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Near the French village of Audouville-la-Hubert 30 German Wehrmacht prisoners were massacred by U.S. paratroopers.
According to an article in Der Spiegel by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied soldiers have been willfully ignored by historians until now because they were at odds with the "Greatest Generation" mythology surrounding WWII, but this has recently started to change with books such as "The Day of Battle" by Rick Atkinson where he describes Allied war crimes in Italy, and "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy," by Anthony Beevor. Beevor's latest work is currently discussed by scholars, and should some of them be proven right that means that Allied war crimes in Normandy were much more extensive "than was previously realized".
A SURVIVOR OF THE DACHAU MASSACRE RECOLLECTS (Source)
The following article about Hans Linberger was written by T. Pauli for Berkenkruis in October 1988.
Berkenkruis is the magazine of the veterans of the Flemish SS volunteers in World War II; T. Pauli was the chairman of the group in 1988 when this article was published. Pauli quoted from the testimony given to the German Red Cross by Hans Linberger.
Begin quote from article in Berkenkruis, October 1988, by T. Pauli:
Hans LINBERGER was wounded east of Kiev when an AT-gun blew away his left arm and covered his body with shrapnel. It was his fourth wound. After a long stay in the hospital he was posted to the Reserve-Kompanie at Dachau, on the 9th of March 1945.
On the 9th of April, 1945, the heavily wounded laid down their weapons; they were no longer suited to be put into action. They reported themselves to the head of the hospital, Dr. SCHRÖDER, who sent them to the barracks. Evacuated women and children were present in barrack right next to it. Preparations to be evacuated were made, doctors, staff and caretaking personnel all wore white coats and the German Red Cross-armband.
Occasional battle noise was heard from SCHLEISSHEIM that day (April 29, 1945), but around 4:30 PM things got quiet again. When suddenly single gunshots were to be heard, LINBERGER went, holding a small Red Cross-flag, to the entrance (of the hospital). (This occurred around noon.) As could be seen from his empty left sleeve, he was badly injured. To the Americans, who were pushing forward in battle-like style, he declared that this was an unarmed hospital.
One Ami (sic) placed his MP against his chest and hit him in the face. Another one said "You fight Ruski, you no good". The Ami (sic) who placed the MP (Machine Pistol) against his chest went into the hospital and immediately shot a wounded man, who fell down to the ground motionless. When SCHRÖDER wanted to surrender, he was beaten so hard that he received a skull fracture. (Ami was German slang for an American.)The Americans drove everyone out to the main place and sorted out anyone who looked like SS. All of the SS men were then taken to the back of the central heating building and placed against the wall. A MG (Machine gun) was posted and war correspondents came to film and photograph the lined up men.Here begins SS-Oberscharführer Hans Linberger's testimony, under oath to the DRK (German Red Cross), about the following events:
The comrade who was standing right beside me fell on top of me with a last cry - "Aww, the pigs are shooting at my stomach" - as I let myself fall immediately. To me it didn't matter if they would hit me standing or lying down. As such I only got the blood of the dead one, who was bleeding badly from the stomach, across my head and face, so I looked badly wounded. During the pause in the shooting, which can only be explained by the arrival of drunken KZ-prisoners, who, armed with spades, came looking for a man named WEISS. Several of them (the wounded soldiers) crawled forward to the Americans and tried to tell them that they were foreigners, others tried to say that they never had anything to do with the camps. Yet this man WEISS said: "Stay calm, we die for Germany". Oscha. (Oberscharführer) JÄGER asked me, while lying down, if I had been hit, which I had to deny. He was shot through the lower right arm. I quickly gave him a piece of chocolate, as we were awaiting a shot in the neck. A man wearing a Red Cross armband came to us, threw us some razor blades and said "There, finish it yourself". JÄGER cut the wrist of his shot arm, I cut the left one, and when he wanted to use the blade on me, an American officer arrived with Dr. SCHRÖDER, who could barely keep himself standing, and the shooting was stopped. This allowed us to drag away the wounded. I remember a comrade with a shot in the stomach, who came to us at Dachau, in a room of café Hörhammer, where all possible troops were mixed together. On the road, we were spit upon and cursed at by looters from the troop barracks who wished we would all be hung. During this action (sic) 12 dead were left nameless. As I later found out, documents and name tags had been removed on American orders, and a commando (work party) of German soldiers were supposed to have buried these dead in an unknown location. During the shooting, the wife of a Dr. MÜLLER, with whom I had been in correspondencer years before, had poisoned herself and her two children. I was able to find the grave of these persons. In this grave supposedly are buried 8 more SS-members, including an Oscha. MAIER. MAIER had an amputated leg and was shot in another area of the hospital terrain adjacent to the hospital wall. He lay there with a shot in his stomach and asked Miss STEINMANN to kill him, since he could not bear the pain any longer. His dying relieved Miss STEINMANN from completing the last wish of this comrade. In the proximity of the hospital/mortuary were probably other comrades executed at the walls, as I later found traces of gunfire there.
Later, as a prisoner of war, I was pointed to a grave in the same hospital terrain, by the wife of a former KZ-prisoner, who on All Saints Day in 1946 (November 1st) came near the fence and, while crying, remembered some children buried in the grave. The children must have died after the collapse (Zusammenbruch) when the Americans took over the camp. Further, comrades from the Waffen-SS are buried in the same grave, as could be concluded from a message of the Suchdienst (the German MIA tracing service).
AMERICAN BRUTALITY IN THE PACIFIC
American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered. According to Richard Aldrich, who has published a study of the diaries kept by United States and Australian soldiers, they sometimes massacred prisoners of war. Dower states that in "many instances ... Japanese who did become prisoners were killed on the spot or en route to prison compounds." According to Aldrich it was common practice for U.S. troops not to take prisoners. This analysis is supported by British historian Niall Ferguson, who also says that, in 1943, "a secret [U. S.] intelligence report noted that only the promise of ice cream and three days leave would ... induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese."
Ferguson states such practices played a role in the ratio of Japanese prisoners to dead being 1:100 in late 1944. That same year, efforts were taken by Allied high commanders to suppress "take no prisoners" attitudes, among their own personnel (as these were affecting intelligence gathering) and to encourage Japanese soldiers to surrender. Ferguson adds that measures by Allied commanders to improve the ratio of Japanese prisoners to Japanese dead, resulted in it reaching 1:7, by mid-1945. Nevertheless, taking no prisoners was still standard practice among U. S. troops at the Battle of Okinawa, in April–June 1945.
Ulrich Straus, a U.S. Japanologist, suggests that frontline troops intensely hated Japanese military personnel and were "not easily persuaded" to take or protect prisoners, as they believed that Allied personnel who surrendered, got "no mercy" from the Japanese. Allied soldiers believed that Japanese soldiers were inclined to feign surrender, in order to make surprise attacks. Therefore, according to Straus, "[s]enior officers opposed the taking of prisoners[,] on the grounds that it needlessly exposed American troops to risks..." When prisoners nevertheless were taken at Gualdacanal, interrogator Army Captain Burden noted that many times these were shot during transport because "it was too much bother to take him in".
Ferguson suggests that "it was not only the fear of disciplinary action or of dishonor that deterred German and Japanese soldiers from surrendering. More important for most soldiers was the perception that prisoners would be killed by the enemy anyway, and so one might as well fight on."
U. S. historian James J. Weingartner attributes the very low number of Japanese in U.S. POW compounds to two important factors, a Japanese reluctance to surrender and a widespread American "conviction that the Japanese were "animals" or "subhuman'" and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to POWs. The latter reason is supported by Ferguson, who says that "Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians—as Untermenschen."
Source
AMERICAN SOLDIERS: STARVATION AT REMADEN
After the capture of the Remagen Bridge, the US Army hastily erected around 19 Prisoner of War cages around the bridge-head to hold an estimated one million prisoners. The camps were simply open fields surrounded by concertina wire. Those at the Rhine Meadows were situated at Remagen, Bad Kreuznach, Andernach, Buderich, Rheinbach and Sinzig. The German prisoners were hopeful of good treatment from the GIs but in this they were sadly disappointed. Herded into the open spaces like cattle, some were beaten and mistreated. No tents or toilets were supplied. The camps became huge latrines, a sea of urine from one end to the other. They had to sleep in holes in the ground which they dug with their bare hands. In the Bad Kreuznach cage, 560,000 men were interned in an area that could only comfortably hold 45,000. Denied enough food and water, they were forced to eat the grass under their feet and the camps soon became a sea of mud. After the concentration camps were discovered, their treatment became worse as the GIs vented their rage on the hapless prisoners.
In the five camps around Bretzenheim, prisoners had to survive on 600-850 calories per day. With bloated bellies and teeth falling out, they died by the thousands. During the two and a half months (April-May, 1945) when the camps were under American control, a total of 18,100 prisoners died from malnutrition, disease and exposure. This extremely harsh treatment at the hands of the Americans resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 German prisoners-of-war in the Rhine Meadows camps alone in the months just before and after the war ended.
Source
'SICK' BEHAVIOUR OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS
Some Allied soldiers collected Japanese body parts. The incidence of this by American personnel occurred on "a scale large enough to concern the Allied military authorities throughout the conflict and was widely reported and commented on in the American and Japanese wartime press."
The collection of Japanese body parts began quite early in the war, prompting a September 1942 order for disciplinary action against such souvenir taking. Harrison concludes that, since this was the first real opportunity to take such items (the Battle of Guadalcanal), "[c]learly, the collection of body parts on a scale large enough to concern the military authorities had started as soon as the first living or dead Japanese bodies were encountered."
When Japanese remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands after the war, roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls.
In a memorandum dated June 13, 1944, the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) asserted that "such atrocious and brutal policies," in addition to being repugnant, were violations of the laws of war, and recommended the distribution to all commanders of a directive pointing out that "the maltreatment of enemy war dead was a blatant violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the sick and wounded, which provided that: After every engagement, the belligerent who remains in possession of the field shall take measures to search for wounded and the dead and to protect them from robbery and ill treatment."
These practises were in addition also in violation of the unwritten customary rules of land warfare and could lead to the death penalty. The U.S. Navy JAG mirrored that opinion one week later, and also added that "the atrocious conduct of which some US personnel were guilty could lead to retaliation by the Japanese which would be justified under international law".
The collection of Japanese body parts began quite early in the war, prompting a September 1942 order for disciplinary action against such souvenir taking. Harrison concludes that, since this was the first real opportunity to take such items (the Battle of Guadalcanal), "[c]learly, the collection of body parts on a scale large enough to concern the military authorities had started as soon as the first living or dead Japanese bodies were encountered."
When Japanese remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands after the war, roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls.
In a memorandum dated June 13, 1944, the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) asserted that "such atrocious and brutal policies," in addition to being repugnant, were violations of the laws of war, and recommended the distribution to all commanders of a directive pointing out that "the maltreatment of enemy war dead was a blatant violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the sick and wounded, which provided that: After every engagement, the belligerent who remains in possession of the field shall take measures to search for wounded and the dead and to protect them from robbery and ill treatment."
American sailor with a Japanese skull
These practises were in addition also in violation of the unwritten customary rules of land warfare and could lead to the death penalty. The U.S. Navy JAG mirrored that opinion one week later, and also added that "the atrocious conduct of which some US personnel were guilty could lead to retaliation by the Japanese which would be justified under international law".
THE DACHAU KILLINGS (April, 1945)
The Dachau Concentration Camp, near Munich, was liberated by US forces on the 29th. of April, 1945. First to enter the camp and confront the horror within was Private First Class John Degro, the lead scout of Company 1, 3rd Battalion, 157 Infantry Regiment, 45th Division of the US 7th Army. Prior to entering the camp, the troops had come upon a train of thirty nine cattle trucks parked just outside the camp. The train had come from Auschwitz in Poland after a journey of thirty days. The trucks were filled with the corpses of 2,310 Hungarian and Polish Jews who had died from hunger and thirst. Enraged, the Americans rounded up most of the SS guard complement of 560 men, hundreds of whom had already deserted. Included in the round-up was a detachment from the 5th SS Panzer 'Viking' Division sent to Dachau earlier to maintain security and replace those who had deserted. Guarded by angry GIs, one group of guards were lined up against a wall to await the appearance of their commander, SS Obersturmfüher Heindrich Skodzensky.
When he appeared, dressed immaculately with polished boots, and giving the military salute, which was ignored by the US company commander, Lt. William Jackson, who ordered "Line this piece of shit up with the rest of 'em over there". The GIs lost control and began shouting 'Kill em, kill em'. Filled with murderous rage and with tears streaming down his face, one GI of the 15th Infantry Regiment, opened fire with his machine-gun. After three bursts of raking fire, a total of 122 SS men lay dead or dying along the base of the wall. A few of the camp inmates, dressed in the familiar striped clothing and armed with .45 caliber pistols, then walked along the line of dead and dying guards and administrated the coup de grace to those still alive. Forty other guards were killed by revengeful inmates, some having their arms and legs torn apart. At another site near the SS hospital, hundreds of German guards were machine gunned to death on the orders of the executive officer of Company 1, 3rd Battalion. Altogether, a total of 520 persons, acting as camp and tower guards, including many Hungarians in German uniforms and recently returned from the Eastern Front, were killed that day. The sad fact is that many of these guards were new arrivals at the camp and were not the real culprits, the truly guilty had already fled. (Controversy rages to this day over just how many camp guards were killed at Dachau and different units of the US Army are still claiming the title 'First Liberators')
THE WEBLING ATROCITY (April, 1945)
On the same day that the Dachau Concentration Camp was discovered, a massacre took place in the little hamlet of Webling about ten kilometres from the camp. A Waffen-SS unit had arrived at the hamlet, which consisted of about half a dozen farm houses, barns and the Chapel of St. Leonhard, to take up defensive positions in trenches dug around the farms by French P.O.W. workers. Their orders were to delay the advance of American tanks of the 20th Armoured Division and infantry units of the 7th US Army which was approaching Dachau.
The farms, mostly run by women (whose husbands were either dead, prisoners of war or still fighting) with the help of French POWs, came under fire on the morning of 29th April causing all inhabitants to rush for the cellars. One soldier of Company F of the US 222nd Infantry Regiment of the 42nd Rainbow Division, was killed as they entered the hamlet under fire from the Waffen-SS unit. The first German to emerge from the cellar was the owner of the farm, Herr Furtmayer. Informed by the French POWs that only civilians, not SS, were in hiding in the cellers, the GIs proceeded to round up the men of the SS unit.
First to surrender was an officer, Freiherr von Truchsess, heading a detachment of seventeen men. The officer was immediately struck with a trenching tool splitting his head open. The other seventeen were lined up in the farmyard and shot. On a slight rise behind the hamlet, another group of eight SS were shot. Their bodies were found lying in a straight line with their weapons and ammunition belts neatly laid on the ground. This would suggest that the men were shot after they surrendered. Altogether, one SS officer and forty one men lay dead as the infantry regiment proceeded on their way towards Dachau. Next day the local people, with the help of the French POWs, buried the bodies in a field to be later exhumed by the German War Graves Commission and returned to their families.
DRESDEN (February 13/14, 1945)
This city of culture is situated on both sides of the Elbe river. Of no tactical or strategic value to the German war effort it was considered 'safe' from destruction by air attacks. By 1945 it became a shelter for some 350,000 refugees fleeing from the approaching Red Army. At the Yalta conference Stalin requested more action against cities such as Berlin, Leipzig and Chemnitz. No mention was made of Dresden. The fact that Dresden was chosen was because the Russians at that time were only fifty kilometres away from the city, much nearer to Dresden than than they were to Berlin, Leipzig or Chemnitz. No doubt Churchill was eager to impress the Soviet leader, Stalin. RAF and USAAF bombers devastated the city in the most concentrated incendiary attack of the war in Europe (Operation Thunderclap) In all, 733 British bombers dropped 1,478 tons of high explosive bombs and 1,182 tons of incendiary bombs and 311 US Flying Fortresses dropped 771 tons of bombs on the city. Around 35,000 persons were reported as 'missing' after the fire-storm which engulfed the city and destroyed eleven square miles of its center including 14,000 houses, 22 hospitals, 72 schools and 31 department stores. By the 10th of March, 18,375 dead and 2,212 seriously injured were accounted for. The final death toll was expected to reach 25,000.
In one of the city squares 6,865 bodies were cremated. Thousands of British and American prisoners-of-war were on work detail in the city from the large POW camp Stalag IVb at nearby Muehlberg. Casualties among the prisoners were fewer than a hundred. Around 200,000 refugees from the east were camped in the city's 'Grosser Garten'. It was estimated that about 1,300,000 people were in the city as the raid started. The toll would have been much higher had not some bomber crews, knowing that thousands of refugees were in the city, deliberately jettisoned their bomb loads wide of the mark. It is doubtful that the air attack on Dresden shortened the war by even one day. At this point of the war, Germany was on the brink of collapse so why give the still twitching corpse this one final brutal kick? Churchill was later to say "The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing". In 1956, Dresden in Germany and Coventry in England, (1,236 deaths) entered a twin-town relationship. (In 1956, the German Statistical Office estimated that German civilian dead, due to air raids throughout the war, to be around 410,000)
THE EXPULSION TRAGEDY
The merciless revenge perpetrated on the entire German civilian population of Eastern Europe during the closing stages of the war, and for many months after, took the lives of over 2,100,000 ethnic German men, women and children. For generations these Germans had lived and toiled in areas that today are part of central and Eastern Europe. Around fifteen million of these Volksdeutsche were driven from their homes and ancestral lands in Poland, East Prussia, Silesia, Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia and forced back into the Allied occupied zones of Germany.
This was the greatest forcible evacuation of people in European history. It is estimated that of the eight million Germans expelled from Poland around 1,600,000 died in the process. In Czechoslovakia, memories of the Lidice massacre inspired acts of revenge against German soldiers and civilians. Soldiers were disarmed, tied to stakes, doused with petrol and set alight. Wounded German soldiers in hospital were shot in their beds, others were hung up on lamposts in Wenzell Square and fires were lit beneath them so that they died the gruesome death of being roasted alive. These ethnic Germans lived in fear of the Russians but no one thought that the dreadful fate which awaited them would not even emanate from the Soviets at all but from their own neighbours, the Czechs!
Thousands of innocent German residents were murdered in their homes by the Czechs, others were forced into interment camps where they were beaten and maltreated before being expelled. Bishop Beranek of Prague declared: 'If a Czech comes to me and confesses to having killed a German, I absolve him immediately'. The Americans, utterly blind to the political consequences of allowing the Soviets to liberate Czechoslovakia, halted at the Karlsbad-Pilsen-Budweis line. The Sudeten Germans now had no protection from the torrent of bestiality vented on them by the Czechs. In Brno, 25,000 German civilians were forced marched at gun-point to the Austrian border. There, the Austrian guards refused them entry, the Czech guards refused to re-admit them. Herded into an open field they died by the hundreds from hunger and cold before being rescued by the US 16th Tank Division on May 8th 1945. In the Russian occupied zones of Eastern Europe and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of civilian men and women, Poles, Czechs, Romanians and Germans, were transported to the Urals in the Soviet Union and used as slave labourers until released in the late 40s. Mostly ignored by the world's press, the unimaginable suffering experienced by the expellees is largely unknown outside Germany, yet it was systematically carried out in a brutal fashion as official Allied policy in accordance with the decisions formulated at Yalta and Potsdam.
RAMPAGE ON MONTE CASSINO
Monte Cassino fell to the Allies on May 18, 1944. After a four month struggle and the abbey bombed into ruins by the US Air Force, Polish troops of the 12th Lancers, 3rd Carpathian Division, raised their regimental flag over the ruins of the 6th century Benedictine Monastery situated high in the Apennines of central Italy. The next night thousands of French Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian and Senegalese troops, attached to the French Expeditionary Corps, swarmed over the slopes of the hills surrounding Monte Cassino and in the villages of Ciociaria and Esperia, which is in the region of Lazio, raped every woman and girl that came within their sight. Over 2,000 women, ranging in age from 11 years to 86 years suffered at the hands of these gang-raping soldiers as village after village was entered. Menfolk who tried to protect their wives and daughters were murdered without mercy, around 800 of them died. Two sisters aged 15 and 18 were raped by dozens of soldiers each. One died from the abuse, the other was still in a mental hospital in 1997, 53 years after the event. Most of the dwellings in the villages were destroyed and everything of value was stolen.
Later in the war, these same troops raped around 500 women in the Black Forrest town of Freudenstadt, on April 17, 1945, after its capture. In Stuttgart, colonial French troops, mostly African, but under the command of General Eisenhower, rounded up around 2,000 women and herded them into the underground subways to be raped. In one week more women were raped in Stuttgart than in the whole of France during the four year German occupation.
ALLIED ATROCITIES
Allied troops, as well as Axis troops, committed terrible atrocities during the war. Some years after the war a mass grave was discovered just west of the city of Nuremberg. In it were the bodies of some 200 SS soldiers. It was not until 1976 that one of the bodies was positively identified. It was the body of SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Kukula, the commander of the 1st Battalion, 38th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment. Autopsies on the other bodies showed that most had been shot at close range, the others beaten to death by the rifle butts of the US Seventh Army GIs. In the village of Eberstetten, 17 German soldiers of the 'Gotz von Berlichingen' Division were shot after they surrendered to US troops.
On April 8, 1945, fourteen members of the 116th Panzer Division were marched through the streets of Budberg to the command post of the US 95th Infantry Division. There, they were lined up and shot. Three were wounded but managed to escape.
On April 13, 1945, tanks of the US 97th or 78th Infantry Division were approaching the village of Spitze about fifteen miles east of Cologne. They came under fire from a 8.8 anti-tank gun which disabled one of the tanks. That night, the village was pounded by tank and artillery fire and at daybreak the US forces entered the village. All the inhabitants, about eighty, were gathered together in front of the church. Included in the eighty were twenty German soldiers, members of an anti-aircraft unit stationed in the village. They were separated from the civilians and marched several hundred yards to a field just outside the village. There, they were lined up and mowed down by machine-gun fire.Next day the US Army ordered the civilians to dig graves and bury the dead. On April 14, 1995, a memorial for the twenty victims was built near the spot.
On April 8, 1945, fourteen members of the 116th Panzer Division were marched through the streets of Budberg to the command post of the US 95th Infantry Division. There, they were lined up and shot. Three were wounded but managed to escape.
On April 13, 1945, tanks of the US 97th or 78th Infantry Division were approaching the village of Spitze about fifteen miles east of Cologne. They came under fire from a 8.8 anti-tank gun which disabled one of the tanks. That night, the village was pounded by tank and artillery fire and at daybreak the US forces entered the village. All the inhabitants, about eighty, were gathered together in front of the church. Included in the eighty were twenty German soldiers, members of an anti-aircraft unit stationed in the village. They were separated from the civilians and marched several hundred yards to a field just outside the village. There, they were lined up and mowed down by machine-gun fire.Next day the US Army ordered the civilians to dig graves and bury the dead. On April 14, 1995, a memorial for the twenty victims was built near the spot.
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At the village of Chenogne in Belgium a group of twenty-one German soldiers emerged from a burning building carrying a Red Cross flag. Their intention was to surrender to the US forces but as they exited the doorway they were shot down by machine-gun and small arms fire. This happened soon after the Malmedy Massacre on December 17, 1944.
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During the Allied assault on Sicily, the largest of the Mediterranean islands, (July, 1943) a dozen unarmed civilians, including some children, were apprehended by US troops after the town of Canicatti surrendered. The civilians were reported to be looting after they had entered a bombed out soap and food factory and were filling buckets with liquid soap that had spilled on the ground. At around 6pm, when an American officer, a lieutenant-colonel, and a group Military Police, accompanied by three interpreters, entered the factory the officer fired a series of shots from his automatic Colt-45 point blank into the crowd. He reloaded and fired again. Eight of the civilians, including an eleven year old girl, died. The officer and soldiers then drove off. Fearing reprisals from the residents of the town, the incident was hushed up for over sixty years. Due to the efforts of Dr. Joseph S. Salemi of New York University, this atrocity was brought to light. The perpetrator of this crime, Lieutenant Colonel McCaffery, died in 1954.
CANADIANS
During the fighting at Leonforte in July 1943, according to Mitcham and von Stauffenberg in the book The Battle of Sicily, The Loyal Edmonton Regiment killed captured German prisoners.
Kurt Meyer, of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, accused Canadian forces of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division during the 1944 Normandy campaign of breaching the Hague Conventions. He claims that on 7 June notes were found that ordered no prisoners to be taken, information confirmed by Canadian infantry under interrogation; that prisoners were not to be taken if they hindered operations. Hubert Meyer also confirms this story; he states that on 8 June a Canadian notebook was found that contained orders to not take prisoners if they impeded the attacking force. Kurt Meyer also calls upon evidence from Bernhard Siebken’s war crimes trial during which the allegation was made that Canadian infantry shot, on at least one occasion, German soldiers who had surrendered during the campaign.
C.P. Stacey, the Canadian official campaign historian, reports that on 14 April 1945 rumours had been spread that the commanding officer of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada had been killed by a civilian sniper; this resulted in the highlanders setting fire to civilian property within the town of Friesoythe in a case of reprisal. Stacey later wrote that the highlanders first removed German civilians from their property before setting the houses on fire, he commented that he was "glad to say that [he] never heard of another such case".
Wikipedia
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AMERICANS KILLED MEN OF SS TOTENKOPF IN 1945
When the Totenkopf surrendered (to the Americans) they were turned over to the Soviets Linz in 1945. Those who were wounded or simply too exhausted to make it to Pregarten were executed by the Americans along the way (some 80 in all suffered this fate).
MORE ON THE DACHAU MASSACRE, APRIL 29, 1945
The incident was investigated by Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the Seventh Army's Assistant Inspector General. A report on the "Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau" was filed on June 8, 1945. It was marked secret, but the contents were later revealed to the public in 1991. A copy of the report is included in Col. John H. Linden's book "The Surrender of Dachau 29 April 1945." The paragraphs below, from the Secret Report, pertain to the Execution of German soldiers by members of the 45th Division.
Dan Dougherty was a 19-year-old soldier with C Company, which was ordered to relieve I Company after the SS soldiers were killed. In an interview in April 2005 with Jennifer Upshaw, Assistant City Editor of the Marin Independent Journal in Marin County, California, Dougherty said that the men of I company had "gone berserk" under the strain.
"They became very emotional, crying," Dougherty said. "We went in to relieve them. They'd walked along that same train of boxcars. We came to the coal yard. It was a strange sight because here are about 10 reporters standing in this courtyard around corpses of SS officers." An estimated 200 to 300 SS guards were rounded up - two to three dozen were "killed unnecessarily," Dougherty said. "I Company, we now know they got there about noon and at 2 p.m. arrived at the southwest corner and worked over to the east side where the prison was. They were holding the prisoners of war in the coal yard. We know there something happened. About 17 (guards) were shot." Dougherty said he has learned through his research a U.S. Army private insisted the group had fired at the guards in self defense, although the company's commanding officer said the group was not provoked. "I think it haunted some of them," he said. No one was ever charged with a crime, he said.
Herbert Stolpmann was a German POW who worked for the US military at Dachau after the liberation. In an e-mail letter to me, Stolpmann wrote:When American Troops "liberated" Camp Dachau proper, they forced all the SS-families, including women and children, out of the so-called villas, put their fathers against the wall and shot them. Most of the mothers had cyanide capsules; they gave them to their children and told them, put them into their mouths, bite onto them as soon as Daddy is shot. The American "Liberators" stopped the shooting after about 24 children were dead.
The American soldiers who were involved in the Dachau massacre were court-martialled, but the papers were torn up and then burned by General George S. Patton, Commander of the US Third Army. The Dachau massacre was kept secret until 1991 when information was finally released.
Dan Dougherty was a 19-year-old soldier with C Company, which was ordered to relieve I Company after the SS soldiers were killed. In an interview in April 2005 with Jennifer Upshaw, Assistant City Editor of the Marin Independent Journal in Marin County, California, Dougherty said that the men of I company had "gone berserk" under the strain.
"They became very emotional, crying," Dougherty said. "We went in to relieve them. They'd walked along that same train of boxcars. We came to the coal yard. It was a strange sight because here are about 10 reporters standing in this courtyard around corpses of SS officers." An estimated 200 to 300 SS guards were rounded up - two to three dozen were "killed unnecessarily," Dougherty said. "I Company, we now know they got there about noon and at 2 p.m. arrived at the southwest corner and worked over to the east side where the prison was. They were holding the prisoners of war in the coal yard. We know there something happened. About 17 (guards) were shot." Dougherty said he has learned through his research a U.S. Army private insisted the group had fired at the guards in self defense, although the company's commanding officer said the group was not provoked. "I think it haunted some of them," he said. No one was ever charged with a crime, he said.
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In a previous interview with Ronnie Cohen of the Jewish Weekly News of Northern California in April 2001, Dougherty said that, soon after he arrived at Dachau, he had seen about 10 reporters staring at a pile of corpses. The following is a quote from Dougherty in this article:
"This mound of corpses was about 2 or 3 feet high and 15 feet across. And they were SS. One of the corporals in my company whips out a hunting knife and cuts a finger off one of the bodies. He wanted an SS ring for a souvenir."Herbert Stolpmann was a German POW who worked for the US military at Dachau after the liberation. In an e-mail letter to me, Stolpmann wrote:When American Troops "liberated" Camp Dachau proper, they forced all the SS-families, including women and children, out of the so-called villas, put their fathers against the wall and shot them. Most of the mothers had cyanide capsules; they gave them to their children and told them, put them into their mouths, bite onto them as soon as Daddy is shot. The American "Liberators" stopped the shooting after about 24 children were dead.
The American soldiers who were involved in the Dachau massacre were court-martialled, but the papers were torn up and then burned by General George S. Patton, Commander of the US Third Army. The Dachau massacre was kept secret until 1991 when information was finally released.
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KILLINGS BY BRITISH SOLDIERS: NAHRENDORF
(Near Hamburg. 1945) A week after the discovery of the Belsen Concentration Camp, the news reached the British Army's 'Desert Rats' that the 18th SS Training Regiment of the Hitler Jugend Division, had shot their prisoners at nearby Rethem. The 'Rats' were engaged in a fierce battle with the SS defenders in the village of Nahrendorf. Slowly, and in groups, the SS began to surrender. As the noise of battle died away the villagers emerged from their cellars and found the bodies of 42 SS soldiers lying in a shallow grave. The bodies were then interned on a hilltop cemetery near the village. Each year, hundreds of SS veterans visit the cemetery to pay tribute to their fallen comrades whom, they say, were shot in cold blood on the orders of a ‘crazed blood-thirsty British NCO’.
Source: Compunews
Source: Compunews
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THE FRENCH PEOPLE THOUGHT THE GERMANS WERE BETTER........
German resistance continued on into the Fall and "the discipline of even some of the finest U.S. units was cracking," including the famous 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. On 5 November 1944, Eisenhower's driver and girl friend, Kay Summersby, recorded: "General Betts reports that disciplinary conditions in the army are becoming bad. Many cases of rape, murder, and pillage are causing complaints by the French Dutch, etc." A month later, General Leroy Lutes remarked: "The French now grumble that the Americans are a more drunken and disorderly lot than the Germans and hope to see the day when they are liberated from the Americans." Lutes discovered that the Allied propaganda which portrayed the Germans as brutes was untrue: "I am informed the Germans did not loot either residences, stores, or museums. In fact the people claimed that they were meticulously treated by the Army of Occupation." By the end of the war, over 450 GIs were sentenced to death by courts-martial, nearly all for having committed nonmilitary offenses like rape and murder.
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British Torture at Bad Nenndorf
By Johannes Heyne
Bad Nenndorf is a bathing resort in the fringe of the uplands of the River Weser's watershed where people with joint ailments are treated with mud baths and soaks in sulfurous waters. On the grounds of the spa suffused with sulfur fumes stands a stately mud-bath house from the 19th Century. At the entrance, cure-seekers are greeted by the goddess Hygeia. Late in the 1920s, the bathhouse was extended into a massive complex with innumerable bathing huts.
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War-Criminal Headquarters
After the end of the war, Bad Nenndorf wound up in the British Zone of occupation. In violation of the Hague Convention for Land Warfare, the occupiers subjugated the civil order and persecuted civilians, in particular political leaders, of the conquered land. In the Potsdam Protocol of August 2, 1945, the following is proclaimed:[1]
War criminals and those who have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes shall be arrested and brought to judgment. Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions and any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives shall be arrested and interned.
In accordance therewith, the area surrounding the mud-bath house was designated a Civil Internment Camp[2] in early August 1945. 1200 residents of the area had to vacate their houses. The area was fenced off with barbed wire. The mud-bath house received a new function: registration center and prison for Germans who were to be charged as war criminals. In the bathing huts, the fixtures were removed and the tubs in the floors cemented over. From this resulted functional prison cells with tiled walls.
NSDAP functionaries, members of the SS, officers from every branch of the Wehrmacht, diplomats and industrialists were confined in the cells in order to be "prepared" for the coming war-criminal trials. But here also were kept defecting Soviet officers and mere illegal immigrants who were suspected of being spies for the Soviet Union-that same Soviet Union that was still an ally of Great Britain in 1945 and 1946.
The guard staff consisted of members of a British punishment company, who hoped by faithful performance in this assignment to recover the ranks that they had been stripped of.
Report of Victim Oswald Pohl
There are only two reports of conditions in the mud-bath house at Bad Nenndorf. One report comes from the head of the Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt of the SS (Economic and Administrative Main Office), SS General Oswald Pohl, who was confined for a time at Camp Bad Nenndorf at the end of May 1945. In the last communication before his execution, he wrote:[3]
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| The mud-bath house at Bad Nenndorf |
"Our treatment by the English in Bad Nenndorf was inhuman. I was confined alone in a cell in which there were four plank beds. My handcuffs were not removed in the locked and watched cell neither by day nor by night, neither when I ate nor when I attended to bodily needs. Indeed, at night with my hands still tied, I was bound by yet another fetter to the posts of the plank bed so that I could not move and for that reason was unable to sleep. I was hustled to my interviews down a long corridor to the interrogation room, during which some of the warders pushed me from behind, and others were to either side, who occasionally knocked me down with tripping and kicks. In front of the door of the interrogation room, I was forced to run in place until the beginning of the interview, which the warders forced to an ever-higher tempo by kicks in the ass and curses and threats. All this happened under the gaze of the sergeant posted at the scene. The way back to my cell consisted of the same gauntlet, wherein I was often knocked down by tripping, and ran headlong into the wall. On the second day, a chair was brought into my cell. I had to site down to be 'shaved.' Even though I was shackled, two warders held me down on the chair while a third pulled my head back unmercifully by the hair so that I fell backward several times....A fourth warder smeared my face with something that burned like acid while he slapped my face back and forth. After he had thoroughly 'lathered' me, he scraped my face with a dull razor so roughly that my blood dripped onto my jacket. During this procedure, his helpers continually spewed violent threats and imprecations in my face.Finally, as though on command, everyone in the cell—there must have been eight or ten of them—set upon me, yanked me up, and pummeled me blindly, bound and defenseless as I was. Blows of fists rained down on my head and kicks hit me in every part of my body. Tottering on my legs, I careened from corner to corner until I collapsed unconscious from a massive blow or kick to the area of the stomach.When I came to, all was quiet in my cell. I lay on a plank bed and I noticed that two doctors were attending me, one of whom took my pulse. My handcuffs were off. I passed out again.I was only able to guess how long all this had taken after night had fallen. Since it was almost dark when I woke up, it must have been around eight o’clock; the beating must have begun around five. Someone handed me a cup of strong coffee and then I was brought to my last interview, this time without having to run a gauntlet. This interrogation lasted until long past midnight. The interrogating officer, noting my condition, inquired as to how it had come about. I gave him a brief account of the above. He stood up outraged and apologized in the name of the British Army. Then he left the room for a long while to—as he assured me—arrange with the commandant for punishment of the perpetrators. The affray had caused me the loss of an incisor and a molar.The next morning at 7 o’clock I was transported, bound, in a truck to Nuremberg.”Another Report
The second report comes from the hand of the Nenndorfer Heinrich Steinmeyer and his wife Marie. The report was published in 1952 in in the magazine Quick[4] and further circulates in Bad Nenndorf in various reproductions. Heinrich Steinmeyer was an inmate of the prison and died in 1948 from the effects of his imprisonment.“British Interrogation Camp Bad Nenndorf 1945 – 1947
[…] the bathhouse [was] hermetically sealed away from the rest of the world. Except for the British officers, who automatically had clearance, and those British warders to whom clearance had been issued, no one knew of the existence of any such prison as this one. The Germans, of course, least of all, since whoever was consigned to this inferno was immediately rendered mute, invisible, obliterated.No reports ever came out to next of kin from Bad Nenndorf. The British authorities, who were situated in Herford, gave information neither to next of kin, to the Red Cross which had been tipped off, nor even to the Quakers, who wished mercifully to provide aid. They even denied, when specific identification of a prisoner was submitted, that the man was even in Nenndorf…[The tiled walls of the cells] became […] a great source of fun for the British watchstanders, and a source of misery for the prisoners because the soldiers systematically smeared the walls with feces and the prisoners then had to clean the walls spotlessly with their fingers or a toothbrush. The individual cells were never heated and in the bitter cold winter of 1946-47, the water faucet in the dayroom froze up. The floors and walls were icy cold. One plank bed. No sack of straw. Two sheets. And all night long, the electric light was on, and every hour the guard noisily opened the door and two times every night came officer’s rounds. The prisoners had to get up, stand still and give their number. For twenty minutes, one had to hear the slamming of the doors, the tramping of the guards, the bellowing of the accompanying soldiers.This Is How They Passed Their Days …
The guard staff were a hand-picked motley crew of thugs who probably possessed but little feeling, and certainly never any sympathy whatsoever. They were all members of a penal company who had to atone for a criminal offense, and here worked out their obligated tours of duty. And they made their remaining time as entertaining and pleasant for themselves as they possibly could. Now and then they had wild disputes among themselves and the prisoners then heard some of the grievances the boys nursed, and they realized in whose hands they lay. Sodomy, thievery, fraud, burglary, attempted murder, desertion. The threat to the prisoners lay in the fact that for every one of these brigands, a shining reward lay in the offing. A fierce struggle for survival drove them back and forth.Each had earlier held a military rank. And each had a chance to win their honor back. But to the detriment of the inmates, this opportunity lay in subjecting the inmates to the roughest and most-brutal treatment possible. For this reason, the boys worked up the most-sadistic, private methods each of them could by which to torture the prisoners.Every prisoner at Nenndorf reported that, after having fallen asleep with great effort, he was then awakened in great disturbance. In between were days, one like the other.Rising time was 4:30. If the sergeant was in a bad mood, he came around at 3:30 or 4:00. The prisoners stumbled out of bed—that is, from their plank beds. Five minutes later, both sheets were to be drawn drum-tight across the bed. During the day, none was to sit, nor to lie. If any poor sod happened to sit or lie for a second or two—denial of food.The day consisted of pacing back and forth in their cells from 4 in the morning to 9:30 at night, or standing against the wall. They stood against the wall until they felt they would go crazy.Every prisoner knew within minutes of his arrival at Nenndorf that he was lost here, since 5 minutes after his arrival he stood in the intake room, where a sergeant tore the clothes from his body. It may be said of the Nenndorf garb that every arrival looked like a clown—jacket too small, pants too wide or too narrow, and everything stiff with dirt. Laundry was never done. In the issuance of shoes, the sergeant in charge was not satisfied unless the size of shoes issued was at least four sizes too large. That sounds harmless enough, but it gave rise to unimaginable torture. There were no shoelaces, our shoes just hung on our feet, and since every step we took outside our cells had to be on the double, we constantly stumbled and fell, the while driven onward with screams and pokes with rifle butts. After 3-4 hours: weak tea and perhaps a little porridge. After this, standing or pacing in the cell until one again thought oneself driven to madness.The Man with the Uppercut
Before the evening officer’s rounds, we had to take off our jackets, pants, and shoes and lay them in front of our cells, standing behind them in shirt and underpants. The commandant of Nenndorf, whose name no one will ever forget, Colonel Stevens, took pleasure in conducting the evening harangue. Rotund with broad shoulders and a face that was always dark red and many campaign ribbons on his chest, he looked askance at the pitiable, half-frozen forms in their underclothes with his small, cold eyes. Now and then he would randomly shout at one or another. This inarticulate yelp contained a question, which the prisoner invariably could not understand. Colonel Stevens would never wait for an answer, but rather immediately strike the man under the chin with his fist.Then began a vicious ceremony under the gaze of the watchstanders. As soon as this tour was over, two or three prisoners were fetched from their cells. They had to sluice water, that had been placed specifically for this fiendish routine, down the long corridor and just so that the insensate bodies of the prisoners were soaked in the filthy froth. So their clothes, if they could be called clothes, lay until dawn in the swill until they awoke and had to clutch the totally besmirched and frozen rags against their bodies.Of course there were interviews and interrogations. A huge number of witnesses have testified that British officers punched and kicked German army officers, officers of the Waffen SS and party functionaries mercilessly until they received the testimony they desired. Every prisoner in his cell either held his ears shut or trembled in every fiber of his body or ran uncontrollably back and forth in his narrow space whenever the deafening yelling, screaming, howling, crying and babbling of the tortured prisoners inescapably echoed down the corridor from the interrogation rooms, punctuated by the ferocious curses of the British interrogation officers.Experiences in Hell
SS Obersturmbannführer Dr. Oebsger-Roeder was beaten unconscious by several British officers on Good Friday 1946, such that he had to be carried back to his cell. It took months for his grave injuries to heal.SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Hahnke, chief of legations in the cultural-political section of the foreign ministry was so badly beaten up that for the rest of his life he had a game leg.The last head of the film department of the propaganda ministry, Parbel, not only was flogged upon his arrival, but was consigned by a British major, a former German, to the feared and notorious Cell 12. In this place, buckets of water were continually poured so that the prisoner, barefoot in only a shirt and pants, had to either stand or pace back and forth all night in the wet. The poor soul spent fully eight days and nights in this hell and his condition even moved the minimal pity of one of the warders, who secretly took him out, gave him shoes and let him rest for an hour on the seat of the privy.Captain Langham presided over most of the beating incidents. His name is unforgettable to Nenndorfers. He made sure that the unconscious were taken to the shower, there to be revived so that the beatings could resume.Most of the torturers were sergeants. It speaks for the gallows humor of the prisoners that in the midst of this misery, they made up nicknames for one and another of these hangmen. One of these was called Henry VIII because he was bursting at the seams and continually roaring with a purple face. Another was called Red-eye for reasons that require no explanation. Another was called Smiley, and he was the worst of the beasts since he would appear in their cells in the middle of the night wearing an ice-cold smile, sweep them out of their bunks and make them do strenuous exercises until they were half-broken.Escape attempts were hopeless, but nonetheless two prisoners who lived in the day room tried it: one of them got away; the other was caught near the camp in the search that ensued the detection of their absence, in which the entire guard staff took part. The unfortunate was interrogated at length and was so beaten that he finally gave away who had supplied him with civilian clothes. This was a miner who worked during the day in Barsinghausen, and on whose door the fugitive knocked one night. As the miner hesitated, his wife said to him, 'Help him, for Christ’s sake.' The miner was detained a few weeks and what this man, an old Social Democrat, had to undergo in that period was cruel in the extreme. He had to throw up at every meal; by the time of his release he also was a complete wreck. The escapee himself was beaten thoroughly and then his handcuffs were chained to the shackles on his legs so that to get around, he had to walk or stagger completely bent over. Many saw him in this condition.No Nenndorfer will ever forget the British 'military doctor' assigned to look after them, Captain Smith. A haggard, grizzled, emaciated figure that personified resignation. He would glance into each cell, listen absent-mindedly when anyone complained about this or that, and then growl, ‘No personal remark.’ (Nothing to report.)Anyone who had a toothache was entirely neglected, and many had toothaches from being struck repeatedly in the mouth. There was no dentist. The dentures of Dr. H. C. Winkler, that venerable Mayor Winkler, who had directed the film industry and financed other major enterprises of the Third Reich, broke when he was thrown into jail at the age of 72. He could no longer chew. Captain Smith listened to the old man, who finally said he would starve to death. Smith responded drily, ‘Then you’ll starve to death.’Oh, You Holy Christmastime
Anyone who spent Christmastime 1945 in Bad Nenndorf will never forget it their whole life.The prisoners employed in the kitchen had scrimped and expended the most strenuous efforts to produce a little cheer on that evening. They had managed to produce ginger bread from their meager resources. And on that Christmas Eve, a faint glimmer of light in the thick fog of mutual hostility appeared. One of the guards, of Polish descent, visited each cell and to its occupant wished a 'Merry Christmas' in his heavily accented English.His own people had received gross mistreatment in the war, perhaps he himself, maybe even by some of those that night confined in this prison, but this night, he spoke from his heart.He had no inkling what a wave of Hell was about to break over the heads of the prisoners in a few hours. The entire British staff, falling-down drunk, wandered from cell to cell and beat, punched, and kicked anything that came between their fists and their boots, the whole night through. A night of much[…]A Certain Type Must Be Eliminated
Verbatim quotation from an interrogation: ‘We know very well that you and your friends weren’t Nazis. But you’re out of luck. You’re of a type that we want to eliminate even more than we do the Nazis.’It was the mill of collective guiltBut there were also God’s mills, which grind slowly but surely what is cried to Heaven to spread it by rumor throughout the rest of the world. Prisoners who were released, spoke. And it became clear that in Nenndorf, things happened at the hands of the English that were as bad as, even worse than, since they were committed in the name of liberation and democracy, things for which Germans at Nuremberg were hanged or sentenced to prison. Many of the prisoners had been sworn to silence. But many were not silent.The ball started rolling. The Catholic camp chaplain of Civil Internment Camp III in Fallingbostel, Vicar Magar, heard the rumors and sought particulars of another Nenndorfer, Mr. Parbel, which he immediately passed on to the bishop of Hildesheim. And within a few weeks, this venerated dignitary came to Nenndorf and held mass in full regalia and delivered himself of the most scathing condemnation of the torture huts operated by the Britons as described by several prisoners. He swore to relay the information in full force to Cardinal Griffy in England.On the first Pentecost of 1947, the deputized member of Parliament Stokes stood at the door of Bad Nenndorf and demanded admittance. The British officers, feigning all innocence, had to let him in. The deputy went from cell to cell and made report of all. What he saw was enough: pitiful, beaten, half-starved, sick, intimidated, broken shells of persons.On the same evening, the British guard staff, who had for more than a year plagued and tortured the defenseless, came on the run with friendly but distracted faces from cell to cell and shared out their own rations of cigarettes, chocolate and bon-bons. But the ball was still rolling…Senior officers of the London constabulary Scotland Yard appeared and gathered evidence as to the conditions theretofore. They made no secret of the fact that they were preparing for a trial of the commandant and guard staff of the English interrogation camp […]Acquittal for the Torturers: 'I Didn’t Know,' and 'I Followed Orders'
The trial in London went on and on. The defendants included the commandant of Camp Bad Nenndorf, Colonel Stevens, one of the most-brutal interrogation officers, First Lieutenant Langham, the camp doctor Captain Smith and some other offenders. It was embarrassing for Lieutenant Langham in that he was shown to be a former citizen of Germany. But much more was amiss. The commandant of the camp Colonel Stevens was let off on the grounds that he didn’t know about the brutality […] Even the sergeants Red-Eye, Henry VIII and Smiley were acquitted, and on no less than the excuse that they were just carrying out orders [...] The only sentence arising from the trials was that passed on Captain Smith. His sentence consisted of his being discharged from the British Army. It was no punishment, since Captain Smith was an old man, long ready for departure, long since not an active military doctor, and he fastened upon this basis for mitigation […]”___________________________________________________________________________________________
"We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland,nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents."... Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler
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