1945 Utah prisoner of war massacre

On the night of July 7–8, 1945, Private Clarence Vincent Bertucci, an American soldier on guard duty at Camp Salina, a small prisoner-of-war camp in Salina, Utah, opened fire on tents housing sleeping German prisoners of war. Camp Salina held roughly 250 German prisoners, most from the Afrika Korps, who had been sent to the area to help with the sugar beet and produce harvest. Bertucci had spent the evening drinking and, before returning to camp, told a waitress at a local café that "something exciting is going to happen tonight."

After the midnight changing of the guard, Bertucci waited for the off-going watch to go to sleep, then climbed the guard tower nearest the officers' quarters and loaded the mounted .30-caliber M1917 Browning machine gun. He fired on the camp for approximately fifteen seconds, discharging about 250 rounds and hitting thirty of the camp's forty-three tents before being removed from the tower by another soldier. He reportedly resisted coming down, saying some of the Germans "are still alive" and demanding more ammunition. Six prisoners were killed outright, two died later in Salina's hospital, and one more died five days later in an army hospital, bringing the total to nine dead; nineteen others were wounded. Bertucci was taken into custody without resistance and was found not to have been intoxicated at the time of his arrest.

Bertucci, born in New Orleans in 1921, had joined the Army in 1940 and had a record of disciplinary problems, including two prior courts-martial. He had reportedly expressed hatred toward Germans before the incident, saying he had felt "cheated" out of a chance to kill Germans during his wartime service. After the shooting, he stated plainly that he had hated Germans, so he had killed Germans. An Army investigator, Captain Wayne Owens, concluded Bertucci was sane and recommended court-martial, arguing there was no evidence of intoxication or unfitness for duty. However, after weeks of evaluation at Bushnell Army Hospital in Brigham City, Utah, doctors determined Bertucci was "mentally unbalanced." Military officials forwent a court-martial on grounds of insanity, and he was sent to Mason General Hospital in Brentwood, New York. He died on December 2, 1969.

The nine victims — Otto Bross, Ernst Fuchs, Gottfried Gaag, Georg Liske, Hans Meyer, Adolf Paul, Fritz Stockmann, Walter Vogel, and Friedrich Ritter — were buried with full military honors at Fort Douglas Cemetery on July 12, 1945, with a separate service for Ritter, who died later. Their caskets bore no flags because the Nazi flag had been banned and no replacement German flag yet existed. A German War Memorial was later erected at the cemetery and refurbished in 1988 with funding from the German Air Force. Surviving wounded prisoners were repatriated to Germany once healthy enough to travel; a bilateral agreement limited their eligibility for American compensation to benefits comparable to those for German veterans. A museum on the site of Camp Salina opened to the public on November 12, 2016. The event is described as the largest killing of enemy prisoners of war in the United States during World War II.