http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...4237_1,00.html
August 27, 2004
From Roger Boyes in Berlin
The men had baled out of a burning aircraft in August 1944. The badly injured radio operator was taken to hospital and the Germans took the eight other airmen by train to a prisoner of war camp north of Frankfurt. The route led through Rüsselsheim.
NI_MPU('middle');There they were set upon by a crowd of more than a hundred people, including housewives and workers from a nearby factory using milk churns, bomb rubble and hammers. A Nazi official finished off six of the airmen with bullets in the head, to the general applause of the mob. Two of the Americans survived by pretending to be dead.
After the war the US Army sentenced five of the mob to death and five others to long jail sentences. Yesterday the town of Rüsselsheim, near Frankfurt, fell silent in remembrance.
“For 57 years no one talked openly about these events,” said Dagmar Eichhorn, who has been the moving force behind the memorial unveiled yesterday. It features a fragment of wall engraved with the portraits of the six victims.
The ceremony was attended by one of the two American airmen who survived the beatings by feigning death, Gene Sidney Brown, and at least three relatives of the killers.
“I don’t want to say their names,” said Frau Eichhorn. “It was a trauma for the whole town because there were plenty of people not on trial. You see this in all of Germany — the story is not spoken.”
The American B24 Liberator was shot down on August 24, 1944, after a bombing run on Hanover.
On the previous night the Royal Air Force had bombed large parts of Rüsselsheim, killing mainly slave labourers denied access to air-raid shelters. But local people were furious. The rail line was damaged and the airmen had to be marched across town, many of its buildings still smouldering, to another station.
As they passed the market square, a shopkeeper, Kathe Reinhardt, shouted: “Tear them to pieces!” The crowd took up the call and pelted the airmen with stones and bottles. The men were chased through the town, battered by milk churns and building tools until they collapsed unconscious in Graben Street — where the memorial was unveiled yesterday.
The Nazi official shot six of the unconscious Americans in the head. Their corpses were carted to the cemetery where they were beaten again.
Two others, including the gunner Mr Brown, were still alive, pretending to be dead. They were saved by an air-raid siren which scattered the crowd. They slipped away but were recaptured four days later.
NI_MPU('middle');Mr Brown, 79, yesterday called for reconciliation, saying: “I have met with nothing but kindness since I returned.”
In July 1945, the US Army — represented by the young lawyer Leon Jaworski, who later went on to prosecute the Watergate conspirators — put 11 Germans in the dock. The Nazi who fired the pistol was hanged. Kathe Reinhardt and another woman were also sentenced to hang but that was commuted. All the long jail sentences were also reduced and the members of the mob quietly returned to everyday life in the 1950s.
The town refused to acknowledge the incident. “They were afraid,” says Frau Eichhorn. “They try to forget because it was too hard for them.”
During the Cold War the US was an ally and troops were stationed in the neighbourhood; the nearby Opel factory was bought by General Motors. It did not seem like a good time to reopen wounds between America and Germany. Moreover, many inhabitants of Rüsselsheim continued to believe that the mob anger was a legitimate outburst against the nightly bombing of civilians. It is only now that the town seems ready to accept its past. Local people approached Mr Brown seeking to exchange memories and make amends. “We all carry respon- sibility,” said the mayor, Stefan Gieltowski. “Everything that happened, everything that happens and everything that will happen must be of concern to us. We all have the responsibility to remember these events.”
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Dr. Solar Wolff
The German Countries
Bookmarks