March 28th, 1945.
The war was supposed to be over.
The German army was collapsing.
American tanks were driving deep into Bavaria.
But when the soldiers of the US 45th Infantry Division approached the city of Ashenberg, they saw something that made them stop their jeeps.
They looked up at the lamp posts lining the street.
Hanging there were bodies.
They weren’t soldiers.
They were civilians, old men, women, even a few teenagers.
They had signs hanging around their necks.
The signs read, “Here hangs a traitor.
” Because he believed in the Americans.
These people hadn’t fought the Americans.
They had simply tried to surrender.
They had hung white sheets out of their windows to save their homes.
And for that, their own German commander had executed them.
The American soldiers stared at the swaying bodies.
They weren’t sad.
They were furious.
They looked at the city ahead, a medieval fortress town, beautiful, historic, and they made a decision.
They weren’t going to capture a Schaffenburgg.
They weren’t going to risk their lives in house fighting for a city that murdered its own people.
The American commander picked up the radio.
He called for the heavy artillery.
He didn’t ask for a precision strike.
He asked for everything.
He effectively said, “Level it.
Turn every building into dust.
If they want to die for Hitler, let’s help them.
This is the true story of the destruction of a Schaffenburgg.
The day the US army stopped playing by the rules.
The day they met a fanatical Nazi major who refused to quit and the brutal explosive punishment they delivered to his city.
To understand why a city was erased from the map, we have to meet the villain, Major Emile Lambert.
Lambert wasn’t a normal soldier.
He was a fanatic, a true believer in national socialism.
By March 1945, most German officers knew the war was lost.
They were trying to surrender with dignity, but not Lambert.
He had been given command of Ashafenburgg, a city on the main river, and he had received a personal order from Adolf Hitler.
Feson Ashafenberg, fortress Ashafenberg, defend to the last stone.
Lambert took this literally.
He didn’t care about the civilians.
He didn’t care about the history of the city.
He only cared about obedience.
He gathered his troops.
He didn’t have many regular soldiers left.
So he gathered the Vulk storm, the people’s storm, old men with hunting rifles, boys from the Hitler youth barely 15 years old, and convolescent soldiers pulled out of hospital beds.
He gave them a terrifying ultimatum.
Anyone who tries to surrender will be shot.
Anyone who hangs a white flag will be hanged.
We will fight until the Americans are dead or we are dead.
The people of the city were terrified.
They saw the American tanks approaching.
They wanted to save their children.
So quietly, behind closed doors, they sewed white flags.
But Lambert had spies everywhere.
On the morning the Americans arrived, Lambert’s execution squads roamed the streets.
They dragged people out of their houses, and they hanged them.
When the Americans arrived, they didn’t see a city surrendering.
They saw a city held hostage by a madman.
The US 45th Infantry Division, the Thunderbirds, arrived on March 28th.
They were confident.
They thought this would be easy.
Another town, another surrender, they thought.
They sent a small force of infantry into the suburbs.
They walked down the quiet streets.
The windows were shut.
The shops were closed.
Suddenly, a shot rang out, then a machine gun, then the roar of a panzafouast rocket.
The Americans scrambled for cover.
They were taking fire from everywhere.
From the church steeple, from the basement windows, from the sewers.
But it wasn’t just soldiers shooting at them.
The Americans were shocked to see who was pulling the trigger.
civilians, old men in suits, women dropping grenades from rooftops, children firing rifles, Major Lambert had forced the entire population to fight.
He told them the Americans would butcher them if they surrendered.
He turned the civilians into combatants.
The American soldiers were confused.
They didn’t want to shoot women.
They didn’t want to shoot kids.
They hesitated.
And because they hesitated, they died.
Casualties mounted.
Ambulance chiefs raced back and forth.
The easy victory had turned into a meat grinder.
The American commanders met in a command post outside the city.
They were angry.
They had lost good men to civilians who should have been surrendering.
And then the reports came in about the hangings.
The scouts reported finding bodies of German citizens hanging in the town square, murdered by Lambert for trying to stop the fighting.
This changed everything.
The mood shifted from liberation to punishment.
The American commander looked at the map of Ashenburg.
He looked at the castle Schllo Yahannesburg, a massive stone fortress dominating the city.
That was where Lambert was hiding.
The American commander made a decision.
He wasn’t going to send any more boys to die in those narrow streets.
He wasn’t going to play knights and castles.
He was going to use technology, brute force.
He called for the big stuff.
the 15 mm long tom artillery, the M12 gun motor carriages, massive self-propelled guns designed to crack concrete bunkers, and the air force.
He issued a new order to his troops.
Pull back.
Get out of the streets.
We are not going to take this city.
We are going to knock it down.
That evening, the bombardment began the next morning.
It wasn’t a tactical strike.
It was an eraser.
The Americans lined up their heavy guns on the hills overlooking the city.
They fired point blank.
Usually artillery fires in an arc over a long distance, but here they lowered the barrels.
They fired straight into the buildings.
It was systematic destruction.
Block by block, house by house.
The 1555 mm shells smashed into the medieval timberframed houses.
The buildings didn’t just break, they disintegrated.
Fire broke out.
The city began to burn.
In the sky, P47 Thunderbolts dived down.
Inside the city, it was the apocalypse.
Major Lambert sat in his bunker under the castle.
He ordered his men to hold.
“The Americans are weak,” he shouted.
“They are afraid to come in.
” But the Americans weren’t afraid.
They were just efficient.
They realized there was no point in dying for a city that wanted to fight.
An American sergeant wrote in his diary, “We just sat on the hill and watched it burn.
” After seeing those bodies on the lamp posts, I didn’t feel a thing.
They brought this on themselves.
This was one of the most controversial decisions of the war.
destroying an entire city to save American lives.
Was it justified or was it excessive force? We bring you the hard questions of history.
If you want the truth uncensored, subscribe to the channel now.
Join us on the front line.
After days of shelling, the city was a ruin.
But the castle Schllo Yannesburg was still standing.
It was a massive red sandstone fortress built in the 1600s.
The walls were 8 ft thick.
Lambert was inside with his most fanatical troops.
The Americans moved in to finish it, but they didn’t send infantry to storm the gates.
They brought up an M12 gun motor carriage.
This was a 155 mm gun on tank tracks.
They parked it right in front of the castle, point blank range.
The German soldiers inside looked out of the arrow slits.
They saw the massive barrel pointing straight at them.
[sighs] The first shell hit the main tower.
Stone exploded.
Dust filled the air.
The Americans fired again and again.
They were punching holes through walls that had stood for 300 years.
The castle caught fire.
The roof collapsed.
Inside, the wounded were screaming.
The teenage soldiers were crying.
They begged Major Lambert to surrender.
Hermayor, we cannot fight a wall of fire.
But Lambert pulled his pistol.
He threatened his own men, the Kempen.
But finally, the men had enough.
On the morning of April 3rd, the firing from the castle stopped.
A white flag appeared from a hole in the castle wall.
The Americans held their fire.
Slowly, the German soldiers walked out.
They were covered in red dust from the sandstone.
They coughed.
They stumbled.
They looked like ghosts.
And then Major Lambert walked out.
He was still wearing his uniform.
He still had his medals.
He walked with his head high, arrogant to the end.
He walked up to the American commander, Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks, the same Felix Sparks, who would later liberate Dhow.
Lambert saluted.
He tried to make a speech about honor and duty.
Sparks didn’t listen.
He looked at the ruins of the city.
He looked at the smoke.
He looked at the dead civilians in the streets, killed by Lambert’s refusal to quit.
Sparks didn’t salute back.
He ordered his MPs.
Get him out of my sight before I shoot him myself.
Lambert was stripped of his weapons.
He was thrown into a jeep.
As he was driven away, the surviving citizens of Ashafonburgg came out of their cellars.
They didn’t cheer for him.
They spat at him.
They cursed him.
Murderer, they shouted.
You destroyed our home.
The battle for Ashaenberg lasted 10 days.
It should have lasted 10 hours.
Because of one man’s fanaticism, the city was 90% destroyed.
Hundreds of civilians were dead.
Hundreds of American soldiers were killed or wounded.
When General Patton heard about the battle, he was grimly satisfied.
He visited the ruins.
He looked at the piles of rubble that used to be houses.
He said, “It is a good lesson.
If they want to fight, this is what happens.
We will not trade American lives for German buildings.
” Patton used a Schaffenberg as a warning for the rest of the war.
Whenever the Third Army approached a town, they sent a message ahead.
Remember Ash Schaffenberg.
Surrender now or we will bring the heavy guns.
Most towns surrendered immediately.
The destruction of a Schoffenberg saved thousands of lives later in the war because it proved that the Americans were not bluffing.
And what happened to Major Lambert, the man who hanged his own people? He wasn’t treated as an ordinary P.
He was put on trial for murder.
Not for killing Americans, that is war, but for killing the German civilians who tried to surrender.
He was found guilty.
He was sentenced to death.
Though later in the confusion of postwar appeals, his sentence was commuted to imprisonment.
He lived, but he lived in disgrace, hated by his own countrymen.
The destruction of a Schaenberg is a brutal story.
It is not a story of glory.
It is a story of the terrible logic of war.
The American soldiers didn’t want to destroy the city.
But when they saw the bodies on the lamposts, when they realized they were fighting a fanatic who valued ideology over life, they did what they had to do.
They stopped being liberators and they became destroyers.
It serves as a reminder that mercy has a limit.
You can push a good man too far and when you do, you don’t get a negotiation.
You get a 155 mm shell through your front door.
The American commander ordered the city destroyed to save his men.
Was that the right choice or was it a war crime to level a city? It’s a debate that still goes on.
What would you have done? Let me know in the comments.
And if you want to see the story of how US soldiers took revenge at Dao, the video is right here.
Click it now.
Thanks for watching.
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