The Utah POW Massacre of Nineteen Forty-Five

On the night of July eighth, nineteen forty-five, a United States Army private walked into a prisoner of war camp near Salina, Utah, opened fire on sleeping men, and killed nine of them before anyone could stop him.

The camp held German prisoners of war, many of them from Rommel's Afrika Korps and captured in North Africa, who had been transferred to the United States to work on farms and in processing plants as labor shortages bit into the American home front. By the summer of nineteen forty-five, the war in Europe was already over, and many of these men had been working peacefully alongside American civilians for months.

Private Clarence Bertucci, a Louisiana-born soldier assigned to guard duty at the camp, opened fire from a guard tower with a machine gun just after midnight. He opened fire in the darkness, spraying bullets through the sleeping quarters. Nine prisoners were killed and nineteen more wounded before guards overpowered Bertucci.

The Army's investigation concluded that Bertucci was mentally ill, suffering from what a later era would call psychosis. Rather than face court-martial, he was declared mentally unfit and sent to a military hospital, avoiding criminal prosecution altogether.

The massacre drew little public attention at the time. The war in Europe had ended in May; the war in the Pacific was still consuming the nation's attention; and the deaths of enemy prisoners, even ones who had been model captives, did not make front-page news.

For decades the event was almost entirely forgotten. Descendants of the victims and historians eventually pushed for formal recognition of what happened here. A memorial now marks the site in Salina. It remains one of the worst atrocities committed against prisoners of war on American soil.