War Crimes

Discuss about the WW2 War Crimes.

The other one isn't that like mine.. (Started by Panzerknacker)
Owyes: I wanted to post these all together (the reports, but on a stupid way it didn't work, well you can read them on this way.. READ THEM; you can give comment etcetera.. Pictures will come too)

Since there always is talked about "War Crimes" this is a good place to discuss them and information/Photos/stories about these War Crimes.

I saw never a real thread about War Crimes so I wanted one, so we could talk about those War Crimes.
German/Americans/Soviet.... they all did War Crimes

Some War Crimes:
source: unknown

The first is a famous one from the famous divison 12TH SS-HITLERJUGEND.

(more coming..)

 

Some more: Pictures coming

 

Some more: Pictures coming:

 

More coming: Pictures coming:

 

More coming: Pictures coming:

 

More coming: Pictures coming:

 

More coming: Pictures coming:

 

1st:
Mass grave of 300 Polish POWs of the Polish 74 Infantry Regiment murdered near Ciepielow by the German 15th Motorized Infantry Regiment of German 29th Motorized Division Commanded by General Joachim Lemelsen.

2nd:
Hanging of Partizan by 'Das Reich' in Thulle

3d:
'Prinz Eugen' troops shoot down '(Pow/Partizan) Escapers' in Serbia

 

I ran across this list of criminal acts during World War II, he also has some other facts elsewhere in his site that are not so grim.

Massacres and Atrocities of WWII in the Pacific Region

 

The Dachau Massacre

In the camp of detainees in dachau no one does not dispute that were committed terrible crimes,
I would want we receive however that in the release dachau if committed also the allies crimes of war

http://www.zundelsite.org/english/antiprop/war_crimes_ww2/dauchau_massacre/index.html

This photograph me reminds a film that you report in some list
Only that in the film in the armchair it sate German and no American

 

What? Your English is very broken, and I want to make sure I understand what you are saying/insinuating before I respond. Are you saying the Allies committed war crimes as well? If so, please produce a list of said crimes for the rest of us to peruse.

 

kreta

Kondomari 31.Mai 1941



Kondomari - Kreta-Wiki

 

There's a polish film out called Katyn (pronounced 'Katsinskya') about the Katyn massacre oif Polish POWs by the NKVD in 1940. Has anyone seen it? It got nominated at the oscars for best forgienfilm.

 

And the Fallschirmjäger is smiling !!!

 

I am agreeing with this quote... it is the posting by Tixodioktis to which I am responding....

I'm sorry, but I don't find the website convincing. No one questions that in warfare sometimes the worst is brought out in a few people, and that sometimes people take retribution upon themselves when they discover someone who has committed a heinous crime.

A website which may post photos out of context is not proof of the accusation. As there were survivors at Dachau that day, I would find their testimony more convincing.

Do you have proof from alternate sources?

 

To get in all the information will take multiple posts.

Part 1

I actually started to go through the book Canadians Behind Enemy Lines: 1939-1945 by Roy MacLaren for the thread Spies Like Us to add some information that probably wasn’t widely known. While I will still add information there later, I was saddened to read what happened to some of the first Canadians with the S.O.E. who went to France in early 1944 and were captured by the Germans. Their treatment following capture and the manner of their deaths were war crimes.

“The first two months of 1944 were disastrous for Canadians with S.O.E. in France. Bieler was captured in St. Quentin; Byerly, Deniset, and Sabourin were parachuted to awaiting Germans; and another Canadian, Alcide Beauregard of the Eastern Townships of Quebec, was also destined never to return.

Beauregard originally enlisted in the Regiment de Masonneuve (he had arrived in Britain with Bieler and Chartrand) and later transferred to the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. Dark, Slight, and by prewar training an electrical and radio mechanic, the twenty-six-year-old Beauregard volunteered for S.O.E. in mid-1943, when there was an acute shortage of French-speaking wireless operators. The enemy had long realized that wireless operators were the most vulnerable link in the S.O.E. chain. If an operator could be eliminated, a whole circuit could be paralysed. The premium on operators was exceptionally high. As a result, many operators, including Beauregard, were given accelerated training. On his Ringway parachute course in late November, Beauregard sprained an ankle. Accordingly, on 8 February 29454, he was landed by Lysander east of Tours (on almost the same field where Chartrand had been deposited a year before) to journey across France to his assignment in Lyon. Beauregard was to be radio operator to a Frenchman in his fifties, J.E. Lesage, who had already worked with a circuit in Lyon and was returning from training in Britain to establish a new sub-circuit of the larger “Ditcher” circuit based on Lyon. Lesage, however, soon proved to be of no further uses as an organizer. During his first tour, he had so alienated other resistance workers that he could find few still willing to cooperate with him. When Lesage retreated into bucolic inactivity, Beauregard was left without a circuit chief. What he did thereafter is no clear from the scant records in London and Ottawa, although it appears that he joined “Ditcher” in Lyon. A Canadian army record suggests that he operated his wireless set continually from the house of a schoolmaster. London apparently warned Beauregard of the growing danger from wireless detection equipment as he continued to transmit from the same place. With the Allied invasion rapidly approaching, Beauregard accepted the risks in view of the heavy volume of messages – which, by their numbers, also increased the chances of his detection. He was caught on 15 July, but only after he had destroyed his wireless set and codes with the help of the schoolmaster’s son.

After being interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters in the Place Bellecoeur, Beauregard was imprisoned in Fort Monluc, a dark, gloomy fort in Lyon. A postwar Canadian intelligence report noted tersely: “His reason is believed to have been unhinged by the tortures to which he was subjected. Lieut. Beauregard gave way no information.” With the approach of the Allied armies up the Rhone, the Gestapo in Lyon carried out Hitler’s order to execute all resistance and “commando” prisoners. On 20 August, Beauregard and one hundred and twenty of the resistance were machine-gunned to death at St. Genie Laval. Hand grenades were thrown among their bodies to ensure that no one was still alive. Himmler had always intended that all such “terrorists” should be murdered, “but not before torture, indignity and interrogation had drained from them that last shred and scintilla of evidence which should lead to the arrest of others. Then, and only then, should the blessed release of death be granted them.” Having disclosed nothing, the time had come for Beauregard to be cast aside.

And so it was for all the captured Canadian agents. None survived the autumn of 1944; they were of no further use to the Germans. And neither the Gestapo nor the S.S. wanted surviving Allied agents to report to their liberators what had been done to them in captivity. In any case, many agents succumbed to the appalling day-to-day conditions of their camps. Of the remainder, most were murdered during the last quarter of 1944 or the first months of 1945. Hitler himself approved an order for some agents to be garrotted with nooses of piano wire; death would then come more slowly and more agonizingly. Beauregard escaped that final degradation by being machine-gunned. Gustave Bieler was also shot, but in a different way – if that is a distinction of any moment.”

 

Part 2 The Executions of Canadians in the S.O.E. in France

By Christmas 1943, time was running out for Bieler and Yolande Beekman. At an overnight meeting in Lille on 25 November, Trotobas had confided to Bieler his concern about the carelessness and incompetence of one of his workers. Two nights later, the agent, under torture, disclosed to the Germans his chief’s hiding place. Trotobas fought it out with the Germans. He and several of his workers who were later captured were soon executed. Bieler, after reporting the disaster to London, did what he could from St. Quentin to help the crippled circuit in Lille to regroup.

Bieler was left too long in France. He should have been brought out after about six months – long enough for any agent, however dexterous, brave, and security-conscious. But Bieler stayed, since “F” Section, greatly pleased by his success, wanted to expand his circuit to help meet the increased needs for sabotage, both preceding and following the anticipated Allied invasion. In a sense, Bieler became a victim of the omnipresent tension arising from the long-term need to husband resources for the impending invasion
and the immediate need to harass the enemy wherever and whenever possible.

Bieler’s success was, in a sense, his own undoing. It attracted the intensified attention of the Germans. Having his own wireless operator contributed to his greater efficiency, but it also enabled German counter-intelligence to use its detection equipment to pinpoint the St. Quentin transmission – an advantage they did not have earlier when Bieler was passing messages through other circuits. From October, Beekman had been transmitting from a secluded house. In December, a German automobile equipped with wireless-detection equipment was seen nearby. Beekman hurriedly moved her set to the house of Camille Boury, a pharmacist in the resistance. It was with the Bourys that Bieler and Beekman spent Christmas Eve of 1943, a Christmas that Mme. Boury never forgot:

Guy arrived in his familiar garb (he was almost always dressed as a workman) carrying two Santa Clauses stuffed with candy for our children and under each arm a few good bottles. We listened to the [BBC] messages from London and then the wonderful Christmas music. We had arranged a good Christmas atmosphere with the traditional pine-tree and candles. Guy recited to us (as he could do so well) the beautiful poetry of Victor Hugo. We also sang Canadian and French choruses.

At midnight guy held his head in both hands for a long time. When this…silence…was over, he was very serious and seemed completely overcome. He asked us for a pencil and wrote on the back of one of our photographs an address: “Chief, French Dept., Sun Life Assurance Company, Dominion Square, Montreal.”

He then said to us…”If misfortune overtakes me some day, write to this address. You will find my wife there. Tell her how I spent Christmas of 1943, describe this evening to her. Tell her of how I thought of them.”

He also used to speak to us often of his children…His greatest pleasure was to go and look at my little boy and girl sleeping. They never saw him for he did not want them to be able to chatter. We had to take so many precautions against this accursed Gestapo but each time that he could, he went to see them asleep.”

Within three weeks, as stranger was seen in the Boury’s street, his collar turned up apparently to conceal earphones. Three days later, on 15 January 1944, Bieler and Beekman were at the drab, red-brick Café du Moulin Brule on a lonely road near the St. Quentin Canal where they had spent many evenings. Suddenly, a dozen armed Germans rushed in. The café owner and his wife, along with Bieler and Beekman, were included in the total of forty members of the network arrested that day and the days following. Among the few to escape arrest was a veteran Franco-Swiss agent who had parachuted to Bieler four days before to assist in the demolition of the gates of the canal locks.

The Germans had done their homework well. They had removed the copestone of Bieler’s carefully constructed network. During the following days, they arrested more than a dozen agents in the area, but they were unable to destroy the network completely. Six months later, when the Allied invasion began, several of Bieler’s sabotage and ambush teams were still intact, hindering the arrival of German reinforcements on the Normandy front.

Among those arrested with Bieler was Eugene Cordelette, the land surveyor who had housed him when he had first arrived in St. Quentin fourteen months before. On the night of their arrest, Cordelette saw Bieler in a corridor of the St. Quentin prison, being taken to a small cell after the first of many brutal Gestapo interrogations. “He was chained hand and foot. His face was horribly swollen, but I could read in his eyes this order: ‘Whatever happens, don’t talk!’…In spite of all torments, he showed no weakness.” The horror of Bieler’s treatment seeps through even the usually arid prose of his citation for a posthumous D.S.O.: “Despite the most barbarous forms of torture by the enemy over a period extending over at least eight days, he refused absolutely to divulge the names of any of his associates, or the location of any arms dumps. Despite the intense pain that he was suffering from the injury to his back [broken when he first parachuted into France], he faced the Gestapo with the utmost determination and courage.”

Following almost three months of interrogation during which his back injury was exacerbated and his kneecap broken, the now-emaciated Bieler was sent with fourteen British officers to narrow, windowless cells in the concentration camp which took its name from the nearby Bavarian town of Flossenburg.

In the their tiny concrete cells, Bieler and the British agents were cut off from each other as well as the outside world, aware of the passage from night to day only by the appearance of a watery soup and a dark, spongy substance that passed for bread. There was no exercise, no reading or writing, no news of the war – only solitary confinement, increasing debilitation from malnutrition and the endless struggled to retain one’s sanity. His anxious wife in Montreal knew only from a terse War Office message that he was missing following an operation “somewhere in Europe.” Captain Lunding, a Danish army officer and one of the few survivors of Flossenburg, was in an adjoining cell and later supplied a few details about Bieler’s fate. By September 1944, Bieler had become a physical wreck as a result of his back and leg injuries, torture, and malnutrition. But his courage remained. According to a statement made to Lunding by a camp official the day after the execution, Bieler conducted himself with such courage and dignity that even the camp guards themselves paid a peculiar tribute to him: he had “made so powerful an impression on his captors that when the order for his execution came from Berlin…the S.S. at Flossenburg mounted a guard of honour to escort him as he limped to his death.” For an Allied agent to be executed by firing squad was in itself rare, if dubious, honour. Most agents were hanged as terrorists. Buckmaster recorded, “This is the only instance known to us of an officer being executed in such circumstances by a firing squad with a Guard of Honour.”

Several of Bieler’s French accomplices were also in prison. His radio operator, Yolande Beekman, was in Karlsruhe jail. Three days after Bieler was executed on 9 September 1944, Beekman with three other female S.O.E. agents, was killed at Dachau concentration camp near Munich, shot through the back of the neck.

 

Part 3 The Executions of Canadians in the S.O.E. in France

There is abundant material about Frank Pickersgill’s short life. There is also much detail about his death, and that of Macalister and Sabourin. F.F.E. Yeo-Thomas, one of the most intrepid S.O.E. agents, provides in The White Rabbit a graphic account of his own experiences and the end of the three Canadians at Buchenwald.

On 8 August 1944, with the Allied vanguard twelve days from Paris, the Gestapo had hurriedly rounded up a total of thirty-seven male and female agents from several prisons in and near Paris and sent them by rail to Germany, most destined for the notorious Buchenwald. With Yeo-Thomas aboard that crowded train of death were Sabourin and Defendini, the Corsican to whom he had been assigned as a radio operator; Pickersgill, Macalister, and Culioli who had been arrested with them; Garel whom Chartrand had joined; and Garry to whom Deniset had been sent as wireless operator. The fortitude of Pickersgill shone through again; he attempted to tell jokes. Yeo-Thomas later recalled, “They weren’t particularly funny jokes…At first they weren’t appreciated. Then suddenly everyone realized that Pickersgill was only trying to keep them from all going crazy. They cheered up a bit and took a grip on themselves.”

On the second day, near the German border, the agents almost died an unexpected death. They were left locked in their over-crowded box car while their guards took cover from a roof-top strafing by the R.A.F. After a total of eight days of the foetid confinement, brutality, starvation, and agonizing thirst, all of the prisoners were delivered on the night of 18 August to the gates of Buchenwald. Upon entering they had good reason to abandon hope.* During the following three weeks, the prisoners existed in a world which must have been close to Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of souls writhing in the torments of hell.

As they were marched across the camp the prisoners had their first glimpse of their fellow inmates, and it was anything but reassuring. The compound was filled with emaciated, hairless wretches shuffling wearily round and round in heavy wooden clogs. The eyes of those listless sub-human creatures were mean with terror. On the faces of many of them a sticky stream of yellow rot oozed from purulent sores set in the middle of purple weals. Others were so weak that they staggered as they walked. Even when their clothes were too short for them, they were too wide because of the thinness of the frail bodies which they covered. The same grim question occurred simultaneously to all the thirty-seven as they beheld this gruesome spectacle: “How long is it going to be before we look like them?”

They were…in the worst camp in Germany. Their chances of survival were practically nil: if they did not starve to death they would be worked to death; and if they were not worked to death they would be executed. Every single day more than three hundred prisoners died from starvation or from being beaten by their guards… Each [working party] consisted of hundreds of prisoners quarrying stone, dragging logs or cleaning out latrines…The S.S. guards were also there and so were their Alsatian hounds, and when enough amusement couldn’t be derived from bludgeoning a man’s brains out there was always the alternative of setting the dogs upon him to tear out his throat…

A squat black chimney just beyond the Block was pointed out to them. “That’s the crematorium,” they were told. “It’s the surest of all escape routes; most of us will only get out of this camp by coming through that chimney as smoke.”

On 6 September, three weeks after their night arrival, the camp loudspeaker called for fifteen of the thirty-seven S.O.E. agents to report to the headquarters tower. They did not return to their hut. The following day a Polish prisoner with contacts in the crematorium squad told the remaining agents of their comrades’ deaths. Now the surviving twenty-two could have no more doubt about what awaited them. Three days later, on 9 September – by coincidence the same day Bieler was shot in Flossenburg – another sixteen prisoners were summoned, including the Canadians. According to one postwar account:
Some knew what it meant. Others suspected. All hoped for the best. Without a work they fell in, in threes, with Pickersgill at the head of one of the files. At Pickersgill’s command they marched off…., a threadbare, forlorn little band, trying to march like guardsmen. Up front they could see Pickersgill, limping and occasionally staggering as his unhealed wounds, malnutrition and slight deafness combined to unsteady him, a cracked husk of a man, but unbroken.

Pickersgill began flailing the air with his hands, just as he had done on campus years before. But not he was no longer celebrating Andre Gide, passing judgement on Neville Chamberlain or analyzing St. Augustine. He was beating time….

That night the marchers were thrashed and flung into a bunker. An emaciated French priest, Father Georges Stenger from Lorraine, stumbled a mile across the camp and pleaded for permission to administer the last sacrament to the Roman Catholics. He was refused. Stenger stayed all night outside the bunker praying and managed to slip into the captives, via a guard who began to show a sense of shame, wafers of the Sacred Host.

The following night the sixteen were taken to the crematorium and the doors were slammed. Once more Father Stenger knelt outside and prayed. Later he recalled that he’d heard scuffling noises and faint cries of “Vive la France!” “Vive l”Angleterre!” and “Vive le Canada!”

Macalister, Sabourin, and Pickersgill died the cruellest death with Gestapo sadists could devise: they were hanged from meat hooks cemented in a wall, nooses of piano wire slowly strangling them. Theirs was not the quick death of hanging by breaking the neck; it was slow strangulation, garrotting. Hitler had a number of such executions filmed so he might have the pleasure of seeing prisoners perish in agony.

*Sabourin, Pickersgill, and Macalister would not have known it, but at least one other Canadian was in Buchenwald when they arrived. Signalman George Rodrigues of Montreal, an M.I.9 agent, was sent to Buchenwald in late 1943 or early 1944. He survived more than a year of its bestiality, but he died shortly after liberation from the maltreatment which he had received.


The end of Francois Deniset and Robert Byerly is not so well documented. All that is known is that after a period of interrogation and torture at the Gestapo prison in Paris – they were seen there by other agents on 27 June 1944 – they were taken by train to the Gross Rosen concentration camp in Poland where they were executed in September. While varying perhaps in detail, their end cannot have differed so very much from that of their fellow Canadians at Lyon, Flossenburg, and Buchenwald.

And so they died: Byerly, the American serving in the Canadian Army, and six Canadians who had volunteered to serve with the S.O.E. in France – Beauregard, Bieler, Deniset, Macalister, Pickersgill, and Sabourin.

 

i still cannot for the life of me understand why spies at time of war should be executed. otto skorzeny's commandos were executed simply because they were wearing US army uniforms in the battle of the bulge.

 

To discourage the use of spying as a means of making war. Actually as I understand the situation it isn't that they SHOULD be shot but that they aren't protected as POW's and therefore CAN be shot. Many spies were shot for treason, betraying their home nations in time of war and so on. Skorzeny's men were shot because they were using US uniforms which meant that they were breaking various conventions and so were not entitled to protection as prisoners, had the US troops who captured them been having a really good day they might have taken them prisoner and looked after them. Unfortunately they were not and so were hardly disposed to treating them well.