Gardelegen ( war crime ) The war crime that is often referred to as the " Gardelegen massacre " occurred on April 13 , 1945 , on the Isenschnibbe estate near the northern German town of Gardelegen . German SS and Luftwaffe troops forced 1 , 016 slave laborers who were part of a transport evacuated from the Mittelbau - Dora labor camp into a large barn which was then lit on fire . Most of the prisoners were burned alive ; some were shot trying to escape . The crime was discovered two days later by F Company , 2nd Battalion , 405th Regiment , U . S . 102nd Infantry Division when the U . S . Army occupied the area . Details . The discovery of the massacre seems to have been by chance . The consensus account is that American Lieutenant Emerson Hunt , a liaison officer between Ozark HQ and the 701st Tank Battalion , was captured by German forces on April 14 , 1945 , that he bluffed the German forces defending the town of Gardelegen into believing that American tanks were approaching the city , and that this induced the German commander to surrender to the American forces . The Americans arrived at the site before the Germans had time to bury all of the bodies . On April 3 – 4 , following the U . S . Army ' s crossing of the Rhine River and push into Germany , the SS camp administration at Dora - Mittelbau had ordered the evacuation of prisoners from the main camp and a number of its affiliated subcamps . 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 prisoners from Dora - Mittelbau , its satellite camps , and a Neuengamme subcamp 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 . Greatly outnumbered by the prisoners , the SS guards began recruiting auxiliary forces from the local fire department , the air force , the aged home guard , the Hitler Youth , and other organizations to watch over the inmates . 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 . The assembled guards then barricaded the doors and set fire to gasoline - soaked straw . Prisoners who escaped the conflagration by digging under the barn ' s walls were killed by the guards . The next day , the SS and local auxiliaries returned to dispose of the evidence of their crime . They planned to incinerate what remained of the bodies and the barn , and kill any survivors of the blaze . The swift advance of the 102nd Infantry Division ( United States ) , however , prevented the SS and its accomplices from completely carrying out this plan . On April 14 , the 102nd entered Gardelegen and , the following day , discovered the atrocity . They found the corpses of 1 , 016 prisoners in the still - smoldering barn and nearby trenches , where the SS had had the charred remains dumped . They also interviewed several of the prisoners who had managed to escape the fire and the shootings . 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 : I never was so sure before of exactly what I was fighting for . Before this you would have said those stories were propaganda , but now you know they weren ' t . There are the bodies and all those guys are dead . 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 . Over the next few days , the German civilians exhumed 586 bodies from the trenches and recovered 430 bodies from the barn , placing each in an individual grave . On April 25 , the 102nd carried out a ceremony to honor the dead and erected a memorial tablet to the victims , which stated that the townspeople of Gardelegen are charged with the responsibility that the “ graves are forever kept as green as the memory of these unfortunates will be kept in the hearts of freedom - loving men everywhere . ” Also on April 25 , Colonel George Lynch addressed German civilians at Gardelegen with the following statement : The German people have been told that stories of German atrocities were Allied propaganda . Here , you can see for yourself . Some will say that the Nazis were responsible for this crime . Others will point to the Gestapo . The responsibility rests with neither — it is the responsibility of the German people . . . Your so - called Master Race has demonstrated that it is master only of crime , cruelty and sadism . You have lost the respect of the civilized world . Investigation . An investigation was undertaken by Lieutenant Colonel Edward E . Cruise , Investigating Officer , Ninth Army War Crimes Branch . Text of Lieutenant Cruise ' s report and text of other exhibits are stored in US Army file 000 - 12 - 242 . The man who gave the order to burn the prisoners , Gerhard Thiele , escaped by disguising himself in the uniform of a German soldier and traveling with false papers . He lived in the Western zone of occupation and later in West Germany under a false name . He was never brought to justice and died June 30 , 1994 . SS - Untersturmführer Erhard Brauny , the transport leader for the prisoners evacuated from the Mittelbau - Dora concentration camp who subsequently wound up in Gardelegen , was put on trial in 1947 before a US military tribunal and was sentenced to life in prison . He died in 1950 . Memorials . Gardelegen is now a national memorial . The sign at the cemetery reads :