Key facts
- Date
- 17 December 1944 ( 1944-12-17 )
- Attack type
- Mass shooting by machine gun and gunshots to the head, summary execution
- Deaths
- 84 U.S. POWs of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion
- Perpetrators
- 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler Joachim Peiper Werner Poetschke Sepp Dietrich
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- mass murder
- Country
- Belgium
- Location
- Malmedy
- Image
- Bodies of U.S. officers and soldiers slain by the Nazis after capture near Malmedy, Belgium. - NARA - 196544.jpg
- Number of deaths
- 90
- Participant
- Waffen-SS
Show 3 more facts
- Commons category
- Malmedy massacre
- point in time
- 1944-12-17
- time period
- World War II
via Wikidata · CC0
~16 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Malmedy massacre was a German war crime committed by soldiers of the Waffen-SS on 17 December 1944 at the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945). Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; many of the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre were executed with a gunshot to the head.
Besides the summary execution of the eighty-four U.S. POWs at the farmer's field, the term "Malmedy massacre" also includes other Waffen-SS massacres of civilians and POWs in Belgian villages and towns in the time after their first massacre of U.S. POWs at Malmedy; these Waffen-SS war crimes were the subjects of the Malmedy massacre trial (May–July 1946), which was a part of the Dachau trials (1945–1947).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Malmedy massacre” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.