New from Harvard University Press:
The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy, by
Steven P. Remy (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York). A description from the Press:
During the Battle of the Bulge,
Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of
Malmedy—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War
II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most
controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly
declassified documents, Steven Remy revisits the massacre—and the decade-long controversy that followed—to set the record straight.
After the war, the U.S. Army tracked down 74 of the SS men involved
in the massacre and other atrocities and put them on trial at Dachau.
All the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death or life
imprisonment. Over the following decade, however, a network of Germans
and sympathetic Americans succeeded in discrediting the trial. They
claimed that interrogators—some of them Jewish émigrés—had coerced false
confessions and that heat of battle conditions, rather than superiors’
orders, had led to the shooting. They insisted that vengeance, not
justice, was the prosecution’s true objective. The controversy generated
by these accusations, leveled just as the United States was anxious to
placate its West German ally, resulted in the release of all the
convicted men by 1957.
The Malmedy Massacre shows that the torture accusations were
untrue, and the massacre was no accident but was typical of the Waffen
SS’s brutal fighting style. Remy reveals in unprecedented depth how
German and American amnesty advocates warped our understanding of one of
the war’s most infamous crimes through a systematic campaign of
fabrications and distortions.
More information is available
here.
