In the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge, members of a Waffen SS division executed 84 American prisoners of war near the Belgian town of Malmedy. After a long and painstaking investigation, the U.S. Army tried and convicted 74 accused perpetrators, but a concerted effort to delegitimize and overturn the convictions immediately ushered in a decade of controversy over accusations that vengeance-seeking American interrogators had tricked and tortured the defendants and forced them to sign false confessions. By 1957 each of the convicted men had been released.
In The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy, historian Steven Remy shows how the torture accusations were invented and disseminated by a network of American and German trial critics, including the accused soldiers, their aggrieved American defense attorney, Army officials, prominent German clergymen, and a then-unknown American Senator making his demagogic debut, Joseph McCarthy. Conspiratorial anti-Semitism, a gullible American press, and ex-Nazis and their sympathizers all contributed to our enduring misunderstanding of one of World War II’s most infamous crimes.
Though the term only surfaced after Remy’s work on the book was complete, The Malmedy Massacre can be read as a “fake news” autopsy, a resonance now shaping the book’s reception. Below, we discuss responses to the book with Remy.
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Q: You delivered the manuscript for The Malmedy Massacre in late summer 2016, before we all became aware of the role that deliberately untruthful stories played in the American election, and the “fake news” label became a ubiquitous political barb. And yet those developments have now shaped responses to the book. Could you say anything about the experience of having a work of history be received into a political moment that differs in such significant ways from that in which it was crafted?
For a historian, it is both gratifying and unnerving to see one’s work resonate beyond its intended readership. The unnerving part is the risk that what you’ve written will be misused. Some readers may draw lessons from it that you had no intention of offering or make the kind of unhelpful, facile comparisons that the Harvard historian Moshik Temkin has written about recently in the New York Times. Fortunately, neither has happened here. Not so far, at least.
There’s no question I am in the position of being in the right place at the right time. But the unexpected resonance of parts of The Malmedy Massacre should remind historians—and the presses that publish their work—not to give in to the presentist temptation. While the British historian E.H. Carr was certainly right in claiming that historical research is always in significant part an ongoing dialog between the present and the past, we cannot allow present concerns to over-determine what we research and write about. We must also remain equally, if not more, concerned about what has changed and in recovering what has been lost.
A case in point is the question of interrogators and their methods. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a spate of German, British, and American television documentaries attempted to draw connections between the Malmedy massacre investigation and the abuses perpetrated against suspected terrorists in Iraq and other places. In doing so, the producers of these programs and the on-screen commentators repeated the falsehood that American interrogators tortured the suspects in the Malmedy case. I can understand that the temptation to make such connections must have been very strong. Yet, as I show in the book, the Malmedy case suspects were not tortured. So here was an instance in which well-trained American interrogators did not resort to abusive methods. While I had the recent scandals over torture very much in mind when I was writing the book, in the end the evidence in the Malmedy case pointed to a break with a pattern rather than continuity. Between the widespread use of torture in the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 and the post-9/11 wars, World War II and the immediate postwar period seems rather exceptional in the longer history of American intelligence gathering.
Q: While you were certainly careful to resist that presentist impulse and let the story of the massacre and its aftermath unfold on its own terms, you also clearly highlight some ways in which The Malmedy Massacre can help us to understand aspects of contemporary political life. Do you worry at all that the resonance of the “fake news” phenomenon could obscure the particular contemporary relevance you had in mind?
Not at all. I wrote The Malmedy Massacre because I had become fascinated by the post-trial controversy. The present moment was also very much on my mind. I believed we needed a more historically informed debate about both interrogation methods and military courts. Another purpose was to contribute to what I would call the “untangling” of modern German history. For several decades now, German, North American, and Israeli scholars have—often in the face of considerable resistance—revealed the extent to which our understanding of Nazi Germany has been shaped by former Nazis and their sympathizers. Yet another aim was to call attention to a strain of German and American anti-Semitism that became the lifeblood of the Malmedy case controversy.
It has been encouraging to read thoughtful responses to the book—most recently by Gabriel Schoenfeld and Lawrence Douglas in The Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs, respectively—that have engaged with these themes while also pointing out how the media generated a blizzard of fake news and how a small number of conscientious Army officials, Senators, intelligence operatives, and civil servants responded with diligence and honesty.
Q: At the risk of giving in to the comparative temptations you’ve just warned against, it does seem worth highlighting the book’s treatment of Joseph McCarthy, whom you describe as a “publicity-hungry, impatient junior senator” who used aggressive and ill-informed pursuit of the Malmedy story to help build his name. We see evidence in that episode of the recklessness and demagoguery that McCarthy would later display in his anti-Communist crusading, and it’s perhaps possible to recognize certain parallels with the political career path of Donald Trump, who used unfounded allegations of President Obama’s foreign birth as his own stepping stone. And certainly Trump’s stoking of fear among the American people has been compared to McCarthy’s earlier base appeals. Is it possible in your opinion to responsibly take anything of value from such apparent parallels without letting superficial comparison misuse history?
There are indeed a number of striking similarities between the two. McCarthy was willfully ignorant and lied constantly. Donald Trump is willfully ignorant and lies constantly, perhaps pathologically. McCarthy exploited—and fueled—fears of communist subversion and Trump exploits and fuels fears of non-white immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and Muslims. These are just two examples. But while it is tempting to focus on the parallels, we shouldn’t forget the many differences, both between the two men—their respective backgrounds, for instance—and the profoundly different contexts in which they operated.
To point to one obvious contextual difference—Trump is far more powerful than McCarthy ever was. I’m also struck by the way that the most important medium of information transmission of McCarthy’s era—television—ultimately helped undermine his influence, while the most important medium of our age, the internet and social media, not only helped put Trump in the White House but has been essential to shoring up his popular support as he fails miserably as President.
So one lesson, in my view, is to not focus exclusively on the similarities between the two, as Tom Risen and James Risen did recently in the New York Times, but to consider their differences and the very different contexts of the 1950s and the early 21st century. Another is to pay attention to the responses to both men. In the Senate hearings on the Malmedy controversy, a conscientious and thoughtful Republican Senator, Raymond Baldwin, stood up to McCarthy, as did far less prominent and powerful individuals, mainly the U.S. Army personnel who had investigated and prosecuted the original case. For them, what mattered most were the facts of the case, the best available evidence, and a determination to set the record straight.
