoration of the
crimes committed by a nation. They chose the cheapest ground cover available—wintergreen. With bitter irony the title Wintergreen refers simultaneously to the easy cover-up
of these crimes in the collective memory of a people who were observers, bystanders,
facilitators, and even participants.
With the same commitment to exposing Nazi crimes that has made her books
Against the Stream and Out of Passau so widely read, Anna Elisabeth Rosmus uncovers
the wartime fate of foreign workers, their children, prisoners of war, and Jewish citizens
in Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders. The renowned human rights activist recounts a horrific story of slave labor, forced abortions, and mass murder that took place in and around
her Bavarian hometown. Until Rosmus began her work, the citizens of the region had
successfully avoided acknowledging these atrocities for decades.
Rosmus documents the treatment of women from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and other
Eastern European countries who were deported to Germany and put to work as forced
laborers. She tells how doctors performed abortions—at times without anesthesia—on
these women despite the illegality of such practices for German women and strong opposition by the local Roman Catholic church. Rosmus describes the mistreatment of infants
in so-called children’s homes, where they were intentionally fed spoiled food and the
mortality rates were notoriously high.
Rosmus sheds light on the united effort of the Hitler Youth, secret police, militia, and
German Wehrmacht to massacre thousands of Russian prisoners of war who were being
held in the region. The Nazis and their sympathizers forced some prisoners to dig their
own graves before being shot; others they threw into the Inn River to drown. In nearby
Pocking-Waldstadt, Nazis murdered Jews held in a concentration subcamp, dumping
some bodies from moving trains and placing others in hastily dug graves. As disturbing
as these crimes are, just as unsettling is the local population's ability to gloss over these
acts or to believe that they never happened at all.
ANNA ELISABETH ROSMUS is the recipient of many awards for her struggle against
bigotry and anti-Semitism. Her writings
about Nazism and neo-Nazism have educated generations of Germans and nonGermans, particularly those born after 1945,
about the Holocaust. Rosmus lives near the
Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
IMOGEN VON TANNENBERG is currently
an adjunct faculty member at the University
of Southern California. Von Tannenberg lives
in Venice, California.
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