Sometime in early April 1945 as Allied forces approached the Mittelwerk facilities—where V2 rockets were being produced—the slave laborers from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp were force-marched from the western Harz by a collection of guards drawn from the military, the Hitler Youth, and the "Volkssturm". Approximately 40 kilometers north of Magdeburg in the village of Mieste, this motley assemblage of guards locked a thousand of these prisoners in a barn and burned them alive at the instruction of a local Nazi Party leader; this event came to be known as the Gardelegen massacre. At the town of Celle in Lower Saxony around the same time, members of the SS, SA, local police, Hitler Youth, and "Volkssturm" were aided by locals to "hunt down and shoot" prisoners who had fled into the local woodland after their transport train was bombed.