The execution of men suspected of being resisitance fighters in the Ukraine in September 1941. Mediadrumimages/Phillip Chinnery/Pen and Sword Books

By Alex Jones

 

HORRENDOUS pictures reveal the gruesome fate that awaited hundreds of British and allied Prisoners of War at the hands of the Nazi regime.

Graphic images show smirking Nazi paratroops opening fire on Cretan civilians, a firing squad of 20 Germans preparing to shoot six unarmed Ukrainian men, and a crowd of anxious looking British soldiers being marched past a German tank destroyer as they awaited their fate.

British prisoners are marched past a German tank destroyer in Arnhem, Netherlands. A group of prisoners captured following this assault were mown down with machine gun fire whilst being transported in the back of a lorry. Mediadrumimages/Phillip Chinnery/Pen and Sword Books

Another brutal photo shows the SAS men who were beaten with cudgels and shot in cold blood after they refused to give their captors critical intel and distorted bodies of American soldiers frozen in the snow.

The harrowing photos are including in Phillip Chinnery’s book ‘Hitler’s Atrocities against Allied PoWs’, a chilling description of the ordeals that captured men and women were put through by the Third Reich regime and their Italian allies.

“Tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war died at the hands of the Nazis and their Italian allies. This book is for them,” explained Chinnery.

A photo of the bodies of the murdered soldiers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, still lying next to the barn where they had been
shot, taken by a passing German photographer. Almost 100 bodies would be exhumed in 1942 and
buried locally. Mediadrumimages/Phillip Chinnery/Pen and Sword Books

“The responsibility for the ill-treatment and murder of prisoners of war rested in Berlin and it was to that city that many complaints were directed by the War Office following reports of prisoners being killed or ill-treated while in German hands.

“There were literally thousands of incidents and these were so widespread that they had to take place with the approval, if not the instructions, of the Nazi government.”

One despicable act of cruelty portrayed in the book involved the Royal Norfolk Regiment, which was sent to France in September 1939.

On 27 May 1940 they were in position near Le Paradis where they had been in action since the previous day.

After hours of constant fighting and loss of life on both sides, the British soldiers became isolated from their comrades, fell back to a farmhouse and fought until they ran out of ammo.

American investigators begin the long process of identifying the men murdered by Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge, 1944. The bodies were taken to the nearby railway station where
they were thawed out and identified. Mediadrumimages/Phillip Chinnery/Pen and Sword Books

Fatigued and out of options, they surrendered to the Nazis.

Rather than treating them humanely as PoWs under the Geneva Convention, the cold-hearted Germans led the shattered men across the road to a wall where they were murdered by machine gun fire.

Ninety-seven British troops were killed. Two survived, with injuries, and hid until they were captured by German forces several days later.

Another brutal assault of prisoners’ human rights took place in Ardennes at the Battle of the Bulge.

Amidst the coldest winter of the war in December 1944, and just days before what many thought would be the last Christmas of the war, a ferocious onslaught against Belgian civilians and American troops was held, with orders from high-ranking Nazi officials that American prisoners in particular were an “unnecessary burden on the German economic system” and advocated the harshest treatment of all US soldiers.

British prisoners captured during the fall of Tobruk, Libya are escorted away by members of the Afrika
Korps under the beating sun. Water and food were scarce. Mediadrumimages/Phillip Chinnery/Pen and Sword Books

A group of cold, weary soldiers were cut off from their group and, under heavy fire from tanks, placed their hands in the air and surrendered.

They were stripped of their goods in the bitter cold before they were callously murdered. In some cases the victims were shot at point-blank range, either between the eyes, in the temple, or in the back of the head.

It was later estimated that there were 150 American prisoners in the meadow at that time.

These form just two examples of the catalogue of PoW and civilian slaughters that make up Chinnery’s unsettling new book.

Although the Germans and Italians’ abuse paled in comparison to the indignities allied soldiers faced under the Japanese regime, Chinnery still believes the Nazi’s should be held to account and any surviving prisoners of war affected by their crimes be justly compensated.

Fifty of the Allied airmen who tunnelled out of Stalag Luft 3 in the Great Escape were executed in chilling scenes like this.
In 1946, RAF Special Investigation Branch officers reconstructed the murders of Squadron Leader
Thomas Kirby-Green and Flying Officer Gordon Kidder near Zlín, Moravia. Gestapo officer Erich
Zacharias was hanged for his role in the murders. Mediadrumimages/Phillip Chinnery/Pen and Sword Books

“This book has been written to help set the record straight and to try to educate those in government who should know better,” added the author.

“To those who still believe that the Germans abided by the Geneva Convention and that acts of ill-treatment were the fault of individual guards rather than Nazi government policy, I invite you to read this book and remember its contents – lest you forget”

Phillip Chinnery’s book ‘Hitler’s Atrocities against Allied PoWs’, published by Pen and Sword Books, is available here.