On Thursday (7.04.2023) 24 graves were demolished at Gardelegen Cemetery, on which the victims of the German crime of April 13, 1945 are buried – mostly Poles. The vandals ripped or damaged the crosses and stars of David. The Polish Consul in Berlin, Marcin Król, called on the German police to rapidly identify the perpetrators of this crime.
Gardelegen's memorial site informed about the desecration of 24 graves at the local cemetery, on which there are 1016 victims of crimes from 13.04.1945 – mostly Poles. Crosses and stars of David were torn or damaged.
We anticipate the police to rapidly identify the perpetrators! https://t.co/qq00znQvk3
— Marcin Król, Consul of the Republic of Poland in Berlin (@krol_rp) April 11, 2023
Crimes in Gardelegen have carried out SS and Luftwaffe troops. The victims were 1016 prisoners from the evacuated Mittelbau-Dora and Hannover-Stöcken camps. The German guards locked them in a large, brick barn, which they then set fire to. Most of the prisoners were burned alive and gunned down. And grenades were thrown into the barn.
Local firefighters, older volkssturmists and teenagers from Hitlerjugend were active in the crime. German criminals failed to bury the bodies and hide the traces of the crime due to the fact that on April 14, an American army entered the city. On April 15, Americans discovered traces of a massacre.
The bodies of the victims were in a state that prevented identification. The Allies identified the names of only 4 people and placed camp numbers on 301 crosses. They besides managed to admit the nationality of 186 victims. Most of them were Poles, but there were besides many Russians and French.
On April 21, the U.S. chief of the city ordered the Gardelegen men to dig graves and bury the murdered. During the next 5 days, German civilians recovered 586 corpses from ditches and 430 from the barn, laying each body in a separate grave.
An investigation to detect the perpetrators of the massacre was conducted by Lieutenant Colonel Edward E. Cruise from the U.S. Attorney's Department of War Crimes 9th Army. SS-Untersturmführer Erhard Brauny, commander of transport of prisoners evacuated from Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, who was present in Gardelegen, was in 1947 put before the American military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1950.
Source: Twitter
See also:
P. Kurek: past of the trial of the alleged Auschwitz KL guardian
