The Malmedy massacre was a German war crime committed by soldiers of the Waffen-SS on 17 December 1944 at the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; many of the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre were killed with a coup de grâce gunshot to the head. A few survived.
Corpses of the U.S. soldiers murdered by the Waffen-SS (17 December 1944)
Route of the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper: the black circle near the center indicates the Baugnez crossroads where Waffen-SS soldiers killed 84 U.S. Army POWs, in a massacre at Malmedy, Belgium, on 17 December 1944
A 1945 depiction of the massacre of G.I.s in a farmer’s field, by war artist Howard Brodie
In January 1945, a U.S. soldier views some of the corpses of the 84 U.S. POWs whom the Waffen-SS summarily executed on 17 December 1944.
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
A U.S. soldier observing victims of the Malmedy massacre (17 December 1944), where 84 U.S. prisoners of war were murdered by the Waffen-SS in Belgium
A ditch full of the bodies of Chinese civilians killed by Japanese soldiers in Suzhou, China, 1938
HRW wrote that the Saudi Arabian-led military intervention in Yemen that began on March 26, 2015, involved airstrikes in apparent violation of the laws of war.
Bodies of some of the hundreds of Vietnamese villagers who were killed by U.S. soldiers during the My Lai Massacre