[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I hadn’t heard of Chenogne, but I did know one World War II vet who told me that they did not take SS prisoners and did not accept the surrender of German snipers who ran out of ammunition. Surrendering with a full clip was a German soldier’s best life insurance policy.

A Ramagen, after the American crossing of the Rhine, a group of German civilians were hiding in a railroad tunnel. They realized that they were in a tunnel with a bunch railcars containing flammable materials. They decided to surrender to the Americans, and a German railroad worker left the tunnel waving a white flag. The Americans shot him. After they managed to surrender, they asked the Americans why they shot him. The Americans thought he was SS because the railroad uniforms were black, like the SS.

In the final order for Unternehmen Wacht am Rein, Hitler more or less ordered the Wehrmacht not to take prisoners. He wanted the Americans to retaliate by killing German prisoners. Many, if not most, German soldiers realized that the War was lost and they would fair far better surrendering to the Americans than the Russians, and had a better chance of surviving the War in American custody than fighting in the Wehrmacht. Hitler wanted to change this perception. Killing German prisoners served Hitler’s ends. The Germans most inclined to surrender were the least ideological and least inclined to kill American prisoners.

[robowombat]

Interestingly at the officer level at any rate there was already in 1945 a clear understanding of what was going to happen when the Reich finally crumbled. US forces reached a stop line about a 100 miles east of the zonal boundaries agreed upon at Yalta in late April. German units were still fighting a very big war to the east with the Soviets right up until the surrender was officially promulgated. In at least the 17th Airborne division it was openly permitted for German units to cross division boundaries and load up on munitions, from overrun German ammo dumps, and head back to resupply units still locked in combat with the Russians. MG Miley made no bones of his detestation of the Soviets and that he believed the US would soon be in some sort of war with them and the Germans (at least a lot of them) would be on our side in that conflict. He was not the only officer that believed that by a long shot.