WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (11 page)

Part Four: War And Atrocities Of World War Ii

Belgium In World War Ii

1940–45

During World War II, Belgium was invaded by the Germans. There was heavy fighting as the Belgium army fought to defend the country, and each side lost many men. Finally, on 27 May, 1940, the Belgians surrendered. King Leopold III of Belgium was made a prisoner of war but his ministers were able to flee to London, where they set up a government in exile, under the protection of the Allied forces.

The ensuing occupation of Belgium soon proved to be beyond everyone’s worst nightmares as the Germans rounded up the population for extermination or forced labour in the notorious concentration camps. Over the next few years, more than 25,000 Belgian Jews met their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau, either through being gassed or through malnutrition, disease and neglect. In many cases, Belgian people collaborated with the Germans in sending their compatriots to their deaths; however, there were also hundreds of brave Belgian citizens who risked their lives to help the victims of Nazi persecution, including two underground resistance groups called The White Brigade and The Secret Army.

In 1944, with the help of the Allies, the resistance proved victorious, and the Germans were defeated. However, the war crimes and atrocities that had occurred during the occupation were never forgotten, and they left an indelible scar on the nation’s history. Thousands of innocent victims had lost their lives, and today they are remembered in the many war memorials across the country, whether in great cities, bustling towns, or tiny villages.

T
HE MASSACRE AT 
B
ANDE

By 1944, the Germans were near to defeat, and their troops’ ferocity intensified as they realized that Hitler’s plan was failing and Germany could now lose the war. Accordingly, the Nazis launched the Ardennes Offensive, colloquially known to the Allies as ‘the Battle of the Bulge’, referring to the dent that the Germans initially made in their lines as they advanced. The Ardennes Offensive, which aimed to split the British and American lines and encircle the Allies’ armies, was planned in total secrecy and caught the Allies by surprise. However, the Allies eventually fought back and the Offensive was repelled, but not without great losses to each side.

During the Offensive, a unit of German soldiers arrived in the small village of Bande in the south of the country. It was Christmas Eve, and snowing heavily. They captured the village, and then set about tracking down local resistance fighters who had attacked and killed three German soldiers there several months before. Their method of doing so was to arrest all the men in the village and then question them about the events of 5 September, when the attack had occurred. Then, one by one, each of the men was shot in cold blood.

The way the Germans executed the men was to lead them to an open door and push them in. Inside the door, a gunman was hidden, and as each man entered, the gunman shot him in the neck at point-blank range. As the victim fell, the gunman kicked his body into the cellar of the building. In this way, 34 men were murdered, one after the other. Only one man, 21-one-year-old Leon Praile, escaped. In a hail of bullets, he ran to the forests surrounding the village and hid there, managing to avoid capture.

On 10 January, 1945, British troops arrived in Bande. The war was now over and the Nazis had, thankfully, been defeated. However, the memory of what had happened on Christmas Eve the year before still haunted the villagers, and many of them gave harrowing accounts of what had happened. Accordingly, a war crimes court was set up in Belgium, the massacre was investigated, and one of the culprits brought to justice.

The man involved was Ernst Haldiman, a Swiss national who had joined the SS in France in 1942. He spoke fluent German and had been sent to Bande during the Ardennes Offensive. After the war, he was identified as one of the soldiers who had taken part in the executions at Bande, and was arrested in Switzerland. He was tried in an army court there and convicted of the atrocity, receiving a sentence of 20 years’ imprisonment. In 1960, after serving 12 years of his sentence, he was released on parole.

T
HE 
M
ALMEDY 
M
ASSACRE

Another appalling atrocity that took place in Belgium during World War II was the massacre of American prisoners of war near the town of Malmédy. Here, German troops from the Waffen SS, led by Major Joachim Peiper, shot over 80 American prisoners of war dead in a field. After the war, Peiper and others were found and brought to trial for their crimes, amid a great deal of controversy.

On the fateful day of 17 December, 1944, Major Peiper and his SS Unit encountered a batallion of American soldiers travelling to a new base. The Americans were not heavily armed and had no anti-tank weapons, so Peiper and his men immediately fired on the convoy, causing the Americans to surrender. A total of about 150 American soldiers were taken prisoner, disarmed and taken to a field near the small village of Baugnez, between the towns of Malmedy and Ligneuville.

Next, an SS soldier drove up in an army truck, pulled out a pistol and shot the medical officer of the battalion, who was standing in the front row. He then shot another officer in cold blood. After that, other SS soldiers appeared, armed with machine guns, and began to shoot at random into the group of American soldiers. Not surprisingly, some of the prisoners took to their heels and tried to escape into the nearby woods. Several were shot as they ran away, but many actually managed to reach the woods and hide there.

After the massacre, the bodies of the murdered prisoners of war were left in the field to rot while the SS battalion moved on. They were later discovered by American troops on 13 January, 1945.

T
HE 
S
TAVELOT 
A
TROCITY

On the day after the Malmedy massacre, Peiper’s unit passed through the village of Stavelot and set about decimating the civilian population there. The villagers were charged with sheltering American soldiers, and dozens were rounded up and summarily executed. Estimates vary as to the actual numbers of those who died, but some allege that there were more than 100 people were killed, some of whom were children.

C
HENOGNE 
R
EPRISAL

On New Year’s Day 1945, the Americans took their revenge for Peiper’s work. In the village of Chenogne, American GIs marched 60 German prisoners of war out to a hillside and machine-gunned them to death. However, in this instance, the perpetrators of the massacre were never brought to justice, since the Allies won the war and did not see fit to try their own soldiers for their conduct during the fighting.

As at Malmedy and Stavelot, accounts as to what really happened at Chenogne differ. According to some sources, a US army unit had responded to the massacre at Malmedy by commanding their troops to take no prisoners and to shoot German soldiers on sight. Because of this, it was argued that the GIs were only following orders, and thus no punishment was meted out to them. Others argue that the GIs acted completely illegally and brutally, out of revenge for the murders of their fellow soldiers at Malmedy.

J
USTICE IS DONE

After the war, General Sepp Dietrich, Major Peiper and other members of the SS were caught and put on trial for the massacre at Malmedy. Their trial took place at Dachau, home of the notorious concentration camp, in May 1946. The proceedings were controversial, as there were several different stories as to what had happened. Some witnesses swore that they had heard German officers giving the order to ‘kill all the prisoners’, while others contested that the prisoners had only been shot because they had been trying to run away. Another account held that the Germans were only shooting all those who had been critically wounded during the fighting, as was their regular policy during the war.

Whatever the true story, the fact that so many prisoners died at the same time, and that their bodies were left unburied and unmarked in a field while the division moved on, gave the distinct impression that a brutal massacre had been carried out. Peiper and other members of the unit were sentenced to death, but this was never carried out, as a series of reviews questioned the findings of the court. Instead, the culprits received long prison sentences.

Peiper served his sentence until 1956, when he was released. In 1972, he went to live in Traves, northern France, and four years later he was murdered there by a group of French communists. His house was also burnt to the ground. Thus, the story of violence and reprisal that had started at Malmedy finally came to an end.

T
HE 
B
ELGIAN 
W
AR 
C
RIMES 
L
AW

In 1993, Belgium passed a War Crimes Law allowing any individual to bring war crimes charges to Belgian courts, whether or not the crimes had been committed in Belgium. The law, which upheld the concept of ‘universal jurisdiction’, came to public attention over claims regarding the genocide in Rwanda, but became difficult to administer as more and more individuals began to file what were perceived as politically motivated cases. In 2006, the law was modified, much to the outrage of human rights organizations, who felt that it had been a great step forward in bringing perpetrators of war crimes and atrocities to justice.

France: Prisoners Of War

1940–44

The French experience during World War II was a painful one, not only because of the heavy losses its military forces sustained in fighting the Germans, but because of its capitulation to the enemy in 1940. After this, France was divided into an occupied and an unoccupied zone, with a right-wing government at Vichy, under Marshall Pétain, which collaborated with the Nazis. This left many Frenchmen and women with a stark choice: either assisting the Germans with their policies of genocide and repression, or risking their own lives and those of their families to help the victims of persecution. Inevitably, many citizens were forced to collaborate, and after the liberation of France by the Allies in 1944, the nation as a whole suffered a terrible sense of shame for allowing dreadful war crimes to occur within its territory. However, France could also point to many instances of courage and selflessness on the part of the members of the French Resistance, who had covertly waged a campaign of sabotage against the Germans during the occupation, as well as steadfast determination on the part of the Free French, who had masterminded the resistance campaign outside the country. Even so, the war crimes that were committed in France in the name of the Third Reich remain a stain on the nation’s conscience today, and there is no doubt that the war years are among the darkest in the nation’s recent history.

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RISONERS OF WAR 

One of the most shocking aspects of Nazi brutality was their treatment of prisoners of war, which not only contravened all hitherto accepted regulations as to how to deal with captured enemy soldiers, but went against the most basic standards of decency, humanity and morality. In many cases, Allied soldiers were gunned down in cold blood after they had been captured and rounded up, for no apparent reason other than to satisfy the bloodlust of the German troops. Towards the final days of the war, this aggressive behaviour became more marked, as the Nazis struggled to come to terms with the fact that they were losing the war, and lashed out at the enemy in response. After the war, the Nazis’ actions were universally condemned, and it was clear that they had acted from the basest of motives, for the pleasure of killing, and to seek revenge for the indignities of their defeat.

L
E 
P
ARADIS MASSACRE

On 26 May, 1940, soldiers from the British Royal Norfolk Regiment were stationed at Le Paradis in Pas-de-Calais. They were not fighting, but were part of manoeuvres by the British Expeditionary Force. However, they were captured by troops of the SS Totenkopf Division, or ‘Death’s Head’ Division. The commander of the division, SS Obersturmführer Fritz Knoechlein, ordered that 99 prisoners were to be marched to some farm buildings in the countryside and lined up against a wall. They were then machine-gunned to death by his men. Only two survived: Private William O’Callaghan and Private Albert Pooley, who had managed to hide in a pig sty. Later, the pair were captured by the Germans and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, but at least they had been lucky enough to escape with their lives. After the shootings, the German troops buried the bodies in shallow graves near where they had fallen. Two years later, local French people dug them up and gave them a proper burial in the local churchyard, which is now a war cemetery.

It was not until after the war that the crime was investigated, and the leader of the division, Knoechlein, brought to trial in Hamburg. He was found guilty of the atrocity and received the death penalty. On 28 January, 1949, he was hanged. Today, a memorial plaque on the barn wall where the men had been lined up and shot commemorates the terrible massacre that took place there during the dark days of France’s occupation.

W
ORMHOUDT ATROCITY

Only one day after the massacre at Le Paradis, around 80 prisoners British and French soldiers were shot by the Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, a German infantry regiment under the command of Sepp Dietrich. These unfortunate soldiers were taken to a barn outside the town of Wormhoudt, Pas-de-Calais, and pushed roughly inside. This included soldiers who were already wounded, who did not have room to lie down inside the building.

It was then that the nightmare began. The SS soldiers stood outside and threw stick grenades into the barn, causing many of the imprisoned soldiers to die or suffer terrible wounds as shrapnel tore into their bodies. Those who managed to survive were taken out of the barn five at a time, and each one shot dead by a hail of bullets as they emerged. In the wake of the massacre, the Nazis buried the victims in a mass grave near the barn, but the bodies were later dug up and buried in cemeteries nearby, in an attempt to cover up the crime.

Only 15 wounded soldiers survived the attack, and they were later found by other German troops. Luckily for them, these regular troops treated them better, dressing their wounds before sending them to a prisoner-of-war camp, where they remained for the rest of the conflict. After the war, the man held to be immediately responsible for the deaths of the soldiers, Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Mohnke, was tracked down. A campaign was mounted by a British MP, Jeff Rooker, to bring him to trial, but it was eventually found that there was insufficient evidence to charge him. Thus, sadly, no one was held accountable for one of the worst massacres of prisoners to take place in France during World War II.

A
RDENNES CAMPAIGN

Another example of Nazi brutality was the treatment of Canadian soldiers in the Ardennes campaign, many of whom were shot after being captured. On one occasion, on 8 June, 1944, 37 Canadian prisoners, some of them wounded, were taken to a field near the village of Le Mesnil-Patty and ordered to sit down. They then waited until a group of German soldiers arrived on a truck, armed with machine guns. As they got out of the truck and walked towards the prisoners, they opened fire on them, killing all but two of them dead. The surviving pair escaped with their lives, but were later captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp for the duration of the conflict.

On a further occasion, around 40 Canadians from the North Nova Scotia Highlanders were captured and shot, one by one, as they were marched to the German headquarters. In some cases, the dead bodies were put into the centre of the road for passing trucks and tanks to run over. When French civilians tried to pull the bodies out of the way, they were ordered to leave them there. Back at headquarters, in the Abbaye Ardenne, 20 Canadian soldiers were locked up in a stable, then taken out and shot in the back of the head. In another instance, 26 Canadian prisoners of war were shot by an SS Hitler Jugend Division, at the Château d’Audrieu.

So brutal were the Hitler Jugend Division as a whole that they were branded ‘the Murder Division’ by the Allied forces.

T
HE UNKNOWN SOLDIERS

In the aftermath of the war, the toll of war crimes against Canadian troops was assessed, establishing that a total of 134 Canadian soldiers had been victims of these atrocities. SS Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer, who had been responsible for the atrocity at the Abbeye Ardenne, was finally brought to trial at Aurich, Germany, and convicted by a Canadian military court. He received the death sentence, but this was later commuted and he was eventually released on parole in 1954, after spending many years in German and Canadian prisons. In 1961, Meyer died of a heart attack, aged 51.

Sadly, however, by the end of the war there were many Allied soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. In many cases, the Nazis had tried to cover up the massacres and atrocities, hiding the bodies or disposing of them in unmarked graves, so that the soldiers did not receive a proper burial. Neither did the Germans record the names of those who died. Also, it was the Nazis’ practise to divest the soldiers of all their belongings before they were shot, removing their pay books, documents and identity tags, so that the bodies could not be identified later on. Naturally, the fact that the bodies had gone missing was a great source of anguish for their relatives and communities, who did not have the chance to visit their loved ones’ graves and to mourn them properly. For this reason, many towns and villages commemorated their dead by erecting war memorials. In this way, they were able to ensure that even those whose bodies had been buried in unmarked plots and mass graves on the field of war would never be forgotten.