Among American WWII veterans who admitted to having committed war crimes was former
Mafia hitman Frank Sheeran. In interviews with his biographer Charles Brandt, Sheeran recalled his war service with the
Thunderbird Division as the time when he first developed a callousness to the taking of human life.
By his own admission, Sheeran participated in numerous massacres and summary executions of German POWs, acts which violated the
Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the
1929 Geneva Convention on POWs. In his interviews with Brandt, Sheeran divided such massacres into four different categories.
1. Revenge killings in the heat of battle. Sheeran told Brandt that, when a German soldier had just killed his close friends and then tried to surrender, he would often "send him to hell, too." He described often witnessing similar behavior by fellow
GIs.
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2. Orders from unit commanders during a mission. When describing his first murder for organized crime, Sheeran recalled: "It was just like when an officer would tell you to take a couple of German prisoners back behind the line and for you to 'hurry back'. You did what you had to do."
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3. The
Dachau massacre and other reprisal killings of concentration camp guards and trustee inmates.
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4. Calculated attempts to dehumanize and degrade German POWs. While Sheeran's unit was climbing the
Harz Mountains, they came upon a
Wehrmacht mule train carrying food and drink up the mountainside. The female cooks were first allowed to leave unmolested, then Sheeran and his fellow GIs "ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste." Then the Wehrmacht mule drivers were given shovels and ordered to "dig their own shallow graves." Sheeran later joked that they did so without complaint, likely hoping that he and his buddies would change their minds. But the mule drivers were shot and buried in the holes they had dug. Sheeran explained that by then, "I had no hesitation in doing what I had to do."
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No Atmos on DoT though which was a bit of a letdown.