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Today was the day.

A sharp knock at the door interrupted his vacillating. A short, rumpled officer with thinning gray hair and wire-rimmed spectacles entered the office. His uniform was similar to Judge’s. Dark olive jacket, khaki shirt and tie with light slacks to match. “Pink and greens,” in the military vernacular. Like Judge, he was an attorney and carried the insignia of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps on his lapel.

“I think you’d better come with me,” said Colonel Bob Storey, chief of the IMT’s Document Control Division. “We might have found our pot of gold.”

“What is it? Do you have a name?”

“Just come along. You’ll have plenty of time to ask questions later.”

Judge grabbed his coat and dashed out of the office. The hallways of 7 rue de Presbourg bustled with civilian and military personnel. Not a day passed without a mother lode of documents being discovered somewhere in Germany. Last week, 485 tons of diplomatic papers were found in a cave in the Harz Mountains. The week before, the archives of the Luftwaffe Central Command turned up in a salt mine in Obersalzberg, Austria. Anything dealing remotely with activities that might be construed as war crimes was sent here. Given the scope of the Nazis’ atrocities and their propensity for documenting their every act, that made for a hell of a lot of paper.

Judge followed Storey at a close distance, the two marking a brisk pace. He was troubled by his older colleague’s ambivalence. If they’d found a pot of gold, why wasn’t he more excited? After all, Bob Storey had been his partner in this thing from day one — his cheerleader, his unofficial commanding officer, and more recently, Judge believed, his friend.

He approached Storey his very first day on the job, asking his help with a personal matter. His older brother, Francis Xavier, had been killed last December at Malmedy, he explained. Might Storey keep an eye out for any documents that might shed light on the facts surrounding the incident? It was a tale every American knew well, emblazoned on the country’s collective memory by headlines of fire and vitrioclass="underline" “CAPTURED GIs MASSACRED IN MALMEDY”, “100 SOLDIERS SHOT IN COLD BLOOD”, and, perhaps, most eloquently, “MURDER!” Storey agreed immediately.

These were the details: on the morning of Sunday, 17 December 1944, a column of American troops, primarily members of B Battery of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, found themselves driving south on a two-lane country road in eastern Belgium. The day was sunny, the temperature above zero. Little snow covered the ground. The men traveled in a convoy of thirty vehicles — jeeps, weapons carriers, heavy trucks, and two ambulances reaching the village of Malmedy at 12:15 hours. The area was safely under American control. Route markers had passed through earlier in the day and several other units had followed the same path without incident an hour before. But as B Battery passed through Malmedy, word came that German patrols had been spotted a few miles to the southwest. (Though the massive German counter-offensive that came to be known as the “Battle of the Bulge” had been launched the day before, no fighting had been reported in this particular sector.)

B Battery continued as planned. A few miles outside of Malmedy, after passing through the Baugnez Crossroads, an intersection of five country roads, the convoy suddenly came under direct fire from a column of German tanks less than half a mile away. At least five vehicles were hit and their occupants killed or wounded. The rest halted immediately, many seeking protection in a gully next to the road. The rapidly approaching German tanks kept up their fire, both with machine gun and cannon. Two minutes later, a Panther tank plowed B Battery’s lead Jeep off the road. In the face of a vastly superior force, the American soldiers — among them, Father Francis Xavier Judge, S.J. — surrendered.

The German column was, in fact, the lead element of Kampfgruppe Peiper, or Taskforce Peiper, a fast attack force of a hundred and fifteen tanks, a hundred self propelled guns, and 4,500 men charged with breaking through American lines and dashing to the Meuse river. While the main element of the Kampfgruppe continued past the Baugnez Crossroads, a detachment was left behind to deal with their prisoners. One hundred and thirteen GIs were herded into the surrounding fields and disarmed. A few minutes later, the Germans opened fire on the unsuspecting prisoners. After the shooting ceased, two German soldiers walked through the field shooting the wounded Americans. Amazingly, of the one hundred and thirteen Americans assembled in the field south of Malmedy, forty escaped by playing dead and fleeing into the surrounding woods as opportunity permitted.

That much Judge knew. He’d compiled the information from the existing record: interviews with the massacre’s survivors, statements of captured German troops who’d fought as part of the task force, as well as descriptions of battlefield actions given by officers who had been nearby at the time. Yet seven months after the act, he was unable to identify the officer who had given the order to fire.

Judge closed the door to Storey’s office, refusing the offer of a seat. “So, what have you got?”

Storey drew a manila file from his drawer and slid it across his desk. “Good news and bad news, I’m afraid.”

“How’s that?” Judge spun the file around so that it faced him right side up. A pink routing slip was attached to the cover. He read to whom the file belonged and shook his head. His efforts had narrowed the list of suspects to three men, and if he didn’t know them personally, he was intimately familiar with their records. “He was my longshot. The guy was an Olympian, for crying out loud. You’d think he’d know something about fair play. What clinched it?”

“Go ahead. Read. But, Devlin, I’m warning you, it’s tough going.”

Judge paused before opening the cover, offering a prayer for his departed brother. Inside was a single document, two pages in length, immaculately typed on SS field stationery. It was an “after-action” report filed by one Lieutenant Werner Ploschke. Judge ventured a halting look at Storey, then took a deep breath and read.

At 13:02 hours on 17 December 1944, a convoy of American Jeeps and trucks was spotted passing through the junction of N-23 and N-32, proceeding south on the Ligneuville-St Vith road near the town of Malmedy. Lieutenant Werner Sternebeck engaged the enemy immediately. Two Panther tanks fired six rounds each from their main guns. Four American vehicles were destroyed. Five others were damaged while taking evasive maneuvers. Sternebeck drove his tank to the head of the American column and fired his machine gun over the heads of the Americans to gain their immediate surrender. Kampfgruppe commander, Major Jochen Peiper, ordered all gasoline siphoned from the ruined cars and those vehicles in working condition confiscated. Hereafter, he continued his advance with the main element of the attack group and left the area.

Major Erich Seyss, now in command, ordered all American soldiers into the adjoining field where they were disarmed and searched for items of intelligence value. Forty-six pairs of winter boots and eighty heavy jackets were remanded to field quartermaster Sergeant Steiner. Seyss then ordered Panthers 107, 111, 83 and 254 and Tigers 54 and 58 brought alongside the field. All guns were trained on the prisoners. At 14:05 hours, he commanded gunners and rear guard infantry to fire on the Americans. The shooting lasted exactly ten minutes. Two thousand two hundred and forty-four rounds were expended. Afterwards, Seyss entered the field along with Sergeant Richard Biedermann and administered the coup de grace as necessary.