Thread: The Normandy Massacres

June, 1944

A sensation was caused in Allied Headquarters when reports came through that a considerable number of Canadian soldiers were shot after being taken prisoner by the 12th. SS Panzer Division "Hitler Jugend". On the morning of June 8, thirty seven Canadians were taken prisoner by the 2nd Battalion of the 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment. The prisoners were marched across country to the H/Q of the 2nd Battalion. In the village of Le Mesnil-Patty they were then ordered to sit down in a field with their wounded in the center. In a short while a half track arrived with eight or nine SS soldiers brandishing their machine pistols. Advancing in line towards the prisoners they opened fire killing thirty five men. Two of the Canadians ran for their lives and escaped the slaughter but were rounded up by a different German unit to spend the rest of the war in a POW camp. First to make contact with the Canadians was a combat group led by Obersturmbannfuhrer Karl-Heinz Milius and supported by the Prinz Battalion. Near the villages of Authie and Buron, a number of Canadians of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, were taken prisoner. Numbering around forty, they were individually killed on the march back to the rear. Eight were ordered to remove their helmets and then shot with automatic rifles. Their bodies were dragged out on to the road and left to be run over by trucks and tanks. French civilians pulled the bodies back on to the pavement but were ordered to stop and to drag the bodies back onto the road again.

On the 7th and 8th of June, in the grounds of the Abbaye Ardenne, the headquarters of SS Brigadefuhrer Kurt Meyer's 25th Panzer Grenadiers, twenty of the Canadians were shot. After being taken prisoner they were locked up in a stable and being called out by name they emerged from the doorway only to be shot in the back of the head. During the afternoon of June 8, twenty six Canadians were shot at the Chateau d'Audrie after being taken prisoner by a Reconnaissance Battalion of the SS Hitler Jugend. Other units of the German forces in France called the Hitler Jugend Division the "Murder Division". After the war, investigations established that separate atrocities were committed in 31 different incidents involving 134 Canadians, 3 British and 1 American. Brought to trial before a Canadian military court at Aurich in Germany on December 28, 1945, Kurt Meyer was sentenced to death but later reprieved and spent six years in a Canadian jail at New Brunswick before being transferred to the prison at Werl in Germany where he was released on parole on September 7, 1954. He died of a heart attack on December 23, 1961, at age 51.

You have to wonder what the Germans had against Canada. This is not surprising as the Germans were not known for their good treatment of prisoners in the first place.

In actuality this makes you wonder what Germans had against pretty much everyone in the world from the stories and facts we read. You have to wonder what thoughts were on the soldiers minds when they shot those 30 Canadians. They had to be so full of hate and rage, it really makes you wonder how anyone can do something like that and still smile....

I haven't read yet this. So thank you for posting! It is almost the same as the Malmédy Massacare. How people can do things like this.

Sebastiaan

The Nazis were pretty disgusted with pretty much everyone but there was definitely a pretty big step for them between killing 'sub-humans' and others. The massacres of Jews, Poles, Russians, and Lithuanians was more justifiable for many Nazis because they were considered lower on the totem pole according to race constructs but Hitler always maintained hope that the British (I assume this includes Canadians) would join the Axis because they were racially more 'clean' than others.

Truly horrifying ideology but fascinating to read up on.

I just have such trouble understanding how people can do this kind of stuff. I have read a lot about all this and it still just baffles me. I mean it is bad enough to torture people for no reason at all but than to take them and throw their bodies into the road so they will then get run over is just sick. It is almost like they could not stop at killing them they had to do more.