Montgomery Ordered German Child Soldiers Executed — Until Canadian Soldiers Did the UNTHINKABLE
April 1945 was supposed to be the end.
Across northwest Germany, the Third Reich was collapsing in slow, violent spasms. The trees were turning green again, but the ground beneath them was cratered, burned, and littered with bodies no one had time to bury. Everyone knew the war was lost for Germany. What no one knew was how much cruelty could still be squeezed out of its final days.
That was when the order came down.
From the headquarters of Bernard Montgomery, hero of El Alamein and one of the most celebrated Allied commanders of the war, a directive filtered through the chain of command that stunned even hardened veterans: captured German child soldiers were not to be detained. They were to be executed.
Not questioned.
Not transferred.
Not processed.
Shot.
CHILDREN WITH WEAPONS
By the spring of 1945, the German army no longer resembled an army.
The front lines were defended by old men from the Volkssturm, teenage girls manning anti-aircraft guns, and boys from the Hitler Youth—some barely twelve years old—handed Panzerfausts and told to stop Allied tanks or die trying.
And some of them did.
Canadian soldiers were being killed by children.
A twelve-year-old with an anti-tank weapon could destroy a Sherman just as easily as a trained adult. A fourteen-year-old sniper’s bullet was just as fatal. For men who had survived Sicily, Normandy, and the Scheldt, sympathy was running thin.
Montgomery’s reasoning was brutally simple: these boys were armed combatants. They had killed Allied troops. Under the laws of war, they were enemy soldiers.
And enemy soldiers, in his view, could be executed.
“THE MEN WHO HAD TO DO IT WERE CANADIANS”
The problem wasn’t the order itself.
The problem was who had to carry it out.
The responsibility fell on the Canadian First Army, units like the Regina Rifles and the Royal Winnipeg Rifles—men from prairie towns, farm boys from Saskatchewan and Manitoba who had grown up hunting deer, not executing children.
They had enlisted to fight Nazis.
Not to line up terrified boys in oversized uniforms and shoot them in the head.
The order reached battalion commanders. Then company officers. Then platoon leaders.
And something rare happened.
Not mutiny.
Not rebellion.
A moral paralysis.
“I COULDN’T LOOK AT THEM AND PULL THE TRIGGER”
Private James Henderson of the Regina Rifles would later recall the first captured Hitler Youth soldier he saw.
The boy was thirteen. His uniform hung off his thin frame. His hands were on his head as Canadians searched him for weapons. Henderson thought of his own son back home in Regina—eight years old, missing his front teeth.
He remembered thinking: In five years, that could be my boy.
That night, when Henderson heard about the execution order, he didn’t sleep.
Neither did his officers.
THE OFFICER WHO STALLED
Lieutenant Colonel James Stone, commanding a battalion of the Regina Rifles, read the order three times.
Stone was no idealist. He had fought since Sicily. He had sent men into situations he knew would kill some of them. But this was different.
This wasn’t combat.
This was execution.
Stone did something that could have ended his career—or his life.
He delayed.
He told his company commanders that clarification was needed. That there might be a misunderstanding. That no action was to be taken until further orders arrived.
It was a lie. And everyone knew it.
But it bought time.
CHILDREN WAITING TO DIE
As the Canadian advance continued, captured German child soldiers piled up.
Some were pulled from foxholes, shaking with cold and fear. Others were found hiding in barns, still clutching rifles. A few surrendered voluntarily, walking toward Canadian lines with their hands raised, having finally realized the propaganda about Allied brutality was a lie.
They expected torture.
They expected death.
Instead, they were given food. Blankets. Sometimes cigarettes—absurd, until you remembered many of these “children” were fifteen or sixteen in 1945.
Canadian guards talked to them.
One soldier, Private Thomas Morrison from Winnipeg, spoke with a fourteen-year-old named Klaus from Hamburg. Klaus’s father was dead on the Eastern Front. His mother killed in a bombing raid. His sister evacuated somewhere unknown.
“Why did you keep fighting?” Morrison asked.
Klaus looked at him like he was an idiot.
“Because the SS said they’d shoot us if we ran,” he replied. “Because I was hungry. Because what else was I supposed to do?”
That answer spread through the Canadian ranks like a virus.
These weren’t fanatics.
They were children who had been cornered.
THE ORDER THAT WOULD NOT BE OBEYED
Montgomery’s headquarters grew impatient.
Why were there no reports of executions?
Division commanders applied pressure. Battalion commanders passed it down. Finally, the order landed directly on the desk of Captain Michael Fitzgerald of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles.
No more delays.
No more excuses.
Five captured Hitler Youth soldiers were to be executed immediately.
Fitzgerald was thirty. Before the war, he had been a high school teacher in Winnipeg. He had taught children not much older than the boys he was now ordered to kill.
He gathered his senior non-commissioned officers.
“I’m not doing it,” one sergeant said flatly.
Another nodded.
Then another.
None of them would shoot children.
Neither would Fitzgerald.
But open refusal would mean court-martial—and probably death—for him and his men. And the children would simply be killed by someone else.
So Fitzgerald chose deception.
THE “EXECUTION” THAT SAVED LIVES
The five German boys were taken to a secluded area.
Canadian soldiers surrounded them. Rifles were raised. To any observer, it looked like an execution detail.
The boys were screaming. Crying. Praying.
Then Fitzgerald gave the order.
The rifles fired.
Into the air.
The prisoners were shoved to the ground and told not to move. Afterward, they were quietly relocated, mixed in with adult German POWs, and their paperwork altered to list them as regular Wehrmacht soldiers.
Fitzgerald filed a report stating the executions had been carried out.
On paper, the order was obeyed.
In reality, five children were alive.
If discovered, Fitzgerald could have been shot.
Every man involved agreed to keep the secret.
A QUIET CANADIAN REBELLION
Word spread—not officially, but through the invisible channels that exist in every army.
Other officers began doing the same thing.
Fake executions.
Delayed paperwork.
Prisoners “misclassified.”
Transfers between units that ensured no one could track responsibility.
Montgomery’s order was being followed on paper only.
A few executions did happen—war is never clean—but they were rare.
The vast majority of Canadian units found ways around the order.
They chose humanity.
WHEN MONTGOMERY REALIZED THE TRUTH
Montgomery eventually noticed the numbers didn’t add up.
But by then, Germany was weeks from surrender.
Court-martialing dozens of officers for refusing to execute children would have been a political and moral disaster. So the matter quietly disappeared.
It never appeared in Montgomery’s memoirs.
It barely surfaced in official histories.
But it lived on in letters, diaries, and whispered stories between veterans.
THE CHILDREN WHO LIVED
Most of the German children survived the war.
They returned to destroyed cities. Dead families. A country that had to rebuild from moral and physical ruin.
Klaus, the boy from Hamburg, found his sister in a displaced persons camp. He became a carpenter. In 1962, he wrote to the Canadian War Museum, trying to find the soldier who had shown him kindness.
Private Morrison never saw the letter. He died in a car accident in 1958.
But his family did.
The letter still exists.
THE ORDER THAT FAILED
Montgomery is remembered as a brilliant commander—and he was.
But this part of his legacy remains buried because it complicates the story.
He ordered something indefensible.
And ordinary Canadian soldiers refused.
Not with speeches.
Not with heroics.
But with paperwork, silence, and shared moral courage.
One veteran later said it best:
“They were kids. What were we supposed to do—shoot them? I didn’t fight the war to become a murderer.”
In April 1945, when cruelty was easy and obedience expected, Canadian soldiers chose to disobey.
Because some orders should never be followed.
And because sometimes, the most powerful act in war is simply refusing to become a monster.
