Y1806

On February 4, 1945, Hauptmann Georg Lessing, an intelligence officer with the 352nd Volksgrenadier Division, was processing a prisoner intake report near Saarbrücken when a detail stopped him. It was not tactical. It was human. The report, drawn from interrogations of three captured American soldiers over the previous 48 hours, described an incident at a … Read more

On May 9, 1945, in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, General der Panzertruppe Hermann Balck sat across a field table from an American colonel and waited. He had been waiting for three days. He was not held in a prisoner cage or a transit compound behind wire fencing. He was housed in a requisitioned … Read more

In February 1945, at a Third Army prisoner of war processing facility in the Lorraine region of France, a group of German prisoners laughed at the condition of recently liberated American POWs. The laughter was audible, witnessed by American guards, the facility commander, and a visiting Third Army inspector. Within 48 hours, a report describing … Read more

In January 1945, German commanders near the shattered Belgian village of Malmedy began noticing something strange about the American forces pressing toward them. The Americans were not simply advancing. They were driving forward with a ferocity that defied their earlier performance in the Ardennes. A captured American soldier east of Bastogne told his German interrogators … Read more

On April 12, 1945, behind a wooden shed in central Germany, out of sight of the cameras, out of sight of his staff, and out of sight of the two other generals who had entered the shed without him, a 59-year-old American commander knelt in the mud and vomited onto the grass. He carried three … Read more