At the beginning of this week, news reports and satellite images showed what looked to be a Russian atrocities committed in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. Our own Jay Nordlinger rightly called for a full investigation and documentation of these crimes. This is important not only for justice, but to properly establish guilt.
Last night the New York Times shared a video appearing to show Ukrainian soldiers executing bound and bleeding Russian soldiers. The immediate reactions I’ve seen are that this is understandable. The Russians are invading. Hadn’t Russian soldiers just previously raped and murdered Ukrainians? It’s important to think through these issues soberly.
Yes, the Russians are the invaders. But as of now we don’t know from the video alone that these executed prisoners had just committed the barbarities that would make a retaliatory war crime akin to a crime of passion.
My father-in-law’s father served in the Army’s 157th Infantry Regiment during World War II; the Third Battalion was led by Colonel Felix Sparks, later promoted to brigadier general. This was the unit that cut a bloody swath northward through Europe, from Anzio in Italy to Berlin. One of the soldiers’ final missions was the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. What they found in Dachau was a horror unimaginable. Nothing about it had been tidied up or hidden ahead of the liberation. I have seen the photos that members of the 157th took; they are a portal into the depth of hell. Thousands of bodies, many women and starved children, mutilated, and stacked “like cordwood,”according to their accounts.
One of the most notable moments in the remarkable career of Sparks was his imposition of discipline on his soldiers as some of them were understandably losing control of their emotions and imposing rough justice on the hundreds of German guards and civilians near the camp.
Lieutenant William Walsh of the 42nd Battalion was one such man who lost control. He had expected to find a POW camp like ones he had seen in upstate New York. Instead he found railcars full of corpses. He separated German SS soldiers into a coal yard and called for a machine gun; his charges opened fire, killing a number of them. The gunfire attracted the attention of Colonel Sparks, who ran over. You can see a photograph of him firing his pistol while attempting to restore order here.
From his account:
As I watched, about fifty German troops were brought in from various directions. A machine gun squad from I company was guarding the prisoners. After watching for a few minutes, I started for the confinement area. After I had walked away for a short distance, I hear the machine gun guarding the prisoners open fire. I immediately ran back to the gun and kicked the gunner off the gun with my boot. I then grabbed him by the collar and said: “what the hell are you doing?” He was a young private about 19 years old and was crying hysterically. His reply to me was: “Colonel, they were trying to get away.” I doubt that they were, but in any event he killed about twelve of the prisoners and wounded several more. I placed a non-com on the gun, and headed toward the confinement area.
By Sparks’s own account it took about 30 minutes to quell the disorder breaking out in American ranks, a disorder inspired by the horror they saw and what Sparks called the “chilling roar” beginning to come from the camp’s prisoners as the fact of their forthcoming liberation dawned on them. In the months after the war, there were rumors that the Americans had indeed massacred hundreds of German soldiers that day. But, in the affray and in those first 30 minutes, the number of Germans killed in fighting, or while trying to escape imprisonment by the Americans, was much lower. Some German SS men were murdered by prisoners.
These moments were duly investigated by the U.S. military. American soldiers were variously charged for firing their weapons on prisoners and with dereliction of duty for refusing medical care to a dying German concentration camp guard. And yes, in the end, the charges were dismissed on grounds similar to those cited to defend a crime of passion. Colonel Charles Decker, acting as judge, concluded: “In the light of the conditions which greeted the eyes of the first combat troops, it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken.”
Sparks’s intervention to stop an American slaughter of the SS — however understandable such a reprisal would have been — was brave, wise, and noble. He first sought to reestablish order rather than the meting out of justice. Order meant meeting the immediate priority: getting food and medical assistance for the thousands of prisoners in the camp. He and the 157th also set their priority as burying the dead — the thousands of corpses in the camp itself. For this task, they drafted the residents of Dachau.
Sparks eventually moved to Colorado, the home state of most of his subordinates. And it was his bravery that very day that allowed him to serve time and again as a valuable eyewitness against those who tried to deny the horror of Shoah. He could not have done so with such credibility if he had allowed war crimes to be committed that day.