80 years ago, in the town of Gardelegen north of Magdeburg, on 13 April 1945, 2 days before the U.S. troops entered, 1 of the cruelest crimes was committed, in what is simply a rich act of degeneration, the past of planet War II. On that day, about 1,100 prisoners from “evacueed” concentration camps, as well as forced laborers, were lured into a large, brick barn with straw and hidden combustible materials lined to their knees. The barn was then closed and set on fire. To those trying to escape from abruptly unleashed hell by 1 of the loose powerful gates, device guns were fired, and fire grenades were thrown inside. Who did it? Direct perpetrators were SS soldiers, Luftwaffe, a group of about 20 parachutists, young people from Hitlerjugend. erstwhile 2 days later – on April 15, 1945, soldiers of the 102nd United States Army Infantry Division arrived at the site, they found a burnt barn and a mass of monstrously distorted corpses. American soldiers thwarted the effort to cover up the traces of the crime committed by her perpetrators, that is, fire brigades, method Rescue Service, Reich labour Service, and others who began digging ditches and pits to bury the bodies of murdered innocent prisoners without any marking. At the command of the commander of the 102nd U.S. Infantry Division, General Frank A. Keating, men of Gardelegen were forced to exhume the murdered and worthy of their burial. The ceremony work took days. From the full number of 1016 burnt bodies, fewer victims were identified. Most of them were Poles. They lie together close the place of their execution, on a immense cemetery in individual graves marked with white crosses: Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, French, Belgians, Jews and another nationalities. They only met once. They rejoiced together with a certain salvation that they had managed to escape hell, but their joy was deceptive due to the fact that hell caught up with them. Americans shot 20 captured SS men in Gardelegen, but the chief initiator of this macabre, Gerhard Thiele, escaped on April 14 and lived utilizing false papers under the name Gerhard Lindemann in the western business region and then in the RFN-in Cologne, where he died in 1994. Only in 1996 was he identified by the D.A. in Stendal.
Only a fewer victims of the pogrom survived and could bear witness to the truth. This part of the truth, due to the fact that in our country there are hundreds of specified places, where German occupiers smoked alive, especially Poles, making giant burnt victims in rituals as if taken out of Germanic mythology, guided by national-socialist ideology, which became a religion of almost the full nation.
In the times of GDR, mass manifestations in spirit took place in the cemetery
anti-fascist memory culture. After the unification of Germany, the memorial site remains under the management of the city of Gardelegen. Since May 2015, it has been submitted to the Saxony-Anhalt Memorial Foundation and has been transformed into a place of memory and history, and in 2020 equipped with a fresh Documentation and Visitor Service Centre and a permanent historical exhibition that offers an educational program for youth and adults.
In order not to forget these events, so that they could not happen again, organizations: The Polish Newspaper/Rodło Berlin-Brandenburg Club ordered the Holy Mass in the intention of the victims celebrated by the venerable Priest of Przemysław on 13 April 2025 at 10:15 in the Basilica of St John in Berlin. The parishioners and the organisers of the mourning ceremony attended the Mass. After the Eucharist, participants went to the cemetery in Gardelegen. Upon arrival at the cemetery, members of the GP Club prayed, folded flowers and lit candles in Polish colours.
A dramatic description of events in Gardelegen was given by the master of the column, Melchior Wańkowicz, who long collected material for his reportage, and the robustness of his pen may be a warrant of the veracity of evidence about what happened at Gardelegen at the time tragic.
