The Brutal Fate of SS Sappers on the Eastern Front

The Brutal Fate of SS Sappers on the Eastern Front The SS Pioniere were among the most feared engineers on the Eastern Front, laying minefields that maimed and killed Soviet soldiers by the thousands. But when Soviet forces broke through German lines in 1943 and 1944, they sometimes captured the men responsible and for SS sappers taken beside their own work, the Geneva Convention was the least of their concerns. This is the story of what happened when the architects of those killing fields were marched back into them at gunpoint, ordered to disarm their own creations with frozen hands in sub-zero temperatures, and forced to confront the most brutal irony of the Eastern Front: that the precision which made them effective was now the only thing that might keep them alive.