In a horrific war in which millions perished, the massacre at Malmedy does not figure large. In the history of fake news, however, it is a landmark deserving of recognition.
On December 17, 1944, as Hitler made his last stab in the Battle of the Bulge, 84 American soldiers were captured and slaughtered. The perpetrators were members of the 1st SS Panzer Division, a combat unit belonging to the Waffen SS, an especially vicious force integral to the Nazi campaign of genocide. Some 43 Americans crawled away from the carnage, made it back to American lines, and told their horrific story of machine-gun spray followed by German soldiers shooting their wounded comrades point-blank in a field in Belgium near the village of Malmedy.
The basic facts of the massacre are not in question. The aftermath, however, has been the source of intense dispute, set out in close detail by the historian Steven P. Remy.
In the months after Germany’s surrender, American occupation forces managed to apprehend approximately a thousand soldiers and officers belonging to the responsible SS unit. They were incarcerated in a facility near Stuttgart and subjected to interrogation. The interrogators came from Camp Ritchie in Maryland, where, beginning in 1942, combat intelligence officers had been trained. Given the demand for fluent German speakers, it was natural that many of them were Jewish refugees from Germany.
It was these interrogators who, by May 1946, had assembled enough evidence for prosecutors to put 74 SS men on trial before an American military tribunal standing in Dachau. The Army appointed a certain Col. Willis Everett as chief defense counsel. In civilian life an attorney from Atlanta, with no previous trial experience, Everett reluctantly set out to do his best. As he interviewed the defendants, he began to hear stories of physical abuse at the hands of American interrogators. Everett attempted to employ the stories in the proceeding to discredit confessions, maintaining that they had been coerced. The effort failed: All the SS men were convicted, with 22 getting life imprisonment and 43 sentenced to death.
But that was not the end of the matter. Almost immediately, a campaign to overturn the verdict began to take shape in both Germany and the United States. The constituency in postwar Germany was obvious enough: Innumerable unpunished mid-level Nazis and Nazi sympathizers were roaming free, including various Christian clerics who lent their prestige to the cause.
The story in the United States was more complicated, and Willis Everett was a central player. Drawing on personal correspondence, Remy shows that Everett had come to regard the Allied occupation of Germany as “corrupt and misguided.” Worse, his sympathies “lay not with the victims of Nazi Germany but with Germans—including former Nazis—victimized, in his mind, by ignominious defeat and a vengeance-filled occupation.” Everett’s fervor was fueled by a prejudice not uncommon at the time, believing that American military justice had been “subverted by vengeance-seeking Jews,” i.e., the interrogators from Fort Ritchie.
In his anti-Semitism, as Remy shows, Everett was swimming in a broader current. Warren Magee, the American defense counsel for the last seven Nazi war criminals condemned to death at Nuremberg, regarded the Allied war-crime trials as “Mosaic” justice. “We all know Jews suffered much under Hitler,” Magee wrote in an analysis prepared for Pope Pius XII. “We also know,” he continued,
As Everett and like-minded personages floated their accounts of German prisoners subjected to physical abuse, stories began to appear in various quarters of the American press. On the left, the Christian Century reported that American interrogators had employed “torture, both physical and mental,” so cruel “as even the Nazi sadists never surpassed.” The Progressive regaled its liberal readers with tales of “American Atrocities in Germany,” as one of its articles was titled. On the right, Regnery published Freda Utley’s The High Cost of Vengeance: How Our German Policy Is Leading Us to Bankruptcy and War (1949). One of the book’s thrusts was to liken the depredations of American interrogators—those, in particular, with Jewish surnames like Kirschbaum and Metzger—to the crimes of Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, “and other Nazi bullies.”
It did not take long for the story to seep into the mainstream media and central institutions. Time hailed Everett for revealing abuses that “read like a record of Nazi atrocities.” In the House, Rep. John Rankin (D-Miss.) declared that “a racial minority” was hanging not only German soldiers but also “trying to hang German businessmen, in the name of the United States.” In the Senate, Joseph McCarthy, then a freshman, explained that the American interrogators from Fort Ritchie “did intensely hate the German people as a race.” They were, he said, “men whose wives were in concentration camps,” operating as a “vengeance team.”
The problem with all of this is that the allegations of abuse were false. Remy meticulously pursues the origins of the torture reports to a coordinated campaign devised by the SS defendants themselves while awaiting trial. He also reviews the numerous official inquiries prompted by Everett’s insistent accusations, all of which turned up nothing resembling torture or any other form of illicit coercion. Colonel Everett’s claim that the defendants “were given severe and frequent beatings and other corporal punishments” was based upon no evidence other than the statements of the SS men themselves. There had been no physical abuse. It was all a tissue of lies, tinged with anti-Semitism. Those accusing the Jews of operating on the basis of racial hatred were themselves driven by that base force.
Truth always prevails, goes the saying. It did not prevail in this case; instead, the fake news won. One of Remy’s contributions is to demonstrate that more than a few reputable historians of World War II have failed to do their spadework and accepted a pernicious myth as fact. He does not shrink from naming names and citing chapter and verse.
Far more important, justice was not done. By 1957, all the SS murderers behind the Malmedy massacre were set free. None of the death sentences was carried out. The only retribution for the murder of American servicemen came decades later in less-than-perfect form: Joachim Peiper, the ranking SS officer responsible for the atrocity, was assassinated in 1976 by unknown assailants believed to be former members of the French Resistance.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a columnist for USA Today, is the author of, among other books, The Return of Anti-Semitism.
