The Malmedy massacre was a German war crime committed by soldiers of the Waffen-SS on 17 December 1944 at the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre then were killed with a coup de grâce gun-shot to the head.
Operation Pegasus was a military operation carried out on the Lower Rhine near the village of Renkum, close to Arnhem in the Netherlands. Overnight on 22–23 October 1944, Allied military forces, Britain's MI9 intelligence organization, and the Dutch Resistance evacuated 138 men, mostly soldiers trapped in German-occupied territory who had been in hiding since the Battle of Arnhem a month earlier.
Karl Eberhard Schöngarth was a German SS officer during the Nazi era. He was a war criminal who perpetrated mass murder and genocide in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust; he participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was originally planned. After the war, Schöngarth and six others were tried for murdering a single downed Allied pilot, Americo S. Galle, in 1944. They were all found guilty. Five of them, including Schöngarth, were sentenced to death. They were all executed in 1946.
Operation Loyton was the codename given to a Special Air Service (SAS) mission in the Vosges department of France during the Second World War.
Despite Dutch neutrality, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940 as part of Fall Gelb. On 15 May 1940, one day after the bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch forces surrendered. The Dutch government and the royal family relocated to London. Princess Juliana and her children sought refuge in Ottawa, Canada until after the war.
The Italian resistance movement is an umbrella term for the Italian resistance groups who fought the occupying forces of Nazi Germany and the fascist collaborationists of the Italian Social Republic during the Second World War in Italy from 1943 to 1945. As a diverse anti-fascist movement and organisation, the Resistenza opposed Nazi Germany, as well as Nazi Germany's Italian puppet state regime, the Italian Social Republic, which the Germans created following the Nazi German invasion and military occupation of Italy by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS from 8 September 1943 until 25 April 1945.
The 9th SS Panzer Division "Hohenstaufen" was a Waffen-SS armoured division of Nazi Germany during World War II. It participated in battles on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. The division was activated in December 1942. Many of the men of the division were young German conscripts, with a cadre of NCOs and staff from the SS Division Leibstandarte and other Waffen SS divisions. Hohenstaufen took part in the relief of German forces in the Kamenets-Podolsky pocket, the Normandy battles, Operation Market Garden, the Ardennes Offensive and Operation Spring Awakening. The division surrendered to the United States Army on 8 May 1945, at Steyr.
The 34th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division "Landstorm Nederland" was a division in the Waffen-SS of Nazi Germany during World War II. It was formed by converting the SS Volunteer Brigade Landstorm Nederland into a division. It was composed of volunteers of Dutch background and saw action on the Western Front, but its strength never reached more than a brigade.
The Wola massacre was the systematic killing of between 40,000 and 50,000 Poles in the Wola neighbourhood of the Polish capital city, Warsaw, by the Waffen-SS and fellow Axis collaborators in the Azerbaijani Legion, as well as the mostly-Russian RONA forces, which took place from 5 to 12 August 1944. The massacre was ordered by Heinrich Himmler, who directed to kill "anything that moves" to stop the Warsaw Uprising soon after it began.
The Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II can be mainly characterized as non-violent. The primary organizers were the Communist Party, churches, and independent groups. Over 300,000 people were hidden from German authorities in the autumn of 1944 by 60,000 to 200,000 illegal landlords and caretakers. These activities were tolerated knowingly by some one million people, including a few individuals among German occupiers and military.
Johann Baptist Albin Rauter was a high-ranking Austrian-born SS functionary and war criminal during the Nazi era. He was the highest SS and Police Leader in the occupied Netherlands and therefore the leading security and police officer there during the period of 1940–1945. Rauter reported directly to the Nazi SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, and also to the Nazi governor of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. After World War II, he was convicted in the Netherlands of crimes against humanity and executed by firing squad.
Hoenderloo is a Dutch village located south west of the city of Apeldoorn. Most of the village is part of the municipality of Apeldoorn, but a small part belongs to the municipality of Ede, among which the hamlet Hoog Baarlo.
Operation Silbertanne was the codename of a series of executions that were committed between September 1943 and September 1944 during the German occupation of the Netherlands. The executions were carried out by a death squad composed of Dutch members of the SS and Dutch veterans of the Eastern Front.
The Putten raid was a civilian raid conducted by Nazi Germany in occupied Netherlands during the Second World War. On 1 October 1944, a total of 602 men – almost the entire male population of the village – were taken from Putten, in the central Netherlands, and deported to various concentration camps inside Germany. Only 48 returned at the end of the war. The raid was carried out as a reprisal for a Dutch resistance attack on a vehicle carrying personnel from the Wehrmacht.
Dr. Gerrit Willem Kastein was a Dutch communist, neurologist and resistance fighter and leader during World War II.
Andries Jan Pieters was a Dutch war criminal and, together with Artur Albrecht, was one of the last two people to be executed in the Netherlands. Pieters served as a volunteer for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. When he was wounded he returned to the Netherlands and in the final months of World War II he led a SS commando in the Netherlands, which tortured and executed resistance members and others.
The Chortiatis Massacre was a violent reprisal by the Greek collaborationist Security Battalions and German army troops during the Axis Occupation of Greece. On 2 September 1944, a platoon of Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) fighters ambushed a government water supply column outside Chortiatis village. Several hours later an Axis penal expedition into the area led to the destruction of the village and the parallel execution of 146 of its citizens, most of whom were women and children.
The Battle of Nijmegen, also known as the Liberation of Nijmegen, occurred from 17 to 20 September 1944, as part of Operation Market Garden during World War II.
Erich Isselhorst was a German war criminal and Schutzstaffel (SS) member before and during World War II.
The Normandy massacres were a series of killings in-which approximately 156 Canadian and two British prisoners of war (POWs) were murdered by soldiers of the 12th SS Panzer Division during the Battle of Normandy in World War II. The majority of the murders occurred within the first ten days of the Allied invasion of France. The killings ranged in scale from spontaneous murders of individual POWs, to premeditated mass executions. Colonel Kurt Meyer, a commander in the 12th SS Panzer Division, was the only perpetrator charged for his role in the atrocities.
