Politic?

The Nazi Criminal Canadian Prisoner of War Slaughter

"[Canadian soldiers taken prisoner by Nazi troops were subjected to] cold, calculated and systemic acts of mass murder ... a criminal slaughter of Canadian prisoners of war."
"When the time came, each prisoner shook hands with his comrades, clasping them firmly, letting go only reluctantly, so as to gain a few more precious seconds of life."
"The three Canadians went down simultaneously. Though none of them betrayed any signs of life [SS 'special missions officer' Dietrich] Schnabel drew his pistol, walked over to the bodies and applied the coup de grace to each."
Howard Margolian, author, Conduct Unbecoming, 1998

"It's impossible not to feel that you're in a place where something very tragic happened. That's partly why the story has survived. There is a physical space where this happened that people can go [to]."
"We can take students there. They place maple leafs on the altar as each soldier's name is read. It's a very powerful and moving experience."
"While the evidence of [Meyer's] direct involvement was circumstantial -- some people would say there was no evidence at all -- he was the most senior officer in the regiment and his headquarters was in the abbey."
"For someone to take the prisoners from the courtyard into the garden where they were shot in the back of the head, and for Kurt Meyer not to have known about it, seems beyond belief."
Terry Copp, professor emeritus of history, Wilfred Laurier University

Howard Angel, a Canadian soldier who was executed in France after D-Day. jpg

According to Veterans Affairs Canada, an estimated 48,000 surviving veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War are left in Canada. That's out of a million Canadians who served in the Second World War, and 26,000 who served in Korea. There were fourteen thousand Canadian troops who landed 75 years ago today on French soil, and more yet supported the invasion at sea and in the air on D-Day, the allies' beachhead effort to begin to push Nazi troops out of France during the Juno invasion.

Apart from the fourteen thousand who landed on the Normandy beach, tens of thousands more Canadian soldiers entered France in the days following. When northwestern France was finally liberated, the Germans defeated, Canada had lost more than 5,000 of its military men, and another 18,000 had become casualties of war. On D-Day alone 359 Canadians died in action.

And then there are those who a day following the June 6, 1944 invasion when Canadian troops stormed ashore on Juno Beach, became 'casualties' of this brutal war with an unforgiving enemy of humankind. Over 150 Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner by a regiment of the 12th SS "Hitler Youth" Panzer Division. Prisoners of war they were. But they were not maintained as such. They were instead murdered in cold blood.

Some were shot by pistol to the back of the head while others were mowed down by machine-gun fire. A Canadian military chaplain had a bayonet run through him to his death. Several of the slain were left for dead in the road and were plowed over by German tanks. Others yet died when their skulls were crushed by rifle butts. One of the Canadians was with the Cameron Highlanders, Pte. George Millar of the Ottawa Valley town of Renfrew.

He was executed on June 7 in the garden of the Abbaye d'Ardenne, among 18 others. Then there was Howard Angel, a 30-year-old father of four children from Ottawa. Pte.Howard Angel was machine-gunned with two others at a farmhouse in Mesnil-Patry, slightly west of Caen, France two days later, on June 9. These murders became front-page news in Canada in late 1944, when the news emerged of their deaths.

Col.Kurt Meyer, commander of the 12th Panzer Division, was placed on trial in 1945 after the end of the conflict, for war crimes. He was convicted, sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Of that life imprisonment, five years were served at Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick. And then he was transferred to a prison in Germany, freed there in 1954, with the knowledge of the Canadian government.

His life resumed; he worked at a brewery eventually selling beer to Canadian troops who were stationed with NATO in Germany, until his death in 1961. The man held to be responsible for the murder of Howard Angel and dozens of other Canadian prisoners of war, was SS officer Lt.Col. Wilhelm Mohnke, considered a fanatic addicted to morphine. On the morning of June 9, Mohnke learned his men had taken three more Canadian prisoners.

Mohnke had already been responsible for the killing of 45 Canadian POWs. When he learned that Angel, along with Ptes. Frederick Holness and Ernest Baskerville of the Royal Winnipeg rifles were taken prisoner, he ordered them to be shot. The three Canadians had been wounded and were given treatment, but now SS troops led them to a field where they fired machine-gun bursts of ten to 12 rounds at their backs.

Up to June 10, a few more executions of Canadians at the hands of the SS took place in Normandy.
Mohnke was captured by the Russian army during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, after he had become one of Hitler's most trusted generals. He spent years in a Soviet gulag and although the Canadian and British militaries investigated Mohnke he was never charged with the Normandy slaughters, dying in Hamburg at the age of 90, in 2001.

In the Canadian experience at the time, there were echoes of the Nazi death camps where Jews were consigned to death. They were ordered on arrival to go to the left or to the right as they entered the death camps; one of the divisions meant immediate death in the crematoria, the other line was for those who appeared physically capable of slave labour.

And so it was for the Canadian prisoners of war whose survival depended upon which side of the road they were standing on, where those on the left were taken under control of SS military police, marched off to be interned as prisoners of war, even as those on the right ended up with Meyer or Mohnke, to face execution.