Malmedy, but What About Wereth?
I imagine that, if you know much about the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, you have heard that at least 84 captured U.S. soldiers were assembled in a field near Malmedy, Belgium on December 17, 1944 by men of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment. The SS troops proceeded to machine-gun them down and left their bodies in the frigid weather. The claim was that the Germans had no facilities for prisoners and were on a schedule to advance as fast as possible so could not take them with the advance. A reason, not an excuse.
In July of 1946, the Nuremberg trials found 43 members of the Kampfgruppe Peiper guilty and sentenced them to be hung. This included their commander, Joachim Peiper who accepted responsibility for the actions of his men. Due to irregularities in how evidence was gathered, it was determined Peiper did not necessarily give the order for the massacre, so his sentence was changed to life imprisonment. Eventually, his sentence was commuted after 12 years in December, 1956.
However, have you heard about the Wereth massacre that occurred at the same time?
On that same day in 1944, German SS troops massacred 11 Black soldiers from the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion near the farming town of Wereth in Belgium. They were known as the “Wereth 11”:
· Curtis Adams of South Carolina
· Mager Bradley of Mississippi
· George Davis Jr. of Alabama
· Thomas Forte of Mississippi
· Robert Green of Georgia
· James Leatherwood of Mississippi
· Nathaniel Moss of Texas
· George Motten of Texas
· William Pritchett of Alabama
· James Stewart of West Virginia
· Due Turner of Arkansas
The 333rd was an all black unit and the 11 men had escaped capture, trudging through deep snow, avoiding roads to avoid German patrols. They carried only two weapons. They were eventually caught again at the Langer home where the family had been feeding them. To avoid repercussions to the family, they surrendered without resisting the German soldiers.
The atrocity against them, not far from the family’s home, included blows to the head, bayonet stabbings, multiple gunshots, and some bodily mutilations.
It would be hard not to consider some racial motivations behind the kind of treatment they suffered compared to the Malmedy murders which involved none of the individual, personal attacks.
This event was not never prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials. It was not recognized until decades after the war.
This Smithsonian video (from Facebook) discusses this massacre: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=343719004628604.
Tina Langer, whose father sheltered 11 black American soldiers during World War II before German soldiers massacred them, stands in front of the Wereth 11 Memorial in Wereth, Belgium. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/migration/belgian-villagers-remember-wereth-11-with-memorial-1.migrated
Source — Stars and Stripes
