
The Americans were not, it should be emphasized, front line troops who had fought stubbornly and then thrown up their hands at the last moment. Most of the captured came from Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. On that date, German troops of the 1st SS Leibstandarte “Adolf Hitler” Division under SS Obersturmbahnführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Joachim “Jochen” Peiper crashed into a convoy of American rear-echelon troops near the town of Malmedy and, after a brief firefight, captured 113 men.

Such events formed the context for the notorious murder of dozens of American soldiers at Malmedy, Belgium, on December 17, 1944.

The most notorious of the latter took place on June 10, 1944, when a company of the 2nd SS “Das Reich” Division murdered some 642 French civilians in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

#Mal library wars series
In the west, the Allied invasion of Normandy on Jtriggered a series of German war crimes against captured soldiers (some of the American paratroopers who landed on the night of the invasion were tortured and murdered by Wehrmacht soldiers) and French civilians. Veterans of fighting on the eastern front had already witnessed innumerable atrocities committed against captured soldiers and helpless civilians, to say nothing of the Waffen SS’s frequent participation in the wholesale campaigns of extermination against European Jews. So did Allied strategic bombing campaigns that laid waste to many German cities.Ītrocity was anyway nothing new to the Waffen SS-or, in some cases, the Wehrmacht. Germany’s catastrophic defeats on the eastern and western fronts, which had now brought Soviet and western Allied forces to the country’s doorstep, reinforced perceptions that the end was near. Hitler had from the beginning posited the war effort as presenting only two possible outcomes: total victory or absolute defeat. This sense of desperation only hardened attitudes among German soldiers, both Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, on the battlefront. It was a strategy born of desperation, for everyone with a scrap of sanity recognized that Germany could not survive 1945 without a miracle-and maybe not even then. At the least it would set the western Allies back on their heels but Adolf Hitler also hoped it might force them to seek a separate peace, allowing him to redeploy Germany’s shrinking military assets to the eastern front against the Soviet Union. Operation Watch on the Rhine, subsequently known to the Americans as the Battle of the Bulge, began on Decemas an effort to split the Anglo-American armies and seize Antwerp. Merge pull request #1 from frodegill/digest_sha256Īdded support for digest algorithm SHA256įixed possible recursion crash when parsing mailbox groups.By December 1944, World War II had become a zero-sum game for Germany. Merge pull request #271 from frodegill/digest_sha256Īdded utility function to convert byteArray to HEX string. Merge pull request #272 from frodegill/bytearray_to_string Internationalized Email Support (RFC-6532).

SSL/TLS security layer and X.509 certificates (using either GNU TLS or OpenSSL).aggregate documents and embedded objects.Here are some of the numerous features supported by VMime:
#Mal library wars license
