The Malmédy Massacre: Snow and Blood

January 1945, executed American POW's bodies are uncovered by US Army personnel in Malmédy, Belgium.

The Malmédy Massacre occurred on December 17^th 1944 when Nazi SS Stormtroopers opened fire on unarmed US POW's in Nazi occupied Belgium. When the machine guns fell silent 84 of nearly 150 unarmed American GI's were slaughtered like diseased pigs and their bodies were discarded in the snow and blood.

The events surrounding the massacre happened one day after Adolf Hitler ordered the great Ardennes Offensive beginning on the 16th - sending those Nazis that had served at the highest levels of German military and government into the field to protect Germany from a widening and successful Allied invasion.

This was the late war counter-offensive known as the Battle Of The Bulge.

The Winter of 1944-45 was the coldest and most snow-bound in Europe for 20 years. This brutal winter unfolded during the Ardennes Offensive and later during The Battle of the Bulge as US Forces cut deep inroads into Nazi occupied Europe and Germany itself. It was early in this brutal winter that these men lost their lives after having surrendered to German forces near a small Belgium town called Malmédy.

In mid-December of 1944, the Combat Group of the 1^st SS Panzer Division, led by SS Major Joachim Peiper, was approaching the "Five Points" crossroads at Baugnes near the town of Malmédy where they encountered a small company of US troops from Battery B of the 285^th Field Artillery Observation Battalion from the US 7^th Armored Division.

The German half-tracks and tanks charged across the farm fields and fired into a convoy of thin-skinned vehicles and lightly armed troops of the FAOB - catching the Americans by surprise. After a series of hopeless firefights and realizing that the odds were hopeless, the US company's commander, Lieutenant Virgil Lary, ordered a surrender.

At the war crimes trials that would take place in the aftermath SS-Obersturmführer Werner Sternebeck testified: "When my lead panzer (tank) had approached to within 60 to 70 meters of the column, the Americans stood up from the roadside ditch and raised their hands in surrender."

At this point, it was clear by all accounts that the small American force had surrendered to the armor and superior fire power of the Germans.

After being searched and relieved of weapons by the SS, the US prisoners were quickly marched into a field adjacent to the Cafe Bodarwé - whose owner had been murdered by the SS when they burned it down. The bulk of SS troops present during the day's skirmishing then moved on except for two Mark IV tanks numbered 731 and 732. These were left behind to ostensibly guard the captured GI's.

As he stood among his men, Lt. Lary could not know was how fanatical the SS group commander he had just surrendered to really was.

Joachim Peiper turned 18 the same day that Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933. Peiper signed up for military service soon after. During his SS officer training, Peiper actually volunteered for classes in torture at Dachau inside the infamous Jewish concentration camp. Rising high in the Nazi ranks, Peiper acted as a leader and as SS "König" Heinrich Himmler's personal adjutant (a military secretary of administrative services) from 1938 to 1941 and was close friends with Nazi elite.

This man that Lt. Lary had just surrendered his men to was in every sense of the word - a true Nazi.

As the Nazis held the US soldiers in a loose formation, the Nazis later stated that "a couple of GI's tried to flee into the nearest woods". At that point, the order was given to fire at them and stop the escape. SS Private Georg Fleps of Tank 731 drew his pistol and fired at one of the escapees, Lt. Lary's driver, and this man fell dead in the snow.


January 1945, bodies of American POW's are marked and identified by US Army personnel in Malmédy, Belgium.

According to survivor accounts Fleps then took aim at a medic, 1st Lt. Carl R. Genthner of 575^th Ambulance Company and calmly fired three shots into him.

Then, for reasons still unclear, the machine guns of both Panzer tanks opened fire on nearly 150 unarmed prisoners. Many of the GI's immediately took to their heels and headed for the woods. Incredibly, 43 GI's survived, but 84 of their comrades lay dead in the field, being slowly covered with a blanket of snow and blood. Survivor accounts relate how SS soldiers went among the dead and wounded Americans and "finished the job".

According to survivor PFC Paul Hardiman, who lay badly wounded under a mass of brittle red snow and dead soldiers, 1st Lt. Carl R. Genthner the second unarmed prisoner that was shot that day was still alive enough plead for his life to the SS soldiers in German. His pleading went unheard and he was shot at point blank range, killing him instantly.

American Army brass was only made aware of the situation when a panicked Jeep driver drove a badly injured officer into camp screaming "Krauts!". The man was shot in the throat and the driver survived because they had trailed behind the doomed convoy. The Jeep's driver's name was Lt. Ksidzek ^[0].

No attempts were made at rescue or to recover the bodies until the area was retaken by the 30^th Infantry Division on January 14^th 1945. Men from the 291^st Engineers used metal detectors to locate the bodies buried in two feet of snow.

Following the discovery and reports of the massacre, US troops in the area were issued official orders that for the next week: No SS prisoners were to be taken.

At the end of the war, Peiper, and 72 other suspects arrested for atrocities committed before and after this last offensive of the Wermacht. When they were brought to trial Peiper and his men were held responsible for the cold-blooded murders of 362 POW's and 111 civilians. Lt. Lary, who survived the bloody massacre testified against Joachim Peiper and his men.

When the trials ended on July 16^th 1946, forty three of the defendants were sentenced to death by hanging, twenty two sentenced to life imprisonment, two sentenced to twenty years, one for fifteen years and five others sentenced to ten years imprisonment.


Nuremberg Trials 1946: Joachim Peiper is Number 42 on the far right.

Peiper and Fleps were among those sentenced to death but after a series of reviews these sentences were eventually reduced to terms in prison.

On December 22^nd 1956, SS Sturmbannführer Peiper was released. Peiper's friends in the Nazi elite were no more. Heinrich Himmler had committed suicide awaiting trial in Nuremberg in 1945. Peiper himself eventually settled alone in the small village of Traves in northern France in 1972 where he earned a living by translating military books from English into German.

Four years later, on the eve of Bastille Day, July 14^th 1976, Peiper was murdered and his house burned down by a French communist group known only as "The Avengers". The 61-year-old's charred body was recovered from the ruins and transferred to the family grave in Schondorf, near Landsberg in Bavaria.

After the original discovery of the massacre at Malmédy, most of the remains of the GI's murdered in Malmédy were shipped back to the US for private burials. Today, twenty-two bodies that were never sent home, including that of 33-year-old Lt. Carl R. Genthner, lie buried in the American Military Cemetery at Henri-Chappelle north of the woods of Malmédy were they fell.

Notes:
[0] = Battle of the Bulge, Vol. 2: Hell at Bütgenbach / Sieze the Bridges
By Hans J. Wijers. Page 151

References:
Wikipedia, SS Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper
7^th Armored Division, History of the 7AD
30^th Infantry, The Malmedy Massacre at the Baugnez Crossroads
575^th Ambulance Company, The Bitter End of 1st Lt. Carl R. Genthner
Army Quartermaster Foundation at Fort Lee, Malmédy Massacre
Massacres and Atrocities, Malmédy Massacre
Amazon, Malmedy Massacre

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

Well sir, this is the genuine coin of the realm.

The Cardiff Giant

The Cardiff Giant in his current resting place in upstate New York.

The Cardiff Giant was exhibited in the 19^th century and billed as the fossilized remains of a "prehistoric giant". This popular roadside attraction was actually made of plaster and the creation of a New York tobacco farmer named George Hull.

Hull, an atheist, created the giant out of spite after an argument with a fundamentalist minister about the passage in Genesis 6:4. In that verse, it's stated that there were giants, known as Nephilim, who reportedly once roamed a primordial Earth.

"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."

- Genesis 6:4

George Hull was clearly perpetrating a hoax upon those who followed literal bible interpretations. However, the Cardiff Giant eventually became a national sensation in the latter part of the 19^th century in America. Many people actually believed that Hull had unearthed proof of giant humanoids from scripture.

The idea of a petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. In 1858, a newspaper in Alta, California published a bogus letter that claimed that a prospector was petrified when he drank a strange liquid within a geode. Some other newspapers had also published stories of supposedly petrified people.


The Cardiff Giant is "unearthed" in upstate New York in October of 1869.

Hull hired men to carve out a 10-foot (3.0 m) long, 4.5-inch block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument to Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired a stonecutter to carve it into the likeness of a man and swore him to secrecy. Various stains and acids were used to make the giant appear to be old and weathered, and the giant's surface was beaten with steel knitting needles embedded in a board to simulate pores. Then Hull transported the giant by rail to the farm of William Newell, his cousin, in November 1868.

Nearly a year later, Newell hired two men on the pretext of digging a well. On October 16^th 1869, the trio "found" the Giant. One of the men reportedly exclaimed, "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!"

The giant drew such crowds that famous showman P.T. Barnum offered Hull $60,000 for a three-month lease of it. When the new owners turned him down, Barnum hired a man to covertly model the giant's shape in wax and create a plaster replica. Barnum put his own giant on display in New York, claiming that his was the real giant and the Cardiff Giant was a fake.

On December 10^th 1869, George Hull confessed to the press that his Giant was a hoax. On February of 1870, both giants were revealed as fakes in court. The presiding judge also ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling Hull's hoax a fake.

Apparently Hull, after the hoax was found out and a high profile court battle with P.T. Barnum was not dissuaded from making fake archeological "finds". In 1876, he created yet another enormous creature. This giant was christened as the Solid Muldoon. The Muldoon was made from clay, ground bones, discarded meat, rock dust and plaster.

Today, the original Cardiff Giant resides at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, an arcade and museum of oddities in Farmington Hills, Michigan near Detroit, where the statue still draws a crowd of wide-eyed spectators and religious fanatics alike.

References:
Wikipedia, The Cardiff Giant
Cardiff New York, Site Marker

The Piltdown Man

For over four decades the Piltdown Man was a fossil accepted by the world's scientific community as an authentic artifact of man's evolution from ape. However, the so-called Piltdown Man, originally "discovered" in 1912, was eventually revealed to be an infamous paleontological hoax.

The fossil consisted of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near East Sussex in England. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilized remains of a previously unknown form of early man. The fossil, itself, was so radically different from previous and following paleological discoveries that it demanded further analysis.

The significance of the specimen remained a subject of controversy until it was finally exposed by researchers in the British Museum in November of 1953 as a forgery.

Although the upper portion of the skull was 50,000 years old (still within the threshold of a modern or later archiac homo sapien) was so roughly combined with an ape jaw that it was conspicuous and suspicious to an expert's eye. The fossil was actually a combination of the chemically treated lower jawbone and teeth of an orangutan and skull fragments from a the skull of a homo sapien. A skull that was more than likely stolen from the Museum itself.

The hoax's perpertrator, lawyer, amateur geologist and dealer of fake antiquities Charles Dawson had died in 1916. The blame, forty years later, fell on ichthyologist Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum, whose aid no doubt helped Dawson re-construct the fossil in the first place. By 1953, once again, the joke was on the scientific community as Smith had retired from the Museum in 1924 and died in 1944.

References:
Wikipedia, The Piltdown Man
Hoaxapedia, Piltdown Man
Oriental Rug Review, Vol. 13/2, December/January, 1993, Debunking of Three Hoaxes