IT’S BEEN ANALYZED, studied, recalled, remembered. We’ve seen the films, read the books, listened to the survivors tell their terrifying stories. We’ve learned World War II. We’ve learned the Holocaust.

Yet there are things we haven’t been taught, stories we haven’t been told. How many of us knew about the 350 American POWs who were "classified" as Jewish and sent to a German slave-labor camp? Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, these GIs were carted to Berga, a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and were subjected to atrocities too horrific to imagine. And few of us have ever known their stories.

Until now.

Berga: Soldiers of Another War is the final work of Charles Guggenheim, a four-time Academy Award–winning filmmaker who died in October of pancreatic cancer. The film intertwines interviews with Berga survivors, archival photographs, and re-creations using young East Germans as actors.

Guggenheim’s interest in the Berga story was rooted in his personal World War II history: a member of the 106th Infantry Division, he was left stateside with a blood infection when his fellow GIs shipped off. After the war, Guggenheim tried to find an Infantry friend and learned he’d died in a salt mine; that piece of information began what would become Guggenheim’s 50-year quest to tell the stories of the Berga victims and survivors. Six weeks after the completion of Berga: Soldiers of Another War, Guggenheim lost his battle with cancer; his daughter, Grace, a producer of his acclaimed films for 17 years, is left to tell his — and the Berga — story.

Q: Tell me about the genesis of this film, why you and your father felt it needed to get made and how it got made.

A: First of all, this is a non-commissioned work, which means that it was a personal project of my father’s that he wanted to make, and therefore it meant that it would take a lot longer to produce; it took us over six years to make. We didn’t get full funding until about two and a half years ago. So this really had a long journey, and the genesis really is the fact that my father was in World War II. Growing up, I always remember him talking at the dinner table about how penicillin had saved his life. What had happened was, from Infantry training he had developed a foot infection, which then progressed to a blood poisoning, which then progressed all the way up to his hip. So he was really on the verge of losing his life, and penicillin had just come out, and a doctor put him on it sort of at the last minute.

[My father] was a very profound man, and these things really stuck with him, and I think it was only later in life that he realized more of the secondary perspective, which was the fact that the Battle of the Bulge, where his Infantry had gone into, had been one of the worst battles of the Allied forces during World War II. It had the highest number of casualties out of any battle. His division in particular had the highest number of casualties. So you have all these different ramifications, and knowing him, he really probably took this very personally, and realized, you know, "I’ve lived 50 years of my life; how about my friends? What happened to them?" And he realized they came back maimed, or injured, or deaf, or not at all. I think it’s just like why these guys want to talk about it: you get really reflective in your older age about your life; it’s sort of like coming to some sort of resolution.

And that is why he began to investigate where a friend of his had been, what had happened to him in the war. And that’s why he had written off to find out that he had died in a salt mine, which didn’t make much sense. And then he had read an article in a paper maybe 20 years ago in Florida, a guy had interviewed a couple of Berga survivors, and that confirmed that there was a story out there, and then he found a couple books that had one chapter discussing it. So one thing led to the next, and he did discover that there was this story out there.

Q: What was the shooting of the film like?

A: It was really magical, I have to admit. We have a very close-knit team, so we work well together in small, intimate circumstances. March in Germany is like February here, it’s just awful. But every day we filmed, the weather seemed to be exactly how we wanted it to be. It was sort of an iridescent experience, really. Going back in time to the Eastern side of Germany, which was East Germany, and how much it hadn’t changed over time. The young kids in their 20s don’t speak English. Manufacturing hasn’t really come in. It’s still very poor. Things haven’t changed.

Q: How did you find the veterans?

A: Finding veterans for any film is really hard, because it’s not public. You have to go through the associations, so there’s a lot of legwork, and not everybody participates with the associations, or these annual meetings that they have. So a lot of times it’s word of mouth. We actually also went through the Veterans’ Association, which also will not give out any public information, but we got congressional permission to get through, just to write people, and then let them respond to us. We probably located over 100 people, and combined within that were just people who were witnesses on another level: they had been only at the POW camp, Stalag 9B, or they had been political prisoners, or were a war-crimes investigator. You could take at least a year trying to find these people. Particularly something like this, where it’s so obscure. Stalag 9B, which was the main POW camp, is the reunion that the Berga survivors would’ve gone to. And these guys never talked about it. The Stalag 9B veterans didn’t even know what had happened to these guys. So you can see how so much of this information was suppressed by not wanting to talk about it, or just in not knowing about it.

Q: How much convincing did it take to get them to participate in this?

A: The convincing, I think, went easily, only because we approached them very gently. You know, writing people a letter and saying, "If you would like to respond and talk to us about your story, contact us." So we really left it up to them. And then from that pool, we interviewed people to get a sense of what their voices were like, and who were the strongest candidates. So in the end we interviewed probably 40 people audio-wise, and 12 on camera.

Q: What was the experience of sitting down with them like?

A: I found it very intense. My father seemed to be very — well, first of all, he’s a master conversationalist, and really knows how to make people feel at home, and they become themselves. I felt guilty, frankly, because to take these people back to an experience which was not pleasant, I was quite worried about that. In fact, one of the guys in Boston who we interviewed, the first time we interviewed him, he broke down. The second time we interviewed him on camera, he called us up and he said he felt depressed for three days. These guys are extremely sensitive, and understandably. And those who can speak so eloquently are even more so, because they feel more deeply. There are some people who are a little bit more detached. I have to say, it’s a gift, when I look back, because if they weren’t willing to take the risk, we would really not know.

Q: That’s really the big question: why do you think the experiences of these GIs aren’t more widely known?

A: I think it’s completely understandable, first of all. There was so much we didn’t know about what was going on during the war, and what was really happening abroad with the atrocities. And don’t forget, this was a very small incident compared to what was going on in Europe. This was a world war; it wasn’t just in this little town of Berga. You had millions of Jews that were being exterminated, and suddenly this was all being revealed. My guess is that the US government was just happy they got their men home. And they did investigate it quite quickly; there was a war-crimes investigation that took place, and they went back into Berga a month later and exhumed who they could find who had been buried. I also think people didn’t want to talk about it. These guys came home and they wanted to go forward in their lives. I think that’s why you always see this pattern, even with other historic events — people don’t start talking about them until later. Because you want to forget about the bad things. Why would you want to talk about it? You suppress it and block it out in order to survive, I think.

Q: How have the vets reacted to seeing the film?

A: Really positively. My father spent the last six months of his life basically finishing the film. And I think knowing him along the way, they felt very close to him, and they basically would call up and say, "I feel so grateful to your father for what he has done, and any guilt that he has, he should put aside." I think they realized why he wanted to do it. And they realized what a gift it is for them, too. Of course, you always have one Berga survivor who will be more literal and say, "Well, that’s not exactly how the tunnels looked." Well, the tunnels are all boarded up. This is a film that is to help envision the events, and that’s why you have a disclaimer at the front. You get some people who get differences of opinion, but overall, they are really touched and moved. I think it makes them feel proud that they’re getting honored, in a way, for the first time.

Q: So your father was really able to finish the film before he died?

A: Yeah. I think these guys, ironically, gave him the faith to believe he was going to make it. Because most of the guys in the film who we interviewed knew they were going to make it. Films were like a religion for him; he would really internalize them and live them every day, and I think it really helped him focus on something other than himself — and realize that he’s probably still awfully lucky.

Q: What were his feelings about the film when it was finished?

A: He got to have one screening a month before he passed away, which allowed us to raise money for publicity, which was great; he’s never had money for publicity, he’s never had money for advertising. His big test always is when you sit in the theater and you see how people react in the theater, you know it’s good. And even with all of his experience, he realized you don’t know until you get there. And so he got there, and I think he realized it works. I think that was a real blessing for him.

Q: What do you think is the most important legacy your father left behind?

A: I hope people who are filmmakers will come away with, if they have something to say, and they feel strongly about it, that they should express themselves. I think that was his calling, that he was a storyteller, and he had stories to tell, and because of that, it allows us to be reflective about ourselves and history and our morality, and to really cherish our American heritage, and to realize what a wonderful country we live in.

Berga: Soldiers of Another War airs on May 28, at 8 p.m., on PBS. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com