Quoting Raffael Scheck’s Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940, page 39:

The [Fascists] then led eight white officers and sixty to seventy Tirailleurs Sénégalais down the road to Chères, the next village. Near a field where two tanks were parked, the officers had to lie down. Meanwhile, the [Fascists] ordered the Tirailleurs to assemble with raised hands in the field with the tanks and ordered them to start running, as if attempting to escape. The two tanks then fired their machine guns and cannons at the fleeing black soldiers while driving over the wounded and dead.59

Close to fifty Tirailleurs were murdered in what an observer described as a Dantesque “vision of horror.”60 A [Fascist] deliberately wounded the white French commander with a pistol shot, but the other officers were not hurt. In the days that followed, some surviving Tirailleurs were found in the houses of Chasselay and the surrounding fields and orchards.

[…]

Some sources claim that the tanks deliberately ran back and forth over the bodies, but witnesses closer to the events state that the tanks drove over the bodies while in pursuit of the fleeing Tirailleurs without apparent intention to crush them. For testimonies, see Archives départementales de Lyon, folders 3808 W 879 (Chasselay) and 437 W 173. The most detailed and reliable witness reports are by Marcel Requier, one of the surviving officers, and by Raymond Murard, a resident of Chasselay who helped bury the corpses the next day.

(Emphasis added.)

Similarly, the Fascists in Libya sometimes ran tanks over rebels.


Events that happened today (September 12):

1882: Ion Agârbiceanu, fascist priest, made the mistake of existing.
1938: Adolf Schicklgruber demanded autonomy and self‐determination for the Germans of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region.
1942: An Axis submarine torpedoed the RMS Laconia off the coast of West Africa, sinking it and massacring its civilians, Allied soldiers and Italian POWs. Meanwhile, on the first day of the Battle of Edson’s Ridge during the Guadalcanal Campaign the Imperial Japanese Army assaulted the U.S. Marines protecting Henderson Field.
1943: Otto Skorzeny’s commando forces rescued Benito Mussolini from his house arrest. 1944: The liberation of Yugoslavia from Axis occupation continued, and Bajina Bašta in western Serbia was among the liberated cities. 1945: Korean communists proclaimed the People’s Republic of Korea, bringing an end to Axis rule over Korea. Coincidentally, the Axis field marshal Hajime Sugiyama ended his own life.
1953: Hugo Schmeisser, Axis arms designer, expired.
1956: Count Sándor Ágost Dénes Festetics de Tolna, pro‐Reich Zionist, dropped dead.

  • NeelixBiederman [he/him]
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    28 months ago

    I’ve heard stories of the eastern front where the mud made areas impassable, so the Nazis ordered captured Soviet troops to lay down in the mud, where they were sprayed with water, which froze, and their bodies were then used as traction for tanks to cross the mud. Guess I don’t know if it happened for sure, but probably

    stalin-point barbara-pit pit

    • @Magos_Galactose
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      18 months ago

      That seem too much of a logistical demand for the German of that time.