Malmedy Massacre

it was about 1964 and i was in a 57 VW beetle in Belgium we were looking for the site of the December 1944 Malmedy Massacre. the actual site is and stood not in Malmedy but out on the road. i came to a side road and pulled over by a cafe, there was field with some flags and a wall and a shelter but my eyes went instead to the field behind this well manicured corner lot. I just knew that something terrible had happened here and not there. It was in fact the field where the American soldiers captured by Kampfgruppe Peiper had been rounded up and stripped of their weapons and watches and stood not knowing what would happen next. Then, as was told by the few survivors, the Germans who had been smoking and joking with the prisoners moments before suddenly and for no provocation opened fire on the men killing most of them. Only a few men hid under dead bodies of their slain buddies had escaped the German officer who walked around kicking bodies and giving the coup de grace with his pistol. He shot the moaning men in the head. Weather conditions were about the same that day in 1964, snowy and cold and grey. they snow hid the places where the crumpled forms lay, and if those men had not survived and run to our lines to tell the grisly tale. there would be no well manicured lot with memorial plack and books that tell of the stark terror they must have felt. Now lets not forget about them.

 

86 men died in that field for no reason. shows how sick those fanatic nazi's were.

 

malmady

I remember it well, I also know that the All American 82nd. Airbourne Div took very few prisoners when the bodies started to come through the melting snow.
please leave this photo in Roel.

 

It ultimately proved quite counter-productive for the Germans.
The slaughter only served to stiffen American resistance at Bastogne, as word spread to US troops after the massacre, defenders reasoned we might as well fight to the death... if we surrender, the Nazis will shoot us anyway.
Speaks volumes about the SS doesn't it?
I'm certain it was quite sobering to walk the same ground that so many died upon in the snow.

I've never toured a WW2 battlefield, but I have walked the battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi... and looked down from the heights where Confederate artillery overlooked the Yazoo River. I squinted my eyes and imagined Union gunboats running the river under fire. Very inspiring.
Yes, we should never forget.

Tim

 

peiper

Peiper was killed by (suspected) French underground in France date July 13th.76.

 

I have been to the crossroads at Baugnez myself, two and a half years ago. I found the monument there very impressive, but indeed, the knowledge that this seemingly peaceful field was the place where it all happened is much more sobering. Several other locations in the Ardennes that I have visited, as well as places along the road near Arnhem, had a similar effect on me.

Once again Tim, Bastogne was a sideshow. You're quite right that the news of the Malmedy massacre strengthened the American resolve never to surrender, but it is much more important to the failure of the German offensive that the 82nd got this message than the 101st.

 

Roel:
I DO understand the point you are making... though I'm certain the veterans of the 101st Airborne would disagree.

Tim

 

The Malmedy memorial is most impressive, not for its size, but for its simplicty. So much about what America was (and hopefully still is) is expressed in the names on the wall. The names run the gamet of a lot of nationalities, including German. Touring battlefields can cause some strange emotional responses. I felt very moved by the remnants of the Ludendorf bridge at Remagen. The Rhine is a hell of a big river there. Those first guys to run across the bridge had cajones the size of basketballs.

 

i remeber a phrase of the movie "battle of the bulge"
it's a scene were an american commander has heard rumors about a massacare. he goes to the german commander hessler. at a certain moment the American commander says: "Goddamme, every massacare has it's survivors. i hope for you that there never was a masacar."

when the amarican leaves, hessler is trying to get some information he finds out of the commanding general that the SS is operating in the section where the massacare had taken place.
Hesslers respons: "I just lost 16 tanks trying to break the american moral and now i shall find a stuborn enemy whereever i go"

 

i belive the ss also murdered some british troops before dunkirk...ive read they shot french colonial troops ...sengelese ect ..out of hand...all this in 40..battle of france...

 

yes they did, i don't know what the reason for it was. probably for the death of a couple other SS-ers.

 

yes ..well quit a few more than a couple ss...in fact the ss were quite reckless in early battles...taking much higher casualtie ratios than the wermacht in france and poland.the murdered brits had exacted a very high price as i recall..

 

massacre

It was on May 28th. 1940, 80 soldiers of the Warwickshire Regiment were massacred by troops of Leibstandarte SS, Wilhelm Mohnke was officer in charge. The field where this happened was recently saved from being a potatoe crop by subscriptions from UK and France. I was recently by this place at Wormhoudt, 15 miles from Dunkirk.

They started to take them out five at a time and shoot them, then decided it was quicker to throw grenades into the barn where the prisoners were held.
Alf Tombs of Droitwich in Worcestershire was one of the few survivors and was still alive six years ago, likewise Mohnke was 92 six years ago and was living in a village near Hamburg.
And some of you wonder why I don't glorify the SS!!

 

nobody of us glorifies the SS. (maby only for pure military occations, like Demanjansk, soldier against soldier and there it ends.)
i don't think you'll find anybody on this forum that is saying: "wow, the SS sure knew what to do with prisonners. just kill them all, saves the trouble of feeding them, those weaklings, getting themselves cought, something only untermenschen do" (JUST AN EXAMPLE, I DON'T MEAN THIS!!!!!)

but i understand your point of view Merlin, after all, you fought against the germans so i can understand that you're not keen to glorify them (neither would i, BTW)

 

ss

When I see post like "Cool Uniforms" what am I supposed to think!

 

AFAIK Merlin did not fight in WW2... commenting on the design of their uniforms is something different than justifying their actions!

 

Re: ss

he didn't? you mean that al this time i thought that merlin fought in WW2?

anyway, i agree with panzerman. it's not the uniform that pulls the trigger, it's they guy with the fingers. i mean, i like the german whermacht uniforms (i just love the officers ) but that doesn't mean that i go around killing people with a different colour of skin.
you can't expect us to always find the allies cool on all point. the war is over for 61 years, so we can start to think objective. so what, they had cool uniforms, does this means that i love the actions of those guys??
it would be like saying that you love the uniforms of the RAF. but wasn't it bomber command that killed thousands of innocent civilions during their attacks on big cities??? don't expect that we love those actions, for me the bombing of innocents is just as low as shooting POW's. does this means that i turn down bomber command and all call them brutal murders who loved to kill women and children (mostly by burning them alive by the huge firestorms)? does this means that the RAF was just like the SS?
also an interesting fact, just like the SS, the RAF liked statistics. like how many tons of bombs did we dropped on Dresden when it was full of refugees, while we knew that it was full of refugees but bombed them anyway.

like herman goering used to say: "history is written buy the victorious ones" (or something similar). with that he wanted to say that the defaited would be responsable for everything bad while the victorious ones would be completly innocent. this also implicates, that when germany would have won, Churchill would be imprissoned for mass murder on civilians (and now it was Goerings fault).

PS: it's not that i'm mad or angry at you merlin but i think you go to far when you are going equalizing liking SS-uniforms with liking their actions. and with this post i just want to show you that such things can backfire, like at the RAF (and also USAAF).

 

Quillen:
I think when a bomber-pilot is given a mission to bomb a city-center, he sees it as a military target, not as a terror-bombing in the way in which unguided buzz-bombs and V-2s were turned loose to fall indiscriminently on a civilian population.
In this way, he is able to accomplish his mission... and sleep at night with a clear conscience.
I remember reading a book by Tom Brokaw--The Greatest Generation--where a bomber-pilot by the name of George McGovern,--I believe--described a mission where they didn't drop due to bad weather over the target. Instead, they were to toggle their load over unoccupied territory on the way home.
The bombardier on this mission let loose his load on a german farmhouse--on purpose--and George was so angry when they got back to base, he told his commander and refused to fly with this man as his bombardier in any future missions.
No Sir. There IS a difference.

Tim

 

Bombing a city center is justified while bombing a farmhouse is not? :lol: I see no difference between bombing a city with manned bombers or bombing a city with unmanned rockets. You are still, in essence, bombing a city. Bombing industry is something else though.

 

good, you have indeed a point but what i gave was an example about how you can see the RAF pilots as cruel murderes if you think narrow minded. (but it does make me wonder why the RAF upper commando did order the bombing of city centers and not the factories that mostly stand at the outskirts af a city? i'm just asking objectivly)