Transcript
Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra
Episode 3: Malmedy
One of the most shocking incidents of World War II for Americans — a cold-blooded Nazi massacre of surrendering American troops — gets weaponized against the United States by surviving Nazis hoping to return to power, as well as a group of Americans sympathetic to their cause. A gruesome hoax around the massacre, cooked up by the Nazis, will soon rocket through American politics.
(NBC NEWS RADIO CHIMES)
Rachel Maddow: This is not a World War II story. Not really. But it does start here, in Belgium, in the Ardennes Forest.
Reporter: German tanks and infantry had penetrated from to 20 miles into the American lines. And although there is no information at the moment about our losses, it is reasonable to assume that any offensive of such great proportions and moving with such speed cost us plenty.
Maddow: It’s day one of what will be a six-week-long battle, the deadliest battle of the whole war for the U.S. military. At the start of this battle, the military orders a media blackout. No news from the front here. They’re worried that anything about Allied troop movements, or locations, or even losses, the Germans might be able to make use of it.
But then, just a few days into this fight, there’s one story. One big and terrible story that does make its way home.
Reporter: This story comes from a front-line clearing station in Belgium. A handful of doughboys described today how a German tank force ruthlessly poured machine-gun fire into a group of American prisoners who had already been disarmed.
Maddow: This was December 17, 1944. It was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. And a group of American soldiers in Belgium, in a town called Malmedy, they were ambushed by a Nazi SS tank unit, a Panzer unit. These Americans were lightly armed artillery observers. There was a brief firefight, but they were severely outgunned, and the American troops fairly quickly surrendered.
Reporter: The German foot soldiers, working forward with tanks, disarmed the Americans and took them to an open field.
Maddow: The Germans lined the Americans up in rows in the field. They took all of their weapons. They searched them for valuables, for cigarettes or watches or wedding rings. They ordered them to put their hands behind their heads. But then, instead of taking the Americans into custody, these unarmed men who had surrendered, who were now prisoners of war, the Germans just opened fire.
Reporter: Soon, a German soldier with a pistol opened fire from a car nearby, and motorized troops then raked the Americans with machine-gun fire.
Steven Remy: They accepted the surrender of the Americans. They gathered them in a field, and then they executed nearly all of them.
Maddow: That’s historian Steven Remy. He’s written one of the definitive historical accounts of this incident.
Remy: U.S. Army autopsy reported that 84 had been killed, and what’s striking, though, is that over half of them had been killed at close range. They were killed by bullet or bayonet or blunt instrument. It was an extremely brutal encounter.
Maddow: The Germans started with machine-gun fire. Then they used rifles and pistols. They shot at anyone on the ground who appeared to still be alive. They shot the wounded. They used their bayonets. They used the butts of their rifles. They beat and tortured and killed the survivors. The L.A. Times headline days later was just gut-wrenching.
The headline was, “Nazis Murdered Yanks, Then Stomped on [Their] Faces.”
Reporter: German sergeants moved among the fallen men, taking what they wanted and killing off the wounded. The living among the battalion made a dash for it, and they got back to American lines by scattering in the woods.
Maddow: Somehow, there were American soldiers from the group that was initially captured who got away, who managed to survive it. And those Americans who miraculously made it out of there, who escaped, they immediately told the story. They explained in detail what they had just survived.
Survivor: They marched us up the road, they took everything that was worth a damn, and took us over in a field. A guy pulls down in a tank and he opens a hatch and climbs out, fires a pistol into the crowd.
Remy: These are terrified and deeply traumatized soldiers. Some of them were wounded, and they were telling this story only hours after the incident itself to American reporters. So the stories are very graphic.
Survivor: They came around with pistols and shot anyone who moved or moaned or tried to make a break.
Remy: The ones who survived and played dead had to listen, in many cases, to the sounds of their fellow G.I.s being executed, in some cases, really, really brutally.
Survivor: I looked up and took notice of one German taking out a pistol and shooting two of our comrades. So, after that, about 10 minutes, I heard a command fire and I hit the ground. Played dead for about an hour and a half. After that, I finally made a break to get away.
Maddow: The American public came to know about that massacre of American prisoners of war, not just because of survivors like that telling the press what happened, but also because of the aftermath, because of the physical evidence that was left behind. A month after the killings, in mid-January 1945, American troops were finally able to get back to the site of those killings. They were finally able to get back to the town of Malmedy.
Announcer: Advancing troops near Malmedy returned to a battleground where their comrades had been captured.
Maddow: What those troops found when they returned, under a blanket of fresh snow, was devastating.
Remy: They discovered the frozen, unburied corpses of 84 American G.I.s.
Maddow: Press reports from the time described how American troops extricated the bodies of their comrades from the freezing mud and the snow. Some of the corpses still had their hands frozen in place above their heads. Stories ran in Stars and Stripes and in Yank Magazine. A horrifying series of photos were printed in Life Magazine, including one American G.I. whose eyes had been cut out. The images were so graphic they had to be blurred.
Remy: Images of fallen American servicemen published during the war were incredibly rare. It was rarely, rarely seen. And this was the most graphic display of the victims of a massacre, American soldiers, that the American public had seen during the war.
Maddow: The Malmedy Massacre.
In all of the combat tales and tragedies that came home to the American public during the war in Europe against the Nazis, this one stood out. This wasn’t combat. This was a crime that not only cost American lives, it left behind American survivors as witnesses, and all of that evidence in that frozen field.
It was a huge news story all across the United States. It was enraging and galvanizing to the American public. It even turned the head of the supreme commander of all Allied forces in Europe. He vowed that the United States would find the specific Nazi SS unit that was responsible for what had happened at Malmedy. They’d be hunted down. They would be held to account. There would be justice for this.
In time, the perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre would be caught, and they would be put on trial. But then the whole thing would boomerang. The process of getting justice for this crime would become a political weapon against the United States. There would be an attack on this case, a successful attack, that would also become a larger attack on American democracy, and specifically on the American rule of law.
It would involve graphic, even bizarre, literally unbelievable allegations, disproven but insistent lies, repeated and repeated and repeated. Parts of the American media that were unwilling or unable to stop themselves from being used to advance this attack. And most dangerous of all, it would involve powerful Americans, elected officials, who were part of it and knew it, and who changed American politics forever. This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”
Prosecutor: The above-named defendants have been accused of participating in the shooting and torture of unarmed Allied nationals.
Reporter: The military court at Dachau in Germany has just finished that trial of Hitler’s SS men.
Remy: After the trial, they realized they were in very, very serious trouble.
Willis Everett: Each of us wondered what defense we could make for these 74 accused.
Remy: He began hinting that he had an explosive story about what had really gone on.
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Maddow: Episode 3: Malmedy.
Prosecutor: The above-named defendants have been accused of participating in the shooting and torture of unarmed Allied nationals.
Maddow: Sitting in the dock, inside the courtroom, before the judges and the lawyers and the international press, are more than 70 German soldiers. They’re members of a unit that’s been given a nickname. They’re called the Blowtorch Battalion. They got that name for their habit of burning down civilian villages and murdering all the inhabitants. In the German offensive that began the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, this unit is accused of indiscriminate killings of Belgian civilians. This is the unit that’s also accused of the massacre of American POWs in the town of Malmedy.
Trial official: The court will come to order.
Burton Ellis: The prosecution is ready to proceed with this case.
Maddow: U.S. Army investigators had scoured hospitals and prisoner-of-war camps all over Europe to find the members of this particular German panzer unit, to find these defendants.
Ellis: We expect the evidence to show that troops of the first SS Panzer regiment proceeded to execute their orders to kill unarmed and defenseless prisoners of war and unarmed Allied civilians with zeal and enthusiasm.
Maddow: Now they sat inside a makeshift courtroom that had been set up on the grounds of the decommissioned concentration camp at Dachau.
Trial official: The court has declared to be properly constituted. The trial will be conducted in open court.
Maddow: The foundation of the prosecution’s case is straightforward. The defendants admitted they did it. They admitted they killed civilians. They admitted they killed those American POWs. They had described what they’d done in detailed confessions that were obtained by U.S. Army investigators who questioned the Nazis while they were in custody.
Ellis: And who, according to the statements of the accused, Joachim Hoffman, Siegfried Jekyll, Gustav Springer, and his own confession, fired a machine gun into those prisoners who still turned and twisted on the ground in the field at the crossroads south of Malmedy.
Remy: These former SS men turned on each other. They turned on each other when they gave their confessions.
Maddow: That’s historian Steven Remy again.
Remy: These sworn statements became the foundation for the prosecution’s case at the trial.
Maddow: The fact that there are comprehensive confessions from these defendants, it makes the whole thing a bit of an uphill climb for the defense at the trial, for the U.S. Army lawyer who’s assigned to serve as defense counsel for these Nazi soldiers. That lawyer is a U.S. Army colonel, a man from Georgia. His name is Willis Everett.
Remy: Willis Everett was shocked to find out that he would be the lead defense attorney in this very high visibility case. He was determined to do the best he could by his clients, even though I think he thought the case was largely hopeless.
Maddow: Willis Everett knew that it would be pointless to argue that this crime hadn’t happened. Everybody knew that the crime had happened. He knew it would be pointless to argue that these defendants hadn’t done it. After all, they admitted they had done it.
Everett: When the defense staff was assembled just three months ago, each of us wondered what defense we could make for these 74 accused.
Maddow: There had been a moment before trial when Everett thought he might have a hook for a defense strategy.
Remy: Shortly before the trial begins, Willis Everett starts hearing reports that some of the prisoners had been abused by American interrogators. And he doesn’t know quite what to do at first, but he is responsible for defending his clients. And if it’s true that any of the accused men were coerced into signing false confessions, then this is something that had to be brought out.
Maddow: The prosecution’s case depended on those confessions. So if there was a problem with the confessions, that was a very big deal, if the claims were true. But the claims were not true, as Everett himself soon learned.
Remy: Everett does decide to go to superior officers to report what he had heard. And they did the right thing. They dispatched an investigator to Dachau, where the accused men were then being held. He looked into these accusations and found them to be baseless. And at the time, so did Willis Everett. At the time, we know that Willis Everett had to admit that a handful of the accused who were making claims about having been beaten, that they were lying.
Maddow: They were lying. Willis Everett even acknowledged that in a letter home to his family at the time. So this little episode was a brief detour on the way to trial, but the men who made these claims admitted they were false, and so did Willis Everett, and so the trial went ahead.
In court, Everett argued a few different ways that the Germans just shouldn’t be held responsible for what they’d done, for what they admitted they had done. It wasn’t a particularly powerful defense. And from the prosecution side, they had very compelling witness testimony to draw from, including from American survivors of the massacre.
Survivor: We were motioned into the field, shoulder to shoulder, 20-man front, approximately.
Survivor: He then fired two shots into our group. The first shot, a man to my right front, approximately here, with his hands up in this manner, went down like this.
Ellis: How many bodies do you estimate you saw lying in the field when you made your break?
Survivor: I estimate well over a hundred.
Maddow: These witnesses, the survivors, testified in detail about what they had seen. The Nazi defendants themselves also testified. The U.S. Army interrogators who spoke German, who obtained the defendants’ confessions, they testified about that, too.
Investigator: Boltz told us about the shooting of the prisoners and about the fact that he fired his machine gun into those prisoners who were still alive in the field at the crossroads.
Maddow: The trial lasted two months overall. And then it was done.
Reporter: The military court at Dachau in Germany had just finished that trial of Hitler’s SS men who were charged with violating the rules of war. The specific act was the slaughter of American prisoners at Malmedy in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. And the court today found them guilty.
Maddow: All of them were found guilty. No acquittals. The lightest sentences were between 10 and 20 years in prison. But most of the Malmedy defendants, 43 of the Nazis who were put on trial, were sentenced to death.
And if that were the end of the story, the Malmedy trial would have gone down as one more disturbing war story from World War II. A massacre of American POWs, the perpetrators captured, put on trial, convicted, held accountable for their crimes. But that would not be how this story went. And that’s in part because of that American lawyer, Willis Everett, who had led the defense in the Malmedy case.
Everett: May it please the court —
Maddow: Willis Everett was a Georgia lawyer. He was the son of a Georgia lawyer. His family was very well connected back home. It was thanks to some of his dad’s friends that Everett had been able to talk his way into an officer’s commission in the Army, even though he technically didn’t qualify for one.
During World War II, Willis Everett was active-duty Army for the entire duration of the war. But he never really left home. He stayed in Atlanta. He worked every day inside the Atlanta post office in a low-key Army intelligence job.
Announcer: This is the news that electrified the world. Unconditional surrender.
Maddow: It was not until after the surrender of Germany and Japan that Willis Everett finally got orders to prepare to deploy to Europe in the fall of 1945.
Remy: He had become a judge-advocate lawyer, and he had no courtroom experience.
Maddow: Before shipping out, the Army assigned Willis Everett to do a training course at Columbia University in New York City. From New York, Everett wrote to his wife back home, complaining that when he went to church one Sunday morning, there were two Black people in the choir. He told her their presence in the choir, quote, “spoiled the service.”
In the dorm where he was assigned to live at Columbia, Everett was outraged to learn that a Black student was on the same floor as him and was therefore sharing the same bathroom. Everett demanded that the Black student be moved off his floor. He told his wife in a letter home that he couldn’t, quote, “stomach the toilet business.”
Columbia would not move the Black student. Willis Everett moved himself out of the dorm instead. That training course in New York was just a matter of weeks. He was soon on his way to Germany, where he would bring his own experience and his own worldview to bear on his defense of the Nazi war criminals who committed the Malmedy Massacre.
Remy: Before and during the trial, as Willis Everett became increasingly frustrated, his prejudices came to the surface in private correspondence with his family. He lashed out. I found correspondence in the National Archives from Willis Everett to Army officials to civilians. These expressions comported more generally with his outlook on the occupation, which he considered to be corrupt and unjust and vindictive.
And I think that resonated deeply with his sense of himself as a Southerner, as a proud Georgian, as a rebel, as he described himself to another officer. It’s easy to see how he would find himself sympathetic to a proud nation that had been defeated militarily and was now occupied. In general, his sympathies lay with the defeated Germans and much less so with their victims. He thought the Germans were being victimized.
Maddow: Willis Everett sympathized with the Germans, with his Nazi defendants in the Malmedy case, but also with the German people who were under Allied occupation after their side lost the war.
Remy: When he was in occupied Germany, he didn’t like what he saw. He saw American soldiers cavorting with German women, and all these things offended his conservative sensibilities.
Maddow: Willis Everett believed that the post-war Allied occupation of Germany was wrong. He believed that America putting Nazis on trial for war crimes was wrong. He believed that his own case, the prosecution for the Malmedy massacre, he believed that was wrong and morally illegitimate. And he believed all of these things because, in his mind, it was the Jews who were behind all of it.
Remy: Willis Everett was an anti-Semite. He became convinced that the whole investigation and the whole trial had been corrupt and corrupted, mainly by Jews.
Maddow: During the Malmedy trial, Willis Everett privately railed about what he called the overproduction of Jews in the U.S. military. He called his co-defense lawyer a quote, “nosey talking, arguing Jew.” He complained about the quote, “Jewish occupation” of Germany. He called a fellow U.S. Army officer involved in the court proceedings a quote, “Jew law member.”
Remy: There’s no question that Willis Everett was deeply prejudiced, and he wasn’t talking about what he considered to be a few bad apples. His anti-Semitism was of the conspiratorial variety, which was so common then and since, that the punitive occupation was driven by Jewish interests, driven by a kind of Jewish conspiracy and Jewish desire for revenge. And he took the position that the Jews were simply using the investigation and the trial to seek revenge for what the Nazis had done.
Maddow: The entire thing for Willis Everett, the investigation of the Malmedy Massacre, the trial of its perpetrators, he believed the whole thing was just a Jewish conspiracy.
Remy: This was baseless. There was absolutely no truth to any of it. But it was a perception that Willis Everett held.
Maddow: When Willis Everett’s defense of the Malmedy Massacre perpetrators failed in court, when all of his defendants were convicted, he did not accept the loss. He dug in for a new kind of fight. Just a few months after the trial ended, Willis Everett shipped back to the United States from Germany, and he came back with a plan.
Remy: He started talking to the press and began hinting that he had an explosive story about what had really gone on. He wrote a long petition which distorted the trial record and suggested that all kinds of bad things were going on during the investigation.
Maddow: Willis Everett wrote a petition to the U.S. Army about the Malmedy case. It resurrected those false abuse allegations that a few defendants had tried floating before the trial, allegations that Everett himself knew and had admitted were false.
Remy: The interrogators had gone too far, and the result was that the accused men had been coerced into signing false confessions.
Maddow: Within just days of Everett returning to the United States from Germany, these allegations he made in his supposedly confidential petition to the U.S. Army, it all started to turn up in the press.
Remy: He was bluffing because he didn’t have the goods. He didn’t have the proof. But increasingly, the press in the United States is picking up on this story, and they’re starting to quote Willis Everett, and this starts to put some pressure on the Army.
Maddow: As his story starts to get attention in the press, these allegations from this defense lawyer about this very high-profile Malmedy case, the U.S. Army’s War Crimes Unit feels pressured to respond. They tell reporters they are baffled by Everett’s claims, that he didn’t raise any of these supposed concerns at trial.
But in response to Everett’s criticism and to all the press that he was getting for it, the Army does decide to launch a review of the trial. The review finds no basis for these claims of abuse. Then they launched a second review of the trial, which again found no basis for any claims of abuse. Then they launched a third review of the trial, and then they launched a fourth review of the trial, and all of them came to the same result.
This had been a very high-profile case with a lot of public attention, a lot of public emotion behind it. The U.S. government, the U.S. Army, was very focused on the perceived legitimacy of the war crimes trials in Germany. With criticism of this trial for this notorious crime making front pages all over the country, the Army was willing to bend over backwards. They reviewed everything.
Remy: The Army carried out four extensive reviews of the investigation and the trial. All four reviews of the case came to the same conclusion. No one had been tortured. The torture claims were baseless.
Maddow: Now, some of these reviews did say that the sentences might have been too harsh for some of the defendants. Maybe more of them should have received long prison sentences. Fewer of them should have been sentenced to hang. But none of the four separate reviews of the Malmedy case found fault with the convictions or with the trial. There was no evidence that the defendants had been systematically abused or that their confessions had been forced.
Nevertheless, here was this American, this very well-connected American colonel, saying that unspecified bad things had gone on during this investigation. He was saying that the perpetrators of the Malmedy massacre, the Blowtorch Battalion, these convicted Nazi SS war criminals, they were the victims here. As confounding as this was for the U.S. Army and the War Crimes Unit, this would also be a light bulb moment for the convicted Nazi soldiers themselves.
They, of course, were looking to avoid execution, looking to avoid their long prison sentences. Maybe this was a way they could get out of it.
Remy: We know that the torture accusations were not true, but nearly all of them claimed that they had been physically and psychologically abused. Limbs broken. Bones had been broken. It was very graphic.
Even more ominously, this was also a light-bulb moment inside Germany for surviving, committed Nazis who thought well, here was something they could work with, too. Here was a weapon for them. And here was an American showing them the way to use it.
Maddow: That’s next.
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Remy: After the trial, Willis Everett was exhausted and he was very, very angry.
Maddow: When the American defense lawyer from the Malmedy trial, Willis Everett, started telling American officials and the American press that something had been wrong with the Malmedy case, when he was claiming vaguely that somehow the Nazi defendants in that case, the perpetrators of the Malmedy massacre, somehow they were the real victims. Everett had the idea that maybe if he could sell this story, literally sell it, it might really be worth something.
Remy: He also was convinced that he was sitting on top of a sensational story.
Maddow: That’s historian Stephen Remy again.
Remy: A story that he believed would be worth a lot of money.
Maddow: Willis Everett thought the press might pay him quite a bit for a wild story about the famous Malmedy massacre. He also thought if he could somehow make himself the hero of the story, maybe it might lead to something even bigger.
Remy: There’s some evidence to suggest that Willis Everett imagined that Hollywood would take up this story and that maybe Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart would play him.
Maddow: The Malmedy Massacre trial was Willis Everett’s first ever criminal trial. It was a really high profile thing, this Malmedy case. And so, the outcome of it, with every defendant convicted, among all the other things that that was, for Willis Everett personally, it was a humiliation. One that he very much wanted to reverse.
Remy: He had lost the case, of course, very badly.
Maddow: In Willis Everett’s mind, it was the Jews who were to blame for his failure. Jews in the U.S. Army War Crimes Unit, Jews in the U.S. Army more broadly. The whole Allied occupation of Germany was a Jewish plot in his mind. If he could get this case reopened, maybe he could free his Nazi clients and vindicate his own performance at trial. Maybe vindicate his own prejudices as well. Maybe there could be some fame and fortune in it too.
But after Everett had lost the Malmedy case in Germany, he’d also left the country and come back to the United States. His convicted Nazi clients were left behind, languishing in Landsberg Prison. When Everett began agitating over this case in the United States, his old clients back in Germany learned that there was a new lawyer who wanted to represent them to try to get them clemency. A German lawyer this time. One who was ubiquitous at the post-war trials.
He was the lawyer who represented more Nazi war criminals than any other lawyer anywhere. And he had a mixed record in the courtroom. A lot of his clients were hanged. But he was definitely committed. Deeply committed to the work. And his commitment was not just as a lawyer.
Remy: Rudolf Aschenauer was a German lawyer and a former Nazi who had not really renounced his allegiance to national socialism.
Maddow: After the end of World War II, committed unrepentant Nazis were not supposed to be allowed to practice law in Germany. Rudolf Aschenauer slipped through those cracks.
Remy: He made it his life’s mission to defend Nazi criminals.
Maddow: While Aschenauer was representing Nazi war criminals, he also was part of every significant post-war effort to try to reorganize the Nazi movement inside Germany. He was connected to a Nazi return to power plot led by former SS officers, one that made front page news all over the world when it was busted up by British intelligence. He also was a leader and a successor to the Nazi party that got banned in Germany.
Remy: The Socialist Reich party wanted to create a new German Reich.
Maddow: The U.S. pressured Germany to ban that party on the grounds that you can’t let someone on the ballot if they plan to dismantle democracy once they’re elected.
Remy: The West German Supreme Court does ban the Socialist Reich party. Now, what does somebody like Aschenauer do after that? Well, he briefly is involved in trying to rebuild the party under a different guise.
Maddow: This lawyer, Aschenauer, was a key player in all of those plots and more. U.S. Army counterintelligence kept him under surveillance in Germany for years. They also used him as an informant.
Remy: He’s an ideologue, certainly. He’s a cagey character.
Maddow: All the while, his day job was representing Nazi defendants at various war crimes trials. That’s because, for him, these two things went great together. For the Nazi return-to-power movement that he was part of, stoking resentment against these prosecutions was their best issue. It was their best propaganda tool to try to set the public against the Allies, against the West, against America, specifically.
Remy: They fought very hard to undermine war crimes trials.
Reporter: Today, after a full hearing, that American military court reached its decision, guilty on all counts.
Remy: For them, war crimes trials were simply one arm of this machine of punishment that the Allies were imposing on the Germans.
Maddow: This had been Rudolf Aschenauer’s argument in court and in public and in the press. The Nazis had done nothing wrong, at least nothing any more wrong than any other country. These prosecutions should stop. Anybody convicted at these trials, they should all be freed.
Remy: They considered Germans to be victims. Victims of the Jews. Victims of a punitive occupation.
Maddow: In time, thousands of Germans would turn up for repeated large demonstrations outside Landsberg Prison, calling for all the convicted war criminals to be released. But it was the Malmedy trial specifically where they really hit gold.
Trial official: This is a duly constituted military government general court for the trial of war criminals.
Remy: Aschenauer was representing most of the men convicted in the Malmedy trial who were still in prison.
Maddow: When Aschenauer took over the Malmedy case, trying to get the case reopened, the real pressure to force that outcome was happening in the United States.
Remy: Willis Everett was determined to put political pressure and public pressure on the Army to retry the entire case. And he took a maximalist position. For Everett, it was all or nothing. Increasingly, he was making thinly veiled references to Jewish investigators and the Jewish law court member. They were recent Americans. They were animated by a spirit of revenge.
Maddow: Rudolf Aschenauer and the Nazi return-to-power movement in Germany had already been making these kinds of arguments, using this issue to try to rile up the German people to rekindle their nationalism, to once again create a sense that Germany was being unfairly persecuted and the Jews were behind it.
Now here was an American colonel backing them up, spreading the same kind of story in the United States. This was gold. And so, inside Landsberg Prison, the convicted perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre signed up with this committed Nazi, with Aschenauer, as their new lawyer. And with his help, they got to work.
Remy: They had all signed sworn statements. They had all signed confessions. So they started writing new statements in which they refuted their sworn statements and nearly all of them claimed that they had been physically and psychologically abused.
Maddow: Now a few of these defendants had tried something like this before trial and they’d been found out and they hadn’t gotten away with it. But now, this time, they would all commit to the bit. They all wrote new sworn statements saying they were all horribly, physically, and psychologically abused.
So, in America, here’s Willis Everett trying to reopen this case that he lost, trying to make the Malmedy trial into some kind of big scandal in the United States. In Germany, the Nazis convicted in that trial are working with their new Nazi lawyer to cook up a whole new story about what happened in the trial to say that they hadn’t really done anything wrong. They hadn’t actually committed the massacre. They’d all only falsely confessed because they’d been forced to by terrible abuse. They’d been tortured, specifically by Jewish U.S. Army investigators.
Remy: Now, if you read these, they read like a hack screenwriter’s attempt at dramatizing torture. That they had had limbs broken. That they had been assaulted. That their testicles had been damaged. That bones had been broken. It was very graphic.
Maddow: It was very graphic. It was also very, very made up. And because these statements were fiction, that freed them up to be as gory as possible, to be as shocking and unforgettable as they could imagine, to hopefully make these things so gross they’d be irresistible to the press. So they just went for it.
It wasn’t just that they were beaten with clubs and thrown downstairs. They said they were all systematically kicked in the genitals until permanent damage was done. They said they were denied not just food, but also water. So they had to drink out of their toilets to stay alive. One guy said investigators had tied his hands to a table, then put sharpened matchsticks under his fingernails, and then lit them on fire.
They even said they were subjected to spiritual torture by these vengeful American Jews who forced them into defiling symbols of Christianity in blood-soaked satanic rituals involving crucifixes and candles.
Remy: They’re just unbelievable. They’re just too incredible to be believed.
Maddow: Inside Landsberg Prison, the convicted perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre, they sat together in the lecture hall to write up these affidavits, these over-the-top horror stories about how they were supposedly forced by these sadistic, demonic Americans to make confessions to crimes that they had not committed. Some of them later said that during their time in prison, this exercise, this group effort at writing these fantastical torture stories, they said it was a lot of fun. They called it their favorite sport.
Remy: The convicted men were writing these statements with the assistance and guidance of their ex-Nazi lawyers, and these statements were being smuggled out of Landsberg Prison by the convicted men’s ex-Nazi lawyers.
Maddow: These lurid, shocking new lies about the Malmedy prosecution, they definitely were not true. And Willis Everett himself knew for sure that these were not true. He had admitted that even before the trial. But these lies were so shocking. They were so tabloid-ready. If they got enough attention, maybe they would do the trick for Willis Everett in the United States. Undo the insult of having lost this high-profile case. Make a name for himself in the meantime. Maybe even make some money.
These false tales were also exactly what Rudolf Aschenauer needed in Germany. Maybe this could overturn the convictions of the Malmedy defendants and free these Nazi clients of his. But maybe also this could free all of his clients. Maybe this could discredit the war crimes prosecutions altogether, which was key to his overall political goal of returning some form of Nazi rule to Germany. Parallel efforts meeting both of their needs.
But if they were going to get all the way there, they were going to need more help. And they knew where to get it. Both the guy in Germany and the guy in the United States had a pretty good idea about who else in America might be able to help.
Rally speaker: And I only wish there were more Americans in the United States of America that loved America first.
Maddow: Before America’s entry into the war, certain forces on the American far right, including in Congress, were working with fascists at home and abroad, taking Nazi propaganda and spreading it willingly to the American people and damned the consequences. That had been before the war. Now, after the war, this would be round two.
Remy: American congressmen start picking up on this story.
Anchor: The senators are probing reports that the Germans were beaten and starved to get confessions from them.
Remy: He was very, very badly informed. He did not know what he was talking about.
Rodger McDaniel: He was not bound by the truth or by facts, quite willing to ruin the lives of people who got in his way.
Maddow: It would infect American politics in a way that would ultimately cost at least one U.S. senator his life.
McDaniel: Lester Hunt had been in the Senate only a couple of months when the Senate decided it would investigate the Malminy massacre.
Maddow: It would propel one of the most damaging anti-democratic demagogues in U.S. history toward the peak of American power.
Joseph McCarthy: So many of them said, “oh, we like what you’re trying to do, but oh, we don’t like your methods.” I’ve heard that over and over and over like a broken phonograph record.
Maddow: That is next time on “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”
“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It’s produced by Kelsey Desiderio and Jen Mulraney Donovan. Our associate producer is Vasilios Karsaliakos, archival support from Holly Klopchin, audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory and Catherine Anderson. Our head of audio production is Bryson Barnes. Our senior executive producer is Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our web producer is Will Femia. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MSNBC Audio. Rebecca Kutler is the senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC. Archival radio material is from NBC News via the Library of Congress.
A special thanks to Steven Remy. You really should read his excellent book. It’s called “The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy.” There’s been a lot written about that trial and about that controversy. But Steven Remy’s work is absolutely seminal. Couldn’t recommend it more strongly. You can find much more about this series at our website msnbc.com/ultra.
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Ellis: Today in America, the survivors of these massacres, the mothers, fathers, sweethearts, wives, and children of those comrades of ours who so needlessly fell, not on the field of battle, but from the tender mercies of the SS, are awaiting your findings. From their deaths let there come a clear understanding to our former enemies that the end does not justify the means. It must be brought home to the German people that the principle of extermination which guided them in their last battle will not create for them a new and better world, but will only bring disaster to their homeland and to themselves. Let their punishment be adequate for their crimes. There you got it, boys.