Malmedy massacre

Malmedy massacre
Part of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II
Corpses of the U.S. soldiers murdered by the Waffen-SS (17 December 1944)
Malmedy massacre (Belgium)
Location	Malmedy, Belgium
Coordinates	50°24′14″N 6°3′58.30″E / 50.40389°N 6.0661944°E / 50.40389; 6.0661944
Date	December 17, 1944 (1944-12-17)
Attack type	Mass murder by machine gun and gun-shots to the head
Deaths	84 U.S. POWs of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion and hundreds of other U.S. POWs from other units
Perpetrators	1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler Joachim Peiper Werner Poetschke Sepp Dietrich

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). Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; many of the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre were killed with a coup de grâce gunshot to the head.^[1] A few survived.

Besides the summary execution of the eighty-four U.S. 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. 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).