The Gardelegen massacre

On the evening of 13 April 1945, in the last weeks of the war in Europe, one of the worst crimes of the war’s final phase was committed outside the small town of Gardelegen in the Altmark, in what is now Saxony-Anhalt. More than a thousand concentration camp prisoners – people exhausted by days of transport and marching, most of them sick – were driven into a brick barn belonging to the Isenschnibbe estate, locked inside, and the petrol-soaked straw was set alight. Those who tried to get out were killed with machine guns, grenades and Panzerfausts. The Americans who reached the spot two days later counted 1,016 victims. The crime went down in history as the Gardelegen massacre.

It is often written under this date that more than a thousand slave labourers were locked in a barn that was then set on fire, and that American troops took the town “only a few hours later”. The date and the scale of the crime agree with the findings of historians. Two points, however, need to be made more precise. The victims were not local civilians but concentration camp prisoners – civilians deported to the Reich from all over Europe, prisoners of war and political prisoners, forced into slave labour. And the town surrendered not a few hours later but on the evening of 14 April, roughly a day after the killing began; American soldiers discovered the scene of the crime itself on 15 April.

The evacuation of the camps in April 1945

The Gardelegen massacre was one link in a chain of crimes that accompanied the evacuation of the German concentration camps in the last months of the war. From the autumn of 1944, as the fronts approached the borders of the Reich, the SS emptied camp after camp so that their prisoners would not fall into Allied hands and could go on working for the armaments industry. The evacuations were carried out in open goods wagons or on foot, without food and in inhuman conditions; they went down in history as the death marches. In January 1945 tens of thousands of prisoners were marched out of Auschwitz in this way – a few days before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. In the spring the same fate befell the camps deep inside Germany, now threatened from the west as well.

After crossing the Rhine in Operation Plunder at the end of March 1945, the American and British armies advanced rapidly into the interior. In the path of the US First Army lay the Harz mountains and, on their southern edge, the Mittelbau-Dora complex near Nordhausen. In the underground tunnels of the Mittelwerk factory there, prisoners assembled the V-2 rockets that were still falling on London and Antwerp in March, as well as V-1 flying bombs. The Dora main camp and its many subcamps were among the harshest places of slave labour in the Reich: the death rate in the tunnels and on the construction of further underground plants was enormous.

At the beginning of April, on 3–4 April 1945, the SS camp headquarters ordered the evacuation of the main camp and the subcamps – according to studies by the German memorials foundation, from Ellrich, Ilfeld, Rottleberode, Wieda and other places at the foot of the Harz, among others. They were to be sent to camps further north: Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme. Some prisoners were driven on foot across the Harz, others were loaded into goods wagons. At the same time a rail transport of some six hundred sick prisoners, destined for Bergen-Belsen, was sent from the Neuengamme subcamp at Hannover-Stöcken, where prisoners had worked in a battery factory.

Stranded in the Altmark

The trains never reached their destination. Tracks destroyed by Allied aircraft, damaged locomotives and the approaching front brought them to a halt in the Altmark, near the villages of Mieste and Letzlingen outside Gardelegen. Estimates of how many prisoners found themselves in the area at that time vary: some accounts give about 3,000, others about 4,000, and German studies between 4,000 and 5,000. There were too few SS guards to watch over so many people. The transport commanders, among them SS-Hauptscharführer Erhard Brauny (PL) – until the beginning of April commandant of the Rottleberode subcamp – therefore began to recruit helpers from among Luftwaffe soldiers, older men of the Volkssturm, Hitler Youth boys, policemen and local firemen.

The survivors of the transports were driven on foot in various directions. Many died on the way – shot for failing to keep up or killed while trying to escape; some prisoners managed to get away. In the end a group that German studies estimate at 1,050–1,100 people was locked up in Gardelegen in the buildings of the Remonteschule, a cavalry school. The prisoners did not know what awaited them. They included Poles, Soviet citizens, French, Hungarians, Belgians, Germans, Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Dutch and Spaniards, as well as people from what were then colonies – Algeria and Suriname.

Kreisleiter Thiele’s order

The decision to kill the prisoners was taken – according to the findings of later investigations and historical research – by the head of the local NSDAP district, Kreisleiter Gerhard Thiele. Born in 1909 in Stettin (Szczecin), a schoolteacher and party member since 1931, he had risen to the rank of Obersturmbannführer in the SS. By mid-April 1945 the US Ninth Army was only a few dozen kilometres from Gardelegen, and its spearheads were reaching the Elbe. The district party authorities treated the presence of more than a thousand emaciated prisoners in a town that was to fall into American hands within days as a problem to be “solved”. Historians, among them the Israeli scholar of the death marches Daniel Blatman, point out that in the last weeks of the war decisions to murder were often taken locally – by Kreisleiters, escort commanders and the commanders of the local Volkssturm – in an atmosphere of fear of “rebellious” prisoners and a sense that no one would now be held to account for such deeds.

On the evening of 13 April the prisoners were led out of the barracks in columns of a hundred; those unable to walk were taken by horse and cart. The destination was a large brick barn with a tiled roof on the Isenschnibbe estate, about a kilometre north-east of the town. The people were herded inside, and three of the four great sliding doors were bolted.

The night in the barn

The accounts of survivors and the findings of investigators differ in detail, but their overall picture is consistent. The floor of the barn had been covered with straw soaked in petrol. The guards set it alight; twice the prisoners managed to smother the flames with blankets, sacks and clothing. The guards then began firing into the barn with machine guns, throwing grenades and using Panzerfausts and flare ammunition. During the night more cans of petrol were brought from Gardelegen to rekindle the fire and burn the bodies. People who tried to escape by digging under the walls were killed outside.

According to the German foundation that looks after the memorial site, those who took part in the crime and in the attempt to cover it up included NSDAP and SA functionaries, SS men, soldiers of the Luftwaffe and of the local cavalry school, paratroopers, policemen, members of the Volkssturm, the Hitler Youth and the Reich Labour Service, and firemen. Some 25 prisoner functionaries were also used to help. The next day the perpetrators returned to bury the charred bodies in trenches beside the barn, finish off any survivors and burn what was left. They did not have time – the swift arrival of the Americans interrupted the work.

The Americans at Gardelegen

Gardelegen lay in the path of the 102nd Infantry Division of the US Ninth Army, commanded by Major General Frank A. Keating. According to American sources, which agree on this point, the town’s surrender was hastened by chance: on 14 April the Germans captured Lieutenant Emerson Hunt, a liaison officer between division headquarters and the 701st Tank Battalion. Hunt persuaded the defenders that American tanks were approaching the town, and the German commandant agreed to surrender. On the evening of 14 April, roughly a day after the killing began, Gardelegen was in American hands.

On 15 April soldiers of F Company, 2nd Battalion, 405th Infantry Regiment found the barn. It was still smouldering. Inside it and in the freshly dug trenches lay the bodies – 1,016 in all. Many were burned beyond recognition; some victims had died by the walls and doors, trying to get out. The Americans found eleven prisoners alive: seven Poles, three Russians and a badly wounded Frenchman. The total number of survivors of the massacre is given variously in the sources – from 7 to 33 – because some had managed to slip away from the column or hide in the surrounding area.

According to eyewitness accounts, American soldiers shot about twenty men on the spot whom the survivors identified as participants in the crime.

A burial ordered for the townspeople

Gardelegen was another place where, within the space of a few weeks, the American army came face to face with German crimes. A few days earlier soldiers of the Third Army had entered Ohrdruf, which the Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, visited on 12 April, and soon afterwards Buchenwald. Photographers and cameramen of the US Army Signal Corps came to Gardelegen; their pictures of the charred bodies at the barn doors went round the world. On 19 April The New York Times and The Washington Post reported the massacre, and on 7 May Life magazine published a report entitled “The Holocaust of Gardelegen”. The press quoted one soldier as saying that he had never before been so sure what he was fighting for – and that what he had taken for propaganda had turned out to be true.

The division command decided that the victims would be buried by the townspeople. On 21 April between 200 and 300 men from Gardelegen were ordered to report – according to German studies, all men over the age of sixteen. With shovels, sheets and crosses they had to exhume 586 bodies from the trenches and 430 from the barn and lay each one in a separate grave, marked with a white cross or, where the dead man was known to be Jewish, a Star of David. The work took several days and was filmed; parts of the footage were included in the American documentary Die Todesmühlen (“Death Mills”), later shown to Germans in the American zone.

On 25 April 1945 soldiers of the 102nd Division paid military honours to the dead, and the cemetery was given the status of a military cemetery of honour. Colonel George Lynch told the assembled townspeople that Germans had been told that the stories of German atrocities were Allied propaganda, but that now they could see the truth with their own eyes – and that the responsibility lay not only with the Nazis or the Gestapo but with the German people. A plaque put up by the Americans and signed by General Keating stated that 1,016 Allied prisoners of war murdered by their captors lay there, and that the citizens of Gardelegen were responsible for keeping the graves for ever as green as the memory of the victims would be kept in the hearts of freedom-loving people. Individual families were entrusted with the care of particular graves.

Identifying the victims proved almost impossible. Some accounts, based on post-war documents, state that in the first years the nationality of 186 of the murdered was established – among them 60 Poles and 52 Soviet citizens – while the German memorials foundation states that names have been established for about a third of those buried. As recently as 2023 one of the graves, attributed for decades to a prisoner from Mexico, was identified as that of a murdered Algerian. Most of the victims lie in nameless graves.

The perpetrators

The reckoning for the crime remained incomplete. The investigation was conducted by Lieutenant Colonel Edward E. Cruise of the Ninth Army’s war crimes branch. Erhard Brauny stood trial in 1947 before an American military tribunal at Dachau in the Mittelbau-Dora staff trial; he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the court also found him guilty of taking part in the Gardelegen massacre. He died in Landsberg prison in 1950.

Gerhard Thiele escaped punishment. He was last seen in Gardelegen on 14 April 1945. At the end of the month he was taken prisoner by the Americans, but his part in the crime did not come to light, and at the beginning of 1946 he was released from internment. He settled in the British occupation zone and from 1951 lived in Düsseldorf under the name Gerhard Lindemann, working in the trade-fair business. Searches by West and East German investigators, including the Stasi, came to nothing; the public prosecutor’s office in Stendal issued an arrest warrant in 1991. Thiele died in 1994, and his identity was established only after his death.

Remembrance

Gardelegen ended up in the Soviet occupation zone and then in the GDR. Between 1949 and 1971 a memorial was created on the site of the barn, around a surviving section of its wall, in the spirit of the official state narrative: the inscriptions spoke of “international resistance fighters”, and a new plaque replaced the American one and passed over in silence the part played by local people in the crime. The original plaque was rediscovered during work on a new exhibition; since 2015 the site has been in the care of the Saxony-Anhalt memorials foundation, and in 2020 a documentation centre was opened there (Gedenkstätte Feldscheune Isenschnibbe Gardelegen). The testimonies of Polish survivors were collected and published in 1969 by Melchior Wańkowicz in his book Od Stołpców po Kair (“From Stołpce to Cairo”).

Place in the history of the war

The Gardelegen massacre belongs to the so-called crimes of the final phase (Endphaseverbrechen) – killings committed in the last weeks of the war, when the Reich’s defeat was certain. Like the Deutsch Schützen massacre at the end of March or the Celle massacre of 8 April, where prisoners were hunted down after an air raid on their transport, it showed that the collapse of the state did not put an end to the violence but dispersed it: decisions to kill passed into the hands of local functionaries, and ordinary residents – older men of the Volkssturm and teenage boys – took part in the killings. Guidelines attributed to Heinrich Himmler that prisoners should not fall into Allied hands alive – whose exact wording and authenticity are disputed by historians – coincided with the local authorities’ fear of thousands of starving people.

The pictures from Gardelegen, together with the images from Ohrdruf, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, shaped Western public knowledge of the concentration camp system in the spring of 1945 and became part of the evidence at the post-war trials. The order for the townspeople to bury the victims was one of the first instances of a practice the victors later applied in many places in Germany: confronting the population with what had been happening on its own doorstep.