Malmédy incomplete and rushed investigations

Article from World War II Magazine
Massacre at Malmédy

Sadly, incomplete and rushed investigations, suspicions about the methods used to obtain confessions, and inadequate or flawed evidence ensured that guilty men escaped proper punishment, and there can be little doubt that some innocent men were punished during the trial. In the final analysis, justice itself became another casualty of the incident.

Earlier posting:
While we read in Ardennes-Alsace

CMH Pub 72-26
"In the Losheim Gap the advanced detachment of the 1st SS Panzer Division, Kampfgruppe Peiper, moved forward through the attacking German infantry during the early hours of the seventeenth. Commanded by Col. Joachim Peiper, the unit would spearhead the main armored assault heading for the Meuse River crossings south of Liege at Huy. With over 100 tanks and approximately 5,000 men, Kampfgruppe Peiper had instructions to ignore its own flanks, to overrun or bypass opposition, and to move day and night. Traversing the woods south of the main panzer route, it entered the town of Buellingen, about 3 miles behind the American line. After fueling their tanks on captured stocks, Peiper's men murdered at least 50 American POWs. Then shortly after noon, they ran head on into a 7th Armored Division field artillery observation battery southeast of Malmedy, murdering more than 80 men. Peiper's men eventually killed at least 300 American prisoners and over 100 unarmed Belgian civilians in a dozen separate locations. Word of the Malmedy Massacre spread, and within hours units across the front realized that the Germans were prosecuting the offensive with a special grimness. American resistance stiffened."

In the book The War Between The Generals David Irving

Page 377
"Stimson told Roosevelt of the massacre of 150 U.S. troops at Malmedy
by the 1st SS panzer division, as described by survivors. "Well," replied the President cynically, "it will only serve to make our troops feel towards the Germans as they have already learned to feel about the Japs."

Page 380
"to the south at Bastogne, the tip of the other talon of the pincer, the fighting around Bastogne was getting fiercer as the enemy - and particularly the proud SS divisions - fought back against Patton. He wrote apprehensively on January 4, recalling the scandals he had brought down on himself in Sicily: "The 11th armoured is very green and took unnecessary losses to no effect. There were also some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners (I hope we can conceal this)." not far away, a Waffen SS unit had killed many Americans in a shoot-out near Malmédy early in Rundstedt's offensive, and had laid the American dead side by side - like the cordwood heaps Patton himself had commented on earlier - just before being thrown back in a counterattack. American combat propaganda made an atrocity out of this - the famous "Malmédy incident" - the episode that Stimson, in good faith, had related to Roosevelt."