| Original caption: “The Holocaust of Gardelegen took place on Friday, April 13. German Schutzstaffel SS guards tried to burn between five hundred and one thousand prisoners to prevent their being liberated by advancing Americans. There are approximately a hundred and fifty corpses on the warehouse floor. In the background are three soldiers of the United States Ninth Army who took Gardelegen on April 17 and found the building still burning.” The interior of a large barn on the Isenschnibbe estate, where over a 1,000 inmates of Konzentrationslagers were killed by burning. The interior of the barn, looking down the long axis toward the west wall. This picture, taken by war photographer William Vandivert (August 16, 1912 – December 1, 1989) of LIFE magazine, clearly shows the roof support posts. Note the hole in the far left corner caused by the Panzerfausts. Many of the bodies had already been taken out of the barn when this picture was taken. On April 15, 1945, soldiers of the United States Army 102nd Infantry Division patrolling outside the small German town of Gardelegen discovered the site of what was perhaps the most horrendous of all Nazi atrocities. 2 days before, on April 13, SS concentration camp guards and Fallschirmjäger soldiers had locked over a 1,000 camp prisoners of the Reich in a big barn and set it on fire, throwing in hand-grenades and firing Panzerfaust rounds into the interior. Anyone trying to escape from the burning, smoke-filled building was shot. As a result, a total of 1,016 men died. Although unparalleled in cruelty and horror, the murder action at the Isenschnibbe barn was not an isolated case, as there were several other instances of mass shootings of prisoners in the Gardelegen area during the same week. At the beginning of April 1945, the SS evacuated the Hannover-Stöcken concentration camp and several subcamps of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in the Harz Mountains in anticipation of the approaching American troops. Rail transports brought thousands of concentration camp prisoners from there to the Altmark region. In the towns of Mieste and Letzlingen, the trains came to an unexpected stop. Due to the already destroyed tracks, they could not continue their journey. The SS members accompanying these rail transports forced the prisoners to walk the remaining kilometers to Gardelegen. Along the way, they murdered those who could not keep pace. Other concentration camp prisoners died from malnutrition, mistreatment by guards, or by the population along the route. In Gardelegen, the SS initially housed the prisoners in an old military barracks. From there, on the evening of April 13, 1945, they forced them to march on foot to the Isenschnibber field barn on the outskirts of the city. With the assistance of members of the Wehrmacht, the Reich Labor Service, the Volkssturm, and other Nazi organizations, they drove the prisoners into the barn, locked the gates from the outside, and set fire to the interior of the building. To do this, they had previously doused the straw on the floor with gasoline. Prisoners who attempted to escape from the burning barn were shot. Only a few escaped this deliberately planned mass murder, which continued late into the night. Armand Dureux (July 1, 1920 – ????) urinated into his woolen cap and climbed the roof support posts. Others climbed to escape the flames and bullets. He found a hole in the roof to breathe better air, but his friend was hit by a round and fell, so he descended to comfort him as he died. He hid among the dead until nightfall and ran through the Northeast door. Shot in the head behind the ear, he crawled away and hid in a barn 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) away. The following day, American troops arrived in Gardelegen. They discovered the crime scene and prevented the attempts of the perpetrator groups involved, the municipal fire department, and the technical emergency services, to erase the traces of the mass murder. General Frank A. Keating (February 4, 1895 – April 28, 1973), Commander-in-Chief of the 102nd United States Army Infantry Division, ordered an exhumation by the town’s residents. Not far from the barn, he had a cemetery with individual graves and white wooden crosses established for the victims. Only 305 of the 1,016 victims of the massacre could be identified. The rest were buried with the inscription “Unknown.” A sign declared the burial ground a military memorial cemetery. It obligated the town’s residents to permanently care for the graves and the memory of the murdered. The Allied military administration threatened penalties for desecration of the resting place. Only 1 of the barn’s walls remained as of 2020. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0617.jpg |
| Image Size | 783.82 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2060 x 2152 |
| Photographer | William Vandivert |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 17, 1945 |
| Location | |
| City | Gardelegen |
| State or Province | Saxony-Anhalt |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | International Center for Photography |
| Record Number | 1465.2005 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
Author of the World War II Multimedia Database