From: "The Enlightenment"

Never happened that way. You refer to the Malmedy tragedy? It was a
small breakout attempt by 2 prisoners that turned into a few shots that
became a panic breakout that cost about 18 lives. It eventualy became a
propaganda lie that it seems to me is passionatly cherished perhaps because
it serves a purpose. An almost completely fabricated version of it is
endlessly and somewhat disgracefullty repeated without footnote in the Movie
"The battle for the Bulge". It Seems to have been an excuse for justifying
the murdering of the excedingly young conscipt Germans trying to surrender
and particularly Waffen SS. What little "evidence" that exists was
discredited as it came via the beating to a pulp of 18 German prisoners
testicles after the war.

Having personaly spoken to Austrian Army POWs who were held in open pens in
the snow for weeks and dieing from exposure and had to suffer several
murders by pot shots a night I know that elements of the US military can be
very savage. To be fair it seems to have been mainly Polish American units
that did this.


Another version is this:


The "Malmedy Massacre" is argued by others to be a hoax invented by wartime
sensation-mongers. During the Battle of the Bulge, a unit of the 1st Panzer
Division killed over 80 GIs during a fire fight. The American dead were laid
out in rows in the snow, but the Germans were forced to withdraw from
Malmedy before the dead soldiers were buried. Allied propagandists blew this
event up into a major atrocity story, claiming that the Americans had been
taken prisoner and then lined up and shot. Several Germans were tried after
the war for their participation in this war crime.


I will wait patiently while you provide verifiable sources for either of those
fantasies.

The photographs I have seen show a lot more than 18 dead.

Either way, Malmedy was not characteristic of the Germans in the west.


And Oradeur wasn't either, I suppose? That was a small town in France where
your beloved SS shot all the men they could find and locked all the women and
children they could find in the church, then setting fire to it. I guess
burning women and children to death wasn't their way in the west either.

Dan, U. S. Air force, retired