The Malmedy Massacre

You really should read [this] excellent book…Steven Remy's work is absolutely seminal. Couldn't recommend it more strongly. -- Rachel Maddow * Ultra *
Remy has written an absorbing and authoritative analysis of the Malmedy controversy. -- Christopher Dillon * American Historical Review *
[Remy] writes in a vivid, engaging and sometimes darkly (yet never inappropriately) humorous manner, and conveys the ongoing importance of the broader issues effectively. This is a significant, scholarly and highly recommended contribution to understanding a war crimes trial whose resonance remains palpable seventy years on. -- Ben H. Shepherd * German History Review *
A first-rate book. Remy’s superb analysis shows how virtually every element of the standard narrative on the Malmedy trials is wrong. -- Devin O. Pendas, author of The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965
Steven Remy’s The Malmedy Massacre is an important read for anyone interested in the politics of international justice. Using a broad array of investigative and intelligence records, he reconstructs and then dispels the enduring myth that upright German soldiers were tortured into false confessions—a fiction born of lingering antisemitism, Cold War politics, and an international effort to rewrite the Nazi past. -- Norman J. W. Goda, author of Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War
An impressive and important book. Remy demolishes a lot of the mythmaking surrounding the Malmedy massacre and tells a story that makes the early years of the Cold War in Germany and America look very different and often very surprising. This highly readable and engaging account should fascinate anyone interested in World War II and its aftermath. -- Benjamin Carter Hett, author of Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery
[The] definitive new study of the Malmedy trials…The Malmedy Massacre does an especially sensitive job at picking apart the psychological factors involved…Remy lays out those facts with eloquent clarity and displays a commendable impatience throughout his book at the persistence of the alternate narrative itself…This is as much a story about the battle for history as it is about one set of atrocity trials. The names Remy stitches together in his account will be unfamiliar to readers, but the account itself is one for the permanent collection. -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Monthly *
The story of how a massacre of U.S. soldiers came to be remembered as an instance of American abuse of defenseless Nazis is the subject of Steven Remy’s rigorously researched new book, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy. Remy is hardly the first historian to write about the Malmedy affair. But whereas previous histories have largely accepted the myth of U.S. malfeasance, The Malmedy Massacre convincingly corrects the record. In so doing, Remy offers a timely study of the process of historical mythmaking—how false and distorted accounts come to constitute their own durable reality…The Malmedy Massacre is a solid account of history that current events have contrived to make exceptionally relevant. Remy could not have researched and written The Malmedy Massacre in anticipation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s politics of misinformation, yet he has delivered a sustained exploration into the creation, circulation, and ultimate acceptance of ‘alternative facts.’ What makes this story particularly poignant is that Remy is not really telling us anything new. As he makes clear, the record had already been corrected by the Baldwin committee report nearly 70 years ago. What he documents, then, is the tenacity and durability of fake history. To those who subscribe to the pleasing shibboleth that the truth will always come out, Remy has delivered a disturbing counterexample. -- Lawrence Douglas * Foreign Affairs *