The concept of the "common design" charge was the innovative idea of Lt. Col. Murray C. Bernays, a Lithuanian Jew who had emigrated to the United States at the age of 6. The following words, written by Bernays before the end of the war, while the war crimes trials were still in the planning stage, are quoted by Robert E. Conot in his book "Judgment at Nuremberg":

The crimes and atrocities were not single or unconnected, but were the inevitable outcome of the basic criminal conspiracy of the Nazi party. This conspiracy, based on the Nazi doctrine of racism and totalitarianism, involved murder, terrorism, and the destruction of peaceful populations in violation of the laws of war. A conspiracy is criminal either because it aims at the accomplishment of lawful ends by unlawful means, or because it aims at the accomplishment of unlawful ends by lawful means. Therefore, such technicalities as the question whether the extermination of fellow Germans by Nazis perpetrated before there was a state of war, would be unimportant, if you recognize as the basic crime the Nazi conspiracy which required for success the killing of dissident liberal Germans and the extermination of German (and non-German) Jews before and after the war had begun.

David Daniel Mickey Marcus, a tough Brooklyn street kid, rose by virtue of his courage and intelligence to help save Israel in 1948 and become its first general since Judah Maccabee. After a distinguished career in military and public service to the United States, the 46-year-old Marcus wrote his name forever in the annals of Israeli history.

Born to immigrant parents in 1902, Marcus grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn where, to defend himself against neighborhood toughs, he learned to box. His high school athletic and academic record won him admission to West Point in 1920, from which he graduated with impressive scores. After completing his required service, Marcus went to law school and spent most of the 1930s as a Federal attorney in New York, helping bring Lucky Luciano to justice. As a reward, Mayor LaGuardia named Marcus Commissioner of Corrections for New York City.

After the trial, Everett attempted to get the Supreme Court to hear the appeal of the Malmédy Case defendants. In May 1948 the Court's decision not to hear the appeal prompted the Secretary of the Army, Kenneth C. Royall, to order a stay of execution of the sentences pending further investigation.

One year after the trial ended, an Army office carried out a review of the trial and made large changes in the original sentences. Although no prisoner was released, twenty-five of the forty-three death sentences were reduced to life imprisonment, seventeen defendants had their life sentences reduced and those with shorter prison terms had them made even shorter. Many of these changes were made, the reviewing body said, because of the youthfulness of the defendants at the time. The charges with these changes were also reviewed a year later by the War Crimes Review Board, which, after declaring the pre-trial investigation flawed and saying the court had favored the prosecution, recommended to a higher body a further reducing of sentences. This higher body, the Military Governor of the American Zone, took some of the Review Board's suggestions into account, and its changes led to thirteen defendants being freed, and only twelve still facing execution. Still later, the Governor reduced the number sentenced to death to 6. As the end of the Malmedy affair approached, American military authorities reduced to life imprisonment the death sentences for the 6 remaining defendants

In the prison of the Swabisch Hall, he stated, officers of the S.S. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler were flogged until they were soaked in blood, after which their sexual organs were trampled on as they lay prostrate on the ground. As in the notorious Malmedy Trials of private soldiers, the prisoners were hoisted in the air and beaten until they signed the confessions demanded of them.

On the basis of such "confessions" extorted from S.S. Generals Sepp Dietrich and Joachim Paiper, the Leibstandarte was convicted as a "guilty organisation". S.S. General Oswald Pohl, the economic administrator of the concentration camp system, had his face smeared with faeces and was subsequently beaten until he supplied his confession. In dealing with these cases, Senator McCarthy told the Press: "I have heard evidence and read documentary proofs to the effect that the accused persons were beaten up, maltreated and physically tortured by methods which could only be conceived in sick brains. They were subjected to mock trials and pretended executions, they were told their families would be deprived of their ration cards. All these things were carried out with the approval of the Public Prosecutor in order to secure the psychological atmosphere necessary for the extortion of the required confessions. If the United States lets such acts committed by a few people go unpunished, then the whole world can rightly criticise us severely and forever doubt the correctness of our motives and our moral integrity."

The methods of intimidation described were repeated during trials at Frankfurt-am-Mein and at Dachau, and large numbers of Germans were convicted for atrocities on the basis of their admissions. The American Judge Edward L. van Roden, one of the three members of the Simpson Army Commission which was subsequently appointed to investigate the methods of justice at the Dachau trials, revealed the methods by which these admissions were secured in the Washington Daily News, January 9th, 1949. His account also appeared in the British newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial, January 23rd, 1949. The methods he described were: "Posturing as priests to hear confessions and give absolution; torture with burning matches driven under the prisoners finger-nails; knocking out of teeth and breaking jaws; solitary confinement and near starvation rations." Van Roden explained: "The statements which were admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for three, four and five months ... The investigators would put a black hood over the accused's head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses ... All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair.

 

However, a letter from Fiske H. Ventres to Royall, provides a different view:

… at Bremen, Germany, I was billeted with a member of the War Crimes Commission who had just resigned his post because of the methods employed by "Americans" to gain confessions and convictions. According to him confessions were the sole evidence against the accused and no methods were too brutal to employ in gaining the confessions.

Beaten to death

One defendant was beaten to death because of his refusal to sign a confession and as a lesson to his other unwilling fellow defendants. To prove his point the resigned agent produced from his trunk the blood-caked hood he, himself, had removed from the head of the murdered German.

From one end of Europe to the other, people are quite aware of the true character of these so-called trials, from Nuremberg to the Bulge. They know full well the identity of those conducting the proceedings and, I might add, a great many Europeans are more than a little suspicious that what is being done is more in the interest of another nation than to the United States.

The following allegations were made by defendant Hendel:

… on 4 April 1946 1 was led from my cell under a black hood, was put into a cell facing the door and was then beaten in the abdomen and face until I fell to the ground. When a moment later the hood was taken off, Lieutenant Perl and Mr. Thon stood before me. During the subsequent interrogation, I was also beaten several times. No notice was taken of my request to have the interrogation postponed since I was not in condition for it at that time. The facts described happened before my interrogation. During the interrogation, promises were made to me but since I did not know anything and today still do not know anything of an order, all sorts of threats were made to me and since things were immaterial to me and I wanted to avoid further beatings, etc., I wrote down everything that was dictated to me.

 

Joachim Peiper was a Standartenfuehrer in the Waffen SS who was renown for his bravery on the Russian Front, as well as the Western Front. The fact that Joachim Peiper had no culpability, as alleged by the Jews, in the Malmedy incident was best demonstrated by the fact that Lieutenant Colonel Harold D. McGown, commander of the American soldiers allegedly massacred at Malmedy, appeared at the Dachau show trials as a witness for Mr. Peiper. He testified that Joachim Peiper went out of his way to make sure many Americans were safe. source

 

He charged that Lieutenant Colonel Harold D. McGown, commander of the American soldiers massacred at Malmédy, had fraternized with SS Colonel Joachim Peiper, the German commander, and this explained why McGown had appeared at Dachau as a defense witness for Peiper and had testified that Peiper had held talks with him and had been responsible for saving a number of Americans.

As evidence for the fraternization, Rosenfeld claimed that McGown and Peiper had been "enatirely too friendly during those nights they spent talking together" and that,when Peiper and his men were later able to escape a US Army trap, "McGown was with them." Of coursIt will, of course, be argued that these nightmarish Dachau "trials" have little

Actual testimony from that day from Battle of La Gleize

As we came up a lane into LaGleize a Mark IV tank came toward us and the Tank Cmndr. swiveled his periscope (?) in order to get a good look at me.

I was turned over to an interrogation officer who was originally from Chicago and spoke perfect English. He had a shrapnel hole in his helmet. He was not happy either. From there I was taken to a house and sent downstairs into a basement. There were 30 to 40 American soldiers in the cellar.

Sometime much later, maybe 9 or 10pm, we heard fire crackling overhead in the house above us, compliment of the American artillery… The guards ordered us out. Everyone went out in a good orderly manner. The scene in the street beside the house was chaotic. The town was on fire. 30 to 40 GIs huddled together, artillery shelling the town and a very wild SS soldier waving a sub machine gun from side to side yelling ‘Officer, Officer!’ Since he spoke with a heavy accent it took me some moment s to realize he meant me.

When I was recognized I was taken to Lt. Col. Joachim Peiper’s command post. It was in a cellar that was entered from an outside cellarway. I think there was a blanket for a door. I went through and for some reason recognized who was in charge and snapped probably the best salute I have ever given. There were 4 or 5 other German officers. Peiper was wearing a type of coverall and no helmet. A very good-looking man who spoke slow, good but not perfect English. Shortly thereafter Major Hal McCown was brought in. He gave me a quick and very surprised handshake.

(At this point during the Ardennes Offensive. The advances of Peiper’s battlegroup were being halted. So Peiper had decided to concentrate his forces in and around the Belgian town of La Gleize. McGown, the ex commanding officer of the 2nd Bat of the 119th infantry regiment was captured 2 days earlier. He recalls Peiper and his men.)

An astonishing fact to me was the youth of the members of this organization-the bulk of the enlisted men were either 18 or 19, recently recruited, but from my observations thoroughly trained...

The officers for the most part were veterans but were also very young...The morale was high throughout the entire period I was with them despite the extremely trying conditions...

The physical condition of all the personnel was good, except for lack of proper food…The equipment was good and complete with the exception of some reconditioned half-tracks among the motorized equipment.

All the men wore practically new boots and had adequate clothing. Some men wore parts of American uniforms, mainly the knit cap, gloves, sweaters, overshoes and one or two overcoats. I saw no one however, in American uniforms or civilian clothing.

The relationship between the officers and men, particularly the commanding officer, Col. Peiper, was closer and friendlier than I would have expected.

Later on during the night on the 21st of December I was taken again to the cellar HQ of Col. Peiper… He and I talked together from 2300 until 0500 the next morning.- our subject being mainly his defense of Nazism and why Germany was fighting.

I have met few men who impressed me in as short a space of time as did this officer. He was 5ft 8inches, 140 lbs. in weight, long dark hair combed straight back, well shaped features with remarkable facial resemblance to the actor, Ray Milland…He was completely confident of Germany’s ability to whip the Allies.

He spoke of Himmler’s new reserve army quite at length saying that it contained so many new divisions, both armored and otherwise, that our G-2s would wonder where they all came from.

He did hid best to find out from me the success V1 and V2 rockets were having and told me that more secret weapons like those would be unloosed. The German Air force, he said, would now come forth with many new types and which, although inferior in number, would be superior in quality and would suffice their needs to cover the breakthru in Belgium and Holland and later to the French Coast!!
 

 

 

governor, General Lucius D. Clay, to request an investigation of the trials at

Dachau. On July 29, 1948, the Secretary of the Army appointed a commission

consisting of two American judges, Gordon Simpson of Texas and Edward

Van Roden of Pennsylvania, both JAG reserve colonels. They were assisted

by JAG Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lawrence, Jr. The commission submitted

its report to the Secretary of the Army in October 1948, and selected portions

were made public in January 1949.

German refugees." Steiner, Kirschbaum and Thon (later

chief of the evaluation section of the civil administration division of the US

military government) appeared later and denied all, but they were shaken by

the testimony of investigator Bruno Jacob, who admitted a few things.

He said that the "most brutal" had been Lieutenant Perl, Frank Steiner and Harry W. Thon.

 

 

Search for more information on HighBeam Research for Lt. Col. Willis M. Everett%2C.

The author examines the war crime trial of defendants in the Malmedy Massacre. Topics include attorney Willis Mead Everett, Jr. defence, details of the crime and punishment.

The shooting of American prisoners of war on 17 December 1944 by German SS troops became one of the most notorious atrocities of World War II. Under the command of SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Joachim Peiper, German soldiers surprised and captured an American motor convoy belonging to Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion at a road intersection south of the Belgian town of Malmedy. In what became known as the Malmedy Massacre, more than 100 prisoners were assembled in a field adjacent to the crossroads and mowed down by machine gun fire; approximately 30 survived. As a result of the massacre and ensuing international press coverage, Peiper became for many Americans the most hated man in the German armed forces. He and 73 of his comrades were tried by a U.S. Army court in 1946 for the Malmedy murders and other related war crimes. All were found guilty and 43, including Peiper, were sentenced to death. But none of the death sentences were carried out, the result in large part of the continuing efforts of Colonel Willis Everett Jr., an American lawyer from Georgia who was assigned to defend the accused war criminals.(1)

The case brought together former enemies whose involuntary association reflected the moral ambiguities of war and a shared sense of injustice at the manner in which the Allies conducted the trials of accused Germans, whose guilt often was assumed to be self-evident. The relationship of the Georgia colonel and the SS officer was nurtured by affinities both imagined and real. The story of Everett and Peiper juxtaposes two unlikely allies, one from the American South and the other from Nazi Germany, who found a small area of common ground in a world struggling to overcome the effects of history's most terrible war.

Willis Mead Everett Jr. was born on 25 January 1900 into a prosperous family in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, one of the city's leading attorneys, had been born during the Civil War in western New York. He married a young Georgia woman and settled in Atlanta, which by the mid-1880s had recovered from the ravages inflicted by Sherman's army 20 years earlier and was booming. Everett junior attended Atlanta's Boys' High School and graduated in 1921 from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where Robert E. Lee had served as president during his last years. Despite a lackluster academic record, he graduated from Atlanta Law School in 1924 and joined his father's successful law practice. With his wife, a young woman from a good Memphis family, Willis Everett settled into a comfortable life as a member of Atlanta's upper crust.(2)

Everett understood the importance of social responsibility. On his twenty-fifth birthday, his father wrote to him of the need to "help and live for others," and that he would discover "the purest gold among those who are always helping someone else and are thinking but little of themselves."(3) Evidence of Everett's sense of noblesse oblige can be seen in his later long and devoted service to the African American Gammon Theological Seminary, which is still remembered with respect and affection by older black Atlantans today.(4)

Everett also developed a lifelong interest in the military. Near the end of World War I, he took temporary leave from Washington and Lee for brief service in the U.S. Army. Although he failed to get closer to the battlefield than the Army's Coast Artillery School at Fort Monroe, Virginia, the attraction clearly went beyond the hyper-patriotism of a popular war. While still a law student, Everett applied for a commission in the Army Reserve Corps and was appointed a second lieutenant of infantry in May 1923. Thus began a career that paralleled his practice of law for over 30 years. The Reserve Corps was a rather relaxed form of duty in peacetime, involving little more than occasional unit exercises and annual two-week excursions to summer training camp. Everett's service reflected an appreciation of both the military virtues and the status that being an officer carried in Southern society, as well as a generally conservative outlook characteristic of the officer corps. In applying for a transfer from the infantry to military intelligence in 1932, Everett noted that he had been "actively fighting in every way all forms of communism, socialism, pacifism, etc., in and around Atlanta" for the previous two years.(5)

Everett's comfortable background was similar to that of Joachim Peiper, who was born in 1915 in the Wilmersdorf section of Berlin. Peiper's father was born in the Prussian province of Silesia in 1878 to a family of Imperial Germany's Bildungsbuergertum (educated middle class). He served as an officer in the German army in prewar German Southwest Africa and in Turkey during World War I. Germany had been at war for six months when Joachim Peiper was born, only to be defeated less than four years later with the loss of almost two million men amidst starvation and political chaos.(6)

After the war, the elder Peiper took a position with the state lottery administration, which permitted the family to preserve a bourgeois existence. Joachim Peiper enrolled in Berlin/Wilmersdorf's Goethe Oberrealschule, a school that emphasized mathematics, modern languages, and the natural sciences and prepared its students for university work. But, perhaps stimulated by his father's tales of manly adventure in uniform and Germany's new militarism on the heels of Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor, the younger Peiper decided on a military career shortly after his eighteenth birthday.(7)

Gravitating toward the Nazi dictatorship, Peiper joined the Hitler Youth in the spring of 1933, and the following October he joined the Schutzstaffel, or SS, headed by Heinrich Himmler. By 1933 Himmler had already established the first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, which was to become a model and training center for the entire camp system. That year he also laid the foundation for a military branch of the SS that, as the Waffen-SS, would fight alongside the German army in World War II. To help establish its image as an elite body of Nazi activists, Himmler sought to attract "socially respectable" elements to his black-uniformed organization. The Reiter-SS, or SS cavalry, was designed to appeal to well-bred young men such as the 19-year-old Joachim Peiper, who applied for active SS membership as an officer candidate early in 1934. Peiper attended the SS officers' academy (SS-Junkerschule) at Braunschweig, where instruction in military tactics was combined with indoctrination in Nazi ideology. On 20 April 1936--Hitler's birthday--he was commissioned an SS-Untersturmfuehrer (2nd lieutenant) and immediately assigned to duty with the elite Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer's personal guard regiment and one of the original combat units of the SS. That Peiper was singled out as an unusually promising young SS officer was made clear in 1938 when he was transferred to Himmler's personal staff. The appointment not only provided opportunities to rub elbows with the mighty of the Third Reich, but introduced Peiper to his future wife, one of the Reichsfuehrer's secretaries.(8)

Willis Everett, meanwhile, continued to combine the practice of law in his father's firm with part-time Army reserve service. The board of officers who examined Everett for promotion to the rank of major in November 1935 noted approvingly that

    He is a particularly high-type civilian, well-known and prominent in  
    Atlanta and his Americanism is unquestioned; ... the applicant has on  
    various occasions investigated on his own initiative individuals and  
    organizations purportedly of an un-American or insidious character and made  
    reports of his findings to the civilian organizations who were interested  
    in activities of this nature.(9)  
  

Although Everett's military service may have been more benign than Peiper's, there is a certain parallel to be found in the eagerness with which both young men associated themselves with forces opposed to the political left; still, the similarities are limited. That Everett's conservatism was combined with racism is hardly surprising in one raised in early twentieth-century Georgia, but it was a racism tempered by a humanitarian perspective rejected by the Nazis. Everett believed Jews in general to be morally suspect and African Americans to be inferior to whites, but he was capable of friendship with individual Jews, and he regarded paternalistic support of blacks to be his Christian duty.

Peace in Europe ended on 1 September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France quickly declared war on Germany. Peiper, still on Himmler's staff and soon to become first adjutant, accompanied the Reichsfuehrer to Poland aboard Himmler's personal train. The horror of Nazi extermination policies was first revealed in Poland, where, following the quick German victory, Poland's educated elite were slaughtered as a crucial step toward reducing the Polish people to total subservience. The SS was to be the instrument of annihilation, as another member of Himmler's staff later recalled Peiper informing him.(11) Whether this incident is true or not, Peiper could hardly have been unaware of SS atrocities. Indeed, after the war, Peiper admitted to having attended an early experiment in the use of poison gas on living subjects, although there was no evidence that he planned or participated in mass murder.(12)

Still, Peiper welcomed reassignment to a purely military post in the Leibstandarte in mid-May 1940, as the German blitzkrieg rolled into the Low Countries and France. Here he could see action and build the active military career for which he longed. The young SS-Obersturmfuehrer (1st lieutenant) quickly distinguished himself in combat, first as a platoon leader and later as a company commander, where he demonstrated a high degree of initiative and personal bravery. The operations in which he was involved during the spring of 1940 were of a traditional military nature, but Peiper's career again entered a region of moral ambiguity when he returned to Himmler's personal staff in July.(13)

As the United States moved toward active involvement in the war, Willis Everett's military career assumed a more serious character. In September 1940, Everett was called to active duty in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 (intelligence) for the Fourth Corps Area (later Fourth Service Command), headquartered in Atlanta. The Fourth Service Command included a large segment of the U.S. Army's training facilities and, later, many prisoner of war camps. Important war production plants, including the Manhattan Project's U-235 production facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were located within it. Everett's charge as chief of the Fourth Service Command's Intelligence Branch, Security and Intelligence Division was to ferret out pro-Axis activity and provide security against Communist subversion, as well as vigilance against unrest among African Americans. While some cases were ludicrous, such as the woman who reported to one of Everett's counterintelligence officers that her neighbor's dog was giving the Fascist salute, the challenge of maintaining the surveillance system in the southeastern United States, for which Everett had primary administrative responsibility, was substantial.(14)

Peiper, meanwhile, experienced war at its most cataclysmic. He continued to serve as Himmler's adjutant from July 1940 until August 1941, the crucial period when preparations were being made for an ideologically charged war of annihilation against the purported "subhuman" population of the Soviet Union and steps were taken that would culminate in the Holocaust. While Peiper cannot be accused of framing policies of mass murder, he certainly supported them by his consensual presence. Although he was permanently reassigned to a combat role in August 1941 he remained a favorite of Himmler's and paid him friendly visits until near the end of the war.(15)

In Russia, Peiper proved himself a resourceful and courageous commander of mechanized forces and was awarded the Ritterkreuz (Knight's Cross), the highest grade of the Iron Cross. He was given command of the Leibstandarte's armored regiment in November 1943, perhaps a reflection of his connections in high places as well as of his leadership talents. The Russian war was characterized by brutality on both sides; German forces commonly slaughtered both Russian prisoners of war and civilians, and Peiper must have participated in this aspect of the conflict. While in northern Italy following the Allied landings in Sicily in July 1943, a mechanized battalion Peiper commanded was involved in a brutal incident in the town of Bores. In response to the capture of two German soldiers by Italian partisans, Peiper's troops attacked the town with considerable loss of civilian life.(16)

By December 1944, Germany's armed forces in both east and west were shattered, and Allied aircraft controlled the European skies. Although defeat was certain, Hitler planned a massive offensive designed to split the Anglo-American forces, capture their primary supply port of Antwerp, and turn the war around for Germany. The Ardennes offensive was a desperate undertaking, depending on surprise, bad weather to neutralize Allied air supremacy, and the capture of American stores of gasoline to permit fuel-starved German tanks to reach Antwerp. Crucial to the operation's success was the quick capture of crossings over the Meuse river, an objective assigned to a battlegroup of the 1st SS Panzer Division that Peiper commanded.(17)

Although the offensive, known among the Allies as the Battle of the Bulge, temporarily threw the Allies off balance, ultimately it failed and even hastened Germany's collapse. It was also punctuated by the notorious event that would later bring Everett and Peiper together in a court of law, when on the afternoon of 17 December Peiper's battlegroup captured and fired on more than 100 members of an American motor convoy in a probable effort to rid themselves of inconvenient prisoners. By death camp standards, or even in comparison with the brutality that was commonplace in the war against the Soviet Union, it was a crime of modest scope. But it was the most serious violation of the laws of war perpetrated by Germans against Americans, and the incident received widespread publicity both within the U.S. Army and among civilians at home. Propelled by universal American outrage, the hunt for the murderers began almost immediately.(18)

Willis Everett must have read newspaper accounts of the massacre as the war entered its final months. When it finally ended with Japan's acceptance of surrender on 14 August 1945, American military priorities changed. There was intense political pressure to bring the "boys" home, and the U.S. forces in Europe that had contributed so effectively to the defeat of Nazi Germany were rapidly dismantled. But the United States was also committed to an ambitious policy to fundamentally reform the German nation, which twice within a quarter century had plunged Europe into catastrophic conflict and had carried out a program of genocide against the Jewish population. Such a reformation required a long-term Allied presence in the conquered country, initially in the form of a military government. Embarrassed at having passed the war years in domestic safety, Everett expressed no distress when in October 1945 he was ordered to a 14-week European Staff Officers Studies Course at Columbia University to prepare him for service in postwar Europe. Upon his arrival at USFET (United States Forces, European Theater) headquarters at Frankfurt am Main in March 1946, he was assigned to the Judge Advocate's Division, then hard pressed for legal personnel.(19)

The War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate's Division was responsible for the identification, trial, and punishment of Germans guilty of crimes committed under the Third Reich. When Everett arrived in Germany, the Trial of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg had been in progress for four months and would continue for another six. These heavily publicized trials of major figures in the German government and military were the most visible of the postwar efforts to bring German war criminals to justice. Offenders of lesser stature were tried by military courts of the occupying Allied powers. Everett was assigned to such a court held at the former concentration camp at Dachau, where the defendants of the Malmedy massacre were to be tried. According to Deputy Theater Judge Advocate Colonel Claude B. Mickelwait, the Army was determined to make a "big show" for this particular case. Everett was appointed chief defense counsel for 74 Germans accused of responsibility for the Malmedy and other related atrocities, of whom the leading defendant was Joachim Peiper.(20)

Everett was horrified by the assignment. He had no experience in criminal law and found the prospect of organizing the defense of more than six dozen men in the space of six weeks daunting. Moreover, he had little sympathy for the defendants, writing to his wife that they seemed to be "the worst kinds of murderers," for whom "rope is probably too mild"(21) Within a week, however, his attitude changed dramatically. Initial interviews with the defendants through interpreters produced a lurid picture of the pretrial investigation at the War Crimes Branch prison at Schwaebisch Hall, which had identified this body of former Waffen SS members as the likely culprits. \

Everet Suspiscious

Everett wrote that he and his defense team "got steamed up" over the "underhanded methods" employed by Army investigators, whom he ironically characterized as a "gang of Nazi method boys" Some defendants told of having been subjected to what they now realized had been mock trials. They had been brought before a black-draped table with illuminated candles, on which stood a cross, and Army personnel acting as judges sat behind the table. Witnesses testified to the guilt of the prisoners, who were condemned and sentenced to hang but then were promised clemency if they signed confessions, as some did. Besides mock trials, there were allegations of beatings and other forms of duress employed to extract confessions. Everett concluded from the consistency of the defendants' stories that there was a core of truth. He was deeply disturbed, less by evidence of Army perfidy itself than by its likely impact on American public opinion should the press get wind of it.(22)

By April 1946, when Everett began to delve into the distressing complexities of the Malmedy case, Joachim Peiper had been a prisoner for almost a year. World War II had ended for Peiper and his troops while in hopeless combat against the Red Army in Austria. The disorganized fragments of his regiment fled westward to escape Soviet vengeance and ironically fell into American captivity. Peiper attempted to join his wife and three children in Bavaria, but he was seized by U.S. forces about 20 miles short of his goal. Although Peiper was not initially recognized, the staff of the service newspaper The Stars and Stripes discovered in August that "the American doughboy's number one war criminal" was in a POW compound.(23) Peiper joined the growing number of former SS men suspected of complicity in the Malmedy massacre being assembled for interrogation by Army investigators. In addition to the crossroads killings, the defendants were charged with many other murders of American prisoners and Belgian civilians during the Ardennes offensive.

Although in the absence of strong evidence against him the American War Crimes Branch concluded in early October that "it is very doubtful that he (Peiper) is guilty of any war crimes,"(24) six months later Peiper confessed at the Schwaebisch Hall prison to having received and transmitted orders to kill prisoners of war during the December 1944 offensive and to having ordered or acquiesced in the murder of American prisoners in several incidents. Written confessions by Peiper and many of the remaining defendants constituted the bulk of the case brought against them by Army prosecutors during the trial held from May until July 1946 at Dachau. On the basis of those confessions and the testimony of American survivors, and despite a vigorous if not always skillful defense by Everett and his defense team, all of the defendants were found guilty. Forty-three of them, including Peiper, were sentenced to death by hanging.(25)

For Everett, the verdict was devastating. The next day, he wrote to his wife that his heart was "crushed" and his head "whirling, splitting and hammered." He doubted the veracity of many of the sworn statements and believed that the procedural decisions made by the panel of Army officers who had judged the case had unfairly favored the prosecution. The verdict, he was convinced, had been dictated to the court by the Theater Judge Advocate. But he did not challenge the fact that American prisoners of war had been murdered. Immediately following the trial, he was chiefly distressed by what he perceived to be the injustice of condemning to death young men, some still in their teens, for having committed war crimes under superior orders that they could not reasonably have been expected to refuse. He believed it hypocritical to punish former enemy soldiers for violations of the laws of war of which American troops had also been guilty.(26) In this, he was on firm historical ground, for the killing of inconvenient or unwanted prisoners was far from rare on either side during World War II. But subjective factors were equally significant in Everett's reaction to the verdicts.

Jew black market

Everett was sympathetic to the German people's postwar degradation and material deprivation and may have been inclined to liken it, as did other Southerners, to the plight of the former Confederacy following the Civil War. Like the Germans themselves, he tended to hold the upper Nazi leadership echelons responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich while absolving ordinary Germans, both in and out of uniform. Moreover, he had very quickly become disillusioned with the moral character of the military government in the U.S. zone of occupation. The sexual license, drunkenness, black marketeering, and general inefficiency and lack of discipline that he observed among U.S. Army personnel in Germany offended his strict, teetotaling Presbyterian conscience. Most troubling in Everett's outlook was an obvious element of anti-Semitism. Although like many Americans Everett was quite capable of respect and affection for individual Jews, he shared the antiSemitism common in much of the United States during that period.(27)

shocked at jew brutality

The cultural anti-Semitism Everett brought with him to Germany was inflamed by what he believed to have been the role of Jews in the injustice of the Malmedy verdicts. Several members of the American investigation-prosecution team were Jewish. An officer alleged to have shot a prisoner during interrogation and against whom other accusations of physical brutality had been leveled was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. Colonel Abraham H. Rosenfeld, the "law member" of the Malmedy court whom Everett believed responsible for many procedural decisions that had hampered the defense, was Jewish. In Everett's mind, the injustices of the Malmedy proceedings were partly the products of Jewish vengefulness. The fact that a Jewish civilian member of the defense team shared Everett's critical assessment of the investigation and trial--although not his ethnically-based analysis--did not shake his conviction.(28)

Moreover, Everett was deeply impressed by Joachim Peiper. He may not have been aware of Peiper's close association with Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler and all that that implied. To him, Peiper was simply a brave and capable commander whose spectacular military career the desk-bound Everett probably envied and admired. Having had the misfortune to be on the losing side, he was now a convenient scapegoat for the victors. Furthermore, Peiper could communicate with Everett in English, which he spoke and wrote in a stilted but often dramatic manner. To be sure, what he wrote to Everett was sometimes sharply evocative of the criminal regime he had served. In a letter written at the end of the trial, Peiper recalled the war as "a proud and heroic time! Where we were standing was Germany and as far as my tank gun reached was my kingdom! ... Our vision always has been the `Dream of Reich!'" He mourned the fact that at the end of the war, "when the Fuehrer was needing his Leibstandarte the most, the (sic) fate had separated us from him."(29) These sentiments may well have resonated in Everett, who from his letters had only a superficial understanding of what the "Dream of Reich" had implied and who had been raised in a culture that treasured memories of an earlier lost cause.

But if Peiper showed no remorse for German crimes, he could speak in intensely human terms. In the same letter, he wrote of his concern for his family after his death.

    Besides my charming children I leave my wife, the best and bravest comrade  
    I ever met. Unfortunately, I'm not able to do anything for her  
    protection.... The "thankful" population believes me to be a criminal, and  
    my family has to suffer from this fame.(30)  
  

Everett, a family man whose daffy letters to his Atlanta home expressed constant concern for the welfare of his wife and children, was deeply moved by such domestic sentiments. He was moved as well by Peiper's expressions of gratitude that Everett, an officer of an army recently at war with Germany, was capable of a full-blooded defense on behalf of Peiper and his comrades in a hostile court.

    In a time of deepest human disappointment, you ... have returned to me much  
    faith I already had lost. This will remain one of my best remembrance[s]  
    and was worth the whole of the Malmedy case.... Only men with your  
    character and chivalrous attitude are able to rebuild peace.... Perhaps our  
    end will contribute a little to this goal.(31)  
  

Peiper pictured Everett as Everett wanted to see himself, in sharp contrast to the allegedly vengeful and morally bankrupt U.S. occupation troops.

Everett felt personally responsible for the outcome of the trial. Although the odds would have been heavily against the defense under the best of circumstances, Everett felt keenly that his own professional inadequacies, his lack of experience in criminal cases in particular--although that shortcoming was shared with the prosecution--had contributed to the outcome.(32) As a result, a burning passion to nullify the verdicts of the Malmedy trial dominated Everett's life from that time on.

Everett's public position was not that innocent men had been convicted of crimes they had not committed but rather that the character of the trial, particularly the nature of the pretrial investigation, made it impossible to determine guilt or innocence. The core of the argument rested with the sworn pretrial confessions, many of which allegedly had been secured under various forms of psychological and physical duress. Some confessions contained blatantly fanciful material that could only encourage skepticism of the investigative procedure. Peiper did not claim gross physical abuse as the motivation for his own confessions, but he did claim to have been disoriented and depressed by a combination of solitary confinement, assurances that he might save his subordinates by assuming responsibility for the killings, and confrontations arranged by Army investigators with members of his command who, themselves subjected to duress, had testified to his guilt.(33)

The remedy for such supposed misfeasance in the domestic legal system would have been a new trial, and Everett repeatedly claimed that this was his primary objective.(34) While war crimes trials were not subject to formal appeals and retrials, internal review was required before sentences were confirmed, and Everett made his views known to the Office of the Judge Advocate General. Army analysts partially agreed with Everett's assessment of the pretrial investigation, although they did not recommend wholesale nullification of the trial.(35) General Lucius Clay, chief of military government in the U.S. zone of occupation who had final authority in these matters, became convinced that "improper methods" had been used in securing confessions. He freed 13 of the convicted Germans in 1948 and commuted many of the death sentences to terms of imprisonment, but he confirmed 12 death sentences (later reduced to six), including Peiper's.(36) In 1948, Everett appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and the International Court of Justice at The Hague, but both efforts were in vain. The Supreme Court divided 4-4 on accepting jurisdiction with Justice Robert Jackson abstaining, while the International Court of Justice adhered to its well-established principle of hearing only cases submitted by national governments.(37) His juridical avenues seemingly exhausted, Everett turned to politics.

Everett's unwillingness to abandon his "Malmedy boys" as he often called them, particularly those still under sentence of death, had become an obsession. When relieved of active duty by the Army in 1947, he returned to Atlanta, but the Malmedy case occupied most of his energy and kept him from fully resuming his general practice of law. As a prominent citizen of the community, Everett had connections, and he established many more as he revealed investigatory and judicial improprieties of the war crimes trial to the press. As a result, additional reviews of the investigation and trial were held, including a full-blown Senate probe in 1949, in which Senator Joseph McCarthy, best known for his determined pursuit of alleged communists, played a prominent and not altogether unconstructive role. Although the reviews were inconclusive, sufficient doubts were raised in regard to the case that in 1951 the remaining death sentences were commuted. By the end of 1956, the last of the men convicted for the Malmedy massacre, Joachim Peiper, was released from prison.(38)

Everett paid a substantial price for his obsession with the Malmedy affair. In addition to a neglected law practice and the economic consequences thereof, he later estimated that he had incurred expenses of some $40,000 in 1950s vintage dollars, for which a $5,000 honorarium from the West German government in 1958 was inadequate restitution.(39) In March 1949, moreover, he had suffered a major heart attack, which he attributed to the stress of fighting the Malmedy verdicts. His son recalls friendships strained as a consequence of years spent in the defense of convicted Nazi war criminals, not the most popular of causes in the postwar United States. Over ten years in prison, half of it under sentence of death, exacted a heavy physical and psychological toll on Peiper as well.(40)

Peiper and Everett communicated infrequently during Peiper's years in Landsberg prison, although Peiper was kept apprised of efforts to save him and his comrades from the gallows, and Everett was from time to time the recipient of Peiper's sardonic humor. In response to Everett's apparent recommendation that he write about his experiences with mobile warfare in Russia, probably to demonstrate that he would be more valuable to the U.S. Army alive than dead, Peiper replied that such an undertaking would take a long time, as the light in his cell was so poor that it took him two days to write a letter to his wife. But Peiper also expressed the hope that Everett "would grant his sympathy to an old, honest war criminal."(41) The news in 1951 that all of the remaining death sentences, including his own, had been commuted to life imprisonment, produced a rare burst of jubilation:

    We have received a great victory and next to God it is you [from] whom our  
    blessings flow. In all the long and dark years you have been the beacon  
    flame for the forlorn souls of the Malmedy boys, the voice and the  
    conscience of the good America, and yours is the present success against  
    all the well known overwhelming odds. May I therefore, Colonel, express the  
    everlasting gratitude of the red-jacket team (retired) as well as of all  
    the families concerned.(42)  
  

Although Everett remained intensely interested in the case, his precarious health and the fact that the remaining prisoners were no longer in danger of execution caused him to be less active on their behalf. Following Peiper's release, communication between the two ceased, and the former SS officer attempted to rebuild his life in a Germany far different from the one he had known. He secured a menial job with the Porsche company in Stuttgart cleaning cars but, due in part to his fluency in English, quickly rose to the position of sales manager for Porsche exports to the United States, a circumstance characterized by a friend as "a slight parody of fate." His three children had entered adolescence in his absence and initially regarded him as an intruder, but the tension was overcome as Peiper settled into what he called, with a hint of self-deprecation, a "bourgeois existence."(43)

Everett and Peiper reestablished contact in the fall of 1959 when a German friend and fellow Waffen-SS veteran, to whom Peiper had described Everett's fight against the Malmedy verdicts "with great admiration," discovered Everett's Atlanta address and wrote to him.(44) Everett's own well-established "bourgeois existence" was now based on his law practice, complemented by service on the board of trustees of Atlanta's black Gammon Theological Seminary and his role as adviser to his college fraternity's chapter at Georgia Tech. But an association from Peiper's new life also provided impetus for renewed communication. On 2 November 1959 William J. Sholar, executive secretary of the Porsche Club of America, wrote to Everett that he and other members had attended international meetings in Germany and had come to know and become very fond of Peiper and his "charming" family. They hoped that Peiper and his wife, along with other Germans, might attend a Porsche Club meeting scheduled for July 1960 in Aspen, Colorado. Securing a visa for a convicted war criminal presented a problem, however, and Sholar, knowing of Everett's association with Peiper, turned to the lawyer for help.(45)

Everett's long letter to Peiper of 24 November 1959, the first communication with him since long before his release from Landsberg, reveals a persistent sense of guilt for perceived inadequacies in the Dachau courtroom and his continued rage at what he believed to have been the Army's perfidy. These sentiments combined incongruously with impractical advice on securing a visa for a holiday in Aspen. Everett wrote that Peiper should simply include his application with those of other Germans intending to make the trip and hope his name was not recognized. If it were, Everett would "pull strings" with his senators and congressman.(46) It was not the most eccentric of Everett's schemes. While Peiper was still imprisoned, Everett had recommended to Secretary of the Army Frank Pace that he be brought to Fort Knox as an adviser on armored warfare to the U.S. Army.(47)

Peiper's response was one of polite restraint. If Everett was reliving the past, Peiper seemed intent on trying to forget it. He had received Everett's letter, he wrote, "with deep joy and sincere appreciation" adding that his lack of resentment toward the United States for having deprived him of "the best twelve years" of his life was due to Everett's "upright and unfailing example and the unsurpassed way in which you represented your country." "You have been America's best ambassador to Germany," he wrote, "setting an example that was respected and recognized far beyond the defendants of the Malmedy case" But he found Everett's suggestion for securing a visa "more than improbable" and reacted to Everett's reference to a trip he planned to make to Germany in the spring with something less than enthusiasm.(48)

In fact, Everett was a dying man. In his last letter to Peiper, dated February 1960, he repeated his intention to visit Stuttgart in April and asked Peiper to arrange for him to pick up a Porsche on his arrival although, he noted, he might have to delay his trip "a little" due to two months' treatment "for the uncommon malady of lymphoma" On 4 April he died.(49)

Although Peiper outlived Everett by 16 years, he was unable to escape his past. Opposition by labor unions and Italian "guest workers" who remembered the Bores atrocity in Italy cost him his positions with Porsche and later with Volkswagen. Thoroughly disillusioned with the "new Germany," he retired to rural seclusion in eastern France. In 1976, French communists orchestrated a campaign to drive him from the country. He refused to leave, and on the night of 14 July, Bastille Day, after having sent his wife to safety in Germany, he was killed in a fire-bomb attack on his home.(50)

Everett died believing that Peiper had finally found well-deserved security. From his somewhat naive perspective, a brave and honorable soldier had fallen victim to the victor's postwar vengefulness, but this had been a temporary aberration within an essentially moral universe. Matters ultimately had been put right and, Everett wrote to Peiper three months before his death, "I certainly believe that we all have much to thank God for."(51) Peiper knew better. Apart from what actually happened at the crossroads south of Malmedy, Peiper occupied a responsible position in a Nazi regime that fundamentally challenged western society's belief in a moral universe. During a wartime furlough in which he learned of the mass exterminations in death camps (perhaps from Himmler himself), he reportedly told an associate, "If we lose the war, we'll be in deep shit because of these things."(52) Peiper recognized how precarious was his position following his release from prison, observing that he sat on a "powderkeg" that could explode at any time.(53)

The relationship between Everett and Peiper was based on an unusual set of circumstances growing out of German battlefield criminality and American judicial malfeasance, but the two men were the products of worlds that, despite superficial similarities, were profoundly different. Their meeting in the spring of 1960, had it taken place, would likely have been awkward.

(1) See Trevor N. Dupuy, Hitler's Last Gamble: The Battle of the Bulge, December 1944-January 1945 (New York, 1994), 487-97.

(2) Biographical sketch of Willis M. Everett Sr., n.d., in Everett Papers, in possession of Willis M. Everett III.

(3) Willis M. Everett Sr. to Willis M. Everett Jr., 25 January 1925, Everett Papers.

(4) Telephone interview with Selma Richardson, 22 April 1997.

(5) Appointment certificate, 14 May 1923; Everett to instructor, 326th Infantry, 24 October 1932, both in Everett file, National Personnel Records Center, Overland, Mo. (hereafter National Personnel Records).

(6) "Personalangaben des SS-Sturmbannfuehrer Peiper"; and "Personal-Nachweis fuer Fuehrer der Waffen-SS" both in SS Files, Berlin Document Center, now Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (hereafter SS Biographical Files); Jens Westemeier, Joachim Peiper: Eine Biographie (Osnabrueck, 1996), 6-7.

(7) Westemeier, Peiper, 6-7.

(8) "Personal--Nachweis fuer Fuehrer der Waffen-SS"; "Personalangaben"; Peiper to SS-Oberabschnitt Ost, 17 February 1934; "An die Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler," 30 June 1938; Himmler to Peiper, n.d., all in SS Biographical Files; Westemeier, Peiper, 7-15.

(9) proceedings of Board of Officers, 4 November 1935, National Personnel Records.

(10) Everett to family, 27 November 1945, 14 January 1946, and 6 September 1946, Everett Papers.

(11) Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York, 1991), 95.

(12) Cross-examination of Peiper, 22 June 1946, U.S. v. Valentin Bersin et al., U.S. National Archives, record group 153, roll 3, frames 000189-90.

(13) Westemeier, Peiper, 29.

(14) Separation Qualification Record, 15 June 1947, National Personnel Records; Telephone interview with William Hartman, 23 April 1997; Records of the Fourth Service Command, Security and Intelligence Division, National Archives and Record Service, record group 338, National Archives, College Park, Md., boxes 66-73; see also Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980 (New Haven, 1991), chap. 10.

(15) Westemeier, Peiper, 101.

(16) "Fernschreiben an Fuehrerhauptquartier. Vorschlag zur Verleihung des Ritterkreuzes an SS-Stubaf. Joachim Peiper, 7 March 1943"; "Vorschlag Nr. (?) fur die Verleihung des Deutschen Kreuzes in Gold, 26 February 1943"; "Eichenlaub fur Kommandeur SS-Pz. Rgt. `LSSAH,'" all in SS Biographical Files; Michael Reynolds, The Devil's Adjutant: Jochen Peiper, Panzer Leader (New York, 1995), 27-32; Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (London, 1985), passim.

(17) See Dupuy, Hitler's Last Gamble, 9-20.

(18) James J. Weingartner, Crossroads of Death: The Story of the Malmedy Massacre and Trial (Berkeley, 1979), 51-3, 65-7.

(19) War Department, Adjutant General's Office, Subject: Temporary Duty, 10 October 1945, National Personnel Records; Everett to family, 30 March 1946, Everett Papers; Richard L. Merritt, Democracy Imposed: U.S. Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945-1949 (New Haven, 1995), 1-5.

(20) Frank M. Buscher, The U.S. War Crimes Trial Program in Germany, 1946-1955 (Westport, 1989), 1-3; Everett to family, 2 April 1946, Everett Papers.

(21) Everett to family, 16 April 1946, Everett Papers.

(22) Everett to family, 23 April 1946, Everett Papers.

(23) "SS Colonel, Malmedy Murderer, Captured" The Stars and Stripes, 20 August 1945.

(24) Internal Route Slip, Headquarters U.S. Forces European Theater, Subject: SS Lt. Col. Peiper, 1 October 1945, National Archives and Record Service, record group 319.

(25) Weingartner, Crossroads, 102-3, 161, 164.

(26) Everett to Family, 17 July 1946, Everett Papers.

(27) See, e.g., Everett's reference to the "over-production of Jews" in military government in Germany, ibid.

(28) Leon C. Standifer, Binding Up the Wounds: An American Soldier in Occupied Germany (Baton Rouge, 1997), 17-23; see also Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York, 1994), 128-49; and Everett to Ralph W. Pierce, 7 November 1949, Everett Papers.

(29) peiper to Everett, 14 July 1946, Everett Papers.

(30) Ibid.

(31) Ibid.

(32) Everett deposition, Malmedy Massacre Investigation: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services (Washington, D.C., 1949), 1556.

(33) U. S. v. Valentin Bersin et al., 153/3/000107-8.

(34) Everett to General Thomas Green, 5 November 1948, Everett Papers; Weingartner, Crossroads, 130-31.

(35) Weingartner, Crossroads, 170-71, 176-82.

(36) Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany (New York, 1950), 253.

(37) United States Supreme Court Reports: Lawyers' ed., Advance Opinions, vol. 92 (Rochester, N.Y., 1948), 1051; E. Hambro to Everett, 5 March 1949, Everett Papers.

(38) Weingartner, Crossroads, chap. 8; Reynolds, The Devil's Adjutant, 259; Dupuy, Hitler's Last Gamble, 487-97.

(39) Everett to Dr. Karl H. Schoenbach, 30 July 1958, Everett Papers.

(40) Interview with Willis M. Everett III, 6 June 1997; Westemeier, Peiper, 142.

(41) Peiper to Everett, 7 December 1946, Everett Papers.

(42) Peiper to Everett, 6 February 1951, Everett Papers. Red jackets were worn by German prisoners in Landsberg who were under sentence of death.

(43) Dr. Benno Mueller to Everett, 25 October 1959, Everett Papers.

(44) Dr. Benno Mueller to Everett, 9 October 1959, Everett Papers.

(45) William I. Sholar to Everett, 2 November 1959, Everett Papers.

(46) Everett to Peiper, 24 November 1959, Everett Papers.

(47) Everett to Congressman James Davis, 12 July 1951, Everett Papers.

(48) Peiper to Everett, 13 December 1959, Everett Papers.

(49) Everett to Peiper, 5 February 1960, Everett Papers.

(50) Reynolds, The Devil's Adjutant, 260-61, 264-66.

(51) Everett to Peiper, 22 December 1959, Everett Papers.

(52) Westemeier, Peiper, 30.

(53) Quoted in ibid., 143.

James J. Weingartner is a professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.3

 

Piper Killed

Peiper was, of course, released despite the outcry from "concerned citizens" and most of the veterans organizations. In 1964 he moved to France where he made a comfortable living as a translator. But in 1976 a sensational article on Peiper appeared in a French communist newspaper.

A two-week campaign of threats and harassment followed, during which time Peiper was preparing to leave France, and on the night of 14/15 July, he was killed in a fire-bomb attack on his house.

 

The guards at the prison where the interrogations took place were not under the control of the war crimes team. They also, for a time, included Polish refugees who harbored considerable resentment towards Germans-and especially SS men. Some defendants specifically mention physical abuse by these guards as they were being led between their cells and the interrogation rooms and while waiting in halls, all the time wearing black hoods over their heads. (The hoods were claimed to be necessary to keep the prisoners form recognizing each other and to prevent them form speaking to fellow soldiers.) Kicking, punching, beating about the arms, and pushing prisoners down stairs, in addition to verbal abuse, was conducted frequently, much to the amusement of the perpetrators.

 

 

The president of the panel was Brigadier General Josiah T. Dalbey, who is the fourth man from the left in the photo. The dominant member of the panel, Col. Abraham H. Rosenfeld, was the "law member," who ruled on all motions and legal matters during the proceeding.

Col. Rosenfeld was Jewish, and a graduate of Yale. He had had experience in over 200 court martial cases before coming to Dachau in March 1946

 

The chief prosecutor, called the Trial Judge Advocate, was Lt. Col. Burton F. Ellis, a Jewish attorney who had no prior experience in a military courtroom. He took over the case which had been handled by another Jewish prosecutor, Dwight Fanton, during the interrogation phase. His chief assistant prosecutor was another Jew, Raphael Schumaker.

A week before World War II officially ended, Ellis was assigned to be an investigator at the Europe War Crimes Group, and subsequently was named Chief of Operations. As Chief of Operations, Ellis was in charge of the investigation of the Malmedy Massacre. Since I didn’t know much about the Malmedy Massacre, I had to do some research in Ellis’ papers (photographs and letters to his wife), in the library, and on the Internet.