Killers in Cold Blood

by Ray Black

  The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are called Hibakusha (‘explosion-affected people’) and as the twenty-first century dawned there were still more than a quarter of a million alive whose future was changed forever in August 1945. There is today a cenotaph in the Hiroshima Peace Park which bears the inscription ‘Rest in peace, for this mistake will not be repeated.’

  Apart from achieving the primary goal of forcing the Japanese into surrender, the United States’ display of power was also intended to deter Russian leader Josef Stalin’s political agenda. It could also be said that the attacks on Japan were still carried out despite the fact that a Japanese surrender was anticipated in the next few days as America’s revenge for the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which prompted the United States’ entry in the war. Around 2,500 people died in the surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base that, according to rumour, could have been prevented by the British if they had been willing to admit that they had broken the Japanese code and so could have warned the Americans…

  To be fair, these two bombs are the only time that nuclear warfare has been utilised in a conflict so it could be cited that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have prevented the major powers of the world from destroying each other. Indeed, in the years following the attacks, Japan led the protests against the race towards nuclear proliferation. True, there are still countries today who continue to test their nuclear arsenal and threaten their enemies but the Cold War that followed the end of World War II has thankfully ended, as each party realised that they could be blasted into oblivion simply at the push of a button.

  Malmédy Massacre

  The shooting of a group of unarmed Americans on December 17, 1944, at the Belgian town of Malmédy, stands out among the atrocities of World War II as one of the worst committed against prisoners of war in the West European arena during the conflict. This part of the country was about to become infamous for the epic Battle of the Bulge (later portrayed in a film) that took place between December 16, 1944, and January 25, 1945, which turned out to be the costliest engagement in terms of soldiers killed that the USA suffered during the whole war. In total, around 19,000 servicemen lost their lives in the attempt to defend Antwerp.

  Sunday, December 17, began with the 6th SS Panzer Army being directed to break through the Allied lines and ultimately capture Antwerp. Under the command of General Sepp Dietrich, the offensive succeeded in breaching the American defensive positions and Waffen-SS Colonel Joachim Peiper (along with nearly 5,000 men and 600 vehicles) was charged with securing the Meuse bridges at Huy among other tactical objectives. He was forced to use minor roads that were not at all suitable for armoured vehicles and came across an American convoy.

  Following orders, the men of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion were heading for St Vith in the Ardennes and met up with Lieutenant-Colonel David Pergrin (291st Engineer Combat Battalion) who warned the officers in charge of the convoy that the route they intended to take could lead them straight to the advancing German forces, but for some reason this advice was ignored and they continued as planned. Their journey took them within two miles of Malmédy, to the Baugnez Crossroads (known to the Americans as ‘Five Points’ because of the five roads that met at this junction), and it was shortly before they reached this intersection that they were fired upon by two German tanks.

  In the ensuing fire fight, the lead and rearguard vehicles of the convoy were targeted in order to prevent the column from scattering and the soldiers were taken prisoner. Adolf Hitler had given strict orders that nothing should stand in the way of victory and that the operation should be carried out with brutality in order to demoralise their enemy. As it was, Peiper – formerly Himmler’s adjutant and the holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves – had already established a reputation during the invasion of Russia. It was well known that his men (known as the ‘Blowtorch Brigade’ after they burned around 200 villages in the Soviet Union having locked the inhabitants inside before setting the fires) were perfectly capable of killing civilians as well as military personnel.

  The men from the convoy found that the Germans had already captured some of their countrymen and the whole group of 113 soldiers was ordered to stand in a field by the side of the road. It is not known to this day what prompted the events that followed but there is no record of an officer giving the order to execute the unarmed men. Some survivors later testified that they had heard an order given to kill the prisoners. It has been reported that Peiper was in an extremely bad mood because his progress had not been as quick as anticipated as he had met with strong resistance from the Allied forces, but he had already left the crossroads before the massacre took place.

  One theory suggests the prisoners were left to their own devices in a field as the Germans concentrated on their advance. When the later portion of the column arrived, they assumed that the group of Americans was a combat unit that had not yet been discovered and opened fire on them despite the fact that they were unarmed. Another possibility is that a handful of the prisoners decided to make a break for freedom and were shot. Other German soldiers nearby heard the shooting and joined in, not realising that they should only be targeting the individuals who were trying to flee. While international rules of warfare allowed captors to shoot escapees, it did not give them the right to massacre the whole group. This theory does not explain the actions that followed.

  The most popular train of thought, however, is that the prisoners were deliberately executed. It would have been too troublesome for the Germans to have marched the men back to somewhere where they could more suitably be detained so they decided to rid themselves of their burden. Some of the Americans apparently tried to seek refuge in a nearby café to escape the shooting but it is alleged that the Germans set fire to the building and then shot anyone who emerged. They then examined each man to ensure nobody was left alive, shooting any survivors in the head or clubbing them to death, as autopsies later showed.

  The first the Americans knew of the events was when three survivors were picked up by a patrol that had been sent to investigate after hearing gunfire. Pergrin took the wounded soldiers back to Malmédy and informed his superiors that a massacre had taken place. On the same day that the massacre happened, numerous statements were taken from witnesses and their accounts of the event were similar, despite the fact that they had not had any time in which to corroborate their stories. They all claimed (bar one man) that no escape attempt had been made and that the Germans had simply opened fire without warning. As they lay among their compatriots feigning death, it is also alleged that German soldiers who were driving past the scene were firing shots and using the bodies for target practice as they lay in the field. Eventually more than forty survivors from the massacre made their way back to the American lines but because of the continuing battle it was not possible to retrieve the bodies of those who had been killed.

  It took almost a month for the US forces to advance far enough to claim the land around the crossroads, but when they did finally reach the site of the massacre, they found that the bodies were in a remarkably good state of preservation due to the snow that had fallen and blanketed the area. On January 14, 1945, seventy-one bodies were recovered and sent for autopsy. These investigations were carried out over the next three days and the evidence partly contradicted the survivors’ accounts of Germans looting the dead bodies. It turned out that the majority of the dead soldiers were still wearing their rings and watches, while their valuables were still in their pockets.

  What the autopsies did confirm, however, was that forty-three men had died from gunshot wounds to the head and several more displayed evidence of severe cranial blows. The investigation was hampered slightly due to the fact that many bodies had been hit by shell and mortar fragments as they lay in no man’s land for almost a month. The army doctors who carried out the autopsies, also discovered that at least five of the men had had their eyes removed from their sockets, with one allegedly st
ill being alive as he was maimed, though it has since been debated that this damage could have been caused by crows.

  It was time for the recriminations to begin in earnest once the hostilities came to an end, with the surrender of Germany on May 2, 1945, and the men responsible for the Malmédy Massacre were tried at a subsequent war crimes court in Dachau during May and June of 1946. No clear evidence was produced, however, to back up claims that the Germans had been ordered not to take any prisoners, but to kill any enemy personnel they encountered.

  A total of seventy people were charged with the massacre, including Joachim Peiper and his junior officers, and the court issued forty-three sentences of death by hanging once it had reached its verdict – each case took on average just three minutes to be decided – with twenty-two of the remaining defendants sentenced to life imprisonment. As it turned out, none of the death sentences were carried out and they were commuted to life sentences. In fact everyone had been released from their internment by 1956. The last person to taste freedom was Peiper himself, when he was released in December 1956.

  The events of December 17, 1944, still cause great debate to this day. Not because anyone denies that the massacre took place, but because the exact circumstances of the atrocity have never really been confirmed. Whether the Germans did indeed kill their prisoners of war in a deliberate act of cold-blooded murder, or whether the soldiers were killed in the confusion of an attempted escape, will probably never be known for certain. As well as in The Battle of the Bulge (1966), the events of that day have been immortalised in the film Saints and Soldiers released in 2004.

  Today, there is a memorial at the Baugnez Crossroads in Belgium in honour of the men who were mercilessly gunned down by German forces.

  The Holocaust

  While the Nazis of Germany targeted many different population types during World War II, including Soviet POWs, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses and disabled people, it was their treatment of Jews that they received most criticism and condemnation for. The Third Reich was responsible for the deaths of an estimated nine to eleven million individuals but an incredible six million of those were of the Jewish religion. This extermination has come to be known as the Holocaust (coming from the Greek words olon meaning ‘completely’ and kauston meaning ‘burnt’).

  It wasn’t just during World War II, however, that the persecution of the Jews began; it all started early in 1933 after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30. He had written about his anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews) in his 1925 book Mein Kampf but few in the international arena could have foreseen the devastation that was to be unleashed on that race.

  In less than three months, the former Austrian national had been granted dictatorial powers and ordered the setting up of concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. (Intended to provide slave labour, these are not to be confused with the extermination camps later set up to eliminate millions of people.) On April 1, the Nazis staged a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses and ten days later issued a decree categorising the Aryan race that they so revered. Basically, anyone who had ‘non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents . . . classified the descendant as non-Aryan’. By the end of the year, Jews had been banned from owning land or being employed as newspaper editors.

  The persecution escalated even further – although there was a temporary lull in the sanctions during the 1936 Munich Olympics as Hitler sought international approval – with Jews over the age of fifteen being forced to carry identity cards and being banned from trading or practising medicine (July 1938) before a law was introduced in September 1938 requiring all Jews to have a big red letter ‘J’ stamped on their passports. By this time, Germany had annexed Austria with its population of 200,000 Jews and the end of 1938 saw all Jewish pupils expelled from non-Jewish German schools, while laws were passed authorising the Aryan takeover of all Jewish businesses.

  Nazi forces invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939 but it was the invasion of Poland on September 1 that thrust the world into a second global conflict. Hitler’s abhorrence of everything Jewish gained steam, and ghettos were established where the Jews could be contained and by 1941 Heinrich Himmler had ordered the expansion of the concentration camp at Auschwitz so that it could accommodate 100,000 people. Each territory that Germany conquered obviously included a percentage of the population that was Jewish and they targeted each and every nation they gained control over.

  Such were the appalling conditions in the ghettos that starvation and disease killed hundreds of thousands, with 43,000 dying in Warsaw in 1941 alone. The following year saw the onset of deportation of Jews to the concentration camps, and within two months a staggering 300,000 people had been transported from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Germans had labelled the operation ‘resettlement in the East’ but more and more rumours were getting back to the ghettos and there were several attempted uprisings.

  But Jews weren’t just at risk in the concentration camps. It has been reported that there were mass executions throughout the newly formed German empire. One such instance took place outside Kiev in the Soviet Union where nearly 34,000 were killed in two days at the end of September 1941.

  The Nazis soon found that they were unable to cope with the number of Jews that were being sent to the camps as they implemented ‘the final solution’ and decided to start gassing them to death. Initially, the victims were herded into a gas chamber where carbon monoxide was piped into the room, but the Germans soon found a way to improve on that system and used Zyklon-B (also known as hydrogen cyanide). In an ironic twist of fate, Zyklon-B had been developed as a pesticide by Fritz Haber (a German Jew who was forced to emigrate in 1933).

  By June 1942, a second gas chamber had been set up at Auschwitz because the Germans could not cope with the number of Jews being sent there. Unlike Treblinka, where the ten individual gas chambers each only housed 200 people, the new set-up at Auschwitz meant that they could execute 2,000 people at a time. In reality, the lucky ones – though it can hardly be called good fortune – were the people who died during the transportation to the camps. Herded like cattle in freight trains, many often perished before reaching their final destination.

  Once they reached the extermination camps that had been hastily constructed to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible, the prisoners were stripped naked and their possessions were confiscated with the explanation that they were going to have a shower to clean themselves up. Often they were handed a bar of soap and a towel to perpetuate this lie but they were eventually taken to the gas chambers where they took up to twenty minutes

  to die.

  Their remains were initially buried but worries about contamination of the water supply, however, led to those bodies being exhumed and incinerated in huge firepits. Before this the Germans had already removed any items of value including gold fillings. In two weeks of May 1941, the SS collected eighty-eight pounds of gold and white metal from the teeth of those they had executed. This was the job of prisoners who wanted to delay their own execution, but spot-checks were carried out by the SS and if any filling was missed in a corpse then the person responsible was thrown into the furnace alive.

  It wasn’t just the mass extermination that the Jewish people faced, though. They were also the subject of medical experiments, with the most notorious practitioner being Dr Josef Mengele. He regularly conducted experiments on his ‘patients’ that included observing the results of high pressure and freezing temperatures, testing various drugs, attempting to change the colour of children’s eyes by injecting chemicals and sterilisation along with amputations and other horrific surgical procedures.

  He is reported to have enjoyed working with Romani children (who in their naivety used to call him Onkel Mengele) and twins were a fascination to him. One particular incident saw him adjoin two siblings back to back as if they were Siamese twins but they were in unbelievable pain and their wounds were infected so the parents managed to get ho
ld of morphine and ended their children’s lives rather than see them suffer.

  Perhaps the Germans realised that they were losing the war because they closed the camp at Sobibór in Poland after an escape by 300 detainees in October 1943. Only fifty survived the ensuing pursuit but the Nazis closed the camp and removed all traces of their activities by planting an orchard of trees on the site. But this didn’t stop the genocide, as the extermination camps worked at full pace during 1943 and 1944 with Auschwitz in particular responsible for killing and incinerating 20,000 people per day.

  By the middle of July 1944, Soviet troops had liberated the first concentration camp at Majdanek in Poland, the site of more than 360,000 murders. That was the year when perhaps the most infamous of all those who died in the concentration camps was arrested. Anne Frank was a fifteen-year-old girl who had been hiding with her family in secret rooms in her father’s office for two years before they were betrayed and given up to the authorities. She kept a diary of her life under the German occupation that was posthumously published in 1947, but she and her family were sent to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister were eventually transported to Bergen-Belsen where she died of typhus less than two months before the end of the hostilities.