The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (14 page)

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F COMBAT TRAUMATIZED and brutalized Ameri- can soldiers—young men who had the benefit of training, group solidarity and, of course, weapons

to defend themselves—how much worse might this sort of warfare have been for the civilians caught in this maelstrom? The evidence from Belgian records is quite eloquent: it was every bit as awful for them, and indeed even worse, as these were people who had few means to protect themselves. They were subject not just to violence from their enemies, the Germans, but also from the Americans who, precisely because of their own trauma, often behaved with callous indiffer- ence toward civilians and their property, or killed civil- ians by mistake. And of course for local Belgians the stakes were even higher than for soldiers: the violence

of the war threatened their lives, their families, their livelihoods, their homes, villages, cities, and indeed their very sense of place and identity. For the people of the Belgian Ardennes and surrounding areas, the win- ter of 1944–45 was a time of catastrophe, suffering, and displacement. Over 3,000 civilians died in the Battle of the Bulge. The liberation that had gleamed so brightly in September was to be suffused in a midwinter blood- bath.
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“ We’ll be back,” some German soldiers had sneered as they withdrew from Belgium in early September 1944. And so they were, nowhere with more vengeance than in the Amblève valley. The residents of the small town of Stavelot, which straddles the shallow, narrow Amblève river, knew the Germans were coming. On December 17, residents observed anxious, not to say panic-strick- en, American soldiers moving westward through town, away from the front. Laurent Lombard, professor at the Athénée Royal de Stavelot, recalled that on the after- noon of the 17th refugees from Lingeuville, six miles to the east, arrived in Stavelot with word that they had seen the German tanks on their way. The residents were stunned, unbelieving: surely the Americans had not been turned back? At 5 P.M., refugees from Mal- médy began to trickle into town, bearing the same ill tidings: “ The Germans are coming back to Stavelot! For

the villagers, this was the most terrifying prospect one could imagine—the return of a nightmare.” The word spread fast. A wave of panic and fear spread through the town. Young people made preparations to flee; old people, unable or unwilling to join the flood of refu- gees, nervously awaited their fate. “ The night [of 17 De- cember] passed in a torment of agitation…. Few of us slept that night.”
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Had they known what was coming, they all might have made greater efforts to flee. Stavelot lay in the path of the 100 tanks and 4,000 soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper, named for its SS- Obersturmbannführer (or colonel), Joachim Peiper, part of the 1st SS Leibstan- darte Adolf Hitler Panzer Division. Peiper’s unit had proven its ruthlessness in Russia, and now was as- signed a vital breakthrough role in the Ardennes: along with the rest of the division, Peiper was to penetrate quickly to the Meuse, and hold open the door as the rest of the German invasion rushed through the Ar- dennes. Colonel Peiper, a mere twenty-nine years old yet battle-hardened and fanatical, let his soldiers know what was expected of them: total commitment, fear- lessness, and brutality, including the killing of prison- ers and civilians, partly in retribution for Allied bomb- ing of Germany, and partly because this was the SS way—to kill and sow fear.
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Early in the morning of De-

cember 17, immediately upon its penetration through an almost nonexistent American line at Losheim and Lanzerath, Peiper’s men had an opportunity to show their zeal: in the village of Honsfeld, they rounded up a few stray, sleepy Americans from small units of the 99th Division—perhaps sixty men in all—and shot them. Another 250 or so prisoners were herded down the road toward the rear, jeered at, beaten, and mis- treated by the Germans along the way. Peiper’s tanks rolled northwestward into Büllingen, filled up at a cap- tured American gasoline depot, and then stretched out for Stavelot and Trois Ponts, where they planned to cross the Amblève river and race to the Meuse. In the afternoon of the 17th, just south of Malmédy at a road junction at the hamlet of Baugnez, the Kampfgruppe surprised a small, ill-equipped American battery of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. These sol- diers, along with men from other scattered units that had been overwhelmed—perhaps 113 men—were herd- ed into an open field, stripped of gloves, clothing, and other items, and shot. Though over 40 Americans sur- vived the shootings by feigning death and later secret- ing themselves in the nearby woods, 72 men lay dead in the field; another dozen would be rooted out of hiding places and killed in the subsequent hours. The Mal- médy massacre, rightly infamous, was the worst atroc- ity against American troops in the European war.
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The Malmédy massacre is well-known today because it was immediately publicized by the commander of the First U.S. Army, Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges; he learned of it that very day from a few distraught survivors who made it back to American lines and told the grisly tale. The story of this German atrocity spread through American ranks and certainly led to reprisals upon German POWs by Americans. In 1946, seventy- three German soldiers, including Peiper, were put on trial for the murders, and all of them were convicted. Yet less well-known is the fact that Peiper’s battle group had not finished its lethal work. After its harvest

of death at Baugnez, the Kampfgruppe rolled onward to the west, pausing for the night on the outskirts of Stavelot. Early the next morning, the murderous col- umn jerked into life and set out toward the town, where hundreds of terrified citizens huddled in basements and barns, awaiting the return of the Germans. The Germans rolled into town from the southeast, crossed the short bridge into the northern half of Stavelot, and moved west along the road toward Trois Ponts, spitting out gunfire as they went. José Gengoux, fourteen years old, was standing in his family’s kitchen at 9:00 A.M. when a bullet hit him in the stomach and felled him. Joseph Alibert, who lived on the Trois Ponts road, had taken shelter in his basement. German soldiers entered his house, interrogated him about the whereabouts of the Americans, and shot him dead. M. and Mme. Lam- bert, also on the Trois Ponts road, were accosted by passing troops, and obliged to bring beer, wine, and cognac; he was shot and killed in return. On the 19th of December, as the long column continued into Trois Ponts, atrocities mounted. Five Germans entered the Georgin home, to find five people huddled there. The soldiers shot one of them, Louis Nicolay, and sum- moned M. Georgin outside to meet the same fate. But Georgin ran, made it to the river in a hail of bullets, and dove in. His arm was mangled by gunfire; it would be amputated three days later. The three souls left behind

in the house during Georgin’s escape—his wife and two members of the Nicolay family—were slaughtered, as were his neighbors, M. and Mme. Burnotte, Mme. Cor- bisier, and Oscar and Gustave Job—all shot with a bul- let to the head.

What happened next was certainly conditioned by the military context. After the Germans had crossed the bridge at Stavelot and begun to move west toward Trois Ponts, the 117th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. 30th Division retook the town of Stavelot and blew up the bridge across the Amblève. This had the effect of cutting off supplies to Peiper’s column coming up from the rear; and it also cut off Peiper’s line of re- treat. That was significant because farther down the line, at Trois Ponts, La Gleize, and Stoumont, all towns along the Amblève, Americans put up stiff resistance to Peiper’s attack and managed to pen him in behind the Amblève. Peiper’s column, bristling with tanks and sol- diers, could not break out across the river or continue its advance westward. The fighting here was emerging as one of the most important engagements of the Battle of the Bulge: American resistance now formed a line that emerged as the northern shoulder of the “bulge.” The Americans diverted the Germans away from Liège and into a narrow, compressed westward movement, making them vulnerable to counterattack. Peiper knew

this perfectly well, which is why his soldiers fought like caged animals clawing for an exit; inevitably it was the local civilians that felt the sting of this fury.

On December 19, at about 8:00 P.M., twelve SS sol- diers appeared in front of the Legaye house on the Trois Ponts road in Stavelot. Inside, twenty-six people huddled in the basement, where they had spent the previous night during the heavy fighting in the town. The Germans, who claimed that shots had been fired at them from the house, rousted out the civilians in- side by throwing two grenades into the basement. Madame Regine Grégoire, who knew some German (she was originally from Manderfeld, right on the Ger- man border about twenty miles east of Stavelot), and her two children were among the group that now was herded into the garden of the Legaye house. Mme. Gré- goire and her children were set to one side, perhaps because of their German ethnicity. The other twenty- three people, almost all women, children, and elder- ly, were lined up against a hedgerow. After an hour or so, two young SS soldiers drew their weapons and methodically shot them all in the head, using a pistol and rifle. Mme. Grégoire was told directly that the ci- vilians, however innocent, must pay for the crimes of the guilty—presumably the alleged “terrorists” who had been shooting at the Germans. These were not iso-

lated acts but part of a systematic campaign by Peiper’s men to exact reprisals. In Parfondruy, a hamlet on the outskirts of Stavelot, a similar atrocity: a dozen women and young children were forced into a garage and shot dead. On December 19, in nearby Renardmont, twen- ty-one prisoners—nineteen men and two women, one of whom was seventy-five years old—were marched to the Legrand farm, gathered into the large wash- house there, and shot to death. The building was then set ablaze; miraculously one man, Achille André, sur- vived to bear witness. But the owner of the farm, Mar- cel Legrand, suffered a bitter loss: he was hiding in his granary while the Germans were busy with their mur- derous activities. After dark, he emerged, only to find in his home the lifeless corpses of his mother-in-law, wife, and two children, aged five and eight. They had all been shot in the head. All told, in Stavelot and the neighboring hamlets during the period of December 17 to 23, about 130 civilians were murdered in cold blood by the soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper.
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T IS RIGHT to insist that the brutal crimes of the Germans inflicted upon Belgian civilians be re- membered, and condemned. What happened in Stavelot, and in Bande, where on December 24, thirty-

four civilians were summarily shot, one by one, in the back of the head, ought to be held up as vivid testimony of the true nature of German soldiers.
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Yet it must not be forgotten that in the Ardennes, as in all of Europe in 1944–45, the liberators also took many lives. This har- vest of innocent life by the liberators was not malevo- lent, as the atrocities described above were. But it was deliberate, because the Allied leaders reluctantly ac- cepted civilian deaths as part of the price to be paid for achieving victory. In Saint Vith, Houffalize, and a dozen other Belgian towns, the once-radiant face of libera- tion turned ugly, like a bruise.

Just to the south of the icy Amblève river, around Saint Vith, some of the heaviest fighting of the German of- fensive took place, which boded ill for the people of the town. The 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier Divisions swallowed up two American infantry regiments on the opening day of the campaign and took thousands of prisoners; the German tanks then moved toward Saint Vith, beyond which lay the Salm river and the road to the Meuse. The Americans, pushed back from the original line of defense near Losheim, drew up an improvised defense around Saint Vith and formed a horseshoe-shaped defensive ring; but waves of Ger- man tanks swept down on the town and threatened to surround this salient. On the evening of the 22nd,

the Americans began a planned withdrawal across the Salm river. The 106th Division, which had arrived in the line just two weeks earlier, full of green recruits, had been virtually wiped out; the 7th Armored Division had been badly mauled; overall, the Americans had suffered some 5,000 casualties in the Saint Vith sector. German soldiers stormed into Saint Vith hungry, cold, and ex- hausted; they pillaged the town for food, abandoned American rations, warm clothing, and valuables. The Americans at Saint Vith had successfully delayed the Germans and badly upset their timetable; but this was incontestably a defeat.
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These military events caused inevitable human trag- edy for residents of Saint Vith. Although the town was in the German-speaking part of Belgium, few civilians there welcomed the return of the Germans. Young men feared either being shot as resistance fighters or en- rolled into the German army. On December 16, when the battle began, Saint Vith was shelled by the Germans and this was the signal for many of the townspeople to flee. Those who did not were all but compelled to do so when, on December 25, the American Ninth Air Force bombed the town; one day later, the RAF followed suit. The town was set ablaze by the use of phospho- rous bombs, and hundreds of residents were inciner- ated in their basement shelters. In the midst of battle,