The author wrote of this soldier’s ‘war crimes’, as if he had been proven guilty of war crimes.
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The unit he served with was found guilty of many war crimes.
https://timenote.info/en/events/Huta-Pieniacka-massacre
….. Early in the morning of February 28, 1944, a mixed force of Ukrainian SS and German soldiers surrounded Huta Pieniacka. There were some 600–800 soldiers and it has been established that Kazimierz Wojciechowski (who was burnt alive that day), commandant of Polish forces in the village, had been informed of the approaching enemy around two hours before the attack. The Poles however, had too little time to prepare a defense or to escape.
The village was shelled by artillery. The Ukrainian SS soldiers, led by a German SS captain, after firing and throwing grenades, entered Huta Pieniacka, assembled the farmers and their families and locked them in their barns. They then set fire to the village and remained until nightfall before leaving. Those trying to escape were killed.
Polish account
Some time around noon a mixed force of Ukrainian SS and German soldiers and a strong contingent from the SS Freiwilligen Division “Galizien” surrounded Huta Pieniacka and herded the villagers into their barns.
The attackers set fire to the village and it burned all day. According to Bogusława Marcinkowska, a historian from Kraków’s office of the Institute of National Remembrance, …..the Ukrainians threw infants against walls and cut open the stomachs of pregnant women…… The murderers left at night. Many of them were drunk and singing songs. Only four houses remained, and on the next day a mass funeral took place. Those who survived escaped to Zloczow and other towns, never to return.
Witnesses interrogated by the Polish prosecutors of the “The Head Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation” described the details of crimes committed against women, children and newborn babies. After murdering the inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka, the local Ukrainian population looted the remaining property of the murdered, loading everything on horse-drawn carts that had been prepared beforehand. According to those Poles who survived, the Germans did not participate in the massacre itself……