Malmedy massacre trial

General Josiah Dalby (with head turned) presides over the Malmedy massacre trial at Dachau

The Malmedy massacre trial (U.S. vs. Valentin Bersin, et al.) was held in May–July 1946 in the former Dachau concentration camp to try the German Waffen-SS soldiers accused of the Malmedy massacre of 17 December 1944. The highest-ranking defendant was the former Waffen-SS general Sepp Dietrich.

Malmedy massacre[]

The Malmedy massacre (17 Dec 1944) was a series of war crimes committed by the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper against American prisoners of war and Belgian civilians during the Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945). The Waffen-SS massacre of 84 U.S. Army POWs near Baugnez was the primary subject of the war-crime trial, which was one of a series of war crimes that the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper committed between mid-December 1944 and mid-January 1945.^[1] In the course of their massacres, the Waffen-SS murdered POWs with close-range gunshots to the head; the actual number of dead was 362 American POWs and 111 Belgian civilians.^[1]

The corpses of the U.S. soldiers murdered by the Waffen-SS in the Malmedy massacre were covered and preserved with snow until Allied forces recaptured the area in January 1945.

The U.S. soldiers who survived the Malmedy massacre said that on 17 December 1944, in the vicinity of Baugnez, the armored advance of the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper surprised approximately 120 U.S. Army soldiers from the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion (FAOB) who surrendered after a brief battle.^[2][3] The Waffen-SS then assembled their U.S. POWs in a field near the Baugnez crossroads, and then used machine guns to kill them.^[2][3]

The SS machine gun fire alerted and panicked the U.S. Army POWs; some soldiers fled the killing field, other soldiers were killed where they stood; and other soldiers ran to and hid in a café at the Baugnez crossroads, which the Waffen-SS soldiers set afire, and then shot dead every U.S. soldier who tried to escape the burning building.^[3] Meanwhile, at the killing field, the Waffen-SS soldiers walked among the American corpses to find and kill any G.I. pretending to be dead.^[3][4] Among the 84 murdered soldiers, many corpses had head-shot wounds consistent with a massacre than with wounds suffered in self-defense or with wounds suffered while escaping summary execution by machine gun.^[5]

On 13 January 1945, the U.S. Army secured the crossroads at Baugnez where the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper had massacred their U.S. Army POWs. The corpses of the soldiers of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion were recovered on 14–15 January 1945; the winter weather preserved the flesh and the wounds.^[6] The autopsies revealed that approximately twenty of the murdered American soldiers had close-range gunshot wounds to the head — the coup de grâce that ends the life of a fatally-wounded soldier.^[5] The head-shot wounds were additional to the gunshot wounds made by the machine guns of the initial gunfire of the massacre. Twenty other soldier corpses showed small-calibre gunshot wounds to the head, without powder-burn residue;^[5] 10 corpses had blunt-trauma injuries, likely from having been butt-stroked to death;^[5] some corpses showed a single gunshot wound, either to the temple or behind the ear.^[7] U.S. Army investigators established that most of the G.I. corpses were in a very small area, which location suggested that the Waffen-SS had assembled and summarily executed their U.S. POWs as quickly as possible after capture.^[8] Later, under custody of the U.S. Army, Waffen-SS POWs testified that some American POWs had tried to escape the shootings; other Waffen-SS POWs said that some of the American POWs had recovered their own weapons, and then fired upon Waffen-SS soldiers enroute to Lignéville.^[4][9]

Trial proceedings[]

Joachim Peiper and interpreter at Malmedy Trials 1946

The trial – Case Number 6-24 (US vs. Valentin Bersin et al.) – was one of the Dachau Trials, which took place from 16 May 1946 to 16 July 1946. The defendants appeared before a military court of senior American commissioned officers. The defendants were 73 former members of the Waffen-SS, mostly from the SS Division Leibstandarte. Highest in rank were SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, commander of the 6th Panzer Army, his chief of staff, SS-Brigadeführer Fritz Krämer, SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Priess, commander of the I SS Panzer Corps and SS-Standartenführer Joachim Peiper, commander of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment – the core element of Kampfgruppe Peiper, which conducted the massacre.

The counts of indictment related to the massacre of more than three hundred American prisoners of war "in the vicinity of Malmedy, Honsfeld, Büllingen, Ligneuville, Stoumont, La Gleize, Cheneux, Petit Thier, Trois Ponts, Stavelot, Wanne and Lutrebois", between 16 December 1944 and 13 January 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge, as well as the massacre of about one hundred Belgian civilians in the vicinity of Stavelot.^[10] The defense was directed by Colonel Jr., a lawyer from Atlanta, assisted by other American and German lawyers. The prosecution was led by Colonel .

Six defendants, including Peiper, complained to the court that they had been victims of physical violence or threats of violence meant to force them to provide extrajudicial confessions.^[10] The defendants were invited to confirm the statements they had made under oath.^[10] Of the nine who testified, three had claimed mistreatment they had suffered.^[11] For most of the accused, the defense argued that they either had not participated, or had done so by obeying a superior's orders.^[6] The court ruled that all but one of the defendants were guilty in some degree. Forty-three were sentenced to death, including Peiper; the rest were sentenced to from ten years to life in prison. Dietrich received a life sentence and Priess 20 years imprisonment.

Verdicts[]

On 16 July 1946 the verdict was delivered on 73 members of the Kampfgruppe Peiper.

• 43 sentenced to death by hanging, including Peiper.^[12] Peiper's sentence was commuted to 35 years in 1954, and he was released in December 1956.^[13]
• 22 sentenced to life imprisonment
• 2 sentenced to 20 years imprisonment
• 1 sentenced to 15 years
• 5 sentenced to 10 years

Review procedure[]

Pursuant to procedure, an in-house review was undertaken by the American Occupation Army in Germany; the trial was carefully examined by a deputy judge. Colonel Everett was convinced that a fair trial had not been granted to the defendants: in addition to alleged mock trials, he claimed that "to extort confessions, U.S. prosecution teams 'had kept the German defendants in dark, solitary confinement at near starvation rations up to six months; had applied various forms of torture, including the driving of burning matches under the prisoners' fingernails; had administered beatings which resulted in broken jaws and arms and permanently injured testicles'."^[14] These allegations of torture were later proved false.^[15]

The Simpson Commission[]

The turmoil raised by this case caused the Secretary of the Army, Kenneth Royall, to create a commission chaired by Judge of Texas to investigate. Apparently,^{[according to whom?]} the Commission was interested not only in the facts of the Malmedy massacre trial, but also had to deal with other cases judged by the International Military Tribunals in Europe.^{[example needed]}

The commission supported Everett's accusations regarding mock trials^[specify] and neither disputed nor denied his charges of torture of the defendants.^[14] The Commission expressed the opinion that the pre-trial investigation had not been properly conducted and that the members felt that no death sentence should be executed where such a doubt existed.^[16] One of the members of the commission, Judge of Pennsylvania, made several public statements alleging that physical violence had been inflicted on the accused. The anti-communist author Freda Utley wrote “All but two of the Germans in the 139 cases we investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators.”^[17]

Furthermore, under his signature, an article denouncing the conditions under which the assumed guilt of Malmedy defendants and of other questionable cases was going to be published in February 1949 with the assistance of the National Council for Prevention of War.^[18] He refused to commute the six remaining death sentences, including Peiper's, but the executions were postponed.

The Senate Subcommittee and Sen. Joseph McCarthy[]

Eventually, the United States Senate decided to investigate. Ultimately, the case was entrusted to the Committee on Armed Services over the Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments. The investigation was entrusted to a subcommittee of three senators chaired by Raymond E. Baldwin. The subcommittee was set up on 29 March 1949. Its members went to Germany and during its hearings, the commission heard from no fewer than 108 witnesses.^{[citation needed]}

Joseph McCarthy had obtained from the subcommittee's chairman authorization to attend the hearings. McCarthy's state, Wisconsin, had a large population of German heritage, spurring allegations that McCarthy was politically motivated in his work on behalf of the Malmedy defendants.^[19] He used an aggressive questioning style during the proceedings.^[20] McCarthy's actions further inflamed a split between the American Legion, which took a hardline position after Malmedy and generally supported upholding the death sentences, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who supported more lenient penalties for the Waffen-SS members under Peiper.^[21] The last clash took place in May 1949 when he asked that Lieutenant Perl to be given a lie detection test. Since this had been rejected by Baldwin, McCarthy left the session claiming that Baldwin was trying to whitewash the American military.^[22]

While on the one hand McCarthy was far from impartial, two of the members of the three-man subcommittee, the chairman Senator Raymond Baldwin and Senator Lester Hunt have been accused by historian David Oshinsky of being "determined to exonerate the Army at all costs".^[23] Oshinsky also alleges that the third member of the committee, Senator Estes Kefauver, displayed a lack of interest in the case, attending only two of the first fifteen hearings.^[24] McCarthy sought to denounce Baldwin in front of the whole Senate,^{[according to whom?]} but his efforts were repudiated by the Commission on Armed Forces, which clearly showed its support for Baldwin^[how?] and eventually adopted the report of the subcommittee.^{[citation needed]}

The subcommittee report[]

In its report, the subcommittee rejected the most serious charges, including beatings, torture, mock executions and starvation of the defendants.^[15] In addition, the subcommittee determined that commutations of sentences pronounced by General Clay had occurred because of the U.S. Army's recognition that procedural irregularities could have occurred during the trial.^[15] The commission did not exonerate the defendants or absolve them of guilt and it endorsed the conclusions General Clay issued in the particular case of Lieutenant Christ. In summary, Clay had written that "he was personally convinced of the culpability of Lieutenant Christ and, that for this reason his death sentence was fully justified. But, to apply this sentence would be equivalent accepting a bad administration of justice, which led [him], not without reserve, to commute the death penalty to life imprisonment".^[25]

Approximately sixteen months after the end of the trial, almost all the defendants presented affidavits repudiating their former confessions and alleging aggravated duress of all types.^[26]

See also[]

• Nuremberg Trials
• Biscari Massacre

Notes[]

Sources[]

• Smelser, Ronald; Davies, Edward J. (2008). The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet war in American popular culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521833653.
• Westemeier, Jens (2007). Joachim Peiper: A Biography of Himmler's SS Commander. Schiffer Publications. ISBN 978-0-7643-2659-2.

Further reading[]

• Steven P. Remy, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), x, 342 pp.

External links[]

• Dachau Trial, Review and Recommendations of the Deputy Judge Advocate, Jewish Virtual Library
• Malmedy Massacre Trial, Jewish Virtual Library
• "Clemency", (17 January 1949), Time magazine (registration required)
• Utley, Freda, (November 1954) "Malmedy and McCarthy", Printed in The American Mercury

Coordinates: 48°16′13″N 11°28′05″E / 48.27028°N 11.46806°E / 48.27028; 11.46806