During the earliest days of 1944, the U.S. Army's Special Projects Division of the Office of the Provost Marshal General was established in order to take on the enormous task of re-educating 360,000 German prisoners of war. Even before the Allies had landed in France it was clear to them that the Germans would soon be blitzkrieging back to the Fatherland and in order to make smooth the process of rebuilding that nation, a few Germans would be required who understood the virtues of democracy. In order to properly see the job through, two schools were set up at Fort Getty, Rhode Island and Fort Eustis, Virginia.
This article was written by Robert Lowe Kunzig (1918 - 1982) who was not simply an instructor at Fort Eustis, but also accompanied many of these men back into the smoldering ruins of Germany and recorded their reactions as thew saw what twelve years of Nazi rule had left for them. Trained as a lawyer, Kunzig remained in Germany and worked as a prosecutor for the Civilian War Crimes courts of the U.S. Government.
Attached is a stirring collection of eyewitness accounts by the American survivors of the Malmedy Massacre (December 17, 1944) that took place during the Battle of the Bulge.
"The German officer in the car stood up, took deliberate aim with a pistol at an American medical officer in the front rank of the prisoners and fired. As the medical officer fell, the Germans fired again and another American dropped. Immediately two tanks at the end of the field opened up with their machine guns on the defenseless prisoners..."
Click here to read about the Nazi murder of an American Jewish P.O.W.
