On December 17, 1944, near the hamlet of Baugnez on the height half-way between the town of Malmédy and Ligneuville in Belgium, elements of Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper encountered the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. After a brief battle, the Americans surrendered. About 150 of the prisoners of war were disarmed and sent to stand in a field near the crossroads. Peiper and his leading armoured units then continued their advance.
A tank pulled up, and a truck shortly thereafter. A single SS officer pulled out a pistol and shot a medical officer standing in the front row, and then shot the man standing next to the medical officer. Other soldiers joined in with machine guns. It is not known why this happened; there is no record of an order by an SS officer. While the shooting of POWs was common on the Eastern front, such incidents were rare on the Western front.
Many prisoners escaped into the nearby woods. Some 72-84 of the prisoners were killed, their bodies left on the field where they fell. An American patrol discovered the massacre that night. News of it spread quickly among Allied troops. Afterwards, the order went out: SS and Fallschirmjäger were to be shot on sight.
American forces recaptured the site where the killings took place on January 13, 1945. The bodies were recovered on January 14 - 15, 1945. The memorial at Baugnez bears the names of the murdered soldiers.
The Trial of the SS:
The SS soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper were captured, and in May, 1946 were put on trial for the killings, in the controversial Malmédy Massacre Trial. This was held in May-July 1946 in Dachau. The highest-ranking defendant was Sepp Dietrich. It attracted great attention because of the nature of the crime and the later disputes about the conduct of the trial, and is repeatedly brought up by the German extreme right-wing. Ten of the SS soldiers involved recieved the same sentence; Death by hanging.
