1945: The Rüsselsheim Massacre perpetrators
November 10th, 2018 Headsman
The U.S. Army hanged five German civilians as war criminals at Bruchsal Prison on this date in 1945. Their crime: lynching the crew of a downed American bomber, the day after Allied bombing raids devastated the manufacturing town of Rüsselsheim.
The lynching is known as the Rüsselsheim Massacre, and it claimed the lives of six of the nine flyers of a B-24 Liberator cheekily christened Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’m!. One of their number survived thanks to his shrapnel wounds, which saw him safely to hospital while his comrades were being transported.
The other two were simply lucky to survive the beatings administered by a mob of enraged civilians who caught sight of the Americans under the escort of only two German soldiers. On the night of August 25-26, Britain’s Royal Air Force had dumped more than 1,600 tons of explosives on Rüsselsheim to destroy the Opel factory and rail lines there. It was only the latest, and ultimately the largest, of several raids on the town dating back to July. A later U.S. study reckoned 315 Opel workers killed and 277 injured during the July-August raids, to say nothing of the devastation on other townspeople and on Opel’s slave labor.* A POW, Frenchman Pierre Cuillier, recorded of the August 25-26 attack that “a bomb fell on the dug-out for Russian women. We hear of 119 victims, a number that in reality is surely much higher.”
Under the circumstances, the good folk of Rüsselsheim were not pleased on the morning of the 26th to see Allied airmen in their town being marched to a train transfer … even if, and surely the distinction must fail to impress amid the smoldering rubble of one’s own hometown, this particular American crew had not been part of this particular British bombing. (The Americans had been shot down two days earlier en route to do a similar thing to Hanover.)
“There are the terror flyers. Tear them to pieces! Beat them to death! They have destroyed our houses!” cried Margarete Witzler and Käthe Reinhardt. As the Americans protested, the crowd overpowered the guards and took its rough revenge with whatever bludgeons were ready to hand.
At last, Joseph Hartgen, an air raid warden, finished them off with his pistol … or at least, finished off six before his chamber went empty.
Spoiler alert: it will not go well for Herr Hartgen.
Somehow the two un-shot men, Sgt. William M. Adams, and Sgt. Sidney E. Brown, still drew enough breath by the end of the ordeal to sneak away when they were being dumped into a mass grave. Captured again a few days later, they survived the war in a POW camp.**
Eleven Rüsselsheimers stood trial in Darmstadt for these Lynchmorde by July, when war was still raging in the Pacific: it was the very first war crimes proceeding under U.S. occupation.
The defendants tried out a pre-Nuremberg version of the “only following orders” defense, blaming Nazi propaganda against bomber crews for inciting the murders. The U.S. prosecutor† scoffed: “They were all grown men and women. If they are called on to commit the murder and they do, they are just as responsible as any other murderers.”
Harten and six others of the 11 caught death sentences, but the two women — Witzler and Reinhardt — both had their sentences reduced.
Warning: Although not graphic, this is a video of actual hangings.
* Quotes and figures from Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany During the Second World War, which is topical because Opel was a General Motors subsidiary.
** Brown lived long enough to return to Rüsselsheim at official invitation in 2001 for a formal apology. However, at the time of the trial, it was still mysterious how there came to be only six exhumed bodies from eight lynched airmen: Adams and Brown only emerged out of the mass of returning POWs after convictions had already been secured.
† The army prosecutor at the proceeding was one Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski, but he’s better known for hunting larger game later in his career as the special prosecutor during the Watergate investigations. (Jaworski is the guy embattled President Richard Nixon appointed after firing Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre.) Jaworski’s eventual legal victory over the White House in United States v. Nixon obtained the incriminating Watergate tapes in late July of 1974, forcing Nixon’s resignation just days afterwards, on August 9, 1974.
On this day..
- 1066: John Scotus, sacrificed to Radegast - 2020
- 1657: Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, Queen Christina betrayer - 2019
- 1735: Elizabeth Armstrong, oyster knifer - 2017
- 1882: Samuel and Milton Hodge - 2016
- 1944: Thirteen from the Ehrenfeld Group and the Edelweiss Pirates - 2015
- 1939: Nelson Charles - 2014
- 1571: Anneken Hendriks, cursed Mennonist - 2013
- 2009: John Muhammad, D.C. sniper - 2012
- 1834: The bushrangers John Jenkins and Thomas Tattersdale - 2011
- 1865: Henry Wirz, for detainee abuse - 2010
- 1780: Corregidor Antonio de Arriaga, by his slave - 2009
- 1954: Hossein Fatemi, before the blowback - 2008
- 1995: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine - 2007
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Germany,Hanged,History,Mass Executions,Mature Content,Milestones,Murder,Occupation and Colonialism,U.S. Military,USA,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1945, joseph hartgen, leon jaworski, november 10, russelsheim, watergate, world war ii
So glad to see this forum back to its normal format! May I ask when the Bundy page will be open again? I hardly think the usual forum members should be punished because one person has a bee in his bonnet and keeps stalking Kevin!
Not trying to punish anyone so much as manage my days. However, one other consideration was that the Bundy thread has not had a great deal of conversation in the past several months.
I’d love to keep it open even if it’s only an ancillary forum among the constellation of serial killer conversations happening out there. How would you suggest proceeding?
Pass! I thought that the page had been shut down.
Ah, I wondered what happened.
I wonder, did you get a lot of feedback saying that we liked the old format of your pages better than the new one? That would have been my feedback had I decided to comment. But now, since you reverted I couldn’t help but ask… 🙂
Ha. I did get some, yes. Scout’s honor, there was never any redesign intended; reverting the site to a basic template was one of the troubleshooting steps when the joint imploded in early October. Because there have been a number of other changes on the back end as well, I decided to limp along with it for a while instead of throwing another variable into the mix.
Tinkering continues. Advance apologies for any continued or emergent crumminess. And thanks for reading, forbearing, and replying! 😉