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It always brightens my day to see someone like Bill O'Reilly step on his own tail.

Now, I quibble: the versions I have read of the Malmedy massacre suggests that it was, in large part, the work of young, green troops who were overexcited and panicked at innocuous movements by their prisoners, which they interpreted as an attempt to escape. (This is possible, but not proven.) It is also not proven that an explicit order to shoot was given by an officer. Peiper was not present at the time, as he was with the forward elements of his battlegroup. He may not have known about events at Malmedy until after the Battle of the Bulge was over. His orders on the handling of prisoners were not sufficiently explicit and therefore open to interpretation; they said something like "Don't bother with prisoners, but keep moving" which he claimed at his trial meant that prisoners were to be left for support units to deal with. This is possible, but since the orders didn't say so in so many words, the claim that this was an order to take no prisoners, or to kill men trying to surrender, could plausibly be made. Later on during the Battle of the Bulge, Peiper treated captured American troops under his direct control carefully and correctly; when he began his retreat, he left the prisoners behind. One of the prisoners he released was willing to testify in his defense, in fact. This doesn't mean he was being Mr. Do-right out of natural niceness; he was bright enough to figure that leaving murdered prisoners would only make the American troops who would be on his tail that much hotter. I think it can be argued that Peiper himself had figured out that he wasn't fighting on the Eastern Front at this point. Whether everyone in his battlegroup had caught on is dubious; you don't break bad habits that easily, and the Leibstandarte Division, like most of the SS, had a lot of bad habits. Certainly, as the commander of the battlegroup, he was accountable for what the troops under his command did, whether they were acting on his orders or not.

The trials over the Malmedy massacre were not among our finest examples of jurisprudence. Questionable means of interrogation were used on the defendants, and their counsel were not given full access to documents and other evidence. There was a great deal of pressure to obtain convictions in this case, and the people carrying out the interrogations and prosecutions seem to have felt that any means were justified.
Both John Eisenhower's The Bitter Woods and Michael Reynolds' biography of Peiper, The Devil's Adjutant give what seem to be careful accounts of the events, and Reynolds covers the trial as well.

I'm not saying here that Malmedy wasn't as bad as it's made out to be, or that Joachim Peiper was a knight in shining armor (Himmler's old adjutant? yeah, that's a recommendation for his moral qualities), or in any way let the people who did the shooting (and gave the order, if an order was given) off the hook. It's a case where the facts are often reported in a confused manner, and our emotional reactions to it help to keep them confused. There are some important lessons to be learned. One is that troops who have developed bad habits, like killing surrendered prisoners, will tend to keep those bad habits; another is that untried troops in stressful situations cannot always be relied upon to understand and do what they are supposed to do, including handling prisoners correctly. These rules of thumb, alas, apply to every military force everywhere, and not just to the Germans in World War II. Another is that tampering with things to make sure we get the verdict we want often ends up making us look like flaming hypocrites when we try and claim we're out to support truth, justice, and the Geneva Convention.
However, if Peiper, who wasn't at Malmedy when the shooting took place and gave no specific direct order to kill prisoners, could be held accountable, then the people in the chain of command above William Calley at My Lai, and everyone in the chain of command for these incidents in Iraq and elsewhere can and must be too. It's a situation where sauce/goose = sauce/gander. If you want moral authority, you have to work at it.

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ladymeow.livejournal.com

*headdesk*

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Er...how does this explain the blunt force trauma? It's not an injury you can really inflict easily if you've got an opponent who is actively fighting back at the time. It kind of argues the opposite. So do all the head shots. Center mass is easier to hit.

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I know there's a lot to be said about the aftermath.

Which isn't really relevant to the point being made here (that O'Reilly said the 82nd Airborne committed an atrocity at Malmédy. We shan't even go into them being 10 miles away, and the 504th being the group which was killed [odd piece of trivia, Charles Durning was one of the soldiers who escaped by running into the woods).

We can argue the legality of things (and the degree to which Pieper was responsible for the actions of the men under him. In the US his lack of attempt to impose punishment would be used as evidence against him, unless he could show he never knew anything about it. Were it an American commander he would still be at risk of court-martial).

The question of what he meant is interesting, only insofar as he didn't (and I've never, in 25 years of reading about Malmédy seen any evidence to the contrary) tell his troops there were new rules of engagement now that they were fighting the Amis. Since he hadn't done that, a reasonable man would assume the present rules were unchanged, as such he was, tacitly, winking at killing prisoners (and read, "The Men of Company K" for some instances of how Americans made the distinction between which prisoners lived, and which prisoners died; I've never said there are armies with no, unclean, blood on their hands) which combined with his comment about not worrying about them could be construed as instructing men to kill them. At the very least it argues for having a much looser definition of what made them un-keepable.

The accounts of the witnesses aren't clear, it's possible it was all a mistake, but it was a mistake with the signs of guilt (viz. the head shots and clubbings). It may have been impossible to help the wounded, but there were those who had only one wound, a gunshot, in the head; at mere inches.

Do I think the trial at Dachau was poorly done? Yep.

Do I think there was any excuse for what happened? Not as any of the details came out.

Do I think Pieper was responsible? Pretty much.

Do I think he should have hanged? No.

TK

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It's not quite that simple (see below).

The biggest questions are: Did Pieper mean, "take no prisoners," when he said not to worry about taking them, and who started it; and why.

The best accounts say a single shot was fired; when the men were in the field, and then a free for all took place.

Then the troops when through giving coups de grace. If the three who were in the field and survived are to be believed (and some of the evidence seems to support this) the Germans went through and shot/clubbed the wounded. They also kicked bodies in the groin to see if the reacted. One account said some unwounded men were discovered this way and killed.

The same account says he managed, because of this, to know what was coming and supress reacting when he was kicked.

All in all, war crimes, of a capital nature, seem to have been committed. How high the guilt ought to have gone, and how many (interesting that some 70 plus men were put on trial, and only 800 of 5,000 were left of the unit. That means, according to the prosecution, almost all of the men who were in that fight (and the 504th took some serious payback a couple of weeks later) managed to survive the rest of the war) were guilty enough to be hanged is an open question.

As is the nature of the prosection.

Then again, Tail-gunner Joe said that all the guys we were trying in this cases were scapegoats and not guilty. Ask Ann Coulter about that.

TK

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No, thanks, she's like O'Reilly in drag.

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Believe me, I have no desire to spend anytime dealing with her.

But see, she thinks McCarthy was an American hero, even though he defended members of the WaffenSS, and accused Americans of pinching their balls in a vise to get forced confessions from them; about innocent men.

Never mind that the people telling him this were nazis, and; in one case, apparently a communist as well.

Why does she hate America.

TK

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Yep, that's a good question. Why does she hate America so much? She even proposed bombing the NY Times.

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wcg.livejournal.com

Jesus, what a doofus. I suppose he thinks the US Marines caused the Bataan death march too.

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Glad to see you're doing well.

I'm not sure he thinks.

TK

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wcg.livejournal.com

Oh, that malignant brain is hard at work. It's not necessarily *rational* thought, but it's thought.

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I can't argue with any of that; I'm not trying to disagree with you.

The points I'm concerned about:
The basic descriptions we see most of the time about Malmedy are simplistic, and tend to make both Peiper and his commanding officer sound as if they were personally standing there, passing out the extra ammunition. Both Peiper and his commander did not explicitly order such killings, but failed to give explicit orders against such actions, or to investigate and discipline those responsible, which is a failure in their duty as commanders.

If Peiper and the other German commanders, as well as Japanese and other commanders of armies we've faced over the years are supposed to be responsible for what their troops did/do, we can't give our officers free passes, and the same for the civilian leaders.

Because of the flawed trials, the position of moral authority the Allies took after WWII was weakened to some extent, which should serve as a future warning that if you want to hold out for a standard of behavior, you have to be prepared to live up to it yourself, and to held accountable if you don't--too many people like Rush and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders seem to lose sight of that.

Because the Nazis were the Bad Guys in WWII, we are tempted to believe that we will never, ever, ever do anything bad like they did during the course of a war. This is, I believe, one of the first steps down the road to Doing Bad Things. If someone believes they can't do bad things, they won't be on their guard against doing them.

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jeffreyab.livejournal.com

There is no possibility that O'Reilly was referring to the post Malmedy reaction of the 82nd to German prisoners?

If you talk to many combat vets they talk about how often they did not take prisoners.

Not the same as cold blooded execution though.

Issue also crops in the series "Band of Brothers."

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It doesn't explain the blunt force trauma.

It was a massacre of unarmed troops. I do not dispute that; I'm not trying to say the people who pulled the triggers, or plied the rifle butts should get a free pass. What I don't know is whether the killings began as the result of an order, or as a reaction by a nervous soldier that set off other shooters. Once the shooting started, the Germans clearly decided it was safer to kill everyone, and hope that the bodies would be buried by the time anyone who cared how they died found out they were dead. Whether it started out as an intentional effort to order the killing of unarmed prisoners or not, it turned into one, and that makes it a war crime. If the officers and NCOs at the scene had reacted differently, it would have still been a crime, but not theirs. If the battlegroup and division commanders had reacted differently afterward, it would still have been a crime--but not theirs.

It was still a crime.

The reason I seem to be trying to split hairs is that too many people (and I don't include either you or TK--both of you have a capacity for self-examination that is both wrenching and humbling to watch) cannot look at something like the Malmedy masacre and see anything beyond "The Bad Guys hurt Our Boys". There are some terrible lessons to be learned from Malmedy, and simplifying it into that makes it impossible to learn them.

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If you go to Crooks and Liars there's a clip. No, he said the 82nd committed the massacre.

I know all about how prisoners got handled. There's a difference between puting them on the road, and taking them to the road.

TK

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Yes, I see your point. It's kind of an interesting study on the implications of leadership, responsbility--and retribution.

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I thought you would, because you think about things like that, and you worry about what happens when people don't.

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patgreene.livejournal.com

Wat did Clark say in response? Hopefully, something like "It was the SS that perpetrated that massacre, you idiot."

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