FRANCE

THE NORMANDY MASSACRES
(June, 1944)
A sensation was caused in Allied Headquarters when reports came through that a considerable number of Canadian soldiers were shot after being taken prisoner by the 12th. SS Panzer Division ‘Hitler Jugend’. On the morning of June 8th. thirty seven Canadians were taken prisoner by the 2nd. Battalion of the 26th. Panzer Grenadier Regiment. The prisoners were marched across country to the H/Q of the 2nd. Battalion. In the village of Le Mesnil-Patty they were then ordered to sit down in a field with their wounded in the centre. In a short while a half track arrived with eight or nine SS soldiers brandishing their machine pistols. Advancing in line towards the prisoners they opened fire killing thirty five men. Two of the Canadians ran for their lives and escaped the slaughter but were rounded up by a different German unit to spend the rest of the war in a POW camp. First to make contact with the Canadians was a combat group led by Obersturmbannfuhrer Karl-Heinz Milius and supported by the Prinz Battalion. Near the villages of Authie and Buron , a number of Canadians of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, were taken prisoner. Numbering around forty, they were individually killed on the march back to the rear. Eight were ordered to remove their helmets and were then shot with automatic rifles. Their bodies were dragged out on to the road and left to be run over by trucks and tanks. French civilians pulled the bodies back on to the pavement but were ordered to stop and to drag the bodies back onto the road again. On the 7th. and 8th. of June, in the grounds of the Abbaye Ardenne, the headquarters of SS Brigadefuhrer Kurt Meyer’s 25th. Panzer Grenadiers, twenty Canadians were shot. After being taken prisoner they were locked up in a stable, and being called out by name they emerged from the doorway only to be shot in the back of the head. During the afternoon of 8th June, twenty six Canadians were shot at the Chateau d’Audrieu after being taken prisoner by a Reconnaissance Battalion of the SS Hitler Jugend. Other units of the German forces in France called the Hitler Jugend Division the ‘Murder Division’. After the war, investigations established that separate atrocities were committed in 31 different incidents involving 134 Canadians, 3 British and 1 American.  Brought to trial before a Canadian military court at Aurich in Germany on 28 December, 1945, Kurt Meyer was sentenced to death but later reprieved and spent six years in Canadian jails before being transferred to Germany where he was released on September 7, 1954. He died of a heart attack on December 23, 1961 at age 51.

LE PARADIS
(Pas-de-Calais. May 26,1940)
A company of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, trapped in a cowshed, surrendered to the 2nd  Infantry Regiment, SS 'Totenkopf' (Death's Head) Division under the command of 28 year old SS Obersturmfuhrer Fritz Knoechlein. Marched to a group of farm buildings, they were lined up in the meadow along side the barn wall. When the 99 prisoners were in position, two machine guns opened fire killing 97 of them. The bodies were then buried in a mass grave on the farm property. Two managed to escape, Privates Albert Pooley and William O'Callaghan emerged from the slaughter wounded but alive. When the SS troops moved on, the two wounded soldiers were discovered, after having hid in a pigsty for three days and nights, by Madame Castel of Le Paradis who then cared for them till captured again by another Wehrmacht unit to spend the rest of the war as POWs. In 1942, the bodies of those executed were exhumed by the French authorities and reburied in the local churchyard now part of the Le Paradis War Cemetery. After the war, the massacre was investigated and Knoechlein was traced and arrested. During the war he had been awarded three Knight's Crosses. Tried before a War Crimes Court in Hamburg, he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, and on January 28, 1949, the sentence was carried out. Married with four children, his wife attended the trial every day.

WORMHOUDT
(Pas-de-Calais. 27/28 May, 1940)
The day after the Le Paradis massacre, some 80 men of the 2nd Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the Cheshire Regiment, and the Royal Artillery, were taken prisoner by the No7 Company, 2nd Battalion of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. At Esquelbecq, near the town of Wormhoudt, the prisoners were marched into a large barn, and there the massacre began. Stick grenades were lobbed in amongst the defenceless prisoners who died in agony as shrapnel tore into their flesh. When the last grenade had been thrown, the survivors were then ordered outside, there to be mown down under a hail of bullets from automatic weapons. The SS then entered the barn again to finish off the wounded. Fifteen men survived the atrocity, only to give themselves up to other German units to serve out the war as POWs. Unlike the Le Paradis massacre, the victims of Wormhoudt were never avenged, as after the war no survivor could positively identify any of the SS soldiers involved.

Where as the majority of soldiers serving in the Waffen SS were entirely blameless, the actions of some units have forever tarnished the name of the Waffen SS.

PARIS DEPORTATIONS
(July 16-17, 1942)
A total of 12,884 non French Jews, (3,031 men, 5,802 women and 4,051 children) were rounded up in Paris for deportation to the death camps in Poland. For a whole week, 6,900 of them including the 4,051 children, were confined in the huge sports stadium, the Velodrome d'Hiver on the Boulevard de Grenelle. Without food and little water and only four toilets, the victims were in a deplorable state before being transferred to the camps at Drancy or Pithiviers on the outskirts of Paris. Here the Vichy French police separated the children from their parents. The parents were then transported to Auschwitz to be gassed. The children followed soon after. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 26, 1945, they found 2,819 inmates still alive but only thirty of the 6,900 non French Jews were alive. Sadly, none of the 4,051 children survived. It is estimated that around 60,000 Jews from 37 countries perished in France under the German occupation. This includes 22,193 French Jews and 14,459 Polish Jews who had fled to France earlier. Prior to this, on June 11, 1941, three hundred Jewish boys, aged between fourteen and nineteen were arrested and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Of the three hundred, none survived. On May 15, 1944, a fifteen cattle-truck train left Paris (Convoy-73) heading for Kovno  in Lithuania. On board were 878 male Jews including 37 boys aged between thirteen and eighteen. On arrival at Kovno 400 were taken to the slave labour camp at Pravieniskes where many were executed by Lithuanian SS auxilliaries. The other 478 were taken to Reval in Estonia where sixty of the prisoners were shot in a nearby forest. A hundred more, judged too sick to work were murdered. The rest ended up in the Stutthof concentration camp where many died. After the war it was found that only twenty-three of the original 878 deportees had survived.

ORADOUR-SUR-GLANE
(Central France. June 10, 1944)
On their 450 mile drive from the south of France to the Normandy invasion area, the 2nd SS Panzer Division 'Das Reich' (15,000 men aboard 1,400 vehicles, including 209 tanks) under the command of SS General Lammerding, arrived at Limoges. In the small town of St. Junien (30 kilometres from Limoges) the 'Der Führer Regiment' was regrouping. Following many encounters with the local maquis in which two German soldiers were killed, the regiment marched to ORADOUR (believed to be a hotbed of maquis activity). At about 2 pm on this Saturday afternoon the 120 man SS unit surrounded the village ordering all inhabitants to parade in the market square. Women and children were separated from the menfolk and locked up in the local church. The men were herded in groups into six carefully chosen local garages and barns and shot. Their bodies were then covered with straw and set on fire. The 452 women and children in the church were then killed by smoke grenades lobbed in through the windows and shrapnel grenades that were thrown down the nave while machine-guns raked the interior. The church was then set on fire. Incredibly, one woman, Mme Rouffanche, escaped by jumping through a window, she was the only witness to the carnage in the church. (Mme Rouffanche died, aged 91, in March, 1988). Unspeakable atrocities were committed throughout the village, but five men managed to escape. The world heard of the massacre nine years later when some of those responsible were brought to trial. In 1953, a French Military Court at Bordeaux, established that 642 people (245 women, 207 children and 190 men) had perished. The commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the SS regiment at ORADOUR was thirty-two year old SS Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, a survivor of the Russian Front. He was later killed in action in the Normandy battle area on 30th of June. Twenty-one other members of his company (including fourteen Frenchmen from Alsace-Lorraine who had been conscripted into the SS) were sentenced to death but later their sentences were commuted to terms of imprisonment. All were released by 1959. SS General Lammerding died peacefully at his home in Germany on the 13th. Of January 1971, of cancer. A close friend of Diekmann was Major Helmut Kampfe, commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion of the Der Führer Regiment. He was kidnapped and executed by the maquis the day before the massacre. His kidnapping has been wrongly blamed for the events at Oradour.
Today, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane stands in ruins, just as the SS left it.

ASCQ
(Near Lille, April 2, 1944)
At the end of March, 1944, the 12th SS Panzer Division 'Hitler Jugend' set out on 24 rail trucks for Normandy to cover the coast in anticipation of an Allied landing. The convoy, under the command of SS Obersturmführer Walter Hauck, was approaching the small railway station of Ascq when a violent explosion blew the line apart. Stopping the train, it was found that two flat trucks had been derailed, holding up the whole convoy. Hauck, in a foul mood, ordered his men to search and arrest all male members of the houses on both sides of the track. They were assembled together and marched down the track about 300 yards where each man was shot in the back of the head. Altogether 70 men were shot beside the railway line and another 16 killed in the village itself. After an investigation by the Gestapo, six more men were arrested and charged with planting the bomb. They were all executed by firing squad. When the war ended, a search for the perpetrators was set in motion. Most of the SS men were found in Allied POW camps in Europe and in England. In all, nine SS men stood trial in a French Military Court at Lille. All were sentenced to death, including Hauck. The sentences were later commuted to a period of imprisonment and Walter Hauck was released in July, 1957.
In the local cemetery at Ascq, two rows of identical tombstones, and a large plaque engraved with the names of all victims, stand in silent testimony to the tragic events of April 2, 1944.

OUTRAGE AT IZIEU
(Central France, April 6, 1944)
The sleepy French village of Izieu lies overlooking the Rhone river between Lyon and Chambery in central France. A number of refugee Jewish children, most of them orphans, were being sheltered in a home in the hope that the Nazi Gestapo would not find them. Supervised by seven adults, they felt safe and secure. However, on the morning of April 6, 1944, as they settled down to breakfast, a car and two military trucks drove up in front of the home. The Gestapo, led by the regional head, Klaus Barbie, entered the home and forcibly removed the forty four children and their seven supervisors, throwing the crying and terrified children on to the trucks like sacks of potatoes. All were transported to the collection centre at Drancy outside Paris where they were put on the first available train to 'points east'. One carer, Miron Zlatin, and two of the oldest children ended up in Tallin in Estonia where they were all shot. The others found themselves in the notorious concentration camp of Auschwitz. Of the forty-four children, aged between five and seventeen kidnapped from Izieu, not a single one survived the war. Of the supervisors there was one sole survivor, twenty-seven year old Lea Feldblum. It is a tragic fact that patriotic French citizens willingly helped the Gestapo in their search for these Jewish children. On July 3, 1987, Klaus Barbie was finally arrested, tried in a French court and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of cancer in prison on September 25, 1991.
The former children's home in Izieu is now a memorial-museum, opened on April 4, 1994 by the then President of the French Republic, Francios Mitterrand.

FRAYSSINET
(Near Tulle, Central France, May 21, 1944)
In the small village of Frayssinet just south of Tulle , in central France, members of the French underground shot and killed a German officer. For this crime, fifteen  hostages were taken and executed.  These hostages were all young males from one child families. This, in the twisted minds of the SS, was to prevent any further family line of descent. Outside the entrance to the local church in Frayassinet stands a small monument mounted with a stone cross, and a plaque bearing the names of all the fifteen young victims.

THE TULLE MURDERS
(Near Limoges, Central France, June 9, 1944)
The day before the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane , the SS murdered 98 men in the town of Tulle in central France. This was in response to activities by the local resistance groups who had attacked and taken over the town. When the 2nd SS Panzer Division 'Das Reich' took over the town they found 40 dead bodies of the German 111./95 Security Regiment garrison troops near the school, their bodies badly mutilated. Other bodies were found around the town, bringing the total German dead in Tulle to sixty-four. Next day, the reprisals began. All males in the town were gathered together and 130 suspects were selected for execution. A number were released because of their youth and the remaining 98 were executed by the Pioneer platoon of SS-Panzer Aufklarungs Abteilung 2. Their bodies were hung up on lampposts and from balconies along the main streets of the town in the hope that the hanging bodies would deter future attacks by the Maquis. More would have been hanged had not the SS ran out of rope. Instead, they rounded up 101 civilians and deported them to Germany for slave labour.

SAULX VALLEY ATROCITIES
(August 29, 1944)
In the Saulx Valley, in the Meuse départment of eastern France, stands the sleepy villages of Robert-Espagne, Couvonges, Mogeville and Beurey-sur-Saulx. Late in August, 1944, as the German armies were retreating eastwards in the face of the Allied advance, units of the British 2nd S.A.S. Regiment were parachuted in behind the enemy lines to harass the retreating Germans. Joining up with units of the local maquis, their first action, on August 28, was the ambush of a German staff car carrying two officers and two NCOs. The deaths of these four men so infuriated an SS officer to such an extent that he ordered several lorry loads of his soldiers into the nearby village of Robert-Espagne. Their first act was to destroy the telephone equipment at the local post office, thus cutting off the village from the outside world. All males were then rounded up (49 in number) and marched off to the station and there, with their backs to the embankment, they stood, three deep along the rails, and awaited their fate. Three machine-guns, firing in unison, sent their deadly stream of bullets into the helpless group while from nearby houses, their pale faces streaming with tears, wives and mothers watched helplessly from their windows. When the foul crime was over, the SS ordered the women out of their homes to look at the carnage, after which their houses were deliberately set on fire. In the village of Couvonges , 26 men were killed and 54 out of the 60 houses were burned to the ground. Two kilometres from Couvonges, the village of Beurey-sur-Saulx was also targeted by the SS and seven inhabitants met their deaths, the church and houses put to the torch. In Mogeville, three people died as a result of the SS retaliation. 

GERMANY

KRISTALLNACHT (Crystalnight)
(November 9/10, 1938)

Demonstrations against Jews and Jewish property was widespread throughout Germany on November 9/10, 1938. On Nov.12, Heydrich reported to the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, that 101 Jewish Synagogues had been burned down and 76 others demolished. Over 815 shops and businesses were destroyed including the huge Margraf department store on Berlin's Unter-den-Linden which was totally ransacked. This orgy of anti-Jewish violence was the result of the assassination of a German Embassy official, Ernst von Rath, in Paris by a 17-year old Polish Jew in an act of protest against the deportation of his parents from Germany. Thirty six Jews were killed and around 20,000, in particular the more wealthy Jews, arrested and transported to concentration camps. The cost of shattered glass alone throughout the Reich was estimated at six million marks. The whole cost of Kristallnacht (night of glass) had to be paid by the Jews themselves, the Nazis confiscating their insurance money and imposing a collective fine of one billion marks!.

THE SKIATAWA MASSACRE
(Sunday Nov. 30, 1941)

The prime mover behind the expulsion of Berlin's Jews was Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect who had been given the task of rebuilding Berlin. A close friend of Joseph Goebbels, together in 1941, they planned for the clearance of the Jewish slum areas in the western part of the city. In doing so, Speer could then take control of around 34,000 houses and apartments and start his demolishing and rebuilding programme. The first trainload of these expelled Jews left Berlin on October 18, 1941. There were to be 130 trainloads altogether. On November 7, a train, No. Do-26, loaded with 943 Jews left the city bound for Riga in Latvia. Arriving at 9.30am in Skiatawa , about eight kilometres outside Riga, in zero temperatures and three inches of snow on the ground, they were forced out of the train and shot into deep trenches previously dug in a strip of the Rumbula Forest. The executions were supervised by SS Major Rudolf Lange  but the actual shooting was carried out by the local Latvian SS troops. Later that day around 4,000 local Jews from Riga itself were transported by trucks to the forest and murdered in the same way at the same spot on the orders of the local SS Commander Friedrich Jeckeln. (By the beginning of 1942, Jeckeln was credited with reducing the Jewish population of Riga from 29,500 to 2,600) This massacre was witnessed by Major General Walter Bruns, a 54 year old German Army bridge building engineer whose testimony is on file at the Public Records Office in London. At the 'Wolf's Lair', Hitler had given instructions to Himmler that the Berlin Jews were not to be liquidated but they were all dead by the time the order came through.

RUSSIAN  P.O.W.  MURDERS

The first 3,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp during September 1941. After months of marching hundreds of miles they finally entered the camp completely exhausted and emaciated into mere skeletons. They had received almost nothing to eat during the march. Some weeks later another 4,000 arrived and during the ten kilometre march from the station in Weimar to the camp, 417 collapsed and died. In the camp, one of the most vile cold-blooded war crimes took place in a facility hastily constructed inside the camp's horse stables. When no longer able to work in the stone quarry the prisoners were taken to the stable and ordered into the shower-room eight at a time. The door was then closed and through a slit in the door the unsuspecting victims were simply shot down by an automatic pistol. To cover the cries of the dying loud music was played over loudspeakers. After the killings the showers were turned on but only to wash away the blood. Another method used was for the prisoner to stand against a measuring device to measure his height. Concealed behind the device was a small cubicle in which stood the SS murderer who then fired a shot into the neck of the prisoner through a slot in the partition. Around 500 killings a day was achieved through these methods. In all, about 7,200 Russian POWs were murdered in Buchenwald.

STARVATION AT REMAGEN

After the capture of the Remagen Bridge, the US Army hastily erected dozens of Prisoner of War cages around the bridgehead. 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. It must however be borne in mind that with the best will in the world it proved almost impossible to care for the prisoners under the strict terms of the Geneva Convention. The task of guarding these prisoners, numbering around 920,000, fell to the men of the US 106th. Infantry Division. The Remagen cage was set up to accommodate 100,000 men but ended up with twice that number. On the first afternoon 35,000 prisoners were counted through the gate. About 10,000 of these required urgent medical attention which in most cases was completely absent. All roads leading to the camps were clogged with hundreds of trucks bringing in even more prisoners, sent to the rear by the advancing 9th.US Army.
Tourists, cruising down the Rhine today can pick out a small memorial and plaque built on the site of the former POW cage. In the Remagen cemetery there are 1,200 graves and at Bad Kreuznach, 1,000 graves.

THE BIG LIE

Just how many German POWs died in Allied camps?. For over forty years we have been told that many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had died in Soviet prison camps while at the same time keeping quiet about the number of prisoners who had died in American, French and British camps. In 1997, around 1.1 million German soldiers were still officially listed as missing. According to the recently opened Soviet archives, which have been proved to be extremely precise and detailed, the Red Army captured 2,389,560 German soldiers. Of these, 423,168 died in captivity. In October, 1951, the West German government stated in the United Nations that 1.1 million soldiers had not returned home. In other words, we were led to believe they had died in Soviet camps. If we subtract the proven number of deaths in Soviet camps from the missing in Germany we arrive at the figure of around 677,000. Where are these men?. They must have been interned by the western Allies, the greatest majority being held in American and French camps where they died in their hundreds of thousands through deliberate starvation, disease and hard work.

The standards set by the Geneva Convention were, in most cases, totally ignored by the Americans and French in relation to their treatment of German prisoners-of-war. The French deliberately starved many of their POWs in order to force them to join the French Foreign Legion. Thousands of Legionaires who fought in the Vietnam conflict were Germans, handed over by the Americans to the French in 1945/46 to work as slave labourers in the rebuilding of France's war damaged cities. Conditions in the French camps were just as bad if not worse than in the American camps. It is estimated that at least 167,000 German soldiers died in French captivity between 1945 and 1948.

THE SAGAN EXECUTIONS
(March, 1944)

The Gestapo’s most cold blooded act of butchery was the murder of 50 RAF officers from the POW camp, Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia. Hundreds of officers had a hand in the building of a tunnel, 28ft down below one of the huts in the British north compound. It ran for 360 feet, passing under the wire at a depth of 20ft. The breakout on March 24th. 1944, saw the escape of 79 men before the tunnel was discovered. The last three men out gave themselves up to the guards in the hope that they could delay the search for the rest. Hitler issued a personal order that fifty escapees were to be shot on recapture. Within weeks, all had been recaptured, except three who eventually managed to reach England. After their capture, the officers were confined to various jails near where the arrests took place.. Early in the morning they were taken out of their cells and in groups of two or three, were bundled into cars in company with their guards, and driven out into the country. On the autobahn, near a wood, the car would stop and the prisoners allowed out to relieve themselves. While performing this natural function, the guards would sneak up behind them and shoot them in the neck. Their bodies were then taken to the nearest crematorium. When the urns containing the ashes of the murdered officers began arriving at Stalag Luft III, the enormity of the massacre was revealed.. Most urns had the officers name, date cremated and place-names such as Gorlitz, Brux, Breslau , Liegnitz, Kiel, Munich , Saarbrucken and Danzig. Most urns had the dates, 29th, 30th and 31st March 1944. Official Gestapo files noted that the officers were ‘shot while trying to escape’. After the war, the RAF Special Investigation Branch began its search for the culprits. It took over three years to bring the murderers to justice. Of the 72 culprits traced, 21 were executed, 17 imprisoned, 11 committed suicide, the rest died, disappeared or were acquitted.

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 POW 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. He was promptly shot dead. Informed by the French POWs that only civilians, not SS, were in hiding in the cellars, 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.

HARTHEIM SCHLOSS

In 1942, a total of 3,166 civilian prisoners from Dachau and Mauthausen were transported to this place, situated near Linz in Austria, just over the German border and there put to death by gassing. They were classified as 'unfit to work'. Hartheim was the only prison from which there were no survivors. Used in the SS Euthanasia Programme, around 10,000 mentally retarded and crippled children were murdered here. Their bodies were then cremated and the ashes spread over the waters of the Danube and Traun rivers. Five such establishments were set up in Germany, including the infamous Hadamar Psychiatric Clinic in Hessen-Nassau where between 40 and 70 patients arrived daily and where 476 Polish and Russian nationals were put to death within days of their arrival. Since the program began in 1939, a total of 70,273 mentally retarded people were murdered in these centres. A total of 772 children from Vienna were put to death and their brains preserved in glass jars. Around 80 persons were employed at Hartheim encouraged by extra pay and a good alcohol allowance. The director of the program was psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolf Lonauer, of Linz, who committed suicide by poison in May, 1945.
Today, the Schloss has been converted into flats housing 22 families. The only reminder of the terrible events that took place here is a large plaque on the wall of the entrance hall.

In the spring of 1939, the "Reich Committee for Scientific Research of Hereditary and Severe Constitutional Diseases" was set up. Headed by SS-Obergruppenführer Philipp Bouhler, it operated out of his headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4, in Berlin, hence its code name T-4. From all over Germany, deformed children, incurably sick and mentally retarded patients were transported from their hospitals and institutions to the euthanasia killing centres of which there were six, (Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, Sonnenstein and Bernberg). At these centres the patients were put to death individually, usually by injection. Later, to speed up the process, cyanide gas, known as Zyklon B, was used. In November, 1942, 1,200 German political prisoners were taken from Mauthausen and transported to Bernberg and put to death by gassing. Documents discovered after the war listed 70,273 deaths at these six centers. The first centre to be so equipped was Brandenburg  in late 1939. The procedure was for groups of twenty or thirty to be ushered into a room camouflaged as a shower room into which gas piping had been laid. The equipment to operate the gas was located outside and operated by the doctor on duty. When the euthanasia program wound down in late 1941, the gassing equipment in these centres was dismantled and transferred to the concentration camps of Belize, Majdenek and Treblinka in Poland in preparation for the forthcoming 'Final Solution' of the Jewish question. It is estimated that between 200 and 250 thousand persons were murdered under the T-4 program.

OUTRAGE AT VELPKE RUHEN
( May 1944 )

In May, 1944, a home for infant children was established in the village of Velpke , near Helmstedt, Germany. The home was for the offspring of Polish female slave labourers working on farms and food factories in the area. Food being scarce in Germany in 1944, more work was required from these Polish women whom the Nazi Bürgermeister of Velpke thought were spending too much time attending to their children. Forcibly removed from their mothers, the children were incarcerated in an old building without running water, electric light or telephone. Ordered by the Reich Labour Office to take charge of the home and assume care of the infants, an ex teacher, Frau Billien, and four Polish and Russian girls were installed in the building. Neither had any experience in running a clinic for infant children. When the Volkswagen factory at nearby Wolfsburg (where many of the women worked) required possession of the premises some months later it was discovered that eighty four Polish infants had died through sheer neglect, lack of mother's milk and a general disregard for their well being. According to the village register the most common causes of death was general weakness, dysentery and intestinal catarrh. After the war, a British Military Court sentenced two of the the perpetrators to death and three to long terms of imprisonment. Within the confines of the Wolkswagen factory a similar clinic was established under the care of the factory doctor, Dr Korbel, and a nurse, Ella Schmidt. The clinic was later moved to Rühen some twelve kilometres away. Between April, 1943 and April, 1945, it was established that around 400 infants had died there. In 1944, 254 out of 310 admissions ended in death for these infants who lay in cots, weak with diarrhoea and infested with lice. Dr. Korbel was later tried and convicted by a British War Crimes Court and sentenced to death.

RUSSELHEIM
(August 26, 1944)

On a bombing mission over Germany, a US 8th. Airforce B-24 was hit by flak and crash landed some 90 miles south of Hanover. The nine man crew were captured, one with a broken ankle was taken to hospital. The other eight were put on a train to a POW camp. On the way, the train stopped at Russelheim where the airmen dismounted and were marched through the town under guard. During the march they were set upon by a crowd of townspeople and pelted with stones, bricks and shovels. Two airmen ran for their lives and escaped. The other six, battered and unconscious were shot by the local Nazi leader, a foreman in the towns Opel Works. All were buried in a common grave. After the war eleven of the perpetrators were found and arrested. Five men were found guilty and hanged, two women received a 30 year jail term, two other men, 15 years each, and one to 25 years. One was acquitted. That same year, on December 13, three British airmen were captured and were being marched through the streets of Essen on their way to a Luftwaffe unit for interrogation. The three man escort was commanded by Hauptmann Erich Heyer who ordered the escorts not to interfere if civilians attacked the prisoners. Attacked they were as the party crossed a bridge. Sticks and stones were thrown and a pistol was fired which wounded one of the prisoners in the head. The prisoners were then kicked and beaten, their battered bodies thrown over the parapet of the bridge killing all three. At the Essen War Crimes Trial from 18 to 22 December, 1945, Hauptmann Heyer and one of the civilians, Johann Braschoss, were sentenced to death. One of the escorts, Private Koenen, was sent to prison for five years and two other civilians, Karl Kaufer and Hugo Boddenberg, to life imprisonment and ten years respectively. The death sentences were carried out on March 8th 1946. On March 22, 1945, five RAF aircrew were captured after baling out from their damaged aircraft during a raid on the Dreierwalde airfield in which around forty civilians and Luftwaffe personnel were killed. Marched to an interrogation centre by a three man German guard, under the command of Oberfeldwebel Karl Amberger, the party turned on to a track leading into a wood. There the prisoners were shot in cold blood. One prisoner, Australian Flt.Lt. Berick, though wounded, managed to escape. At a British Military Court at Wuppertal on 11th to 14th March, 1946, Karl Amberger was found guilty of shooting unarmed prisoners of war and was sentenced to death. He was hanged on May 15th. 1946.

DRESDEN
( February 13/14, 1945 )

RAF and U.S.A.F. bombers devastated the German city of Dresden in the most concentrated incendiary attack of the war in Europe. In all, 733 British bombers and 311 US Flying Fortresses dropped 771 tons of bombs on the city. At least 35,000 lives were lost in the firestorm which engulfed the city and destroyed eleven square miles of its centre. The raid was requested by the Russians to support their drive from Breslau. Thousands of British and American prisoners were on work detail in the city from the large POW camp Stalag IVb at nearby Muehlberg. 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. Churchill said "The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing".

GANG RAPE IN NEMMERSDORF

Just inside the east German border with Czechoslovakia, the town of Nemmersdorf was the first to fall into the hands of the victorious Red Army. Overrun by General Gatlitsky's 11th Guards Army, his soldiers, crazy with bloodlust, set about raping, looting and killing with such ferocity that eventually discipline had to be restored to force the soldiers back to fighting the war. From buildings, Russian signs were hung which read ' Soldiers! Majdanek does not forgive. Take revenge without mercy!'. When the Soviet 4th Army took over the town five days later, hardly a single inhabitant remained alive. Women were found nailed to barn doors after being stripped naked and gang raped, their bodies then used for target practice. Many women, and girls as young as eight years old, were raped so often and brutally that they died from this abuse alone. Children were shot indiscriminately and all those trying to flee were crushed to death under the treads of the Soviet tanks. Forty French prisoners-of-war were shot on the spot as spies after welcoming the Red Army as liberators. Seventy one women and one man were found in houses, all dead. All the women, including girls aged from eight to twelve, had been raped. In other East Prussian villages within the triangle Gumbinnen-Goldap-Ebenrode, the same scenes were witnessed, old men and boys being castrated and their eyes gouged out before being killed or burned alive. In nearby Metgethen, a suburb of Königsberg, recaptured by the German 5th Panzer Division, around 60 women were found in a demented state in a large villa. They had been raped on average 60 to 70 times a day. In nearly every home, the bodies of women and children were found raped and murdered. The bodies of two young women were found, their legs had been tied one limb each between two trucks, and then torn apart when the trucks were driven away in opposite directions. At Metgethen railway station, a refugee train from Konigsberg, consisting of seven passenger coaches, was found and in each compartment seven to nine bestially mutilated bodies were discovered. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an ex captain in the Soviet Army, recalls, "All of us knew very well that if girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction" (Details of these, and other atrocities, are contained in the Eastern Documentation Section of the German Federal Archives at Koblenz).
The orgy of rape by Soviet troops was far greater than at first believed. Even women and young girls, newly liberated from concentration camps in Poland and in Germany, were brutally violated.

NAHRENDORF
( Near Hamburg. 1945 )

A week after the discovery of the Belsen Concentration Camp, a rumour reached the British Army's 'Desert Rats' that the 18th SS Training Regiment of the Hitler Jugend Division, had shot their prisoners at the nearby village of Rather. 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 bloodthirsty British NCO’.

THE GARDELEGEN MASSACRES
( April 13, 1945 )

In a large grain-storage barn in a field on the Isenschnibbe estate near the town of Gardelegen, 30 kms north of Magdeburg in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, a massacre was committed on the afternoon of April 13th 1945. Earlier that day a train arrived at the Letzingen railway station, some twelve kilometres from Gardelegen, containing slave workers who were being evacuated from camps in the Mittelbau-Dora complex around the town of Nordhausen. The prisoners were unloaded and marched to the military barracks of the Remonte-Schule, a training establishment for cavalry horses on Bismarker Strasse, Gardelegen. Meanwhile a second train arrived at the small station in nearby Mieste. The train brought 1,400 slave workers from the 'Mittelbau' camps of Rottelberode and Stempeda. As the inmates dismounted from the train hundreds collapsed from hunger and thirst. They were simply shot on the spot. Later, US soldiers dug up 86 dead prisoners from graves around the station. Stationed at the airfield near the town was a Luftwaffe Paratroops unit who took over the guarding of the prisoners. These Paratroopers were ruthless and started shooting prisoners at the least provocation. In a small wood behind the station, a total of 104 prisoners were executed and buried in three large pits. On the afternoon of Friday, April 13, a group of around 1,050 inmates were marched the two kilometres to a field in which stood a large brick walled barn. None of the prisoners knew of the fate that awaited them. Once the prisoners were inside the barn, doors were closed and the SS guards and Kapos then proceeded to pour gasoline on the straw covered floor and set the whole barn alight. Hand grenades were thrown in and machine pistol and rifle fire added to the screams of the panic stricken prisoners. When the screaming masses rushed the doors they were simply shot down mercilessly. Twenty-two prisoners survived by climbing to the inside roof of the barn to escape the flames. The massacre site was discovered next day by soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 405th Infantry of the US 102nd Infantry Division and men of the 548th AAA of the US 102nd Ozark Infantry Division and witnessed by First Lt. Drexel Dwane Powell of Arkansas.  All civilian able-bodied men of the town (population 13,000) were rounded up, marched to the site carrying spades and white wooden crosses and forced to dig graves and bury the dead. Men in white-collar suits had to carry the corpses with their bare hands, gloves were not permitted. Today, on the Gardelegen Memorial Site, all that remains of the barn is a brick wall with the doorway through which the prisoners first entered. All graves are marked with the white crosses bearing the one word 'Unbekannt' (Unknown). There is a memorial with a plaque commemorating the 1,016 victims from the 'Mittelbau' work camps who perished in the flames. 

The former concentration camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were taken over by the the Soviets after World War 11 and became brutal Soviet-run prisons. Tens of thousands of German civilians were arrested during the Soviet occupation. Anyone, young or old, who had any connection with the Hitler regime, or showed signs of unfriendliness to the new communist rulers, were arrested and thrown into these camps without trial. Exposure, starvation and disease soon took their toll. After the collapse of the Communist Government in 1990 investigations were undertaken to trace those many thousands who had simply disappeared. In 1991, excavations at Sachsenhausen uncovered around fifty mass graves 25 feet by 13 feet wide. Digging revealed bodies stacked 15 feet and higher. It was reported by the Brandenburg State that the bodies of 25,500 persons were found at Sachsenhausen. In other mass graves, at Buchenwald, Fünfeichen, Lamsdorf and Ketschendorf, the German Government estimates that another 65,000 bodies will eventually be discovered.

THE BLEIBURG-MARIBOR MASSACRES
( May, 1945 )

During the last days of the war, the Croatian armed forces, as well as tens of thousands of civilian refugees, fled towards Austria to escape the wrath of the Yugoslav communist partisans. In Austria, the British army was about to accept their surrender in a field at Bleiburg, on the Austrian-Slovenia border. In this huge open space was crowded an estimated 100,000 Croatian troops and civilian refugees. In the woods surrounding the field, Titoist Partisans had infiltrated and set up defensive positions. As negotiations were proceeding for the Croatian troops to lay down their arms, the rattle of machine-gun fire was heard from the woods above. The crowd of troops and refugees, too densely packed to move freely, fell in droves as the machine-guns played their deadly fire back and forth. Within minutes, thousands of bodies lay dead or dying. To add to the horror, hundreds of horses, some still harnessed to their carts, panicked and dragged their wagons over the bodies of the fallen. Those that survived were simply driven back across the border to be dealt with by the waiting partisans. On other parts of the border, masses of Croatian soldiers and civilians were turned back after being disarmed by the British forces. Crammed into trains and military vehicles like sheep, they were told that they were being transported to camps in Italy. 

At the town of Maribor they were released from the transports and handed over to Tito's partisans, only to be shot down in their thousands in a massacre that lasted over a week. The 17th Partisan Assault Division, under the direction of Serbian officers, carried out the massacre of some 40,000 persons in the Tezen Forest at Maribor. At Sestine, 5,000 were murdered, at Vrgin Most another 7,000 fell to the partisan's bullets. Untold thousands of Serbs and Slovene Home Guard (Domobranci) from the camp at Viktring in Austria were massacred in a most brutal fashion and their naked bodies thrown into a deep chasm at Kocevje after which grenades were thrown in. There were about three of four survivors from this massacre. In total, 12,196 Croats, 5,480 Serbs, 8,263 Slovenes and 400 Montenegrins were handed over to the partisans. It is estimated that around 180,000 Croatian soldiers and civilian refugees were massacred by Tito's communists. Britain and the US reluctantly agreed to these transfers but insisted that they should be carried out in an orderly and humane manner. Who was ultimately responsible for the carrying out of these forced repatriations? Winston Churchill had expressly forbidden the sending back of all those unwilling to go. Churchill's political advisor and Resident Minister at Field Marshal Alexander's headquarters, Harold MacMillan (future Prime Minister of GB), is the one that all evidence since unearthed, points to as being the one responsible for the order to force these thousands of unarmed soldiers and refugees back into the arms of Tito's communists. Unfortunately his reasons and motives for this shameful behaviour of the British military authorities have gone to the grave with him.

In 1999, during the construction of the Slovenian section of the Nuremberg to Zagreb Highway, between Pesnica and Slivnica , the bulldozers uncovered an antitank ditch containing the skulls of 1,179 Croatian soldiers. This was only in a 60 metre section of the three kilometre long trench. At the time of the massacres, a state of war existed between Great Britain and Croatia and therefore these victims should have been granted prisoner-of-war status after their surrender and entitled to proper treatment under the Geneva Convention. Thus Britain broke the regulations of the Convention by sending these defenceless beings back to their deaths. To date, around 110 mass grave sites have been discovered in Slovenian territory since the fall of the communist regime in 1990.

THE SERBIAN MASSACRES

On April 28, 1941, Units of the Croatian Ustashi Army, a militia created by the Croat Prime Minister, Ante Pavelic, surrounded the villages of Gudovac and Brezovica and killed 234 inhabitants who held Serbian nationality. They were told to go home to Serbia or convert to Roman Catholicism, refusal to do so ended in death. In the village of Blagaj, 520 men, women and children were murdered in the most cruel way by being hit over the head. In the Koprivnica Forest near Livno, around 300 souls were subjected to the most unspeakable acts of brutality before being killed. Hands and legs were cut off, eyes gouged out, heads of small children were severed and thrown onto their mothers laps, breasts were severed and children's hands  pulled through and tied together. In the Livno area alone, the Ustashi killed 1,243 Serbs including 370 children. In the Risova Greda Forest , over 800 Serbs were killed and their bodies hurled into ravines. The Ustashi commander, General Dragutin Rumler, filed a report stating that so far, around 10,000 Serbs, Jews and Gyspies had been killed. The German occupation forces at that time turned a blind eye to the slaughter, after all, the Ustashi were doing what the Nazi Gestapo and S.D. units had come here to do. By far the worst crime committed by the Ustashi was the murder of children from the Mount Kozara region. The Serb children were separated from their parents and taken to various  interment camps set up by the Ustashi. In the camp at Sisak , 6,693 children were housed in filthy conditions and soon 1,600 died. At the camp at Jastrebarko, 3,336 children were housed in the same pitiful condition. Soon after their arrival the local cemetery caretaker had buried 768 boys and girls. In Plot 142 in the Mirogoj Cemetery in Zagreb lie the remains of 862 children who had died after being rescued by the Red Cross. Fifty years after this tragedy, a final count was made. The crimes committed by the Ustashi troops in 1941 and 1942 took the lives of 11,176 children (6,302 boys and 4,874 girls). The average age of these children was 6.5 years. This crime of Genocide, committed by the pro-German Catholic Croatians on the Orthodox Serbian population during World War Two is something the outside world knows little about.

Ante Pavelic, fugitive war criminal, escaped the slaughter of Bleiburg only to surface several years later in Argentina. After an attempt on his life in April, 1957, Pavelic moved lock, stock and barrel
to the safety of fascist Spain. There, on December 28, 1959, he died from complications relating to injuries received during the assassination attempt.

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 and forced back into the Allied occupied zones of Germany. 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 from the hospital were hung up on lampposts 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. 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 gunpoint to the Austrian border. There, the Austrian guards refused them entry, the Czech guards refused to readmit 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.

THE POSTBERG ATROCITIES

Around the small Bavarian village of Postberg (Postoloprty) in the province of Saazerland on the Bavarian-Czech border, hundreds of German men, women and children were shot to death during the Czech 'ethnic cleansing'. All German civilian residents in the province were rounded up by Czech soldiers and communist partisans and marched to a collection point in Postberg. There they were interned and beaten, many were executed. On September 17, 1947, a number of mass graves were discovered in and around Postberg. Thirty-four bodies were found in the village itself, another four nearby at Weinberg and twenty-six in an old sandpit at Schuladen. At Lewanitzer, 349 corpses were unearthed and another 103 bodies were exhumed from another mass grave. Ten corpses were found in a sand pit at Kreuz along with another 225 bodies in a mass grave at the local school. At the military barracks five bodies were found and seven buried in house No. 74. During investigations only one Czech, Vojtech Cerny, admitted to participating in the shootings and killing four Germans. In all, a total of 763 Germans were murdered. A law, passed by the Czech authorities (The Benesch law: No115/1946) stated that all Czech crimes against Germans were not legible to penalty. In the town of Aussig on the Elbe River, on July 31, 1945, there was an explosion at the town's cable works. The Czechs suspected sabotage on the part of the ethnic Germans. A bloodbath followed. Women and children were thrown from the Usti bridge into the river. Germans were  shot dead on the streets. It was estimated that between 1,000 and 2,500 people were killed in this outburst of anger by Czech hooligans. Women and children were thrown from the Aussig-Usti Bridge into the river in a spontaneous outburst of anger and hate. In 1990, a plaque was placed on the bridge by the new government of President Vaclav Havel to commemorate the victims of this tragedy.

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Source: http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html