May 31, 2005
How Times Have Changed
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story(on the front page no less) for Memorial Day that intigues me, a story of local man in WWII. What caught my attention is this passage:
"On the afternoon of May 8, Oettle's company neared the town of Borgo, near the Austrian border. A German staff car approached with a white flag fluttering on the hood."The German officers in the car told us the war had ended," Oettle said.
It was news to Oettle's company. For weeks, they had been traveling so fast and so far ahead of their lines that they were attacked by American fighter planes mistaking them for fleeing Germans. In fact, at 1:41 a.m. May 7, Germany had signed an unconditional surrender. The American troops, part of the 85th Infantry Division, moved cautiously forward. Excitement that the war indeed might be over mingled with dread that the next step could trigger a land mine, or that a mortar could come whistling in. Surrendering German troops were passing in droves, heading for the rear.
And then came shots from a culvert up the road. Oettle's crew buckled up inside their armor. But the infantrymen walking in the field beside them could only hit the dirt. Two officers of the German SS - Hitler's most fanatical soldiers - began picking off the American GIs. Armed with rifles equipped with scopes, the SS officers killed seven men and wounded numerous others before they were captured.
"A second lieutenant marched the SS snipers right in front of our tank destroyer," Oettle said.
"He took their pistols away. We already had their rifles. He stood them in front of a foxhole that the Germans had dug and shot both of them in their bellies. They hollered something and fell back." Oettle recalls the exact time: 4:23 p.m. May 8, 1945. The war had ended more than 37 hours earlier.
Sporadic fighting would continue for a few more days in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Croatia and other regions. Most of it involved German troops trying to force their way through Russian lines to surrender to American forces.
But that wasn't the case in Borgo.
"Those SS troops had no business killing seven of our guys when they knew the war was over. They just wanted to kill as many of us as they could," Oettle said. "That was just disgraceful. Seven men dying a day late."
Think about that. A US soldier deliberately gut shot prisoners of war -- executed in the most painful way he knew how -- and it is repeated without remark in a Memorial Day story on the front page of a left leaning newspaper.
