| Original caption: “German War Crimes Trials. Nuremberg and Dachau. Five Germans were condemned to death for the killing of six American flyers, who were seized from their German military captors. Joseph Hartgen is led to execution by hanging at Bruchsal, Germany.” Consolidated B-24J-135-CO Liberator 42-110107 “Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am” of the 8th Air Force, 491st Bomb Group, 854th Bomb Squadron, took off from Royal Air Force (RAF) Station North Pickenham on a mission to target the Langenhagen airfield near Hannover on August 24, 1944. It was the 1st combat mission for this crew. “Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am” was crewed by Sergeant William A. Adams (August 14, 1925 – March 8, 1980), of Mahantango Township, Pennsylvania, Nose Gunner; Sergeant Elmore L. Austin (July 6, 1925 – August 26, 1944), Enosburg Falls, Vermont, Waist Gunner; Staff Sergeant Forrest W. “Forrie” Brininstool (June 12, 1916 – October 14, 2009), of Jackson County, Michigan, Top Turret Gunner and Flight Engineer; Sergeant Sidney E. “Gene” Brown (October 24, 1924 – April 10, 2009) of Gainesville, Florida, Tail Gunner; Sergeant William A. Dumont (November 8, 1923 – August 26, 1944), of Berlin, New Hampshire, Belly Turret Gunner; 2nd Lieutenant Norman J. Rogers, Junior (December 22, 1919 – August 26, 1944) of Rochester, New York, Pilot; 2nd Lieutenant John N. Sekul (October 17, 1922 – August 26, 1944), of Bronx, New York, Co-Pilot; Flight Officer Haigus Tufenkjian (October 11, 1921 – August 26, 1944) of Detroit, Michigan, Navigator and Bombardier; and Staff Sergeant Thomas D. Williams Junior (November 3, 1920 – August 26, 1944), of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Radio Operator. Tufenkjian was a last-minute replacement; it’s likely that Sekul, Rogers, Adams, and Brown never even saw him, and they only communicated via the plane’s intercom. 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of Hanover, at 1140 Hours, just after Tufenkjian called bombs away, a flak burst underneath the aircraft’s open bomb bay doors, severed the hydraulic system, and caused fuel to leak from the Number 1 engine. Brininstool was wounded in the abdomen. Adams was injured in the arm. Rogers radioed for a fighter escort. 1st Lieutenant Harold W. Burdekin (February 13, 1920 — December 10, 2011), in Aircraft 123 nearby, watched as Rogers feathered the port engines as he dropped out of formation. 1st Lieutenant Douglas O. Hunt (June 29, 1919 – March 27, 1993), in Aircraft 249, later reported that “Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am” dropped to 3,000 feet below the primary bomber formation, “what appeared to be gas or oil coming from the Number One engine.” 1st Lieutenant Edward W. Sunder (February 24, 1919 – January 30, 2011), in Aircraft 242, thought an oil fire started in Rogers’s Number 2 engine. As the B-24 spiraled down, Nazi German anti-aircraft artillery opened up, thinking they were attacking the Ladbergen Canal Bridge. With flak exploding again all around them, the crew bailed out; Rogers was last, holding “Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am” steady for the rest of the crew as long as he could. After descending, the crew was scattered until civilians arrested them. Dumont’s ankle was broken. They were taken to Greven, 75 miles (a 120 kilometers) west of Hannover. There, the enlisted Sergeants were beaten by a Nazi German official. Brininstool was taken away for emergency surgery after Rogers refused cooperation until he was treated. This saved his life. The rest of the crew was embarked on a train to the Dulag Luft aircrew interrogation center at Oberursel, north of Frankfurt. Specialists would try to extract information from the fliers before they were sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. On the night of August 25, as the train passed Rüsselsheim, the RAF bombed the Opel engine factory there. 116 Lancaster and Halifax bombers plastered a city already in ruins. The RAF dropped 674 2,000-pound (907 kilogram) bombs and more than 400,000 incendiaries on Rüsselsheim, more by far than any previous attack. 198 residents were killed; 177 were forced laborers not allowed to enter the air raid shelters. At 0300 Hours, the crew of “Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am” emerged from a shelter holding them during the raids, and the train stopped outside Rüsselsheim when the bombings tore up the tracks. 3 Nazi German guards herded them towards Rüsselsheim, in total darkness. The surviving crew later recalled the smell of fires and burned flesh. Some 300 residents gathered as they passed through Rüsselsheim; they thought these were Canadians shot down over the city the night before. Käthe Reinhardt (September 30, 1907 – November 11, 1958) and Margarethe Witzler (July 28, 1895 – January 7, 1976), sisters and tobaccanists, were in the crowd, having lugged their disabled mother out of bed and into a cart during the air raid. Reinhardt yelled, in German, “These are the gangsters! These are the criminals! These are the ones who have killed our husbands!” Witzler threw a brick. A mob of at least 50 townspeople descended on the airmen, throwing more bricks, stones, pieces of slate from shattered roofs, pipes. Gütlich continued chasing the men and beating them with his stick, shouting “Tear them to pieces!” Others shouted “Juden, Juden! (“Jew! Jew!”) Adams, from Pennsylvania Dutch country, spoke some German, and trying to think of anything that might bring mercy from the crowd, he yelled, “Don’t kill me! I have a wife and two children! We did not bomb Rüsselsheim! We bombed Osnabrück!” trying to calm the crowd, he dissembled; the crew of “Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am” did not bomb Osnabrück (or Rüsselsheim, ) and he had no family. Dumont, carried by Adams, couldn’t run; the others left them behind. As Johann Opper (1880 – November 10, 1945), a railroad worker, said, “You must beat them!” All the Americans were bleeding from repeated blows, rocks, and bottles. Dumont was pulled off Adams, who had no choice but to keep going. Dumont’s body lay on the street, his skull pierced with a cobblestone. Yet the Nazi Germans continued to kick and beat his inert body. Women threw milk cans out of windows when the crowd ran out of stones. Then they beat them with hammers and even a railroad tie. Adams fell with a blow to the head and was still. Brown, hit by a bottle of alcohol, later remembered how much it hurt as the liquor dripped into his wounds. Then he was struck by a 2-by-4. Austin and Tufenkjian fell quickly thereafter, and Friedrich Wüst (1900 – Movember 10, 1945) knelt to slam Austin repeatedly in the head with a hammer. The crowd set upon Tufenkjian with passion, shouting that the Jew terror flier must die. Rogers, Sekul, and Williams were the only ones left standing. They staggered, hunched over, and trying to ward off the blows and projectiles, 1 of them cradling the box of their personal belongings. Trying to escape from the wall, they moved west on Grabenstrasse, with the crowd close behind. The men did not get far before they ran into a 2nd mob, this 1 even bigger, coming southeast down Grabenstrasse. More than 200 people, mostly Opel employees who were milling around the plant to see the bombing damage and people stranded at the train station, had heard that terror fliers were marching through town. When they saw the blood-soaked Americans stumbling and trying to run from their pursuers, the 2nd mob set upon them with a fresh viciousness. At some point, hands in the crowd wrenched a box of personal belongings away from the fliers, and it disappeared. Rogers, Sekul, and Williams ran from the 2nd crowd, back towards the 1st mob. There, Joseph Hartgen (1902 – November 10, 1945), Deputy Party Leader of Rüsselsheim, announced that he would put the Americans out of their misery. He carried an Ortgies semi-automatic pistol in 6.35 millimeter (25 caliber). His 6 shots struck 4 of the Americans in the head. The crowd continued to beat the Americans as Hartgen shot them. Hitlerjugend (HJ) and a Sturmabteilung (SA) member took the bodies in a cart to the Waldfriedhof Cemetery. Then, another air raid hit Rüsselsheim, so the SA and the HJ ran away, as did the other civilians, burying the dead. Adams and Brown, still alive and not shot in the head, extricated themselves from the pile of corpses after waiting a long time. They hid in the chapel, where their wounds began to swell, and they suffered from blood loss. They fled and were on the run for 5 days, hiding in haystacks (against the suggestion of their escape and evasion instructors) and eventually reaching the Rhine River. Too deep and fast to wade or swim, they were caught by the local police. The Luftwaffe collected them and locked them in separate cells for 2 weeks. No 1 connected them with the Rüsselsheim massacre. Brininstool, recovered from his stomach surgery, along with Adams and Brown, returned to the United States. A horrified Brininstool learned of the massacre of his friends and comrades. Still, Adams and Brown, after filing a report with the United States Army, decided not to talk to others in their unit or, especially, the families of the dead men. On July 9, 1945, the United States Army released a report after forcing local Germans in Rüsselsheim to exhume the corpses. Tufenkjian’s corpse was the most traumatized, with skull fractures that ran down from the top of his skull to his jaw. The investigators concluded he had been primarily targeted. The report identifies the bodies as Sekul, Dumont, Williams, Austin, and 1 tentatively identified as Rogers. He had no dog tags, but the name N. J. Rogers was imprinted over the left pocket of his flight suit. Tufenkjian’s body, 1 of the most battered, was not identified immediately because he was not a regular crewmember with the other men and did not have his dog tags. Army investigators interviewed Rüsselsheim’s Burgomeister and witnesses to the massacre. An inquest began on July 25, 1945, 1 of the 1st war crimes trials after Victory in Europe Day. With the help of the postwar mayor and the city’s police chief, the chief prosecutor’s investigator was able to identify 11 alleged conspirators and locate 21 eyewitnesses who confirmed the presence and participation in the lynching of these 11 individuals. These witness statements formed the basis of the prosecution’s case and were not sufficiently challenged by the defense. The court sought confirmation of an individual’s involvement from various eyewitnesses or the defendant’s admission of guilt. Furthermore, all defendants who gave sworn testimony before the court were acquitted or sentenced to hard labor, while those who did not take an oath were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. The trial lasted 6 days, with eyewitness testimony to the killings by Josef Hartgen and accounts of the bludgeoning of the airmen. On August 2, Josef Hartgen, Friedrich Wüst, Johannes Opper, Margarete Witzler, Käthe Reinhardt, and 2 others were found guilty and sentenced to death. Witzler shouted, “Nein, nein!” (“No, no!”) after learning of the verdict. 1 person, Karl Fugmann (1904 – ????), was acquitted by the commission. 2 other defendants, Heinrich Barthel (1902 – ????) and August Wolf (1901 – ????), were each sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor, while the last, Georg Daum, was sentenced to 25 years in prison with hard labor. After Margarete’s husband and Reinhardt’s brother-in-law pleaded for mercy on their behalf, saying that their only crime was screaming at the pilots, their death sentences were commuted to 30 years in prison with hard labor. On November 10, 1945, Hartgen and the 4 others were hanged at the jail in Bruchsal. Another attacker, Franz Umstatter (???? – ????), was tried for his participation in 1946. Witnesses said he stomped on the victims so hard his boots broke, and that he came home with broken boots. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. However, Umstatter’s conviction was overturned on a technicality in 1948. A 6th, Otto Stolz (???? – ????), was convicted and sentenced to death in May 1947. He was executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison on November 14, 1947. Witzler and Reinhardt were both paroled on December 19, 1953. Reinhardt died on November 11, 1958, and Witzler on January 7, 1976. Barthel and Wolf were both paroled on December 21, 1953. Barthel died on February 2, 1965, and Wolf died on May 11, 1981. Daum was paroled on February 5, 1954, and died on July 27, 1955. All of the defendants returned to their homes in Rüsselsheim. Residents often debated behind their backs what roles they had played in the massacre. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0961.jpg |
| Image Size | 838.28 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2916 x 2360 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | United States Army Signal Corps |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | November 10, 1945 |
| Location | |
| City | Bruchsal |
| State or Province | Baden-Württemberg |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NRE-338-FTL(EF)-3161(7) |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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