The massacre at the Isenschnibbe Barn is further testimony to the mercilessness and cold-blooded murderous greed of the Nazis. Especially because the dead were visible to the public. Not hidden away in the cellars of gas chambers, not in torture prisons. They suffered and died in plain sight. And even then, the lust for murder did not wane, even as the Nazis’ defeat became apparent. Just one day later, a surrender would have meant an end to the suffering.
The perverse logic was: if the end is near, there should be no survivors who – this much self-awareness always existed –could testify to the crimes.
This is roughly what Gerhard Thiele, the NSDAP district leader of the old Hanseatic town of Gardelegen in Saxony-Anhalt, and several officers of the Waffen-SS were thinking on the afternoon of April 13, 1945.
The day before, several death marches with prisoners from various concentration camps – mostly from subcamps of Mittelbau-Dora in the Harz Mountains and Neuengamme near Hamburg – had converged in Gardelegen. More than 1,000 people, all malnourished and exhausted. They were among more than 3,000 inmates who had endured a multi-day odyssey aboard two trains. Wherever possible, the SS evacuated its camps before they were overrun by Allied troops.
In Saxony-Anhalt too, there were no accommodations left for the slave laborers. More than 1,000 of them were driven to Gardelegen, where they were housed in a Wehrmacht barracks of the Remonte Cavalry School. But Thiele, who in addition to his party role was also an SS-Obersturmbannführer and a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, knew: if the rapidly advancing U.S. troops found these people under his responsibility, he would almost certainly face summary execution—or at best, a later trial with a predictable outcome: the death penalty.
According to the patchy historical sources, this seems to be the best explanation for the almost unimaginable crime that took place 70 years ago. American tanks were only a dozen kilometers away from Gardelegen when Thiele and other Nazi followers took action.
As dusk fell, at least 1,016 people were driven from the barracks to the nearby Isenschnibbe Barn, located two kilometers northeast of Gardelegen along the road to Bismark. It was a brick barn with a tiled roof. Once the prisoners had been herded inside, straw covering the barn floor was set alight by an SS man.
Twice, the prisoners managed to stamp out the flames; on the third attempt, the barn quickly became engulfed in flames. It’s possible the straw had been soaked with gasoline beforehand, though it may also be that the barn still smelled of fuel because it had previously been used as a fuel depot. When the imprisoned detainees panicked and tried to push open the doors or climb out of hatches, SS men opened fire on them.
More than 100 men, including members of the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm, and 25 former prisoner functionaries from various concentration camps who had been dressed in guard uniforms, fired machine guns and anti-tank weapons into the barn.
Early on the morning of April 14, they dug a trench 55 meters long and 0.9 meters deep, in which the corpses were to be buried. As the dead were being removed from the barn, some severely injured but still living inmates were found beneath the piles of corpses. Most of them were executed on the spot with a shot to the neck.
By the afternoon of April 14, 1945, efforts to cover up the crime had to stop, as American troops were closing in. That evening, the 102nd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army reached Gardelegen. The town and all Wehrmacht units surrendered without a fight; Gerhard Thiele went into hiding using false papers.
Possibly tipped off by a local resident – or perhaps by chance – U.S. soldiers discovered the barn and the mass grave late in the morning on April 15. Specialists from the U.S. Army began documenting the crime. Several survivors were rescued from among the dead still lying in the barn.
Thanks to this timing, Allied war correspondents were able to document the “Holocaust of Gardelegen”.
