photo #9140843

This day (April 13) in 1945, in the small German town of Gardelegen, the Nazis committed one of the last major massacres of the Holocaust. More than 1,000 exhausted, starving, disease-ridden human beings (mostly Jews from Hungary and Romania) were herded at gunpoint into a large brick barn; the doors were barred shut. Straw soaked in gasoline was piled against the walls. Then the SS, local Nazi Party officials, Volkssturm militiamen, and even some Hitler Youth set the barn on fire. As flames engulfed the building and screams filled the night, those inside tried desperately to claw their way out. Machine guns opened up on anyone who reached the small windows or gaps in the walls. The fire burned for hours. By morning, 1,016 bodies, some burned beyond recognition while others were riddled with gunfire from when they tried to escape, lay piled inside. Somehow, a handful survived while hidden under corpses or by squeezing through a tiny ventilation hole at the last possible moment. This was already mid-April 1945, and the war was effectively over. The Red Army had already taken Vienna and was massing for the final assault on Berlin (which would begin in just three days). In the West, American, British, and Canadian forces had crossed the Rhine in March, were racing across Germany, and had already liberated Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau. At the time of the massacre, the U.S. Ninth Army (specifically the 102nd Infantry Division) was only hours away from Gardelegen. The victims at Gardelegen were the were survivors of the infamous death marches - the final, hellish chapter of the Holocaust. As Allied armies closed in from both east and west, the Nazis evacuated concentration camps and subcamps (including Mittelbau-Dora, from which many of these prisoners had come). Tens of thousands of prisoners were force-marched through the freezing German countryside in late winter and early spring 1945 with no food, no shelter, and no mercy. Thousands died along the roads from exhaustion, starvation, or summary execution. Gardelegen was simply the place where one of those columns was cornered; and the killers decided that, rather than let the prisoners fall into Allied hands as living witnesses, they would burn them alive. The horror is compounded by who did the killing. This wasn’t only faceless SS men from the camps. Local German civilians including party officials, farmers, and teenagers in the Hitler Youth all participated enthusiastically. They rounded up the prisoners, locked the barn, poured the gasoline, and pulled the triggers. Ordinary Germans, in the final days of the war, chose to commit mass murder rather than simply let the prisoners live. The next day, April 14, 1945, soldiers of the U.S. 102nd Infantry Division entered Gardelegen and discovered the still-smoking barn. The stench was unbearable. Bodies were stacked like cordwood. The Americans, hardened by months of combat, were sickened. They immediately rounded up every able-bodied German male in the town and forced them, at gunpoint, to dig individual graves for every single victim. A Jewish chaplain conducted a funeral service over the mass grave. The U.S. Army documented everything in photographs and reports that were later used at Nuremberg. Gardelegen was not the last massacre. Comparatively smaller-scale killings and massacres continued until the bitter end; but it stands as one of the final mass slaughters of the Holocaust. The war was known to nearly every German to be a lost cause for a year or years by this point, but the frenzy to murder Europe’s Jews never stopped - it never became less of a German war priority even in the face of total defeat.