Malmedy massacre trial
[10] Col. Willis M. Everett Jr. (USA) led the defence team, and Col. Burton Ellis (USA) led the prosecution team in the trial of the Waffen-SS war criminals indicted for the massacres of more than 300 US Army POWs "in the vicinity of Malmedy, Honsfeld, Büllingen, Ligneuville, Stoumont, La Gleize, Cheneux, Petit Thier, Trois Ponts, Stavelot, Wanne and Lutrebois" and the massacre of 100 Belgian civilians at Stavelot, during the 16 December 1944—13 January 1945 period at the time of the Battle of the Bulge.
[11] The military tribunal asked the defendants to confirm their sworn statements;[11] of the nine Waffen-SS officers who testified, three claimed to have been mistreated by U.S. Army jailers.
[14] Approximately sixteen months after the end of the trial, almost all the defendants presented affidavits repudiating their former confessions and alleging aggravated duress of all types.
[15] Pursuant to procedure, an in-house review was undertaken by the American Occupation Army in Germany; the trial was carefully examined by a deputy judge.
Colonel Everett was convinced that a fair trial had not been granted to the defendants: in addition to alleged mock trials, he claimed that "to extort confessions, U.S. prosecution teams 'had kept the German defendants in dark, solitary confinement at near starvation rations up to six months; had applied various forms of torture, including the driving of burning matches under the prisoners' fingernails; had administered beatings which resulted in broken jaws and arms and permanently injured testicles'.
"[16] The turmoil raised by this case caused the Secretary of the Army, Kenneth Royall, to create a commission, chaired by Justice Gordon Simpson of the Texas Supreme Court, to investigate.
[16] The Commission expressed the opinion that the pre-trial investigation had not been properly conducted and that the members felt no death sentence should be executed in any instance where such doubts existed.
[17] One member of the commission, Judge Edward L. Van Roden of Pennsylvania, allegedly made several public statements claiming that physical violence had been inflicted on the accused and questioned the validity of the hearings.
The National Council for the Prevention of War made a press release on December 18, 1948, publicizing this speech, which the editor of The Progressive asked to run as a partly-ghostwritten article under Van Roden's byline.
[18][19] The press release and article greatly inflamed the public scandal, especially with the statement that "all but two of the Germans in the 139 cases we investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair.
[20] However, Van Roden denied under oath ever making statements found in the article, including the specific claim about 137 cases of damaged testicles.
"[27] Chairman Senators Raymond Baldwin and Lester C. Hunt (D-WY) were later accused by historian David Oshinsky of being "determined to exonerate the Army at all costs".
[28] Oshinsky alleged the third member of the three man committee, Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN), displayed a lack of interest in the case, attending only two of the first fifteen hearings.
[citation needed] It was later found that McCarthy had received "evidence" of the false torture claims from Rudolf Aschenauer [de], a prominent Neo-Nazi agitator who often served as a defense attorney for Nazi war criminals, such as Einsatzgruppen commander Otto Ohlendorf.
But, to apply this sentence would be equivalent accepting a bad administration of justice, which led [him], not without reserve, to commute the death penalty to life imprisonment".
