Gardelegen massacre
On April 13, 1945, on the Isenschnibbe estate near the town, the troops forced over 1,000 slave laborers who were part of a transport train evacuated from the Mittelbau-Dora and Hannover-Stöcken concentration camps into a large barn, which was then set on fire.
The goal was to transport the inmates by train or by foot to the other north German concentration camps: Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, or Neuengamme.
Within days, some 4,000 people held in the Mittelbau-Dora, its satellite camps, and from the Neuengamme subcamp Hannover-Stöcken arrived in the Gardelegen area, where they had to deboard from the freight cars because the trains could not advance any further due to air raid damage to the rail lines.
On April 13, more than a thousand prisoners, many of them sick and too weak to march any further, were taken from the town of Gardelegen to a large barn on the Isenschnibbe estate and forced inside the building.
U.S. Army Signal Corps photographers soon arrived to document the Nazi crime and by April 19, 1945, the story of the Gardelegen massacre began appearing in the Western press.
On that day, both the New York Times and The Washington Post ran stories on the massacre, quoting one American soldier who stated:[2] I never was so sure before of exactly what I was fighting for.
Eleven prisoners survived the burning of the barn and were found alive by U.S. soldiers – seven Poles, three Russians and one severely wounded Frenchman.
[3] On April 21, 1945, the local commander of the 102nd ordered between 200 and 300 men from the town of Gardelegen to give the murdered prisoners a proper burial.
They were buried by citizens of Gardelegen, who are charged with responsibility that graves are for- ever kept as green as the memory of these unfortunates will be kept in the hearts of freedom-loving men everywhere.
In the night of their liberation, a few hours before Allied forces approach, 1016 international fighters of resistance against fascism were brutally and inhumanely burned alive.
It is a reminder of the 1016 concentration camp prisoners from many European countries who were murdered there on 13 April 1945 in a field barn near the Hanseatic city of Gardelegen.
