The Chenogne massacre

On New Year’s Day 1945, amid fierce fighting west of Bastogne, soldiers of the US 11th Armored Division killed several dozen German prisoners who had already surrendered in the Belgian village of Chenogne. According to eyewitness accounts, most of them were lined up in a field outside the village and mown down with machine guns. The exact number of victims is unknown – witnesses and researchers put it at between about 60 and about 80. It was the best-documented crime committed against prisoners by American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. Nobody was ever tried for it.

The statement found in war chronologies that “American soldiers kill dozens of German prisoners at Chenogne” is consistent with what historians have established, as to both the date and the scale. It needs only one addition: the event cannot be understood without its context – the German crimes of the first days of the offensive, the mood of revenge in the American army, and orders which, in the view of some researchers, fed that mood. This context does not excuse the killing of defenceless men protected by the Geneva Convention of 1929, to which both the United States and Germany were parties.

The fighting west of Bastogne

Chenogne is a small village in the Belgian province of Luxembourg, today part of the municipality of Vaux-sur-Sûre, a few kilometres south-west of Bastogne near Sibret (PL). After the tanks of the 4th Armored Division broke through to the encircled town on 26 December 1944 and opened a narrow corridor from the south (the relief of Bastogne), both sides began to bring fresh forces into the area. The Germans wanted to cut the corridor and take the town after all; the Americans wanted to widen the breach and go over to the offensive northwards, towards Houffalize, where the forces attacking from the south and from the north were to meet.

On the western flank of the corridor, two fresh divisions of General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, then under General George Patton’s Third Army, were sent into the attack: the 87th Infantry Division and Brigadier General Charles Kilburn’s 11th Armored Division. The 11th Armored had no combat experience. It had arrived in Europe in mid-December, in the very days when the German offensive began, and after a hurried move from France it went into action on 30 December.

That same morning the Germans also attacked. Standing in the Americans’ way were seasoned units: Colonel Otto Ernst Remer’s Führer-Begleit-Brigade – the same officer who on 20 July 1944 in Berlin had helped to crush the plot against Hitler – and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division (PL). The two attacks collided among the snow-covered woods and villages between Sibret, Chenogne and Lavaselle. Heavy fighting went on there for three days, and the inexperienced American division suffered serious losses in men and tanks. Patton later noted in his diary that the 11th Armored was “very green” and had taken unnecessary losses to no effect.

Chenogne changed hands several times. Combat Command B of the 11th Armored Division, with the 21st Armored Infantry Battalion, finally took the village on 1 January 1945 after house-to-house fighting in which some of the buildings burned down. Several dozen German soldiers were taken prisoner – according to the available evidence, from the Führer-Begleit-Brigade and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division.

Malmedy and the mood of revenge

The background to the events at Chenogne was the crimes committed by the Germans in the first days of the offensive. On 17 December 1944, at the Baugnez crossroads, soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper of the 1st SS Panzer Division shot American prisoners of war, 84 of whom were killed (the Malmedy massacre). In the days that followed, the battle group killed prisoners and Belgian civilians in other places too, including Stavelot, and on the same 17 December SS men at Wereth murdered eleven black American artillerymen (the Wereth massacre (PL)). News of Malmedy spread through the American forces within days, arousing anger and a desire for revenge.

In some units this found its way into orders. The most frequently cited is an order of the 328th Infantry Regiment of the 26th Infantry Division, issued in December before it went into action in the Ardennes: SS troops and paratroopers were not to be taken prisoner but “shot on sight”. According to historians who have studied the matter – among them the British researcher George Henry Bennett and Antony Beevor, author of a history of the Battle of the Bulge – similar instructions, usually given orally, circulated in other units as well, and in some of them the killing of captured SS men became almost routine at this time. The phrase “no prisoners”, heard from superiors before an attack, also recurs in soldiers’ accounts. Researchers who have looked into Chenogne believe that the killings there too were carried out on such oral instructions passed on by commanders, rather than being solely the initiative of the rank and file. No written order confirming this has been found.

The official history of the battle, published after the war by the US Army Center of Military History (by Hugh M. Cole), acknowledged that Germans trying to surrender in the days after 17 December ran a greater risk of being killed than before, but stated at the same time that there was no evidence that American troops had used explicit or implied orders to kill SS prisoners. Bennett called this qualification “somewhat disingenuous”. Another example cited by historians concerns the 90th Infantry Division in the Saar, which at the end of December was shooting Waffen-SS prisoners so systematically that its command had to issue an explicit order to take them alive – if only so that they could be interrogated.

The killings of 1 January

The most important testimony to what happened at Chenogne is the account of Staff Sergeant John W. Fague of Company B, 21st Armored Infantry Battalion. Fague, who – as he himself stressed – knew nothing of Malmedy at the time, described how, after the village had been taken, his comrades lined the prisoners up: “I knew they were going to shoot them, and I hated this.” The prisoners were marched up the hill behind the village, where others captured that morning had already been gathered. Machine guns were set up in the fields on either side of the road – according to Fague, facing groups of 25–30 men each. “We were committing the same crimes we were now accusing the Japanese and the Germans of,” he wrote. On his way back to the village he saw dark, motionless bodies lying in the snow in the fields.

Other soldiers of the division, interviewed by journalists years later, described the same thing: prisoners gathered in a meadow at the edge of the village and machine-gun fire. One of them gave a precise figure of 61 killed. Declassified post-war documents preserve the statement of a soldier named Max Cohen, who spoke of about 70 German prisoners shot with machine guns. According to the American journalist Chris Harland-Dunaway, a group of about 19 Germans who tried to surrender as they came out of the cellar of a burning house was also killed at Chenogne. Hence the differing estimates: the figure most often given is about 60 shot in the field, and about 80 including the other killings. Neither the exact number of victims nor their identities have been established.

The dead were soldiers of the Wehrmacht, not the Waffen-SS – which shows that the anger provoked by Malmedy was turned against German prisoners in general, not only against the formation responsible for that crime.

Patton’s diary

News of the killings reached Third Army headquarters. On 4 January 1945, describing the heavy fighting of the 11th Armored Division in his diary, Patton also recorded what had happened at Chenogne. In The Patton Papers, the collection published in the 1970s by the historian Martin Blumenson, the entry reads: “There were also some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners. I hope we can conceal this.” This was the version cited in the literature for decades.

In 2018 Chris Harland-Dunaway, preparing the report “Take No Prisoners” for Reveal, the radio programme of the American Center for Investigative Reporting, compared this version with the handwritten original of the diary held in the Library of Congress. In the manuscript Patton wrote without euphemism: “Also murdered 50 odd German med. I hope we can conceal this” – the last word of the first sentence is almost certainly a slip for “men”. Because the text had been toned down in print, the entry was long read as a reference to unspecified “incidents” rather than as an admission by an army commander that he knew of a murder and wanted to cover it up.

No investigation, no punishment

The case was never fully investigated. According to documents obtained by Harland-Dunaway, General Dwight Eisenhower later demanded a full inquiry, but the command of the 11th Armored Division did not cooperate and eventually replied that it was “too late: the war is over, the units have been disbanded”. Headquarters never received a report. Nobody was brought to trial and nobody faced disciplinary action. Benjamin Ferencz, one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials, having examined the declassified material, judged that it “smells of a cover-up”.

The contrast with the fate of the Malmedy perpetrators is striking. For the killing of prisoners and civilians during the Ardennes offensive, the Americans in 1946 brought more than seventy soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper, headed by Joachim Peiper himself, before a military tribunal at Dachau; 43 death sentences were passed, although in the end none was carried out. There was a precedent for prosecuting America’s own soldiers: after the landing in Sicily in July 1943, the killing of more than seventy Italian and German prisoners near Biscari (the Biscari massacre) led to courts martial – Sergeant Horace West was sentenced to life imprisonment (he was soon released and returned to duty) and Captain John Compton was acquitted. Chenogne did not get even that.

Soldiers on both sides committed crimes against prisoners in the Ardennes. The German ones, better known, were the subject of trials after the war. Chenogne shows, however, that on the Allied side too the pressure of combat, the desire for revenge and the tacit consent of superiors could lead to crimes – and that the army which committed one preferred to keep quiet about it.

Place in the war

The fighting around Chenogne was part of the American counter-offensive intended to cut off the German salient in the Ardennes. On 3 January the attack from the north began, and on 16 January troops of the First and Third Armies met at Houffalize; by the end of the month the Germans had been pushed back to their starting positions. On that same 1 January the Luftwaffe carried out its last great attack on Allied airfields (Operation Bodenplatte), while in northern Alsace the Nordwind offensive was under way. For the 11th Armored Division, Chenogne was its baptism of fire; the division later fought in Germany and Austria, and in May 1945 its soldiers liberated the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.

For decades Chenogne was known mainly to veterans and a handful of historians. Fague’s account, written down after the war, long remained little known, and the toned-down version of Patton’s diary invited no questions. The crime began to be written about more widely only in the early 21st century – among others by Beevor in Ardennes 1944 (2015) – and the Reveal report of 2018, based on interviews with the last surviving witnesses, the diary manuscript and declassified files, showed for the first time how the affair had been hushed up. Since then Chenogne has become one of the main examples cited in discussions of war crimes committed by Allied soldiers and of how rarely the victors tried their own men.