Posted on 12/17/2023 10:33:55 AM PST by CheshireTheCat
Two mass shootings of U.S. World War II infantrymen in Belgium marked this date in 1944.
It was the second day of the Battle of the Bulge, Nazi Germany’s surprise last offensive in the Ardennes. Hitler, in an inspired albeit ultimately unsuccessful gambit, intended here to burst through the thin-spread Allied line under cover of air power-negating foul weather, and still his western front enemies in time to fortify his east before the Red Army could destroy the Reich.
Needing to inflict a demoralizing lightning defeat, Hitler authorized rougher treatment of POWs than was usual on the western front, resulting in six weeks of savage no-quarter fighting and battlefield atrocities more characteristic of the eastern front. Our focus today is two such instances......
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
What humans will do to each other is almost beyond believing.
They had recently been deployed to Europe and got placed in a "quiet" area of the Ardennes forest to get accustomed to the battlefield.
Little did they know.
My uncle's sergeant was KIA during the battle, so my uncle was field-promoted to sergeant to take his place.
The 99th fought through the Bulge, made their way across Belgium, and was the first division en masse to cross the Rhine via what remained of the bridge at Remagen.
Two days later, my uncle was KIA - had just turned 20 years old.
The world, the flesh, and the devil are run by the spirit of antichrist and are at odds with God and his prime creation, man.
The record shows that after the fall of man, the first-born man, Cain, murdered the second born Abel. The world has gone downhill from there, redemption notwithstanding.
IIRC, Joachim Peiper, the butcher of Malmedy, initially escaped death but was tracked down and burned alive in revenge about 30 years later.
I love a happy ending.
The Allies were way too forgiving after the war. Yes, many major Nazi war criminals were executed at Nuremberg. But many more were sentenced to death or long prison terms, only to have their sentences reduced for “reasons of health” or some other such nonsense.
That’s what happened to Joachim Peiper. However, sometimes things balance out in the long run. From the article:
It [the Malmedy massacre] also resulted in a postwar death sentence for the German commander Joachim Peiper — although that sentence was never carried out, at least not judicially. Controversially freed in 1956, Peiper was assassinated in 1976: an unknown group calling itself the Avengers claimed credit.
The biggest conman of them all was Albert Speer. He knew everything.
So sorry for your family’s loss. Glad to know of him. Same with one in my family.
> The biggest conman of them all was Albert Speer. He knew everything. <
Yes, indeed. Speer was a top-level war criminal. He was also a very clever fellow. For example, at Nuremberg Speer said he planned to assassinate Hitler as the war was nearing an end. Speer’s “plan” was to introduce poison gas into the Führerbunker‘s air intake, killing everyone inside.
But the air intake was too high of the ground, said Speer. So he had to call the whole thing off.
I suppose that story gained him some sympathy with the Allied judges. But it was all a ruse. One of the other Nazi defendants later remarked that Speer was in charge of Germany’s entire industrial production. He couldn’t borrow a ladder from somewhere?
.
There was a rumor that it wasn’t his body in the house and he died later in Nuremburg.
The book, “Operation Paperclip” details Speer and his postwar scam to avoid consequences and curry favor with the allies.
A low life indeed.
The French Commies also took advantage of the chaos after the liberation of France to off a bunch of opposing conservative [non-Commie] French Resistance fighters.
There's a lot more to the story. My guess is that the bad stuff that happened well into the advance of Kampfgruppe Peiper had more than a little to do with Hitler's Little Helper [Pervitin].
“The biggest conman of them all was Albert Speer. He knew everything.”
Speer should have been hanged. Sauckel was doing his dirty work and was hanged for it. Goering and the other defendants knew he was a phony.
Glad they got it accomplished. He deserved a kidnap and a slower end, but still good.
Yeah, Speer had subordinates executed, but he had no clue. Because as anyone involved with Germans knows, they do not generate exacting systems of expectations, reports, accountability, inspections, etc. They aren’t OCD at all.
THE German manager of war production, completely out of the loop about all the death camps, the trains required, the resources and chemicals, the slave labor, etc. The very idea is laughable to anyone remotely familiar with Germany.
The Japs they let off without execution was a far worse offense considering what had been done to our troops.
The actor Charles Durning was in the captured group and he and a few others managed to escape somehow.
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