page_title: Operation Loyton
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Operation Loyton / Aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: Operation Loyton memorial, National Memorial Arboretum
context_page_description: Operation Loyton was the codename given to a Special Air Service mission in the Vosges department of France during the Second World War.
  The mission, between 12 August and 9 October 1944, had the misfortune to be parachuted into the Vosges Mountains, at a time when the German Army was reinforcing the area, against General George Patton's Third Army. As a result, the Germans quickly became aware of their presence and conducted operations to destroy the SAS team.
  With their supplies running out and under pressure from the German army, the SAS were ordered to form smaller groups to return to Allied lines. During the fighting and breakout operations 31 men were captured and later executed by the Germans.
context_section_description: At the end of the war Franks began investigating the fate of his missing men. All that was known for certain was that three men accompanying Lieutenant Johnsen had been killed, and that 10 men had been buried in the cemetery at Moussey. The SAS was officially disbanded in October 1945. Prior to this the 2nd SAS War Crimes Investigation Team (2 SAS WCIT) had been formed to, amongst other things, look into the events after Loyton.  2nd SAS Intelligence Officer Major Eric 'Bill' Barkworth had been informed of the existence of the Commando Order, which called for the execution of all captured commandos when he was interviewing captured German officers in 1944.  In July 1945 Franks was informed by the French that the bodies of some SAS men had been found in the French occupation zone at Gaggenau.
  Franks ordered 2 SAS WCIT, under the command of Major Beckworth, to travel to the area. Their investigation discovered that of the 31 missing SAS men, 30 had been murdered by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), some of them at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in the Vosges mountains. One man's fate was never discovered.
  Erich Isselhorst, head the Sicherheitspolizei in Strasbourg, was sentenced to death by a British military tribunal in June 1946 for the murder of the British POWs but handed over to the French. He was once more sentenced to death in May 1947, now by a French military tribunal, and executed in Strasbourg on 23 February 1948. While posted in Strasbourg, Isselhorst was part of the Operation Waldfest, a scorched earth operation in which villages in Alsace and Lorraine were destroyed to eliminate shelter for Allied troops for the upcoming winter and inhabitants deported as forced labour or to concentration camps. In a coordinated operation by the Wehrmacht and SS, villages were raided, French resistance fighters and the captured SAS soldiers were executed.
  Isselhorst ordered the execution of the captured British SAS members, as well as a number of French civilians, three French priests and four US airmen. The prisoners were taken over the Rhine river on trucks to Gaggenau on 21 November 1944. The leader of the execution commando, Karl Beck, thought it unwise to leave mass graves of shot allied soldiers in an area so close to the front line. The prisoners were initially kept in a local jail but then, on or shortly after 25 November, unaware of their fate, taken to a local forest and, in groups of three, shot in the head in a bomb crater. One prisoner attempted to escape but was killed as well. Apart from Isselhorst, his second in command, Wilhelm Schneider was also executed for the war crime in January 1947. Beck initially escaped punishment but was sentenced to death in the 1950s.
  In 2003 a memorial was erected at Moussey to commemorate those who had been murdered. It details the three men from Phantom, the 31 SAS men, the 140 French civilians and one British and two French service women of the Special Operations Executive that had also been caught up in the search for the SAS camp. A memorial to the operation also exists at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.
caption: Memorial to the operation at the National Memorial Arboretum
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