Rüsselsheim massacre

The Rüsselsheim massacre was a war crime that involved the lynching and killing of six American airmen by townspeople of Rüsselsheim during World War II.

The incident happened on August 26, 1944, two days after a Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber of the United States Army Air Forces was shot down by heavy anti-aircraft fire over Hanover. All nine crew members of the aircraft (2nd Lt. Norman J. Rogers, Jr., pilot; 2nd Lt. John N. Sekul, copilot; F/O Haigus Tufenkjian, navigator and bombardier; Sgt. William A. Adams, nose gunner, S/Sgt. Forrest W. Brininstool, top turret gunner and flight engineer; S/Sgt. Thomas D. Williams Jr., radio operator; Sgt. William A. Dumont, belly gunner; Sgt. Sidney E. Brown, tail gunner; Sgt. Elmore L. Austin, waist gunner) parachuted to the ground, where they were captured and held by German Luftwaffe personnel. Unable to transfer the downed aircrewmen to a prisoner-of-war camp due to the train tracks being heavily damaged by bombing the night before, they forced the Americans to march through the devastated town of Rüsselsheim to catch another train. The townspeople, already angered by damage caused to their town by a Canadian bombing raid the previous night on the Opel automobile factory, which was manufacturing airplane parts during the war, attacked the unarmed crew members with rocks, hammers, sticks, and shovels, killing six of them.