Throughout World War II, the German soldiers who fought for the Third Reich were often seen as some of the most virulent and violent enemies who fought in the whole of the conflict.
Fighting alongside the regular Vermach were SS officers who were fighting a crusade against their enemies.
But often if German soldiers fell into the hands of their enemies, they would be ruthlessly dispatched for a number of reasons.
Some soldiers were seen as higher value targets or specialist forces who offered too much of a threat if they were alive.
In other times, there were more practical reasons why the Allies shot German captives.
For example, on D-Day, there was too much haste to capture the beaches and there was no time to take prisoners.
In this compilation, we look at the different times, different types of German soldiers who were shot during World War II when they possibly shouldn’t have.
One of the most haunting images of the Second World War was child soldiers armed with weapons such as Panzer anti-tank weapons, Panzer Shrek rocket launchers, and MP40s.
The situation in the final days of the war in Germany was so desperate that children who were barely 10 years old were thrust in the way of Soviet T34 tanks, artillery crews, and the brutality of the Red Army.
What happened inside the German capital of Berlin in April 1945 was savage and shocking, and the 1,000-year Reich was collapsing in just 12 years.
The Allied armies were pushing in from the west and the Soviet Red Army from the east.
And the Nazis began to rely on boys, some not even teenagers, to stand in the face of conquer.
These were members of the Hitler youth and their involvement came from complete desperation.
This is the dark reason why Charles soldiers were used and were ultimately shot by the enemy.
For many years, as soon as the Nazis came into power, they began to indoctrinate young boys and girls into their politics and ideas.
The Hitler Youth wasn’t just a youth club that children would attend and play games on a Friday night after school.
It was a ruthless military training organization.
The boys were prepared to become soldiers who would one day give their life for the Reich.
The German boys were taught many things, including that war was heroic, that sacrifice for the fatherland was glorious, and dying for Hitler was one of the most honorable things that someone could do.
They were also taught many other disturbing things, such as the persecuting policies of the Nazis, and the Aryan people were racially superior, but also that the enemy, in particular, communists and the Soviets were barbaric, threatening, and not worthy of life.
By 1945, an entire generation of young people had grown up under Nazi education and brainwashing, and many teenagers firmly believed in the ideals of the regime.
Some did lose faith, but not many.
So, because of this ideology and belief, the young men of Nazi Germany didn’t need too much convincing to take up arms and then fight.
By 1944, Germany and the Vermacht, as well as the military wing of the SS, had lost a huge amount of fighting age men and soldiers.
After the launchings and failings of the Eastern Front offensives, millions of German soldiers and Axis forces were killed, and millions more were wounded and were captured, becoming prisoners of war.
Entire divisions had been destroyed and wiped out, and some were rotting inside Soviet gulags and prisons.
Germany in particular did not have enough adult soldiers left.
Men were being dragged from working in the concentration camps to be then sent to the front lines and boys aged between 12 and 17 were some of the only remaining groups physically able to hold a rifle and a weapon.
Units such as the 12th SS Panza Division Hitler Yugand comprising of mostly 16 and 17 year olds were formed.
These were paired with older SS soldiers and were given mentors and they were then sent to the front lines and teenagers were seen in the defense of Normandy in 1944 and also in the battle of Berlin in 1945.
Hitler also believed that younger people of the Reich were more fanatical.
He had a distrust of older men who had experienced life before the Nazis came to power and who may have been more dissenting.
For him, the youngsters who had been involved and surrounded by the Nazi ideas constantly were more impressionable and less likely to surrender.
He also believed they were stronger, too, and many through their brainwashing lacked fear.
They were sometimes easier to command and control, too, and reports of desertion may have been lower in units that used teenage soldiers.
Hitler once said, and I quote, “We will create a youth before whom the world will tremble.
” But by 1945, that belief turned into policy, and teenagers and even younger children became the last lines of defense against a complete disruption of the Nazi Reich.
But Nazi propaganda also made the war seem like a final existential battle.
And with this, young people believed that they were fighting for their future and that a life would not be worth living in the event of a German loss.
As Soviet forces approached Germany, propaganda from the ministry headed up by Jez Gerbles told that if Germany lost, then the entire German people would be destroyed and also that the Soviets would murder, torture, and enslave them.
This was exaggerated, but it invoked and inspired a huge amount of fear.
Many Germans had heard about or witnessed retaliatory and revenge violence from the Eastern Front and some young people were told that they were going to be defending their homes, families and nation itself, which was putting a huge amount of pressure on them.
In October 1944, the German government created the Volterm, a lastditch panic militia made up of teenage boys, old men, and war veterans who were unfit for normal service.
Some of these men were elderly and in their 80s, but others were incredibly young.
They were rushed into battle and had minimal training.
There are images showing youngsters being given one-shot panzer anti-tank rockets, and the training they were given was just like, well, here you go, aim, and the rocket comes out of that way.
They were sent in against the Soviet tanks, including heavy tanks.
The weapons were also very outdated and poor, and there was a lack of ammunition in the final weeks of the war, meaning that resistance was practically futile.
There was also little understanding of real combat within young fighters, and many Volterm units actually dissolved straight away as the Soviets appeared or surrendered very quickly.
But some fought hard, particularly in the defense of Berlin.
There are very famous images out there showing Hitler awarding medals and accolades to children wearing German uniforms who were fighting in the capital.
But for the children, refusing to serve and fight for the defense of the Reich was actually very dangerous.
If they did not want to take up arms, then their families could be punished, arrested, and some could even be shot for this.
Refusal to fight was considered treason.
And in Berlin in particular, there were deserters and refusers who were hung up from lampposts and street lights with signs around their necks saying they refused to fight and defend the Berlin women.
Local Nazi officials also sometimes pressurized parents, but many boys did not choose to fight.
They were forced to do so.
One example of this was Alfred Zesh.
He was just 12 when he was thrust into the fighting.
Now, he had actually been volunteered to fight in the war by his own family, and he was one of those who was decorated with the Iron Cross by Hitler in Berlin.
He didn’t even know that his father had been killed also in the fighting after he was pressed into the vault.
He was then later sent a long way away from his home to modern-day Czech lands to fight.
And despite being just 12, he was actually wounded and captured and then spent time as a prisoner of war.
But the result of the child’s soldiers was truly tragic.
Thousands of teenagers and some even younger, some still in school, died hopelessly in battles where their fate was absolutely doomed and their operations were doomed to fail.
In Berlin, children as young as 12 were sent into fierce fighting with those one-shot weapons, Panzer, and most of them died without ever firing that single shot.
The Soviet Red Army had no problems with shooting and taking out these child soldiers too.
In their eyes, they were a product of the Nazi land and were at the end of the day a very dangerous enemy who needed dealing with there and then.
Some after capture were shown weeping and pleading for their lives.
But inside of Berlin, hundreds of young children were killed in the tough fighting with the Soviets.
This was not their conflict.
Some encountered truly terrible ends, being blown up by artillery or being attacked by rounds from T-34s or heavy tanks.
But the street fighting led to Soviet soldiers taking absolutely no prisoners and firing their rifles and submachine guns are just children who did pose a danger to them.
These were some of the most battleh hardened soldiers and they were ruthless and age for them did not matter.
One Soviet officer later finding, in his words, a boy of perhaps 13, still wearing short trousers, lying besides a smashed panzer.
He was just a child.
The use of child soldiers throughout the final weeks of the Second World War was one final desperate roll of the dice for the Nazis.
It was, however, completely foreseeable that these youngsters would face immediate death at the hands of the Soviet Red Army.
But the Nazis were more than happy to thrust teenagers into the conflict to meet a certain death.
It showed the complete devotion some had to the Reich.
And as families volunteered their own children to take up arms and be sent thousands of miles away to face the Red Army.
It also shows that families were more than happy to send their children to go and fight and a grave.
It was one of the major turning points of the Second World War.
France had been living under a ruthless occupation for a number of years and after being evacuated from the beaches around Dunkirk, it was certain that one day the Allies would be back to fight another day.
On the 6th of June 1944, thousands of American, British, Canadian, and Empire troops landed on the beaches of Normandy in Operation Overlord.
It was do or die, and in the chaos of the fighting, thousands would not see the following day.
On beaches such as Omaha, invading forces encountered ruthless defenders who sprayed machine gun bullets towards a landing craft.
And with this, when the Allies finally made advances up the beach, they were ruthless when they encountered the German enemy.
On D-Day, it has been reported that up to 9,000 German soldiers were shot and were killed.
However, this 9,000 reflects the killed, injured, and missing German soldiers.
But often in the chaos on the beaches and in the bluffs, there was little time to take prisoners.
This is why so many German soldiers were shot on D-Day.
The men who landed on Omaha, Sword, Gold, Juno, and Utah were the ones who changed history and began the long fight to liberate France from Nazi occupation.
The chaos they encountered that day when they landed, would stay with the survivors until the day that they died.
One soldier, Robert Edlin, a member of the second ranger battalion that joined the first wave on Omaha, claimed, and I quote, “There were bodies floating everywhere.
They were face down in the water with packs still on their backs.
They had inflated their life jackets.
Fortunately, most of the rangers did not inflate theirs, or they might also have turned over and drowned.
I began to run with my rifle in front of me.
I went directly across the beach to try to get to the seaway.
I kept screaming at them.
You have to get up and go.
You got to get up and go.
But they didn’t.
They were worn out and defeated completely.
There wasn’t any time to help them.
I continued across the beach.
There were mines and obstacles all up and down the beach.
The mines had not been detonated.
Absolutely nothing that had been planned for that part of the beach had worked.
The soldiers knew that day that they were going to be involved in making history.
However, when they encountered their German enemy, they often did not take prisoners, and they shot surrendering or retreating Germans.
There was little time to process the prisoners, and the main objective was to take the beach and establish a beach head.
Speed was of the essence.
When the Allied forces landed on the coast of Normandy, they were under incredibly heavy fire.
German units had been ordered to resist to the last and many of them did.
The fighting became very close quarters in trenches or bunkers and was also often conducted in smoke or around dense hedros.
Visibility despite it being the morning was rather minimal and in these conditions many German soldiers were killed whilst they were surrendering and they were mistaken for active combatants.
In some cases, surrender attempts were simply not recognized, but other soldiers just ignored them.
By midday on the 6th of June, 1944, Allied units, especially airborne and frontlined infantry, had more prisoners than they could safely guard.
Small units advancing inland, simply did not have the manpower, food, or secure rear areas to manage captives.
This led to a number of outcomes.
Prisoners were sometimes disarmed and simply released.
Some were sent to the rear under minimal escort, but in other cases, prisoners were just shot, especially if units feared ambush or counterattack.
Technically, under the laws and rules of war, shooting of prisoners of war was illegal, but they occurred in the intense combat zone around Normandy.
It wasn’t official Allied policy to do this, but it did happen.
Some German units, particularly those of the Voffan SS, became infamous, and they had horrific reputations for the killing of Allied prisoners of war.
They were known as the most virulent and most dangerous of enemies.
News of massacres such as those which took place against Allied soldiers in Italy and also on the Eastern Front shaped the mindset of the invading Allied forces.
They knew that if they encountered SS then they were dealing with the most dangerous and ideologically devoted enemy.
This created a mindset amongst the allies that the German troops would kill them if they were captured and that it would be killed or be killed.
This fear combined with exhaustion and adrenaline led to many SS soldiers being shot immediately upon capture because of them being deemed ideologically dangerous and part of a group who had massacred Allied prisoners of war.
Another reason why Allies shot German soldiers was well simply because it was their job to do so.
When they were pushing up the beaches, they were under immense fire, and they were tasked with dealing with the defenders as quickly as possible in order to then allow the Allied ships to bring in the next wave.
They were under immense pressure to do this, and taking prisoners just slowed down their job.
If a German soldier threw his hands up in the air to give himself over to the enemy, well, there could have been more behind this particular soldier who weren’t willing to give up.
And with this, the Allied soldiers, well, didn’t take any chances whatsoever.
You also have to consider the immense fire and chaos of the landings, and that the Allied forces were probably in no mood to take prisoners either.
They had hundreds of thousands, millions of bullets fired at them within a matter of minutes.
They had seen their friends and comrades cut down in a hail of bullets, and many were left dying on the beaches.
Some of the landing craft had been shot through completely by machine guns, and they were scared and fearful.
There would have been an element of resentment in their minds, too, towards their enemies, and rightfully so.
They would be intent on revenge at all costs, and with the reputation of Nazi crimes that came to be known about in the Allied ranks, they would have wanted to get their own piece of vengeance for those who had suffered.
Now the number of 9,000 German soldiers being executed is derived from the total German casualties on the 6th of June 1944 and it is rather at the top end of what historians estimate the total losses to be.
It also includes the missing and injured who were not counted in German records.
In reality, the German losses on D-Day were between 4,000 and 9,000 including the killed, wounded, missing or captured combined.
Most of them were killed in combat and fighting, and they were not executed or were shot after they surrendered or handed themselves over to the Allies.
Modern military historians are in agreement that on D-Day, technical war crimes did occur, including the shooting of surrendered German soldiers.
These incidents were rather localized and were not systematic.
The majority of German deaths on D-Day occurred during the active fighting and the intense battles to establish the beach heads.
Allied commanders did investigate some incidents involving the indiscriminate shooting of prisoners of war, but none were ever really formally prosecuted because, well, it was just put down as the nature of fighting.
And also, as the priority became searching for Nazi war criminals to punish, things just got lost in translation.
So, German soldiers were killed and were shot in large numbers on D-Day, and some of the deceased were shot unlawfully following their surrender.
There were no mass executions of thousands of prisoners, and the figure of 9,000 combines total casualties, which also includes the wounded and those who went missing and still today were never accounted for.
It remains one of the most historic moments of the Second World War.
Well, most certainly, possibly even in history.
And D-Day today is remembered for the bravery and hell that the men who landed on the beaches encountered on June the 6th, 1944.
They were some of the most feared soldiers to take to the battlefields of the 20th century and they were driven by their devotion to their furer.
The SS or should staff led by Hinrich Kimla originally began life as a personal bodyguard unit tasked with keeping a close eye on Hitler.
However, it transitioned to become the elite guard of the Reich and also the force that carried out many security related jobs such as overseeing the concentration camps.
But they had a military wing known as Z of SS.
But if the SS soldiers fell into captivity on the battlefield and were captured even by the Allies, they faced immediate execution and many were shot on the spot.
The Allies feared the SS and they were known for being the most devoted who would fight to their deaths.
But why were SS soldiers more likely to be shot than ordinary vermach or German army ones? The Ven SS were heavily involved in many war crimes throughout World War II.
From overseeing mass shootings and atrocities to carrying out antipartisan warfare against resistors, they became known for their brutal actions.
Hinrich Kimler, the head of the SS, wanted to involve the group in the war effort, and he wanted his force to be seen with as much prestige as soldiers who fought in the ordinary army.
And in late 1939, Hitler, with one eye on a new global conflict, gave Himmler permission to establish an armed SS force known as a Foffen SS.
He was allowed to begin with four divisions, but soon this became more than 20.
Half a million SS men fought in these groups and they had their own command structure.
Instead of just military training or weapons training, SS soldiers were given political indoctrination and further brainwashing that focused on ensuring they would give their lives for the Reich.
The Allied soldiers who came up against them found them with some of the best equipment, MG42s, King Tiger tanks, and much more.
And they had been given stronger gear than the army in some cases.
But after D-Day, there was a belief inside the Allied ranks by some soldiers that SS soldiers needed to be dealt with instantly after their capture or surrender and that they should be shot and executed on the spot.
Of course, this would have been a war crime if someone who surrendered was shot.
But why did this reputation develop? Firstly, the Allies had heard about the SS’s reputation for atrocities and war crimes.
The group had become synonymous with the concentration camps and mass murder.
Organizations like the Tottenham or Dasich divisions were linked to massacres in which hundreds were shot and during the battle of the Bulge, they executed many American soldiers and prisoners in the Malmi massacre.
The Allies knew that the SS executed prisoners, including British, Canadian, and American commandos.
So when they encountered SS men in their captivity, they believed that if the tables were turned, they would not be given any mercy.
One American veteran said that if they wore the SS runes, we didn’t take them prisoner.
We had seen what they did to our boys.
Also, the SS soldiers were known for fighting to the last bullet, and they rarely surrendered willingly.
Many fought on when surrounded, wounded, or even hopelessly outnumbered.
This made them a dangerous and unpredictable enemy, and some SS even used a false surrender, dropping their weapons to then fire at the Allies again, which led allied soldiers to treat surrender with suspicion.
One British soldier of the 11th Armored Division said that, “We learned quickly.
If he was SS, you didn’t trust him to surrender properly.
” They had a reputation for being deceptive and defiant, which led many to be shot before being captured.
But by the final weeks of the war, there were many concentration camps which were discovered and found by the allies and the Soviets.
And they had found the scenes of massacres.
At Dhau, for example, they discovered trained box cars just outside the main camp with thousands of dead bodies inside.
These are victims of the crimes of the SS within the camp.
Upon entering Dhau for liberation, the Americans shot many SS guards.
After seeing this, they were caught up rightly in the emotion and sought instant revenge.
Some Insatrian members, members of the death squads that rampaged in the east after capture, were publicly executed in front of the Soviet population.
Now, the uniforms for the SS made them actually very easy to identify and also spot.
The SS often wore their distinctive collar insignia with SS runes, and they also had blood group tattoos, usually under their left arm.
A small mark with a letter.
Some at the end of the war to avoid capture or punishment for being a member of the SS actually burned these off and tried to remove the tattoo.
The SS were so easily recognizable, and it was difficult for SS men to blend in with regular Vermach troops.
So once identified, they risked immediate execution and could be even spotted in the most ferocious battle situations.
On the Eastern Front, the conflict between specifically the SS and the Red Army was one of annihilation.
The SS were given roles to slaughter and execute those who were said to be racially inferior or undesirable in the eyes of the Nazis.
SS divisions took part in antipartisan operations that involved massacre of civilians.
The Soviets saw them as criminals and not soldiers, and captured SS men were shot frequently on the spot by members of the Red Army in retaliation for the Commissar Order.
They saw the SS as those men who had burned down villages and organized massacre, and there would be no mercy.
Now, official orders from the Allied High Command did demand that all prisoners of war be treated in accordance to the Geneva Convention, but on the field of conflict, whether this was taken seriously or not was rather debatable.
Following the Malmi massacre, in which 84 American prisoners of war were murdered by SS troops, the Americans began to take less SS prisoners.
This was also reported within the Canadian and British ranks in Normandy and also in the Netherlands.
Reports of shot SS soldiers rarely made it back to high command and commanders often turned a blind eye too understanding the emotions of their men and also the reputation of the SS.
The group had been indoctrinated by the Nazis to believe that if they did fall into enemy hands that they would be tortured and executed.
Many were told that the allies, especially the Soviets, would execute them.
Hence why they went down with a fight.
But in the final weeks of the Second World War, order broke down across Germany and the front lines.
Allied and Soviet troops saw the end in sight, but were exhausted by the fighting.
Civilians were lynching SS men in the streets, too.
And field executions began and field executions became common, even by Vermach soldiers who blamed the SS for the Nazis and for prolonging the war.
But to sum up, the SS soldiers were more likely to be shot during their capture because their units had committed atrocities which earned them a reputation for brutality.
Also, they fought fanatically and sometimes there were cases of fate surrender, meaning it was dangerous to take them a prisoner.
Also, the Allied soldiers wanted revenge for the massacre of prisoners of war and fellow countrymen they had heard about.
They were also easy to spot and identify, which meant they did not blend in well to the general German military.
But while many SS men met a violent end when they were captured, others did manage to hide their identities and actually blend into a postwar world, escaping any punishment and any form of justice.
As the allies rampaged throughout occupied Europe after D-Day, there were thousands of German soldiers, members of the Vermacht and also the Buffan SS who were captured and became prisoners of war.
After they had surrendered, they were supposed to be protected by the P status, but often they were not, and some were shot within minutes.
The action of shooting captured German soldiers was not official Allied policy, but it happened because of a number of different circumstances relating to the brutality of the war, battlefield chaos, revenge and retaliation, and also the actions of criminal German units such as the SS.
As the Second World War turned against the Germans, the true crimes of the SS were discovered.
And with this, the Allies decided sometimes not taking prisoners may have been the right thing to do.
By 1944, the Second World War had become exceptionally savage and brutal.
Both Allied and German troops had suffered years of heavy casualties, atrocities, and also fear.
On the Eastern Front, atrocities committed by the Vermacht, the German army, and the SS against civilians and Red Army troops created an atmosphere in which Soviet soldiers often killed prisoners, and they didn’t ask any questions.
The Soviets were unlikely to ever face any reprisal for these shootings, too, as Stalin and the Red Army generals would never punish the shooting of an enemy combatant, even if they had surrendered.
Also on the Western Front, American, British, Canadian, and French forces were shocked by what they came across.
Murdered civilians massacred prisoners of war and of course the concentration camps.
Fighting in the Arden region during the Battle of the Bulge was also very horrifying.
But the increasing brutalization of the war made soldiers far more likely to shoot surrendering or captured soldiers, especially with their emotions running very high.
But the worst treatment of all often fell upon those soldiers and members of the Vaoffan SS.
These were members of Hinrich Himmler’s paramilitary group.
Originally, the group started as Hitler’s bodyguards, but a military wing, the Voffan SS, were responsible for many terrible atrocities, and ruthless commanders ordered the executions and killings of prisoners of war.
For example, the Malmmedi massacre in the Ardens resulted in 84 American prisoners of war being shot by the side of a road.
This event and the news of it spread quickly amongst the American units.
And many would admit that after hearing about this, well, they stopped taking SS prisoners altogether.
Also in Normandy, dozens of Canadian prisoners of war were shot too, and revenge was also in the air after this had been discovered.
After these events, many Allied units informally adopted a policy of no prisoners when facing often SS troops.
With this, they would also shoot members of the German army, mistaking them for SS units and SS men and would then obviously ask questions later.
But combat on the Western Front in the Hedros and Bage of Normandy or within the forest of the Arden was chaotic and very close quarters.
In this environment, some German soldiers tried to surrender at the last moment while still under heavy fire and others pretended to surrender and then they opened fire.
This led to Allied soldiers beginning to distrust late surrender attempts and they then opened fire themselves.
Confusion about who was actually surrendering led to a split-second decision in which prisoners were accidentally or were deliberately shot.
Battlefield confusion became one of the most common causes that led to the deaths of princes of war on either side.
Now by 1944 to 1945, Allied forces in Europe had been fighting for some time.
Men who had lost close friends in front of them, sometimes reacted violently when German soldiers attempted to surrender, believing they were, well, avenging their fallen friends.
Also, the stress and trauma of combat often led to a breakdown in discipline in the heat of the moment.
Many soldiers would claim that they simply snapped in the aftermath of a particularly bloody battle or skirmish.
There were documented cases of German soldiers, especially fanatical SS troops, faking surrender before attacking.
Some SS Grenaders surrendered and then detonated hidden grenades and also last ditch VV units pretended to give up before then firing their own weapons.
This led to some Allied troops viewing all sudden surreners with immediate suspicion.
Small Allied patrols and groups of soldiers often captured more prisoners than they could safely guard.
If the front line was unstable in one section, or if reconnaissance indicated a larger German force, or that a counterattack was expected, soldiers became fearful that prisoners could pick up discarded weapons, overpower the guards, and then attack, but also reveal allied positions.
In a few cases, prisoners in dangerous forward positions were shot as a grim reality of not having the capacity to deal with the enemy.
One example of this was in Normandy following D-Day.
The Allies quickly needed to take the beaches and to move quickly in land, and many of the machine gun teams who had focused their fire upon the allies surrendered.
But with their hands up in the air, the advancing forces just shot and fired their weapons at the Germans.
Some were taken to concealed areas where they were then shot.
There was no time to take prisoners or then process them.
So the enemy was just ruthlessly dealt with.
On the Eastern front, the Red Army soldiers behaved far more aggressively towards surrendering Germans.
This was for a number of reasons.
With the launching of Operation Barbarasa and the subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis committed scores of atrocities.
The Irons Scrippa death squads rampaged and shot millions of civilians and the Soviets wanted revenge.
Also for events such as the siege of Leningrad and the entire destruction of towns and villages, the Soviets refused to take prisoners at times.
They shot SS personnel on site and regular Vermach troops also suffered extremely harsh treatment even if they had surrendered.
As the allies began to discover concentration camps such as Bookenvald, Dhau or Berg and Bellson, they saw so many horrific sites that they lost all restraint.
Inside Dhau, a number of guards were shot by the Allies after liberation.
And many claimed they could not control their emotions after seeing what had happened.
But some German units did also have reputations for fighting ferociously and also for refusing to surrender.
Hitler youth divisions for example were known for this and some allied troops believed they would never surrender and this suspicion led sometimes to shootings.
Also there was at times a lack of senior officers present at the front especially during small engagements.
Without officers nearby then discipline occasionally collapsed and this meant some of the crimes never went reported and no one ever faced punishment for a shooting.
In the final days and even after the conflict, some soldiers sought revenge on the German population and they shot suspected soldiers and suspected members of the SS.
While the Allies did not have a policy of killing prisoners, the extreme brutality of the war, especially the actions of the Voffan SS, as well as the chaos of the battlefields and the psychological trauma of the war, led to unlawful and historically documented instances where captured German soldiers or prisoners of war were shot.
These events were sometimes usually investigated.
Most went unreported and those who which did get reported were certainly unpunished because of the intensity of the Second World War.
But technically shooting a prisoner of war regardless of what army they belong to was a war crime.
It was one of the most feared and brutal weapons of the Second World War and it changed the face of the battlefield.
The impact of the MG42 is still felt today in combat and it proved to be a very reliable and easy to operate machine gun.
It was used extensively by the Vermacht and also the Voffan SS and the Allies were terrified of it because of its immense and rapid fire.
It averaged around 1,200 rounds per minute, which was a lot compared to the previous MG32.
And when compared to the Browning machine gun, it was colossal.
The MG42 became extremely effective when providing suppressive fire and it became known as Hitler’s buzzsaw because of its sound.
But because of the sheer power of the weapon, the crews and soldiers manning the machine gun became the targets of the Allied attacks.
And they knew that if they knocked the nest out where it was being fired from, then they faced a better chance of success.
But often these soldiers were not spared either.
and they were just shot.