The Malmedy massacre

On Sunday 17 December 1944, the second day of the German Ardennes offensive, at a crossroads in the hamlet of Baugnez, a few kilometres south-east of the Belgian town of Malmedy, soldiers of the Waffen-SS opened machine-gun fire on a group of American prisoners gathered in a field beside the road. The wounded were finished off with shots at close range. After the crossroads was retaken in January 1945, the Americans recovered the bodies of 84 soldiers from under the snow – the figure given by the US Army investigation and most studies, although some authors speak of at least 82 dead. The crime, known as the Malmedy massacre, became the best-known German war crime committed against American soldiers in Europe in the eyes of the United States.

The perpetrators were soldiers of the armoured battle group of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, commanded by the 29-year-old SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Joachim Peiper. Contrary to a common shorthand – found in popular chronologies as well – Peiper himself was not at the crossroads when the shots were fired: according to consistent findings, his lead vehicles had already driven on towards Ligneuville. Exactly who gave the order has never been established beyond doubt. A commander’s responsibility for the spirit and conduct of his unit, however, is beyond dispute, and it was for this that Peiper later stood trial.

Kampfgruppe Peiper

The offensive began on the morning of 16 December. On its northern wing attacked the Sixth SS Panzer Army of Oberstgruppenführer Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, whose task was to break through the American front, seize the crossings of the Meuse around Huy and Liège, and then march on Antwerp. The spearhead of its left wing was Kampfgruppe Peiper – a powerful battle group built around the 1st SS Panzer Regiment of the Leibstandarte, reinforced with a battalion of panzergrenadiers, artillery, engineers and Tiger II heavy tanks. According to German studies, it numbered several thousand men and several hundred vehicles, and its column stretched for many kilometres.

Many of the unit’s soldiers and officers had previously served on the Eastern Front, where fighting was waged without regard for the laws of war; according to accounts and the findings of historians, Peiper’s battalion burned Ukrainian villages there in 1943. According to testimony given after the war, calls for “ruthless severity” were passed on to the units before the briefing for the offensive; Adolf Hitler is said to have told commanders that prisoners should be taken only when the tactical situation allowed. The content and scope of these orders are still disputed, but there is no doubt about the climate they created.

The first day did not go the Germans’ way. A destroyed railway bridge on the line of march and congestion on the roads meant that Peiper’s group reached the village of Lanzerath only around midnight, many hours behind schedule – there a small reconnaissance platoon of the American 99th Infantry Division had held up German paratroopers all day. Towards dawn on 17 December the column set off westwards: it took Honsfeld, and in Büllingen captured an American fuel dump and refuelled its vehicles. Already in these villages, according to the findings of the American investigation, soldiers of the battle group killed several dozen Americans taken prisoner. Peiper then turned onto side roads, and around midday his spearhead reached the Baugnez crossroads, roughly equidistant from Malmedy, Ligneuville and Waimes.

The Battery B convoy

At the same time a column of some thirty vehicles of Battery B, 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, was passing through the crossroads. It was a support unit – its men located enemy artillery rather than fighting in the front line. The convoy was travelling south from the Aachen area towards St. Vith, where the battery was to be attached to the American 7th Armored Division. In Malmedy, engineers warned the artillerymen that German tanks had been seen further east, but the column drove on. The senior officer with the convoy was Lieutenant Virgil Lary.

The spearhead of Kampfgruppe Peiper spotted the Americans first. German armoured vehicles opened fire, hitting the first and last trucks and trapping the column on the road. The lightly armed artillerymen, taken by surprise and without any anti-tank protection, began to surrender after a brief exchange of fire. Some fled into the nearby woods; most put up their hands. According to the survivors’ accounts, the prisoners were stripped of their watches, gloves and cigarettes and then herded into a field by the crossroads, where they were joined by a few Americans captured earlier that day. The field held – according to various estimates – from just over a hundred to about a hundred and twenty men.

Shots in the field

Peiper’s lead vehicles did not stop by the prisoners and drove on towards Ligneuville; guarding the prisoners was left to the sub-units of the battle group passing by in turn. In the early afternoon, for reasons that have never been fully explained, the first shots were fired from one or two vehicles at the group standing in the field, and immediately afterwards machine guns opened fire. The prisoners fell to the ground; some tried to run. When the firing stopped, SS men walked across the field, finishing off those who showed signs of life. Several Americans who had taken refuge in a roadside café were killed when the building was set on fire, and those fleeing from it were shot.

In the defendants’ defence it was later argued that some of the prisoners had tried to escape, or that one of them had seized a weapon, and that the first shots were a reaction to this. The court did not accept these explanations, and the findings of the army doctors told against them. Autopsies of the bodies recovered in mid-January 1945 showed that about twenty of the dead had gunshot wounds to the head with powder burns, typical of a shot fired at point-blank range; roughly as many again had been shot in the head from a short distance, and about ten had skulls crushed by blows from a rifle butt. The bodies lay concentrated in a small area. This was the killing of defenceless prisoners, not an episode of combat.

Even so, some men survived. Several dozen soldiers – from over forty to over fifty, depending on how they are counted – played dead, lying among the slain, or managed to escape into the woods when the firing briefly stopped. At around 2.30 p.m. a patrol of the 291st Engineer Combat Battalion met the first survivors on the road to Malmedy. Their stories reached the headquarters of the American First Army that same afternoon.

Not only Baugnez

The shooting at the crossroads was not an isolated incident but the largest of a series of crimes committed by soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper during its drive through the Ardennes. On the morning of 17 December prisoners had already been killed in Honsfeld and Büllingen, and in the afternoon, after the capture of Ligneuville, several more Americans were shot there. Over the following days the battle group pushed through Stavelot and reached Trois-Ponts, Stoumont and La Gleize. In Stavelot and the surrounding villages – Parfondruy, Ster, Renardmont – SS soldiers murdered about a hundred Belgian civilians, including women and children, on 18 and 19 December; according to the indictment at the later trial, the civilian victims in the area were even more numerous. The overall figures remain disputed: the prosecutors spoke of more than 300 murdered American prisoners and about a hundred civilians, and some later studies give more than 360 prisoners and 111 civilians. These estimates, however, include cases documented to varying degrees and should be treated with caution.

On the same 17 December another crime was committed that is often mentioned alongside Malmedy. In the hamlet of Wereth near St. Vith, a dozen or so kilometres south-east of Malmedy, eleven black soldiers of the racially segregated 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, who had hidden in a house after their battery was overrun, were handed over to the Germans. They were beaten and killed; marks on the bodies showed that they had been mistreated. Researchers attribute the deed not to Peiper’s men but to scouts of Gustav Knittel’s reconnaissance group from the same Leibstandarte division; no one was ever tried for it.

Kampfgruppe Peiper never reached the Meuse. Bridges blown in front of it, the resistance of American engineers and infantry, and a lack of fuel brought it to a halt in the valley of the Amblève. Surrounded at La Gleize, Peiper abandoned his heavy equipment on the night of 23/24 December and broke out on foot to the German lines with some eight hundred men.

The news spreads

News of the shooting of the prisoners spread like wildfire among the American units in the Ardennes. Allied supreme headquarters was informed as early as 18 December, and from 21 December the press reported it – first news agency dispatches, then the weeklies and the army newspaper Stars and Stripes. At the end of December the American government, through Switzerland as protecting power, lodged a protest with Germany and demanded an explanation; in a reply sent in March 1945, Berlin denied that the crime had taken place.

Among American soldiers Malmedy aroused anger and a desire for revenge. Many historians believe the news stiffened the determination of the defenders, who now knew what they could expect if they surrendered – but it also brought reprisals against prisoners. In some units, according to researchers, verbal instructions were passed on not to take SS men prisoner, and sometimes German paratroopers too. The best-documented case is an incident on 1 January 1945 in the village of Chenogne near Bastogne, where soldiers of the American 11th Armored Division shot – according to witnesses – anything from several dozen to about eighty German prisoners. George Patton wrote in his diary of “unfortunate incidents” involving the shooting of prisoners and of his hope that they could be concealed. No one was punished for it.

The Dachau trial

The Baugnez crossroads remained on the German side of the front until mid-January 1945. When the Americans retook it, on 14 and 15 January the bodies, frozen under the snow, were recovered, photographed and autopsied; the material gathered later served as evidence. After Germany’s surrender US Army investigators tracked down hundreds of former Leibstandarte soldiers in prisoner-of-war camps and interrogated them, mainly in the prison at Schwäbisch Hall.

The trial – officially United States v. Valentin Bersin et al. – was held before an American military tribunal from 16 May to 16 July 1946 on the site of the former Dachau concentration camp, as one of the so-called Dachau trials. There were 73 defendants: besides Peiper and his subordinates, they included Sepp Dietrich, the commander of I SS Panzer Corps Hermann Priess, and the chief of staff of the Sixth SS Panzer Army, Fritz Kraemer. Werner Poetschke, the tank battalion commander whom some witnesses named as responsible for the order at the crossroads, did not live to see the end of the war – he was killed in Hungary in March 1945. The indictment covered the killings of prisoners and civilians in more than a dozen localities, from Honsfeld to Stavelot and La Gleize.

All the defendants were found guilty. The court passed 43 death sentences by hanging – Peiper’s among them – and 22 life sentences, including Dietrich’s; the rest received prison terms of 10 to 20 years (Priess 20 years, Kraemer 10).

The dispute over the investigation

Soon after the trial the court-appointed defence counsel, Colonel Willis M. Everett, began to argue that the confessions had been extorted. The defendants claimed that at Schwäbisch Hall they had been beaten, held in solitary confinement, and subjected to mock trials with interrogators dressed as judges and to fake confessions. A commission appointed by the Secretary of the Army and chaired by Judge Gordon Simpson confirmed in 1948 the use of mock trials, found that the investigation had been improperly conducted, and recommended that death sentences not be carried out where doubts existed. The gravest charges – of systematic torture – were confirmed neither by that commission nor, in 1949, by a Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Raymond Baldwin. Its hearings were attended by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who aggressively championed the convicted men and accused the army of covering up abuses. Historians – notably Steven Remy in his 2017 monograph – agree that the interrogations were not free of abuse, but point out that the campaign on behalf of the convicted men was exploited by German activists and clergy fighting the whole programme of war crimes trials, and that the allegations of widespread torture proved exaggerated. The crime at the Baugnez crossroads itself, attested by the survivors and by the examination of the bodies, is beyond doubt.

The consequences of the dispute were nonetheless clear. Some sentences were quashed or reduced during the reviews, and the remaining death sentences – Peiper’s included – were commuted to life imprisonment in 1951. No one was executed for Malmedy. The convicted men were gradually released from the war crimes prison at Landsberg from 1948 onwards; Dietrich was paroled in 1955, and Peiper – one of the last – on 22 December 1956. Twenty years later, in July 1976, he died in his house in the French village of Traves, which was set on fire by unknown attackers.

Significance

The Malmedy massacre influenced the course of the Battle of the Ardennes mainly through the way American soldiers perceived it: the news that SS men were killing prisoners meant that surrender no longer seemed a safe option, which many historians link to the tenacity of the defence in the days that followed. At the same time it brought a brutalisation of the fighting on both sides, the gravest manifestation of which was Chenogne. Meanwhile Kampfgruppe Peiper itself, although for a few days it drove deep into the American rear, got stuck in the Amblève valley, and the German offensive achieved none of its objectives.

After the war Malmedy became a symbol of Waffen-SS crimes on the Western Front, and the Dachau trial one of the most controversial war crimes trials. The dispute over the investigation methods contributed to a change in the political climate in the United States, which in the early 1950s favoured the wholesale reduction of sentences for German war criminals. Today a memorial bearing the names of the murdered soldiers of Battery B stands at the Baugnez crossroads, and next to it is a museum devoted to the crime and to the Battle of the Ardennes.