The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (40 page)

The convoy had been on the move through cold, grey sleet since early morning. A corporal in one of the trucks became obsessed by a premonition, which he confided to his best friend in the unit. ‘I’ll not be going home. Something terrible is going to happen to most of us today, but you’ll be going back. Tell the folks back home I love them.’

As the convoy had passed through Malmédy it found the narrow streets full of military vehicles, most of which were moving in the opposite direction. Civilians ran beside the trucks, pointing south and shouting,
‘Boches! Boches!’
The commander was stopped by a colonel in the Combat Engineers, who warned of a German breakthrough, and advised him to consider another route. But the commander, worried that he might lose his position in the march column, decided to press on.

When the convoy reached the Baugnetz crossroads one of the jeeps pulled over and stopped at the Café Bodarwe. Three soldiers went in to check that the column was taking the right road and enquired as to the whereabouts of any German troops in the vicinity. Madame Bodarwe, whose son had been forced into service in the German Army, gave directions but said she knew nothing about any soldiers. A pro-German farmer from across the road, Henri Le Joly, said nothing.

The soldiers went outside and climbed back into the jeep. The lead vehicle of the convoy was scarcely five hundred yards beyond the crossroads when the battalion was fired upon. The convoy had been spotted by an advance unit of Rampfgruppe Peiper, a beefed-up battle group comprising six thousand men, many of them in their teens. It was part of the 1st Panzer Division, which traced its origins to Hitler’s first bodyguard known as Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler - Hitler’s Own. Numbering twenty-two thousand men altogether, it was considered one of the more powerful divisions in the German Army and had a reputation for daring and ruthlessness. Motivated to the point of fanaticism, it had served on the Russian front, where brutality on both sides was routine.

The first round from a German tank fell just in front of the American convoy’s lead vehicle, and the jeep swerved and stopped. The Americans had run into two German tanks at the very point of the battle group, which immediately fired half a dozen shells each. One of the Observation Battalion’s ambulances and the kitchen truck received direct hits and burst into flame. Other German tanks and SPW armoured personnel carriers joined the point vehicles and began firing as they raced to reach the convoy.

Fire from tanks, mortars and machine guns raked the column. Trucks exploded or drove off the road and GIs jumped from the vehicles and dived into the icy water of the roadside ditches. A few men returned desultory and ineffective fire from their M-ls and carbines, but the virtually defenceless Observation Battalion was hopelessly outgunned and had inadvertently crossed the path of one of the elite outfits of the German Army. Rampfgruppe Peiper was formidable and comprised more than a hundred tanks, five flak tanks and a light flak battalion, self-propelled tank destroyers, artillery, and SS Panzergrenadiers. In addition, Major Gustav Rnittel’s Schnell Group, made up of fifteen hundred men in tanks and half-tracks, was also part of the attack force, operating as a reconnaissance battalion.

Lieutenant-Colonel Joachim Peiper, commander of the Rampfgruppe, arrived at the Baugnetz crossroads in a captured American jeep, attracted by the sound of gunfire. Peiper, the ‘Siegfried of the Waffen-SS’ and one-time adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, was a natural soldier who had spent ten years with the division and stood high in Hitler’s personal favour. He now reprimanded his men for needlessly expending valuable ammunition on a target that could have been captured. ‘Those beautiful trucks which we need so badly, all shot up.’ He ordered his troops to cease firing, and American soldiers crawled out of the ditches and emerged from behind burning trucks with their hands in the air. They were gathered into small groups and SS soldiers removed rings, watches and cigarettes. They also stripped the Americans of their gloves, which the Germans particularly prized. One SS soldier went down the line of prisoners putting a pistol against each man’s forehead, saying they would all be shot in retribution for American bombing. The American commander objected that his men were prisoners of war and demanded that they be treated honourably. The German returned the pistol to its holster.

Peiper now left the scene of battle, together with the majority of his tanks and half-tracks, while about one hundred and thirty American prisoners were herded into a field next to the café. These included several GIs who had been captured after the farmer, Le Joly, had betrayed their hiding place to the Germans. The men were joined by a captured American colonel who drove up in his own jeep accompanied by two teenage SS soldiers.

The prisoners stood in the mud with their hands in the air. The farmer, still watching from the café, was surprised at the men’s apparent lack of concern as they chatted easily to one another. They seemed relieved to have survived the initial strafing and now waited without apparent foreboding for trucks to arrive to take them to the rear.

A tank manoeuvred into the road alongside the field and attempted to lower its gun to cover the prisoners. It was unable to do so, and was replaced by two SPW half-track armoured personnel carriers that pulled into the field and stopped. An SS soldier in the rear of one stood, took his pistol from its holster and pointed it towards the huddled prisoners. He fired, and a GI fell backwards, knocking down several other prisoners in the tightly packed group like so many skittles. The men began to shout and scream, and those in the front row fought to get to the back.

‘Stand fast!’ an American officer commanded, alarmed that panic might provoke more shooting. The GIs fell silent.

A second pistol shot rang out, killing a medical officer. An order was then shouted:
‘Alle kaputt machen!’
- Kill them all! Two machine guns mounted on the SPW armoured personnel carriers opened up, and panic broke out as bullets ripped into the prisoners. Some turned and ran across the field while others were cut down where they stood. The machine guns methodically raked the bodies from one end to the other, and the men cried out in fear and pain as the living tried to burrow beneath the dead for protection.

The automatic fire stopped. The brief silence was punctuated by occasional rifle and pistol shots as SS soldiers moved across the field and inspected the bodies for survivors. The low groans of the wounded sounded like the lowing of cattle.
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The Germans called out to anyone surviving to make a sign so they could receive medical attention. Those unwise enough to do so were shot. The soldiers kicked those bodies showing signs of life in the head or groin for a reaction, and if anyone moved he was shot. One German soldier perversely allowed a medic to help a wounded comrade, and then shot them both.

Once the Germans had left, the field survivors began to call out to one another, and frozen GIs crawled out from under the bodies of their comrades. Some ran into the woods, but twelve went into the Café Bodarwé. They were seen by German troops, who moved on the café, set it alight and then shot down the unarmed men as they ran out.

Over the next two hours, as more troops from the Panzers passed the scene, some of the men fired into the pile of bodies for sport. One tank, delayed through a breakdown, arrived at the crossroads in the late afternoon and spotted the abandoned trucks and the field full of corpses. The commander, an SS sergeant, detected movement. He climbed down from the tank and went into the field, where he hauled an unwounded GI to his feet by his collar. The American was ordered to take off his watch, jacket and combat boots. As the prisoner stooped to remove his boots the SS man shot him in the back of the neck with his 9mm Belgian automatic, and twice more in the chest as he fell. The tank gunner then pumped a burst of machine-gun fire into the bodies in the field.

Soldiers from a tank crew threatened to kill the farmer, Le Joly, even though he had delivered the hidden Americans to them. They eventually let him go after abject pro-German protestations. Adele Bodarwe disappeared, and her body was never found. But despite all the shooting, the massacre proved to be an inefficient business. Miraculously, forty-six Americans survived the field of death. Five nights after the massacre, the bodies of their eighty-four dead comrades-in-arms were temporarily buried in a fall of deep snow.
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Kampfgruppe Peiper moved on to attack nearby Stavelot, where the Americans had stashed millions of gallons of fuel. Peiper summoned Rnittel to his command post and ordered him to use the Schnell Group to take the town.

As he left the meeting, Rnittel remarked:
‘Die haben eine ganze Menge auf der Kreuzung umgelegt’
- They’ve killed a good few at the crossroads.

‘The crossroads?’

Rnittel reminded Peiper about Baugnetz, south of Malmédy, where the road turned towards Ligneuville. ‘There’s a lot of Amis [Americans] dead there.’

It was the first Peiper had heard of the killings, but he had more pressing matters on his mind, and returned to the plan of attack on Stavelot. Rnittel was given three heavy Tiger tanks to strengthen his force and immediately moved his men into position. He established his tactical HQ in the cellar of the Ferme Antoine, to the west of the town near the Amblève river, and split his men into two units for the assault. The larger group was sent along the main road, while a smaller force moved north through back roads and hamlets standing on high ground. The Germans were shelled remorselessly by the Americans throughout the battle: three thousand shells were fired in such rapid succession that the artillerymen had to throw cold water over the barrels of their guns.

The attack heralded the beginning of a new slaughter by the SS men, this time random shooting of civilians, all of whom had been declared by Peiper to be ‘terrorists’ in reaction to Résistance activity in the area. The Germans had been shot at from buildings and the SS were to take a terrible revenge. The killing was haphazard, almost casual. An SPW armoured half-track first passed through Stavelot as a machine-gunner fired into the kitchen of a house, killing a fourteen-year-old boy; a farmer was shot in his barn; a woman was killed as she lay in her bed. Locals were rounded up in small groups of two or three, taken into houses and shot. The houses were then set alight as the soldiers moved on.

In one particularly brutal killing in Stavelot, twenty men were packed into an eight-by-twelve-foot shed. A machine gun was set up outside and two belts of ammunition fired into the writhing mass of panicked humans. SS soldiers then entered, firing pistols into the heaped bodies, before they threw down straw and set the shed alight. Somehow, eight people survived the conflagration.
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In another incident, a group of twenty-six locals sheltering in a cellar were flushed out when soldiers threw a grenade down the stairs. Unhurt, a woman called out in German that they were all civilians, and they were ordered to come up into the open. A dozen SS men - mostly in their teens, as at Baugnetz - lined up the terrified group of women, children and old men, who ranged in age from four to sixty-eight. One soldier with a rifle and another with a pistol walked down the line and methodically shot them one by one. Only three people from the cellar were spared: the woman who spoke German and her two children. Another twenty civilians were murdered at a nearby hamlet with a population of just one hundred.

Altogether, one hundred and thirty-eight unarmed Belgian civilians were killed in this way by men under Knittel’s command during the battle of Stavelot. And while there is no evidence that he was present at any of these killings, or personally ordered them, the large number suggests that his troops were encouraged to behave in this manner and that their actions were condoned.

As the battle raged, the Germans’ position became increasingly untenable, but Knittel held on. On the afternoon of 21 December, he left the cellar of his command post at the Ferme Antoine to investigate a report that a number of recently destroyed American tanks might be part of an advance force of forty-five armoured vehicles. Knittel was on foot and unarmed as he walked to the Ambleve Bridge, passing several destroyed enemy tanks on his way. A single Tiger tank secured the road and eight German soldiers provided the only infantry cover. The commander of the giant Tiger reported that more American tanks were out of sight around the curve in the road, guarded by three Shermans hidden in the mouth of a railroad tunnel.

Knittel walked over to inspect a nearby anti-tank gun emplacement on the river bank and was alarmed to find it abandoned with the guns unmanned. He walked quickly to a deserted house standing close by and demanded an explanation from the anti-tank gun commander. The commander had bad news. An SPW had been destroyed and its crew killed, while Knittel’s second-in-command had been killed in a separate incident. In a sworn statement given later, Knittel reported that he was enraged that the Americans had been allowed to break through. The death of the second-in-command, a brave man who was a favourite, particularly upset him.

‘What have we thrown against them?’ he asked the commander.

‘I’ve taken the men away from the
Paks
[anti-tank guns] and ordered them to reconnoitre,’ the commander replied. ‘I couldn’t make the drivers of the vehicle column go forward.’

Knittel fully understood the gravity of the situation. He was faced with a strong concentration of enemy tanks both in front and behind his positions, and his only possible retreat was through a wooded area difficult to reconnoitre. And there were no reserves left. Nothing. He was facing catastrophe.