On Sunday, April 29, 1945, Polish prisoners of war were assembling on the playground at Murnau Oflag VII-A, north of the town of Murnau on the shores of Lake Staver in Bavaria.
The camp was created in September 1939 to house captured Polish officers, and by early 1945 more than 5,000 people were being held.
Sporadic gunshots came from the direction of Munich in the distance. Soon an American plane appeared overhead, hovering above the assembly square, circling back and forth and swinging its wings several times in an attempt to attract the attention of the prisoners of war.
On the orders of the German commander of the camp that afternoon, about 40 German guards laid down their weapons and withdrew from the camp watchtower. At about 15:00, a group of armored vehicles appeared on the road leading to the camp - this was the vanguard tank unit of the US 12th Panzer Division. Several daring Polish prisoners even climbed onto the fence to cheer.
Suddenly, a small convoy of SS soldiers was also coming towards the camp from the town of Murnau. The two men soon met outside the front gate of the camp, and the Germans in the car did not expect to meet the Americans so quickly, and the SS officer in the first car in the rush opened fire with machine guns, and his companions jumped out of the car.
The Americans unceremoniously returned fire with onboard machine guns, and the two men in the first car were killed on the spot. The passengers of the second sedan suffered the same fate.
The remaining German cars turned around and fled into the town, and two American tanks immediately pursued. Another tank entered the camp from the main entrance and drove straight to the square.
The Polish prisoners of war gathered around excitedly, and their representatives addressed the Americans in English. The commander of the American tank shook his head and answered in Polish. "My name is Szefchik, and we are here to liberate you, --- he is also a Polish immigrant from the United States!
Later, while the U.S. army was cleaning up the bodies at the scene, it was found that one of the people killed in the second vehicle was a senior SS officer, SS brigade commander and SS Major General Ernst Fick.
Fick was a full-fledged Nazi who served as a political instructor at the SS Officers' School before the war and then transferred to the Viking Artillery Regiment and served on the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1942, he was transferred to the SS Ideological Training Camp in Lorraine, France, where he was responsible for training foreign SS volunteers. In January 1944 he became Chief Inspector of Ideological Education of the SS and police (Inspekteur für die weltanschauliche Erziehung der SS und Polizei), and at the same time head of the Ideological Education Division of the SS Central General Directorate
The Americans claimed to have found a secret letter signed by SS leader Heinrich Himmler from his briefcase: ordering the killing of all 5,000 Polish prisoner-of-war officers held here! The Americans speculated that Fick might have assembled his men and horses and planned to gather the prisoners of war in the square and then shoot them all with machine guns from the guard tower.
But the authenticity of the secret letter was later called into doubt, as Himmler had been secretly negotiating peace with Count Falk Bernadotte, vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, since April 20, and had even promised the latter the release of Polish prisoners in a vain attempt to exonerate himself. So it seems a little unreasonable to do this kind of thing at this juncture to leave a handle on yourself.
From the photos, there are no machine guns in the car as the Americans said, and the passengers in the two cars may only carry pistols, and somehow they will take the initiative to fire at the US tanks without measuring their own strength, and lose their lives in vain.