Gardelegen (war crime)

The Gardelegen massacre was a massacre perpetrated by German SS and Luftwaffe troops during World War II. On April 13, 1945, on the Isenschnibbe estate near the northern German town of Gardelegen, the troops forced 1,016 slave laborers, many of them Poles, who were part of a transport evacuated from the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp into a large barn which was then set on fire. Most of the prisoners were burned alive; some were shot trying to escape. The crime was discovered two days later by F Company, 2nd Battalion, 405th Regiment, U.S. 102nd Infantry Division, when the U.S. Army occupied the area.

The discovery of the massacre seems to have been by chance. The consensus account is that American Lieutenant Emerson Hunt, a liaison officer between Ozark HQ and the 701st Tank Battalion, was captured by German forces on April 14, 1945, that he bluffed the German forces defending the town of Gardelegen into believing that American tanks were approaching the city, and that this induced the German commander to surrender to the American forces. The Americans arrived at the site before the Germans had time to bury all of the bodies.

On April 3–4, following the U.S. Army's crossing of the Rhine River and push into Germany, the SS camp administration at Dora-Mittelbau had ordered the evacuation of prisoners from the main camp and a number of its affiliated subcamps. The goal was to transport the inmates by train or by foot to the other north German concentration camps: Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, or Neuengamme.

Within days, some 4,000 prisoners from Dora-Mittelbau, its satellite camps, and a Neuengamme subcamp arrived in the Gardelegen area, where they had to deboard from the freight cars because the trains could not advance any further due to air raid damage to the rail lines. Greatly outnumbered by the prisoners, the SS guards began recruiting auxiliary forces from the local fire department, the air force, the aged home guard, the Hitler Youth, and other organizations to watch over the inmates.

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