![]() A destroyed bridge thwarted Peiper's tactical plan earlier in 1944, the retreating Germans had destroyed the Losheim-Losheimergraben bridge over the railroad, which in mid-December of 1944 prevented Kampfgruppe Peiper from traveling that route to their objective - the town of Losheimergraben. : 70įor their part in the German advance to the west, Kampfgruppe Peiper was to travel the Lanzerath-Losheimergraben road and advance onto the town of Losheimergraben, immediately following the Waffen-SS infantry tasked to capture the villages and towns immediately west of the International Highway. To realize the German advance to the west, SS General Dietrich planned for the 6th SS Panzer Army to advance northwest, through Losheimergraben and Bucholz Station, and then drive 72 miles (116 km) through the towns of Honsfeld and Büllingen, and through the villages of Trois-Ponts, to then reach Belgian Route Nationale N23, and then cross the River Meuse. In December 1944, for the Ardennes Counteroffensive the Germans' initial, strategic position was east of the German-Belgium border and the Siegfried Line, near the town of Losheim, Belgium. Army POWs, in a massacre at Malmedy, Belgium, on 17 December 1944 Route of the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper: the circle indicates the Baugnez crossroads where Waffen-SS soldiers killed 84 U.S. German advance to the west German attack : 260+ Because the strategy of the Ardennes Counteroffensive had reserved the roads with the strongest roadway for the bulk traffic of the tanks of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the convoys of Kampfgruppe Peiper traveled secondary roads with weak roadways that proved unsuitable for the weights of armored military vehicles, such as Tiger II tanks. lines, Peiper was to advance his tanks and armored vehicles on the road to Ligneuville and travel through the towns of Stavelot, Trois-Ponts, and Werbomont in order to reach and seize the bridges over the River Meuse that are in the vicinity of the city of Huy. After the Waffen-SS infantry had breached the U.S. : 5įor their part of the Ardennes counter-attack, the Kampfgruppe Peiper was the armored spearhead of the left wing of the 6th SS Panzer Army, under the command of SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper. 1945) was that the 6th SS Panzer Army, commanded by SS General Sepp Dietrich, was to penetrate and break through the Allied front between the towns of Monschau and Losheimergraben (a cross-border village shared by the municipalities of Hellenthal and Büllingen) in order to then cross the River Meuse, and afterwards assault and capture the city of Antwerp. The objective of the Third Reich's Ardennes Counteroffensive (Battle of the Bulge, 16 Dec. Army in the Western Front (1939–1945) - thus Hitler ordered that battles be executed and fought with the same no-quarter brutality with which the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS fought the Red Army in the Eastern Front (1941–1945) in the Soviet Union. Late in the Second World War, the Third Reich's war-crime violations of the Geneva Conventions were a type of psychological warfare meant to induce fear of the Wehrmacht and of the Waffen-SS in the soldiers of the Allied armies and the 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). 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. īesides the summary execution of the eighty-four U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre then were killed with a coup de grâce gun-shot to the head. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. 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). POWs from other unitsġst SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler POWs of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion and hundreds of other U.S. Mass murder by machine gun and gun-shots to the headĨ4 U.S.
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