| Original caption: “These are the bodies of victims of mass burning at Gardelegen prison camp. They will be buried by German civilians under the supervision of United States Ninth Army troops.” In mid-April 1945, evacuation transports from the satellite camps of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and from the Hannover-Stöcken satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp reached the Gardelegen region. Bombing raids had destroyed locomotives and railway tracks, preventing the trains carrying the prisoners from going any farther than Mieste near Gardelegen. The prisoners were therefore taken off the trains and forced to continue on foot in several columns. These death marches, during which several 100 prisoners were beaten to death or shot, ended at an evacuated barracks in Gardelegen. More than 1,000 people, all of them undernourished and mostly exhausted, had converged in Gardelegen. They were part of a total of more than 3,000 camp inmates who had been on an odyssey lasting several days in 2 trains. Wherever possible, the Schutzstaffel (SS) cleared their camps before they were overrun by Allied troops. SS Obersturmbannführer Gerhard Thiele (April 29, 1909 – June 30, 1994), the local Nazi Party official, ordered the SS to march the prisoners out of the city and into an isolated barn on the Isenschnibbe estate, 2 kilometers northeast of Gardelegen on the country road to Bismark. SS-Hauptscharführer Erhard Brauny (October 17, 1913 – June 16, 1950) supervised the transport. About 1600 Hours, the guards formed up the some 1,050 prisoners in groups of a 100 and columns of 5. Then, in the late afternoon, they marched them out of the gate and up the road to the north in 3 large groups of about 300. Those too weak to march — about a 100 – followed in 3 carts and trailers drawn by horses and tractors. Somehow, as the Reich disintegrated, the Germans had assembled some 80 guards: 30 SS men, some of them with dogs; 18 Kapo guards; half a dozen members of the Volkssturm and of the Reichsarbeitsdienst (“Reich Labour Service”); and 30 Luftwaffe soldiers from the nearby airfield. 20 Fallschirmjäger (“Paratroopers”) would join them later. The prisoners managed to extinguish the flames twice; on the 3rd attempt, the barn quickly caught fire. It is possible that the straw had been soaked in petrol beforehand; however, it is also possible that the barn had a corresponding smell because it had previously been used as a fuel depot. When the imprisoned concentration camp prisoners panicked and tried to push open the doors and climb out of the hatches, SS men opened fire on them. More than a 100 Nazi Germans fired machine guns, threw hand grenades and Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons into the barn. Those prisoners that dug their way out were shot point blank in the head as they fled underneath the doors. Dogs were used to track escapees, who were shot or hand grenades as they fled. The massacre lasted until late into the night. When the barn finally burned out, countless half-charred corpses lay around. The next day, Thiele ordered that men from the area be put together to bury the dead. In the early morning of April 14, they dug a 55-meter-long (180-foot) and 1-meter-deep (3-foot) trench to bury the bodies. While the dead were being taken out of the barn, living, seriously injured prisoners were found among the piles of corpses. Most of them were killed immediately by a shot in the back of the neck. The swift advance of the United States Army 102nd Infantry Division, however, prevented the SS and its accomplices from completely carrying out this plan. On April 14, 1945, F Company, 2nd Battalion, 405th infantry Regiment, 102nd Infantry Division, discovered the atrocity. They found the corpses of 1,016 prisoners in the still-smoldering barn and nearby trenches, where the SS had the charred remains dumped. The also interviewed several of the prisoners who had managed to escape the fire and the shootings. Within days, United States Army Signal Corps photographers arrived to document the Nazi crime and by April 19, 1945, the story of the Gardelegen massacre began appearing in the western press. General Keating ordered that the entire population of Gardelegen attend a formal funeral ceremony which was held on the afternoon of April 25. Local families were impressed into the responsibility of forever caring for the graves of these victims of the Nazi regime, each being assigned 1 grave. To ensure that these instructions would be followed in later years, records were left with the city officials. The Divisional Chief-of-Staff, Colonel George P. Lynch (August 9, 1900 – November 30, 1991), communicated the feelings of his soldiers when he told the townspeople: “You have lost the respect of the civilized world.” The Americans immediately started a thorough investigation of the war crime. On April 17, Lieutenant Colonel Edward B. Beale (March 1, 1901 – June 4, 1981), the Judge Advocate of the 102nd Infantry Division, made a preliminary inspection of the murder barn and interviewed a number of freed prisoners at Gardelegen. Between April 19 – May 22, investigating officers of the 9th Army War Crimes Branch collected sworn statements from 99 survivors, implicated Germans, and other eyewitnesses. Among those arrested by the Americans were Brauny (discovered in a prisoner of war camp) and 1 SS guard; 9 Volkssturm members; members of Thiele’s Kreisleitung staff; the burgomaster of Mieste; and 10 of the Kapo guards. The Germans and Kapos suspected of having actually killed someone were confined at 9th Army Detention Camp Number 92 at Ziegenhain. Several of the implicated Germans committed suicide before they could be arrested. Thiele was never apprehended. In January 1946 Thiele went into hiding, worked as a department head at the Cologne Trade Fair and lived as a pensioner under a false identity, Gerhard Lindemann, in Düsseldorf. He sent money to his wife and sick son in East Germany. From 1991 onwards, investigations against Thiele were carried out by the Magdeburg Regional Court and the Stendal Public Prosecutor’s Office. His true identity was not established until 1997, 3 years after his death. An American soldier, “a tall Sergeant from Long Island,” most likely Sergeant William Weissbard (January 29, 1915 – November 14, 1978) of Brooklyn, New York, was widely quoted as saying, “I never was so sure before of exactly what I was fighting for. Before this you would have said those stories were propaganda, but now you know they weren’t. There are the bodies and all those guys are dead.” Today only 1 wall of the barn remains; a memorial is there, dedicated to the 14 nationalities of the victims of the Gardelegen massacre. In 2023, a victim believed to be Mexican, José Luis Zalazar (???? – ????), was removed from the list and replaced with Rabia Boucif (1897 – April 14, 1945), an Algerian. Zalazar survived Buchenwald and was never near Gardelegen. Boucif’s signet ring and pocket watch was returned to his family in 2023; they thought he’d fled his wife and children, when he’d actually been arrested as a miner in Saint-Étienne, France, in December 1943. He was in Neuengamme Konzentrationslager (KZ; “Concentration Camp”) until he was forced marched and killed in Gardelegen. Zalazar’s monument, however, will not be altered because of modern German rules about protection of World War II memorials. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0541.jpg |
| Image Size | 958.01 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2960 x 2354 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | United States Army Signal Corps |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 22, 1945 |
| Location | |
| City | Gardelegen |
| State or Province | Saxony-Anhalt |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | 72-3264 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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