German town admits lynching of US airmen

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Times online snip
From Roger Boyes in Berlin
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,144145,00.jpg
THE murder of six unarmed American airmen by an angry mob in the last summer of the Second World War was remembered by a German town yesterday, ending more than half a century of secrecy. 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.

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.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-1234237,00.html