‘Terror fliers’

was Yugoslavia.

When they told him to start walking, he obeyed.

“I was sure they were going to shoot me in the back,” he says.

He had no way of knowing that four crewmates had met a worse fate less than four miles away. years of research to complete the rest of the picture.

By the time Moore had begun his walk through the woods, it turns out, not three but four of the comrades he hoped had found sanctuary were dead, victims of a program conceived by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and authorized by Hitler.

Interviews with witnesses confirmed that Sgt. Levi Morrow of Emory, Texas; Sgt. Charles Westbrook of Mississippi.; Sgt. Steven Cudrak of Ford City, Pa.; and Cpl. Harold Brocious of Dayton, Pa., had all landed about three and a half miles south of Moore.

The sight of their chutes had drawn the attention of local residents.

Each was surrounded by a crowd of civilians and shot at point-blank range by a Nazi SS officer — at least one man as he begged for his life.

All ended up in a pile of corpses at a place called Strassgang — the railroad crossing where Hoffmann would find the stone.

Under the Geneva Conventions, downed airmen are to be treated as combatants and, if captured, protected as prisoners of war.

No one knows who placed the stone there, or wrote its slightly inaccurate inscription.

But Hoffmann has learned it has been vandalized, removed and returned several times since the end of the war. Seventy-two years later, he, Goll and a team of about 40 high school students in Graz have designed a statelier version, one that would include the name, photo and story of each crew member — and, they hope, spark a fuller, more meaningful discussion of the air campaign over Austria in World War II.

It won’t be ready by the ceremony on Monday — the team hopes to raise the funds to complete it by year’s end — but they’ll be on hand at Strassgang to show the crewmen’s photos and read their names aloud at the site.

Officials of the Graz and Austrian governments, the U.S. ambassador to Austria, and members of the Austrian military are scheduled to attend.

“[Our project is] important because for too many years we have ignored the fact

Moore returned to Danbury after the war, having endured captivity in two Nazi prison camps, a 16-mile forced march, and a succession of narrow escapes that somehow always worked out in his favor, all within a six-week span.

On April 29, 1945, just days before Germany would surrender to Allied forces, he was a prisoner at Germany’s largest POW camp, Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, when an armored tank unit attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army shot its way in and liberated the place.

Moore was only feet away when Patton himself rode in, his famous pearl-handled pistol at his side, and gave a speech the Marylander has never forgotten.

“He looked at these thousands of scrawny, dirty, dehydrated prisoners and said, ‘You guys look damn good for what you’ve been through,’ ” Moore says, and laughs.

He moved to Baltimore with Betty Ann and their three children in 1953.

In the years since — working as a salesman, a stockbroker and more — he has become a grandfather to 12, great-grandfather to 14 and great-great-grandfather to three.

Hoffmann details the Nazi orders to kill downed airmen in his book “Fliegerlynchjustiz,” published in 2015.

Goebbels’ aim, he showed, was to create scenes in which civilians appeared to be rising up in spontaneous indignation to take their revenge against the foreign “terror fliers.”

The book details the fates of two other crew members, 2nd Lt. Oscar Ness of Seattle and Staff Sgt. Kenneth Haver of Ohio, both of whom died in the crash.

The bodies of two others, 2nd Lt. Henry Bottoms of Margarettsville, N.C., and Sgt. Carl Ober of Elizabethtown, Pa., were never found.

In the 2016 book “Missing in Action — Failed to Return”, Hoffmann and Goll document the fates of the more than 1,600 Allied airmen who lost their lives when their aircraft went down over Austria during World War II. At least 70 Americans were executed. Austrian defense minister Hans Peter Doskovil hailed the work.

“This is an important new contribution that brings a whole group of victims out of obscurity, commemorating their names in Austria,” he wrote in the foreword. “It shows how important it is to remember as a way of preventing such events from taking place again.”

The Moores met Hoffmann and Goll several years ago when the scholars came to the United States for a reunion of the 484th Bomb ardment Squadron

The Moores came away impressed, Mac says, and continue to follow their work.

“I’ll be thinking of them Monday,” he says.