Why U.S. GIs Were Ordered NEVER to Trust a Surrendering SS Soldier JJ

On the 17th of December 1944, at a snow-covered crossroads called Bones, just southeast of the Belgian town of Malmid, roughly 120 American soldiers stood in an open field with their hands above their heads. They had already surrendered. They were prisoners now, under the protection of every law both armies had signed.

 Then a [music] single pistol shot cracked across the field, and then the machine guns opened up. Within days, word of what happened in that field reached the foxholes on the northern shoulder of the Ardens, [music] and it carried a warning that would harden into something close to an order. When the men in the fieldgrade tunics with the twin lightning runes come out with their hands raised, do not believe them.

 This is why American soldiers in the winter of 1944 were told never to trust a surrendering SS man. This story does not really begin at the crossroads. It begins with a rule. An unwritten rule that both armies in the west had followed for most of the war. Right up until the moment the men of the first SS Panzer Division decided it no longer applied to them.

 By the winter of 1944, the German soldiers surrendering was not a rare sight. It was a daily one. After the breakout from Normandy and the collapse across France, entire Vermached units had walked into American lines with their hands up, sometimes led by their own officers, glad to be out of a war their generals already knew was lost.

 American infantrymen had learned the ritual. You called out, the enemy stood, the weapons went down, and a scared teenager from Bavaria became a prisoner who would sit out the rest of the war in a camp in the American Midwest. That ritual had a spine and the spine was reciprocity. Both sides understood roughly the same rules. A man who threw down his rifle and raised his hands [music] had removed himself from the fight and killing him after that was murder.

 It was written into the American soldiers own training manual, the rules of land warfare, and it was backed by the Geneva Convention of 1929, which Germany had signed. The regular German army, whatever else it did on the Eastern Front, largely honored that bargain in the West. Prisoners were taken and prisoners were kept alive to [music] sit out the war.

 Then in the pre-dawn dark of the 16th of December, the whole calculation changed. Under a thick fog that grounded Allied aircraft, three German armies came out of the Arden forest in the largest surprise offensive the Western Front had ever seen. Hitler had stripped his best remaining armor from every front to build it.

 At the northern edge, the schwarp punct the main effort was handed to the six panzer army under sept dietrich. And at the tip of that spear rode the first SS Panzer division, the livan darta. These were not reluctant conscripts. They were the ideological core of the Nazi war machine, veterans of the Eastern Front, [music] where quarter was rarely asked and almost never given. The plan depended on speed.

Piper had been handed one main road and a timetable that assumed [music] he would smash through the thin American screen and be across the river m before the allies could react. [music] Standing in his way on the high ground the Germans called the northern shoulder were green and half-ested American divisions.

 The 99th and the second infantry among them dug into the frozen ridgeel lines around Elenborn. Those men did not know they were the hinge of the entire offensive. They only knew that the artillery had started before dawn and that the woods in front of them were suddenly full of German infantry. Every hour they held bent Piper’s schedule further out of shape and a spearhead built entirely on speed does not react well to being slowed down.

 The ground itself favored an ambush. In December, the Arden is a maze of dense pine forest, deep snow, [music] and narrow roads folded between steep ridge lines. Temperatures fell well below freezing. Fog and low clouds sat in the valleys for days. A machine gun set back in a treeine could not be seen until it fired, and a man in the open had nowhere to go but down into snow that offered no cover at all.

 It was terrain built for the man who shot first and explained nothing. You can see what that meant within hours of the jump off. On the morning of the 17th, the spearhead of the first SS Panzer Division rolled into the village of Hansfeld, where American resistance simply evaporated in the confusion. [music] According to the official United States Army history of the campaign, 19 unarmed Americans were shot down at Hansfeld.

The column pushed on to Bullingen, diverting to seize an American fuel dump of roughly 50,000 gallons, filling their tanks from captured cans while prisoners were put to work. At Bullingen, the same history records, another 50 unarmed Americans were killed. The pattern was already set before the column ever reached the crossroads that would give the whole day its name.

 The man driving that column was 30-year-old Yawwakim Piper. By 1944, he was the youngest regimental commander in the Vaafan SS, a holder of the Knights Cross, and a former personal agitant to Hinrich Himmler himself. He had served in the SS since the early days of the regime and had come up inside its ideology completely.

 [music] Historians who studied him did not describe a professional soldier who happened to wear the wrong uniform. They described a man fully formed by the Nazi worldview. His battle group, Conf Group of Piper, was built around the division’s tank regiment, a fast column of panzers and halftracks with a simple mission, punch through, do not stop, do not clear, do not garrison.

 Reach the Moose River and reach it fast and let terror clear the road ahead. Here it matters to be precise about who these men were because it is the whole hinge of the story. The Waffan SS was not the German army. It was the armed branch of the SS, the Nazi party’s own instrument. And after the war, the tribunal at Nuremberg, formerly declared the SS, including the Waffan SS, a criminal organization for its central role in atrocities and crimes against humanity.

 That distinction was not academic to the men in the foxholes. The soldier who had learned to take a Vermach surrender safely was about to meet an enemy who had been trained to see mercy itself as [music] weakness. And the tool that enemy carried into the tree lines was the fastest infantry weapon of the war.

 The German MG42 fired the standard 7.92 mm rifle cartridge, but it fired it at a rate that no Allied weapon came close to matching, [music] roughly 1,200 rounds a minute. Think about that as sound rather than as a number. Most machine guns of the war let you count the individual shots. The American Browning ran at less than half that rate.

 A steady, [music] poundable hammer. The 42 ran so fast the human ear could not separate one round from the next. What men heard instead was a single continuous tearing noise, and every veteran who survived it reached for the same comparison. It sounded like heavy canvas being ripped in half. The Germans nicknamed it Hitler’s buzzsaw. And in the snow of the Arden, a burst from a hidden 42 could put a dozen rounds into a man before he finished falling.

 A gun like that dug into a treeine at the edge of a field was invisible until the instant it spoke. There was no muzzle flash to spot at distance and daylight. No chance to count the shots and locate the shooter. A man caught in the open heard the canvas tear and simply went down. And the men beside him learned in that same second that the trees were not empty.

That is the weapon Piper’s spearhead carried west. And just past noon on the 17th of December, it found a column of Americans who never saw it coming. >> That column was about 30 vehicles carrying most of battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion moving south out of Malmidi towards St. Vit. These were not frontline infantry.

They were an artillery observation unit, lightly armed, doing exactly what they had been told to do, driving down an ordinary Belgian road toward a new position. At the Bales crossroads, they drove directly into the path of Piper’s tanks. It was not a battle. The lead German vehicles opened fire on the softskinned trucks, and the Americans, with nothing heavier than rifles and a few carbines against tanks, did the only sane thing. They surrendered.

 The SS collected them, disarmed them, and herded them into a field beside a cafe at the crossroads. More than a hundred men standing together in the open snow. For a few minutes, nothing happened. Then, by the account of survivors, a German officer or crewman in a passing vehicle raised a pistol and fired into the mass of prisoners.

 A private, later identified as an SS trooper named Guorg Fleps, is said to have fired one of those first shots. And then the machine guns on the halted vehicles opened up on men who had no weapons, no cover, and nowhere to run. First Lieutenant Virgil Larry of the Observation Battalion was in that field.

 He watched the man beside him go down and threw himself into the snow among the bodies, [music] lying still while the guns worked over the field. What he did next is the thread we are going to follow to the end of this story. Because 18 months later, Luri would stand in a courtroom and put a name to the man who fired [music] first. But that is getting ahead of the snow.

The firing lasted only minutes. Then it got worse. SS men walked out into the field among the fallen. And where they heard a man moaning or saw him move, they finished him with a pistol shot to the head or a rifle butt to the skull. Survivors later testified that they lay pressed into the frozen ground, holding their breath, listening to boots crunching closer [music] and to single shots being placed one after another into the men who still moved.

 Some heard laughter. Sergeant Kenneth Arenss, hit twice in the back, lay motionless for the better part of an hour, playing dead while the executioners moved among his friends. Homer Ford, a military policeman who had been swept up with the convoy and lived. Later told an American court that he lay among the bodies and listened to the wounded around him moaning and crying and watched the SS troopers move down the rows, shooting some of them and clubbing others with the butts of their rifles.

 He described the sound the same way every survivor did. It did not stop for a long time. When the killers finally moved on, the survivors who could still move made a break for it, sprinting for the treeine and the road back to Malmidy while some of the SS fired after them. Around 2, bleeding and half frozen, the first of them reached the lines of the 291st Engineer [music] Combat Battalion.

 Lieutenant Colonel David Perran hearing the shooting in the distance had gone forward himself and met them coming out of the woods. From his command post in Malmidi, Pergrin got the first report of the massacre up the chain of command that same afternoon. It [music] is because the survivors came out at Malmidi, not at the crossroads itself, that the atrocity [music] carries that town’s name instead of the name Bes.

The dead stayed where they fell. Piper’s column had already rolled on west, and the crossroads sat in no man’s land for weeks. Snow fell [music] and covered the field. It was not until the middle of January, when American troops retook the ground, that soldiers of the 30th Infantry Division [music] noticed a row of low, even humps in the snow and understood what they were looking at.

When the bodies were finally recovered and examined, the count came to roughly 84 men. That recovery mattered more than anyone standing [music] in the cold that January could have known. American Graves registration teams photographed the field before they touched anything. Then worked the frozen ground methodically, numbering each body where it lay.

 Army doctors examined the dead one by one. What they found built the case that would put these killings in front of a court. A large share of the men had died from a single close-range wound to the head, and others carried the crushed skulls of a rifle butt. Those are not the wounds of soldiers cut down while fighting.

 They are the wounds of men finished [music] off where they had fallen. The snow that had hidden the crossroads for a month had [music] also preserved the evidence of exactly what was done there. And Bes was not the end of the columns route. It was the middle of it. That same day in the tiny hamlet of Were 11 black American soldiers of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion were run down after escaping the German breakthrough near St. V.

 They had been given shelter by a Belgian family, the Langers, and were betrayed to the SS by a neighbor. Taken prisoner, they were marched into a field [music] and their bodies found weeks later under the snow showed they had been beaten and mutilated before they were shot. Their names were Curtis Adams, Mager Bradley, George Davis Jr.

, Thomas Forte, Robert Green, James Leatherwood, Nathaniel Moss, George Mottton, William Pritchette, James Stewart, and Due Turner. Their killing went uninvestigated for decades and was left out of the official congressional report entirely. It would be more than 70 years before their country formally recognized what happened to them.

 There is a bitter symmetry in who those men were. That battalion was a segregated African-American artillery unit fighting for a country [music] that still made them serve in separate units. Its sister battalion, the 969th, would earn a presidential unit citation for standing by the paratroopers in the siege of Bastonia.

 One of the first such honors given to a black combat unit in the war. The 11 men murdered at Worth were cut from [music] the same cloth as those gunners. They simply had the worst luck to run into the first SS Panzer Division first. The killing was not confined to soldiers. As Piper’s men and the units following them pushed through the town of Stavalo, they turned on the civilians they suspected of hiding Americans.

 Over 2 days, roughly 130 Belgian men, women, and children were murdered there, shot in their cellars and gardens in a series of killings that had nothing to do with combat and everything to do with the terror the offensive [music] had been ordered to spread. At Lieuville, where Piper paused at a hotel that would later serve as a German command post, another handful of American prisoners were shot.

Though the local inkeeper is credited with talking the SS [music] out of killing more, the killing traveled with the column the way exhaust travels with an engine at every village where prisoners fell into their hands, and there was no time and no inclination to guard them. But the column that spread all this terror was already dying.

 Piper had gambled everything on speed and captured fuel, and the American engineers he was chasing kept blowing the bridges in front of him and denying him the roads. His spearhead ground to a halt around the villages of Stomont and Llles, the deepest point the northern attack would reach. And there it was, surrounded.

Out of gasoline, low on ammunition, and pounded by the American artillery that the Elenborn stand had bought time to bring up, Piper finally abandoned his tanks and halftracks where they sat. On foot in the dark, he and roughly 800 of his men slipped out of the encirclement and walked back toward the German lines, leaving the wreck of the most feared armored column in the West frozen on the Belgian hillsides.

In all, the post-war investigation would tie Piper’s command to the killing of American prisoners and Belgian civilians at some 12 separate places across [music] those few days. The United States Senate subcommittee that later reviewed the case counted roughly 350 murdered American prisoners of war [music] and 100 Belgian civilians.

 If this is the kind of history you come here for, the fully sourced version instead of the movie version, take a moment to subscribe before we go on, because the next part is where memory and records start to pull apart, and it is the part most retellings get wrong. Here is the version of the story you have probably heard.

 An SS man steps out of the treeine with his hands raised [music] or a white rag lifted over the branches. An American squad, still playing by the old rules, stands up out of cover and walks forward to take him [music] prisoner. At the last moment, the SS man drops flat into the snow, and a machine gun hidden in the trees behind him opens up on the exposed Americans, cutting them down in the open.

 The fake surrender as a deliberate rehearsed trap. It is a vivid picture and when you go looking for it in the surviving records tied to [music] a specific unit on a specific day in the Arden, it becomes very hard to find. Historians who have studied how American soldiers actually behaved toward prisoners and why describe something more honest and in a way darker.

 The fear of the false surrender was absolutely real. It was one of the strongest reasons frontline infantry gave for shooting rather than trusting an enemy who was trying to give [music] up. But that fear was not built mainly on a cataloged SS ambush technique. It was built on malmity. Because look again at what actually happened at the crossroads.

 The SS did not fake their own surrender there. They [music] accepted the Americans surrender. They took the prisoners, disarmed them, gathered them in a field, and then murdered them. That is not [music] a clever battlefield trick. It is the deliberate execution of men who had already given up. And for the soldier who heard about it in his foxhole [music] three miles away, the practical lesson was exactly the same and even simpler.

 Surrender to these men or accept [music] their surrender and you might die anyway. The rules were off. That does not mean perfectly never happened. The record does hold documented cases [music] in the wider fighting of that winter of German troops abusing the white flag, [music] feigning a wish to give up, and then opening fire when Americans came forward [music] to accept it.

 There is at least one grimly clear Arden incident where German soldiers called on to surrender answered by opening fire on the men of the 119th Infantry with automatic weapons [music] instead. Treachery under a flag of truce was a real crime that real men committed. There was also a second kind of deception loose in the Arden that winter, and it poisoned trust just as badly.

 Under the code name Operation Grief, the Germans sent English-speaking [music] commandos in captured American uniforms, driving captured American jeeps behind the lines to seize bridges, cut wires, and sow confusion. [music] Most were caught, and the ones who were caught were shot as spies. But the rumor of them spread far faster than the men themselves.

 Suddenly, every soldier at every crossroads might be the enemy in disguise. and American centuries began [music] stopping their own officers to demand the name of a state capital or a baseball [music] score. A soldier already primed to distrust an SS man with his hands raised was now taught to distrust [music] the uniform on his own side.

 Paranoia had become a survival skill. [music] What the honest record does not support is the tidy universal image of the SS running the same staged play of fake surrender into the buzzsaw [music] as a standard tactic. The truth is that the massacre of genuine prisoners at bones, the fog of an enemy in stolen American uniforms during operation grief [music] and older soldiers tales of white flag trickery all fused in the mind of the exhausted GI into a single conviction.

 Do not trust the SS with [music] his hands up. Given what those men had just done in that field, it was not paranoia. It was arithmetic. And it changed how Americans fought for the rest of the campaign. The change began as word of mouth, the fastest [music] communications network in any army. The survivors reached Perkins engineers on the afternoon of the 17th, and by that night, the story [music] was moving foxhole to foxhole up the northern shoulder.

 By the next morning, [music] it had reached men who had never seen the crossroads and never would. William gets, a soldier of the same engineer battalion, remembered how [music] the report went up to headquarters and how his unit responded to it in the plainest possible terms. We did not [music] take too many prisoners after that.

 For the most part, that hardening stayed unofficial. A grim understanding passed between men rather than a policy printed on paper. But in at least one case, it did make it onto paper. On the 21st of December, 4 days after Bales, the headquarters of the 328th Infantry, issued a fragmentaryary order for the next day’s attack. Its [music] language, preserved in the official army history, left nothing to interpretation.

No SS troops [music] and no paratroopers were to be taken prisoner. They were to be shot on site. That is a real order and it should sit uncomfortably because it points at the other half of an honest account. When the rules come off, they do not come off for only one side. Nobody who tells this story truthfully gets to pretend the anger it produced stayed clean.

 On New Year’s Day near the village of Shenon outside Bastonia, American soldiers of the 11th Armored Division machine gunned a group of German prisoners. The estimates of how many died range widely and no one was ever prosecuted and it was quietly buried at the time. Historians who have looked at it since have linked it directly to the fury that Malmmedi set loose [music] and to the informal no prisoners talk moving through the American ranks that winter.

 It is a [music] smaller thing than the organized ordered killing that Piper’s command carried out. And the official history is [music] careful to say there is no evidence the Americans killed on standing orders the way the SS did. [music] But it happened and leaving it out to keep the story simple would be its own kind of lie.

 What the SS did in the Arden was still categorically its own thing. And the reason lies in where the orders came from. At the postwar trials, Sept [music] Dietrich testified that acting on Hitler’s own instructions, he had passed down a directive that the [music] offensive be preceded by a wave of terror and fright and that his men were to fight without the normal human [music] restraints.

 The official United States Army historian who studied the killings concluded that Piper’s command represented the only organized and directed murder of prisoners of war by either side during the entire Arden battle. Not a moment of panic, not the ugly overflow of combat rage that Shenonia represented, but killing that came down as policy from the top of the German state and was carried out by men conditioned to obey it.

 It is worth sitting with that one word, only. In those same December days, surrender was happening constantly all across the Arden [music] and almost everywhere it still worked the way it was supposed to. On the Schne Eiffel Ridge southeast of the massacre site, roughly 8,000 men of the 106th Infantry Division were cut off, overrun, and forced to lay down their arms in the largest single American surrender of the entire war in Europe.

 They were marched east into prison [music] camps, half starved and frozen. But they were kept alive and most of them came home. That is what surrender was still supposed to mean even in this battle, even against this enemy. Which is exactly why the field at Bes stands out against the whole [music] rest of the campaign like a blood stain on snow.

 That is the line the honest historian holds. [music] You can respect the tactical skill of the German soldier and the waffan SS and the Arden were in the narrow military sense hard [music] and capable men. But there is a difference between acknowledging that a unit fought well and [music] admiring what it fought for.

 and the livan darta in the snow was fighting to spread terror in service of a regime built on mass murder. The men in [music] that field at Bound did not die because they lost a fair fight. They died because they had surrendered to soldiers for whom surrender meant nothing. The reckoning when it came was incomplete.

In the summer of 1946, [music] dozens of members of KF group of Piper Piper among them went on trial before an American military court at the former concentration camp at Dhau. This is where the thread from the [music] snow finally ties off. First Lieutenant Virgil Larry, the officer [music] who had thrown himself among the bodies at the crossroads and lived, took the stand and identified the man he said fired the first shot into the prisoners.

 Survivor after survivor took that same stand, men who had lain in the snow and heard the pistol shots walking toward them and told a courtroom what had been done to unarmed prisoners in a Belgian field. More than 40 of the defendants were sentenced to [music] death, including Piper. Not one of those death sentences was ever carried out.

 Almost from the moment the verdicts came down, the case turned into a political fight. [music] The American Defense Council argued that some of the German confessions had been coerced by the investigators who took them, and those claims, true in part and exaggerated in part, gave the convictions a permanent shadow.

 A United States Senate subcommittee reviewed the whole affair and a young senator named Joseph McCarthy attached himself [music] to it for the publicity, turning a war crimes case into a stage. As the war receded and West Germany became a Cold War ally, the appetite to hang SS men for the Arden drained away. The sentences were commuted, then reduced, [music] and by the second half of the 1950s, every man convicted in the case, Piper included, had walked [music] free.

Piper lived quietly in France under a version of his own name until 1976 [music] when he was identified and his house was firebombed in the night. His body was found in the ruins he was 61. The survivors [music] carried it differently. Kenneth Arenss who had lain in the snow for an hour playing dead said in later years that he kept telling the story not for himself.

 [music] He told it, he said, for the poor guys who weren’t as lucky as me. Today the [music] field at Bes is quiet. A low stone memorial stands there set with dark stones, one for each man who was recovered from that ground. A few miles away in the hamlet of Were a simple cross marks where 11 men of the 333rd were beaten and shot in [music] the snow.

 A memorial raised first by the boy from the family that had tried to save them. The crossroads looks like nothing now. [music] An ordinary junction of ordinary Belgian roads, the kind you would drive through without slowing down. But once on a freezing afternoon in December, more than a hundred men stood in that field with their hands in the air, believing that the raising of empty hands still meant what it had always meant. It did not.

 [music] And every American soldier who fought on after them learned the lesson written in that snow and carried it and never fully trusted a pair of raised SS hands again.