Malmedy massacre
The Malmedy massacre was a war crime committed by German troops during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, involving the murder of prisoners of war.
Kampfgruppe Peiper
On December 17 1944, near the hamlet of Baugnez on the height half-way between the town of Malmedy and Ligneuville in Belgium, elements of Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper, named after its leader SS-Standartenführer Joachim Peiper, encountered the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. After a brief battle, the Americans surrendered. About 150 of the prisoners of war were disarmed and sent to stand in a field near the crossroads. Peiper and his leading armoured units then continued their advance.
A tank pulled up, and a truck shortly thereafter. A single SS soldier pulled out a pistol and shot a medical officer standing in the front row, and then shot the man standing next to the medical officer. Other soldiers joined in with machine guns. It is not known why this happened; there is no record of an order by an SS officer.
However, some survivors testified that they had heard the order given to kill all the prisoners: "Macht alle kaputt.". [1]
While the shooting of POWs was common on the Eastern front, such incidents were rarer on the Western front.
Aftermath
Many prisoners escaped into the nearby woods. Some 72-84 of the prisoners were killed, their bodies left on the field where they fell. An American patrol discovered the massacre that night. News of it spread quickly among Allied troops. Afterwards, the order went out: SS and Fallschirmjäger were to be shot on sight.
Among the soldiers who escaped was actor Charles Durning.
American forces recaptured the site where the killings took place on January 13 1945. The bodies were recovered on January 14 ‒ January 15, 1945. The memorial at Baugnez bears the names of the murdered soldiers.
The trial
Main article: Malmedy massacre trial
The SS soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper were captured, and in May 1946 were put on trial for the killings, in the controversial Malmedy massacre trial. This was held in May–July 1946 in Dachau. The highest-ranking defendant was general Sepp Dietrich. It attracted great attention because of the nature of the crime and the later disputes about the conduct of the trial, and is repeatedly brought up by the German extreme right-wing.
Dramatization
Misinformation Warning
In two separate Bill O'Reilly interviews with General Wesley Clark, once in October 2005 to discuss the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse and once in May 2006 to discuss the alleged Haditha incident, O'Reilly cited the Malmedy Massacre as an example that massacres have always occured in war including by US soldiers in World War II. In the May 2006 interview, O'Reilly told Clark, "In Malmedy, as you know, US Forces captured SS Forces who had their hands in the air and they were unarmed and they shot them down. You know that. It's on the record and documented." O'Reilly has not yet publicly admitted his mistake of reversing the situation and thus making it appear that the massacre near Malmedy was committed by US Soldiers on German SS Troops, instead of the other way around. [2]
See also
External links
- Mortuary Affairs Operations At Malmedy – Lessons Learned From A Historic Tragedy, by Major Scott T. Glass. Quartermaster Professional Bulletin, Autumn 1997
- Malmedy Massacre Trial
- The Battle of the Bulge on the Web, Malmedy Massacre resources
- Massacre at Malmedy