The charred bodies of concentration camp prisoners burned to death in a barn near Gardelegen in eastern Germany on April 13, 1945. The massacre was a massacre by the German SS and Luftwaffe.

   Charred corpses of concentration camp prisoners burned to death in a barn near the medieval walled town of Gardelegen in eastern Germany on the night of April 13, 1945, at the end of World War II. The Gardelegen massacre, a World War II massacre by the German SS and Luftwaffe, took place on April 13, 1945, at the Isenschnibbe farm near the northern German town of Gardelegen, when German troops evacuated 1,016 slave laborers from the Mittelbau Dora labor camp, many of whom were Poles) were forced into a large barn and set on fire. Most of the prisoners were burned alive, and some were shot while trying to escape. The crime was discovered two days later by Company F, 2nd Battalion, 405th Regiment, 102nd Infantry Division, U.S. Army, when American troops occupied the area.

　On Friday, April 13, some 1,050 to 1,100 of the concentration camp's prisoners were herded into a grain barn with knee-high piles of straw that had been doused with gasoline beforehand. According to survivors, the barn was deliberately torched by German SS and Luftwaffe soldiers and teenage Hitler-Jugend boys. Prisoners who tried to escape the fire were machine-gunned by German troops and Hitler-Jugend boys who were guarding the barn. A total of 1016 POWs were burned to death or shot to escape in the unlocked barn. About 100 of the POWs survived, including some Russian POWs.

　The main instigator was 34-year-old Gerhard Thiele, the Nazi Party district leader in Gardelegen, who on April 6, 1945, called his men and other officers to order that prisoners who had looted or escaped, as issued a few days earlier by the governor of Jordan, Rudolf Jordan, should be shot on the spot.

　On October 14, the U.S. 102nd entered Gardelegen and discovered the atrocities on October 15. In a still-smoldering barn and nearby trenches, they found 1,016 dead prisoners; on April 21, the 102nd's commander ordered 200 to 300 German soldiers to bury the prisoners killed by the inhabitants. Within a few days, German soldiers dug 586 bodies out of the trenches, retrieved 430 bodies from the barns, and buried them in individual graves. on april 25, the 102nd held a ceremony to commemorate the dead and erected a monument. on april 25, colonel George Lynch made a statement before the German civilians in Gardelegen.

　Gerhard Thiele managed to escape justice in January 1946. He escaped but lived in Düsseldorf until at least 1991 under a false identity; at his trial in 1947, SS Obergruppenführer Erhard Brauny, who ordered the prisoner's transfer, was sentenced to life in prison and died of natural causes in prison in 1950.