| December 17 |  |
Editor says, what if Joseph McCarthy had exposed other forms of witchcraft? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the December 2011 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1944, in the biggest single atrocity perpetrated against US troops in Europe during World War II, eighty-four American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion POWs were shot dead by a German combat unit of the 1st Waffen-SS Panzer Division during the Battle of the Bulge.
Malmedy massacreThe massacre, as well as others committed by the same unit on the same day and following days, was the subject of the Malmedy massacre trial, part of the Dachau Trials of 1946. After the verdict, the way in which the court had functioned was disputed, first in Germany then later in the United States. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which made no decision. The case then came under the scrutiny of a sub-Committee of the Senate of the United States. A young Senator from Wisconsin, and a war-time veteran of the US Marine Corps, Joseph McCarthy, used it as an opportunity to raise his political profile.
McCarthy was already aware of the undue influence of Congressmen from heavily German-American areas of the Midwest. But he was shocked to discover that former Nazi officials had regained some power due to anti-Communist positions with the occupation forces. The public debate (some would say witch hunt) forced other startling facts to emerge. One such item was Operation Paperclip a covert government programme which would eventually saw over sixteen hundred Nazi scientists receive US passports.
The legal matter of whether or not the Court had tried the defendants fairly was escalated by McCarthy into the larger moral issue of post-war justice. Had the Nazis who murdered the GIs in the snow now infiltrated not only the German Administration, but the Federal Government as well?
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Alternate Historian, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Politicians Source: Wikipedia Labels: Malmedy Massacre, Battle of the Bulge, Germany, America, Nazi. Editor says, in this article we have repurposed significant amounts of content from Wikipedia.
~ There was an argument at the time (1945) that local politicians (mostly Nazi Party members) should be left in their jobs during the early Allied occupation of Germany until elections could be held. (The Soviets didn't follow this tack; they just murdered any local political leaders they found objectionable.) The Allied thinking was that these men knew how to run government on a logistical level, so leave them in place until a less anarchic time. I've always thought this argument was BS---instead, I believe many of the military leaders of the post-war occupation forces just didn't want to bother with the civilian leadership at all, so they supported the status quo.
~ So McCarthy is going to go chasing Nazis? He'd be a hero to the same people who hate him in OTL...
~ Actually the Soviets de-Nazified less than the west did. They were quite shameless about it. They also parachuted their own German reds on top.
~ The German commader of the troops captured at Malmedy had little choice but to issues the orders he did.
~ Military necessity and the rules of war are frequently two different things.
~ Nazi-hunting earlier might've exposed McCarthy's paranoia earlier, sparing us a lot of grief later on.
~ This brings a whole new meaning to the words "political witch hunt"...
~ I suppose McCarthy that is going to accuse the State Department of secretly harboring nazis. That would have been more interesting. As far as I'm concerned, Foggy Bottom was full of prosecutable war criminals, starting with Breckenridge Long.
~ I can't see Joe McCarthy as going after right-wingers, no matter what, unless his own personal history diverged in this timeline. In our history, he never raised so much as a squeak about the Western Allies' willingnes to retain "useful" Nazis in positions of authority.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
