The Midnight Massacre: Salina, Utah, 1945

On the night of July eighth, nineteen forty-five, a United States Army private named Clarence Bertucci climbed a guard tower at a prisoner-of-war camp near Salina, Utah, loaded a thirty-caliber Browning machine gun, and opened fire on the sleeping tents below.

Nine German prisoners were killed. Nineteen more were wounded. When guards and officers reached the tower, Bertucci did not resist. When asked why he had done it, he said he had hated Germans, so he had killed Germans.

Camp Salina was a small branch facility attached to Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, established to handle overflow prisoners from the main camp. At the time of the massacre, it held roughly two hundred fifty German soldiers, most of them veterans of the Afrika Korps, the German North Africa campaign. They had been captured in Tunisia in nineteen forty-three and had spent the intervening years as prisoners in the United States, working in agriculture and local industry under the terms of the Geneva Convention.

The date matters: July eighth, nineteen forty-five. The war in Europe had ended on May eighth. The men Bertucci killed were prisoners of a war that was already over. They were awaiting repatriation to Germany.

The Army convened an investigation. A military tribunal found Bertucci not guilty by reason of insanity and committed him to Mason General Hospital in New York. He was never court-martialed in the conventional sense. The German government was notified. The bodies were eventually repatriated.

The event is remembered as the worst massacre at a prisoner-of-war camp in American history. It is largely unknown outside Utah. The site of Camp Salina has no monument. The names of the nine men killed are preserved in German military records and in the accounts of the few survivors who told the story before they died.