A cold rain was falling on Washington when Senator Joseph McCarthy arrived at Union Station in early December 1946 and made his way to his downtown hotel room. The Republican 80th Congress would convene in January, but he decided to make his presence felt right away. Having toppled La Follette and won election to the Senate before reaching his fortieth birthday, Joe was a changed man, with intimations of invincibility. His inflated ego made him believe that he was as good as any other senator, if not better, as if the Senate chamber were a boxing ring, with the other senators lined up to be knocked down or out in the title bout.
On December 3, McCarthy called a press conference at the Capitol, to give his views on the coal strike. Away with the notion that freshman senators should keep a low profile. The lesson that life had taught him was “Go for it! And whatever you do, you’ll get away with it.” Washington was no different from Shawano, only bigger. Wasn’t all politics local? His proposal was hardly new, for President Truman had been cursed by labor for proposing a similar measure during the railroad strike. Joe wanted to draft John L. Lewis and his mineworkers into the Army. If they still refused to work, they’d be court-martialed, with “penalties ranging up to and including the death sentence.”1
From the start, McCarthy took an anti-labor stance, and positioned himself as the tool of special interests. He was sworn in on January 3, 1947, into a Senate that had fifty-one Republicans and forty-five Democrats, and assigned to the Banking and Currency Committee, chaired by Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire.
His first battle in the Senate had to do with sugar, which was still rationed nearly two years after the end of the war. The sugar-producing states, which included Wisconsin and its beet growers, wanted an end to controls, while the sugar-consuming states like Vermont and New Hampshire, where housewives used large quantities of sugar for their annual canning, wanted an equitable distribution of sugar that did not favor sugar-hungry industries such as the makers of soft drinks.2
In March, the Wisconsin legislature sent a joint resolution to the Banking and Currency Committee urging the removal of all controls on sugar. McCarthy was named to a subcommittee headed by Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont to study the question. He co-sponsored a bill to end sugar rationing at once. His research showed that there was plenty of sugar to go around.
Tobey asked for thirty-five pounds a year per housewife. In the debate on March 27, the freshman senator and the chairman snapped at each other in a pointless argument over how many pounds of sugar housewives should be allotted. McCarthy worked himself up into a lather, calling Tobey’s amendment “fictitious,” “ambiguous,” and “deceptive,” and recalling that in his childhood, “My mother, who had seven children, used to get 100 pounds of sugar to put up her fruits and berries.” A bill was passed to end sugar rationing by October 31, 1947, and when it became clear that McCarthy was right about abundant sugar supplies, the date was advanced to August 30. McCarthy had won his first victory but with his hectoring he earned the enmity of two powerful senators.3
Back in Madison, the anti-McCarthy Capital Times dubbed the junior senator “Pepsi-Cola Joe,” charging that he was the tool of the soft drink company. He was a friend of Pepsi-Cola president Walter Mack, who wanted decontrol so that he could increase his production. He was also a racetrack crony of the Pepsi-Cola bottler Russell M. Arundel, the owner of an island off Nova Scotia where he entertained in style. In December 1947, Arundel signed a six-month note for $20,000, which Joe used as collateral to help secure a loan at the Appleton State Bank. Though it looked like a payoff, Joe reimbursed the note.
Pepsi syrup was not going to put McCarthy on the map. He was a junior senator in search of a cause, which he found in housing. In 1947, there was an acute housing shortage. The Depression had curtailed residential building and the war had diverted contractors into defense work. By 1947, the veterans were back, living in attics, cellars, boxcars, and chicken coops. A baby boom made the need for decent and affordable housing all the more urgent.
Many congressmen favored federal loans for contractors, but there were sharp divisions over public housing for the poor, who could not afford down payments. Surprisingly, one of those who favored public housing was Mr. Republican, Robert Taft. One of his friends had taken the Ohio senator on a tour of the Cincinnati slums in 1937, up unlit staircases, through overcrowded hovels, in and out of garbage-strewn alleyways. Taft became a convert to public housing, and joined with two Democratic senators, Robert Wagner of New York and Allen Ellender of Louisiana, to present a bill in November 1945 with a goal of 1.25 million housing units over the next ten years, as well as low-interest loans for 500,000 public housing units. Taft was startled to find himself under attack as a Socialist by the real estate lobby for his modest espousal of public housing. The TEW bill, as it was known, passed the Senate without a roll call on April 15, 1946, but a conservative coalition in the House Banking and Currency Committee refused to hold hearings on the bill.4
In the summer of 1947, Congress set up a Joint Committee on Housing, made up of fourteen members of the Senate and House Banking Currency committees, to investigate the housing shortage. As one of the seven members from the Senate side, McCarthy opposed public housing, calling the projects “deliberately created slums,” and “breeding grounds for Communism.” The joint committee met on August 19, 1947, to elect a chairman, which according to time-honored congressional protocol should have gone by seniority to Senator Tobey. But by pushing through a motion that no proxy votes be counted, McCarthy got Ralph Gamble of New York, a spokesman for the real estate lobby, elected chairman, with himself as vice chairman. Tobey, who was tangling with Joe for the second time, observed of the joint committee, “This child was born of malpractice. I hope the forceps didn’t hurt it.”5
The joint committee divided into subcommittees and held hearings in thirty-three cities, compiling testimony from 1,286 witnesses that would cover seven thousand pages. McCarthy became an expert on such arcane issues as gypsum lath and cast iron oil pipes. His real role in the hearings, however, was to serve as a paid propagandist for makers of prefab housing and to put public housing in a bad light. There was big money to be made in prefab, which public housing would cut into.6
Behind the scenes, McCarthy was making deals with prefab builders, according to the testimony of Robert C. Byers in his bankruptcy hearing on August 1, 1951, in U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio. Byers had launched a company to build ten thousand “Miracle Homes” for returning servicemen. In the fall of 1947, Joe came to Columbus to address the Association of Building Standards. The mayor was there, as well as other prominent Columbus citizens. He arrived an hour late, saying he’d had quite a night, losing all his money in a crap game.
At Byers’s hearing, the bankruptcy trustee, John S. Dunkle, asked: “You state that most of this money was spent in the operation of the business, and for parties. Let’s take the party that was held at the Seneca Hotel two years ago. The one that Senator McCarthy was present at. Do you know who paid for that party?”
Byers: “It came out of our treasury, one of our companies, I think Bob Byers & Son.”
Dunkle: “How much did you pay Senator McCarthy at that time for coming here?”
Byers: “Five hundred dollars.” [$5,000 in 2003 dollars.] Dunkle: “Was that his only compensation?”
Byers: “Not quite. He had a little extra. Some whiskey, and some entertainment…. I understand my son took him up to the Deshler [Hotel] and took $5500 from him in a crap game…but he never paid.”7
As Byers explained in a sworn affidavit unconnected with the bankruptcy hearing, since McCarthy was vice chairman of the Joint Committee on Housing, he could do no wrong. After the first payment in 1947, Byers gave him $500 in cash and Joe said, “Charge this to advertising and don’t show my name on your books.” With the next $500 payment, Joe said, “Put it down as a loan and later charge it off.”
“It was a disgusting sight,” Byers went on, “to see this great public servant down on his hands and knees, reeking of whiskey, and shouting, ‘come on babies, papa needs a new pair of shoes!’ Someone brought in a gal and he said, ‘That’s the baby, I’ll take care of her just as soon as I break you guys.’ The baby in question sat patiently on the bed awaiting her chances for a ten-dollar bill…. The next morning bright and early he inquired the closest route to the nearest Catholic church.”8
McCarthy held hearings in Columbus, focusing on those who had sold housing materials in violation of wartime regulations. He put the head of the Guden Lumber Company on the stand for selling plasterboard on the gray market. Byers said Joe then told him: “He is softened up now and will be easy to handle.” Later Byers talked to Guden, who was in a rage. “All that shit is after is money,” Guden said. “If I ever get a chance at that bastard, I’ll fix his clock.” Joe told Byers: “In politics there are only two types of people, those you can use and those from which you want to steer clear, and the trick is to separate the sheep from the goats.”9
McCarthy couldn’t do much for Byers, whose real estate license was canceled and who was indicted for selling stocks without a license. Byers felt that Joe had betrayed him. But Joe had found greener pastures. In October 1948, he met Carl G. Strandlund, the president of Lustron, a company in Columbus that made all-steel prefab housing. Strandlund retooled a fighter plane factory that turned out twenty-six houses a day. They came in kits with three thousand pieces that could be assembled in less than a week, and presto, you had an all-steel house, from the studs to the walls to the shingles on the roof. It was rodent-proof, termite-proof, and fireproof. It never had to be painted, for the walls were made of porcelainized steel panels in pastel colors. Billed as the House of Tomorrow, using wartime technology to solve the housing shortage, Lustron was subsidized by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to the tune of $37,500,000 in loans.10
Eager to share his expertise on housing, McCarthy had been working on a book on the subject. He sent his research assistant, Jean Kerr, to the Housing and Home Finance Agency to gather information. Joe pitched an article to Lustron, which agreed to publish it as part of a booklet. Although the article did not promote Lustron’s prefabs, Strandlund was happy to have the vice chairman of the Joint Housing Committee in his corner.
At a press conference in February 1949, McCarthy announced that he had authored a thirty-seven-page article called “Wanted: A Dollar’s Worth of Housing for Every Dollar Spent.” His article would appear in a booklet published by Lustron called How to Own Your Own Home. Asked what he had been paid for the article, he said, “It’s embarrassingly small. Besides, I had to split it with ten people who helped me.” It later came out that he had been paid $10,000.
Lustron went out of business because its houses were overpriced. Unassembled houses with two bedrooms and one thousand square feet were no bargain at prices up to $10,000. The company closed in 1951, after manufacturing 2,500 kits. Today, fifty survivors are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.11
In January 1949, Senate Democrats introduced a housing bill calling for the construction of more than a million public housing units over a seven-year period. A compromise was reached at 810,000 units over six years. McCarthy backed the bill, which passed the Senate and the House in the spring of 1949, showing, if nothing else, that Congress works by a wearing-down process.12
When Truman won the 1948 election, the Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress. Burnet R. Maybank, an old-fashioned Democratic senator from South Carolina, became chairman of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, and one of the first things he did was bump Joe, confiding to a fellow senator, “He’s a troublemaker, that’s why I don’t want him.” McCarthy retained his seat on the Expenditures in the Executive Departments Committee and was assigned to the Committee on the District of Columbia, the Siberia of committees. Joe wrote Taft on January 7, 1949, that “I am the only Republican singled out for no major committee, which…will be extremely embarrassing to me in my state.” Taft, who was chairman of the GOP policy committee, declined to help the upstart who had obstructed his housing bill.13
Mulling over the collapse of the “Thousand-Year Reich” in a bunker near Frankfurt on December 12, 1944, Hitler summoned his generals (who were asked to leave their weapons at the door) and announced a mighty offensive in the West. The Allied armies had forty-eight divisions on a six-hundred-mile front from the North Sea to Switzerland, but were stalled on the German frontier west of the Rhine. Hitler’s plan was a counterthrust in the hilly, wooded, snow-clad region of the Ardennes, in southern Belgium and Luxembourg. The Germans could split the First and Third U.S. armies and blitz their way to Antwerp, the Allies’ main port of supply.14
The German generals in the bunker on that day saw a stooped, puffy-faced man with trembling hands, but though they thought the plan was a delusion, they could not shake his resolve and were left to carry out his order. On December 15, the Fifth and Sixth Panzer armies launched parallel attacks on a seventy-mile front along the German border between Aachen to the north and Trier to the south, in foggy weather and snowstorms that grounded Allied planes for five days. This final offensive on the Western Front, which lasted a month until the Germans were routed, became known as the Battle of the Bulge.15
With a fluid front and the element of surprise, the Germans swiftly thrust into Belgium. One unit, the 1st SS Panzer Regiment “Adolph Hitler,” known as “The Blowtorch Regiment,” moved into Belgium to Büllingen, and by December 17 had reached a crossroads two miles south of the small town of Malmédy, about twenty miles from the German border. The 1st SS Panzer was a battle-hardened regiment of about 1,500 men, some of whom had served on the Russian front or been concentration camp guards. Its leader, twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Peiper, took a forward detachment beyond Malmédy to the town of Stoumont, leaving his second in command, Major Poetschke, in charge.16 On December 17, 1944, with the 1st SS Panzers holding the Malmédy crossroad, an American unit of about 150 men from the 785th Field Artillery Observation Battalion left from Spa, the headquarters of the U.S. First Army, and headed for St. Vith, a town twenty miles south of Malmédy, close to the German border. When they reached the crossroad, they came under heavy fire from the 1st SS Panzers. Outnumbered and outgunned, and above all, astonished at finding Germans there, they surrendered. Sergeant Kenneth Ahrens recalled being stopped by German tank fire, jumping out of his jeep, and crawling into a ditch. “They kept us pinned down until we were captured,” he said. “It was a complete surprise. We threw up our arms and gave up. They pushed us all into a cow pasture. Practically my entire company was lined up in that field. I was thinking about spending Christmas in some camp in Germany.” After searching them and taking their watches, rings, and wallets, the SS lined up tanks on the edge of the field twenty feet away. “A man stood up on top of a tank with a pistol and fired, and all hell broke loose. They opened up their machine guns and sprayed us,” Ahrens said.17
SS men moved through the field, finishing off the wounded at point-blank range, then saying Tot and moving on. Private Kenneth Kingston lay face down in the field. A German reached for his watch and felt his pulse. He pulled out his pistol and aimed at Kingston’s head. Just then another SS called him, giving Kingston time to make a slight adjustment so that the bullet missed his head.18
Seventy-two bodies were found, while about thirty escaped and fifty were missing. It was the worst massacre of Americans in the European war.
On May 7, 1945, the Germans surrendered and the war in Europe was over. The Allies divided Germany into four zones of occupation, with the United States taking the three southern provinces of Hesse, Bavaria, and Bade-Württemberg. Aside from the international trial of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, each occupying power had its own method of dealing with war crimes. The Russians stood suspects up before firing squads or sent them to Siberia. The U.S. Army conducted a series of trials of individual offenders at Dachau, site of the concentration camp, outside Munich. These were mainly German soldiers charged with the torture or murder of captured Allied troops, who were tried by military courts-martial, which produced a total of 426 death sentences. Of these, General Lucius D. Clay, the military governor of the U.S. zone, commuted, set aside, or reduced all but one hundred.19
The War Crimes Group of the Judge Advocate’s Office did not at first know which Nazi units were involved in the Malmédy massacre. Thousands of German prisoners of war were scattered in American, British, and French camps, in hospitals, and in labor detachments. By order of General Eisenhower, all war crimes suspects were assembled in the Zuffenhausen camp near Frankfurt and screened. A high priority was given to finding the troops who had committed the Malmédy massacre. It was a difficult job, for Peiper had sworn his unit to secrecy. Interrogators developed a route of march and Order of March for December 17, 1944, and identified the SS 1st Panzers. They built up a roster with the most likely triggermen. Major Ralph Shumacker, of the Judge Advocate’s office, recalled that “the atmosphere in Zuffenhausen was that of a division reunion. They could not be questioned there, as they would construct their stories among themselves.”20
Those involved, between four hundred and five hundred, were moved in the fall of 1945 to a prison in the small town of Schwabisch Hall, about thirty miles northeast of Stuttgart. They were placed in a separate cell block and isolated from each other so that they could not corroborate alibis. A special unit guarded them and they were questioned for four and a half months by German-speaking U.S. Army interrogators.21
The interrogators built their case from one rank to the next, starting with the privates, who incriminated the sergeants, and so on. They used what they called the “Schnell procedure,” which consisted of questioning the suspect in a room with three “judges” at a table that resembled an altar, covered with a cloth. On the cloth were placed lighted candles and a crucifix, to emphasize the sanctity of the oath and create a sort of Black Mass effect.22
In one case, the man on top of the tank who fired first was identified by the only officer to survive the massacre, Lieutenant Virgil T. Lary, as an SS private named Fleps. One of the interrogators, William Perl, went into Fleps’s cell and said: “We know you fired those first shots. We are not interested in that. We want to know who told you to fire them.” Fleps replied: “Hans Siptrott.”23
Perl, a member of the Vienna bar who fled Austria for America in 1940, found a chink in the wall, which was that some officers were hated by their men. To one officer, Friedrich Christ, he said: “If you lie it is not good. We know everything. You are hated by your own soldiers and they will talk against you. The other officers have confessed.” Perl kept it up until Christ broke, saying: “I only repeated the order I got from Poetschke.” And then he recited the order: “The impending battle will be the decisive one…and we will have to behave towards the enemy in a way that causes panic and that the rumor of our behavior will precede our units…. So that our enemy will be frightened to meet us…. In this connection, no prisoners should be taken.” The Malmédy massacre was part of a deliberate strategy of murdering prisoners of war in order to establish a reputation for terrorism.
Eventually, there were enough confessions to make cases against seventy-three of the SS held at Schwabisch Hall, who were moved to Dachau to stand trial in May 1946. Under the standards of American military justice, they were provided with defense lawyers, some German and some American. The defense team was headed by Colonel Willis M. Everett Jr., an Atlanta lawyer who had no criminal or trial experience, having worked in his father’s law firm since 1921.24
The trial opened on May 16 and lasted until July 16. The court consisted of eight judges, seven of them senior officers, with the president a brigadier general, and the eighth a so-called law officer. Eleven lawyers, six Americans and five Germans, were on the defense team.25
One of them, Lieutenant Colonel John S. Dwinell, felt the defense had a case, based on extorted confessions. But when the defense put the accused on the stand, “they were like a bunch of drowning rats, turning on each other, and clutching at straws. They would say, ‘No, I was not at the crossroads, but so and so was there.’ ” So the defense stopped them from testifying, because “they were so panicky they were saying things to perjure themselves.” Only nine of the seventy-three took the stand, and as a result, the accused were unable to introduce the evidence that might have helped their case.26
Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld, the lawyer on the eight-man court, noted that Everett “during the entire course of the trial took no part in the examination. He simply introduced the witnesses and then sat down. He took very little part in the conduct of the trial.” Nor did he ever ask to go to Malmédy and reconstitute the incident. It was obvious to Rosenfeld that Everett had botched the defense.27
On June 16, the eight judges deliberated for two hours and twenty minutes before returning guilty verdicts against all seventy-three defendants. After the verdict was announced, each defendant had two minutes to plead mitigation: “I have a wife and three children…My grandfather is very very sick…I am the sole support of my large family…If I hadn’t followed orders I would have been shot in the back.” Rosenfeld recalled that only one of the supposedly hardened and unrepentant SS said: “I did what I did because I wanted to do it and I would do it again.” The sentencing was on a case-by-case basis. Forty-three were sentenced to death, twenty-two to life, and the remaining eight to lesser sentences.28
Everett complained bitterly that the mistreatment of the accused at Schwabisch Hall Prison had not been taken into consideration. He saw the verdict as a stain on his record. Even after returning to the United States, Everett was a man obsessed. He began collecting affidavits from the imprisoned Malmédy SS, via their German lawyers. Of course, the urgent interest of those sentenced to death and life imprisonment was to get their sentences commuted. Thus, Benoni Junker’s affidavit on January 19, 1948, said he had been beaten at Schwabisch Hall and that he repeatedly heard cries for help and shouts of agony. Gustav Sprenger’s affidavit, dated January 21, 1948, said: “I was taken before the Schnell court. I was told to be ready at any time for hanging. I was beaten by an American guard. Finally, I said Yes to everything.” Friedrich Christ’s affidavit, dated January 22, 1948, said: “At first Lt. Perl threatened me with perjury…. Then he threatened me with hanging…. I was no longer a master of my own judgment…. I was told my mother would receive a form message about my hanging and that she would not get any work and thus no ration card and she would starve.” Other affidavits, collected by the German lawyers and sent to Everett, told of beatings with clubs, matches lit under fingernails, broken jaws, and injured testicles. Nearly two years after the trial, and after having been convicted and given heavy sentences, the SS murderers of captured Americans were suddenly remembering harsh treatment at Schwabisch Hall.29
Everett appended these uncorroborated and highly suspect affidavits to the petition that he sent the U.S. Supreme Court on May 11, 1948, asking to have the Malmédy verdict vacated for lack of due process. When he spoke in his petition of “wrongdoers,” he did not mean the SS, but the American team at Schwabisch Hall. With Justice Robert Jackson abstaining, since he had served as chief U.S. counsel at Nuremberg, the court was tied 4 to 4, which meant that it declined to hear the appeal. Everett complained that he had spent $30,000 of his own money preparing his petition.30
It was not entirely spent in vain, for the petition revived interest in the Malmédy trial. In Germany, General Lucius Clay commuted thirty-one of the forty-three death sentences, arguing that American jailers had “used very rough methods to get the first breaks…. That so bothered me that I cut the death sentences to life imprisonment.”31
In July, Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall named a three-man commission to conduct a survey of the 139 remaining death sentences meted out at all the Dachau trials, including the twelve Malmédy death sentences. The three were Texas Judge Gordon Simpson, Charles E. Lawrence of the Judge Advocate’s Office, and E. L. van Roden, a judge at the Orphan’s Court in Delaware, Pennsylvania. They spent six weeks in Germany in the fall of 1948, and heard thirty-three witnesses. The Simpson Commission recommended that the twelve remaining Malmédy death sentences be commuted, and General Clay commuted six of them. The other six were commuted in 1951, after West Germany became a federal state and custody of the prisoners was handed over to the Germans.
Upon his return, Judge van Roden began giving speeches at Rotary Clubs and making lurid charges based on Everett’s affidavits, which he had made no attempt to corroborate. Van Roden before the war had endorsed a pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic book, which accused FDR of being surrounded by Jews like Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, and Bernard Baruch. He was a poor choice for Secretary Royall’s commission. Van Roden knew a fellow who worked on the Chester Times, James Finucane, who was also on the staff of a pacifist and isolationist group called the National Council for the Prevention of War. Van Roden told his tale of tortures and threats, all based on the SS affidavits, to Finucane, who put out an inflammatory press release in mid-December 1948. By this time Finucane was in touch with the German lawyers, who had their own axes to grind, and was getting letters from convicted SS men.32
The press release was distributed to members of Congress, who called for an investigation. William Langer of North Dakota, a pacifist and isolationist, made two speeches on the Senate floor regarding this terrible miscarriage of justice. On January 17, 1949, Time magazine ran a story stating that Everett’s petition “reads like a record of Nazi atrocities,” equating the U.S. interrogators at Schwabisch Hall with Nazi war criminals.
In February 1949, The Progressive, a liberal magazine in Madison, Wisconsin, ran an article under Judge van Roden’s byline called “United States Atrocities in Germany.” The article said that interrogators at Schwabisch Hall were “posturing as priests” and that “all but two of the Germans in the 139 cases we investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair.”
“Our investigators,” said the article, “would put a black hood over the accused’s head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him, and beat him with rubber hose.” The article concluded that “American investigators who abused the power of victory and prostituted justice to vengeance should be…prosecuted.”33
McCarthy’s career in the Senate was stagnating in 1949, after his forays into sugar rationing and housing, and he needed an issue that would reignite his popularity in Wisconsin. He was now branded as a troublemaker, bumped from the Banking and Currency Committee, and could no longer rely on his career as a Marine or his upset of La Follette to sway an audience. He had always courted the German vote by taking extreme pro-German positions. On November 3, 1945, when he was laying the foundation for his 1946 Senate campaign, he sent the Green Bay Press-Gazette the text of a radio talk he was giving on November 13, in which he planned to say that “by the subterfuge of refusing to declare the war ended, even though Germany has long since surrendered unconditionally, we are using the soldiers of our former enemy as slave labor. By turning over our German prisoners to France, we are actively dealing in white slaves; and perhaps I will call attention to the recent stories to the effect that roughly one hundred thousand German prisoners of war are slowly dying in France because of malnutrition; and call attention to the Polish demand for an additional fifty thousand German slave laborers to work inside her Silesian coal mines.”34
McCarthy sent a copy of his talk to his friend at the Chicago Tribune, James Maxwell Murphy, on November 15, with the comment: “You will note that I did not touch on the question of our trying the German leaders, whose only crime was attempting to win the war. I could well have made the comparison of our methodical terror bombing of refugee-crowded cities in Germany and compared the men responsible for that practice with the so-called German war criminals. However, I decided to restrict myself to a condemnation of the treatment of the clearly innocent GI Joes of the German army.”35
These were truly stupefying remarks coming from a soon-to-be United States senator who had fought in World War II, albeit in the Pacific Theater. Were the German troops, who slaughtered 5,700,000 Jews in death camps, who executed tens of thousands of hostages in occupied lands, who massacred fifty thousand in the Warsaw Ghetto, and who systematically murdered captured Allied airmen, “innocent GI Joes”? McCarthy’s comparison of Allied bombing with Nazi war crimes was an echo of Colonel Peiper’s remark to an American interpreter that the Malmédy massacre could be justified or excused because of the bombing of German cities.
McCarthy delivered his radio talk shortly before the start of the Nuremberg trial, which revealed the extraordinary scope of Nazi extermination techniques. One of the prominent Wisconsin businessmen of German origin who denounced the Nuremberg trial was Walter Harnischfeger, who owned a company that made construction machinery such as traveling cranes and who also built prefab housing. He said in 1948 that the trial was “worse than anything Hitler did. It beats Dachau.” Harnischfeger before the war was close to Bundist groups and sympathetic to the Nazi regime. One of his nephews, Frederick von Schleinitz, was said to have an autographed copy of Mein Kampf and wore a swastika watch chain.36
On April 12, 1942, the Fair Employment Practices Commission ordered eight Midwestern companies holding war contracts to stop discriminating against workers because of race or religion. The Harnischfeger company was one of the eight. The FEPC charged that Harnischfeger refused to employ Negro or Jewish Americans and ran ads asking for “gentile, white, and Protestant” help. After the war, Harnischfeger made frequent trips to Germany to campaign against the dismantling of German factories for reparations.37
McCarthy’s connection to Harnischfeger was arranged by Tom Korb, who was the industrialist’s general counsel. Korb was a close friend of Joe’s going back to Marquette, when they double-dated and both had gas station jobs. When McCarthy launched his Senate campaign in 1946, Korb joined his team. “I will do whatever I can,” he said, “to resist losing Republican votes in the Fourth District” of Milwaukee, where Korb lived. Then on September 18, Korb wrote his college chum that Harnischfeger was inviting 150 Milwaukee industrialists to lunch, to “educate” them regarding the new public relations program of the National Association of Manufacturers. “Would you like to be my guest at this luncheon?” Korb asked. “We will not put too much emphasis on your presence. You will not be at the speaker’s table, but will sit in the background with me. Word will get through the audience and you will have the opportunity of meeting many of those upon whom you will rely for support.” On September 23, Korb invited McCarthy to attend a dinner in the Harnischfeger plant cafeteria to honor the employees who had worked there twenty-five years or more, of whom there were about 130. “You may be called on to say a few words, but they will not be political,” Korb instructed. Harnischfeger was part of a group of seventy wealthy Wisconsin businessmen who funded McCarthy’s campaign. When he was elected, Harnischfeger sent him a telegram of congratulations.38
Joe was intent on remaining in Harnischfeger’s good graces, for even after the election, he relied on him for financial help. In 1947, when he was having problems with his notes at the Appleton State Bank, he wrote his friendly banker, Matt Shuh, on May 9: “I have made complete arrangements with Walter Harnischfeger…to put up sufficient collateral to cure both our ulcers, but as luck would have it, I was completely laid up in the Naval Hospital under a ‘No Visitors’ rule when Harnischfeger came through Washington. He left for Europe and won’t be back for about a month.”39
In 1950, a Capital Times reporter wrote in an interoffice memo: “For some time, McCarthy’s patron in Wisconsin among the big industrialists has been Walter Harnischfeger…who has very close connections with elements in Germany that were close to the Hitler crowd.” At a meeting in Madison in 1948, the reporter went on, Harnischfeger spoke “in a state of rather advanced intoxication,” and said that “Germany was once again being turned back to the masses.”40
In February 1949, after the publication of van Roden’s article on the mistreatment of the SS defendants in The Progressive, the uproar over Malmédy came to the attention of several Senate committees. McCarthy, who was on the Special Investigation Subcommittee of the Committee on Expenditures, thought it was the proper venue for Malmédy, since it had handled the case of Ilse Koch, “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” married to the camp commander. But Senator Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, quickly preempted McCarthy’s subcommittee and announced hearings in April 1949.41
Smelling Pentagon influence, Joe feared that the armed services hearings would be a whitewash. He also sensed an issue that would appeal to the Wisconsin German vote and particularly to his backer Harnischfeger. When a subcommittee of three was named—Chairman Raymond E. Baldwin of Connecticut, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Lester C. Hunt of Wyoming—McCarthy was invited to attend the hearings and given permission to ask questions of the witnesses.42
Tom Korb arrived in Washington, on leave from the Harnischfeger company, to act as McCarthy’s unpaid administrative assistant for six weeks to help him in his daily preparation and write his press releases. The hearings provided a revealing glimpse of what McCarthy would later become in his anti-Red crusade. He adopted as gospel the contentions of SS men trying to escape long sentences, and did his best to besmirch the reputation of the Army. This was in fact the first Army-McCarthy hearing, with McCarthy as incorrigible then as he would be later.
“I am here informally,” McCarthy said as he arrived on opening day, April 18, in Room 212 of the Senate Office Building, but he quickly took over the proceedings. Of the three senators on the Baldwin subcommittee, Kefauver was rarely present and Hunt seldom opened his mouth. Thus the hearings became a duel between Baldwin, a senator of the old school, courteous and reasonable, and McCarthy, who fought bare-knuckled and below the belt.
Baldwin noted that about eighty American soldiers were “slaughtered in cold blood, in total violation of all accepted rules of civilized warfare…. Young men who were entitled to expect that if they fell into the hands of the enemy, they would be treated as prisoners of war.”
McCarthy jumped in at once: “Every member of our committee realizes the gruesomeness of the crime…. There is no desire to see anyone who is guilty go free.” But he wanted to check out reports on “how confessions were obtained…. Mock trials…physical force…taking ration cards away from the families of prisoners…. Was this ‘American Justice’?”
Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall took the stand and noted that in nearly all murder cases, the defendants claimed their confessions were coerced. People were getting excited about the statements of German prisoners without hearing the other side.
McCarthy: “I was in the Marine Corps and feelings ran high that…it was important to protect the rights of prisoners.”
Royall: “These were not prisoners of war…. They were criminals who had been apprehended.”
McCarthy: “You don’t know whether they are criminals or not until they are convicted.”
Royall: “They are charged with war crimes.”
McCarthy said that if convictions were improperly obtained, “it would be a tragedy…. It would do to American prestige over in Europe infinite damage…. Doing everything we accuse the Russians are doing.”
Royall (losing patience): “I do not want to leave unchallenged the statement that we are following procedures that are analogous to those in Russia. That is not a fact.”
On April 20, the chief prosecutor at the Dachau trial, Lieutenant Colonel Burton E. Ellis of the Judge Advocate’s Office, took the stand. He said the policy at Schwabisch Hall Prison was to isolate the prisoners until they confessed. Only much later, after the trial was over, did they complain of how confessions were obtained. Ellis admitted there had been mock trials, conducted rapidly in German in a cell with candles and crucifix, but said they were not all that effective.
McCarthy: “It makes me rather sick down inside to hear you testify what you think is proper or improper.”
Ellis said he had seen two mock trials. In one, after saying nein, nein for ten minutes, the man confessed. The mock trials were a tactic to elicit confessions, Ellis said. It was a nice-cop, tough-cop routine where the nice cop said “you have got to give him a chance to tell his story.”43 Ellis insisted that the charges of physical coercion were patently false.
Major Dwight F. Fanton, the officer commanding the interrogators, had issued an order on February 7, 1946, stating that “any ruse or deception may be used in the course of interrogation, but threats of physical violence…should be scrupulously avoided.”
McCarthy: “When we were out in the Pacific, we used to pick up Jap diaries, and in it they told exactly what happened to our men, who were held by Japs, and there were threats of running tractors over people, we found out what the Japs did to our boys…. If you are trying to get a confession out of someone, you might get exasperated and shove him around.”44
When Kenneth Ahrens, one of the Malmédy survivors, took the stand, McCarthy objected that “this would appear to put those of us who feel this thing should be investigated in the position of defending the actions of those storm troopers…. It would inflame the public and get away from what our army was doing.” But Baldwin insisted that Ahrens’s testimony was a necessary corrective to the statements of the SS.
Ahrens said that when the SS started firing at 1:00 P.M., “I turned around and fell flat on my face. I didn’t dare look around. I was hit in the back. I could hear them walking amongst the boys that were lying there. Some of the boys weren’t dead and there was a lot of moaning and groaning. You would hear a stray shot here and a stray shot there. Making sure there was nobody left alive. That went on like a little while…. I mean time was like years…. They must have thought I was dead. Troops were going back and forth on the road…. And every once in a while, a tank or half-track would roll by and turn their guns on us, just for a good time. I mean, they were laughing.” At dusk, Ahrens started running and made it to the woods, and got picked up by an American jeep.
Senator Hunt: “If any of those SS troops during the trial was pushed against the wall, would you consider they were being mistreated?”
Ahrens: “I certainly would not. I often wish I would have a chance to push them up against the wall.”
Hunt: “Do you think that six out of 73 who may be hung for the killing…seems to be a very serious penalty?”
Ahrens: “I certainly do not.”
McCarthy: “This provides part of a Roman holiday here…. I think it is so entirely improper…. It is an attempt to inflame the public and intimidate members of this committee.”
McCarthy was attacking the reputation of the Army and defending SS murderers. Running out of patience, Baldwin told him: “I have given you every consideration and every courtesy.” When Joe kept harping on the mock trials, Baldwin said: “I want to give you every latitude I can, but it does seem to me we are wasting time.”
And yet McCarthy persisted. On April 29, he said he was getting “a flood of mail from men in that area,” that is letters from imprisoned SS forwarded by their lawyers. “The two men who were most referred to as sadistic are Perl and Thon.” McCarthy was using SS affidavits to build a case against the U.S. interrogators.
James J. Bailey, the court reporter at the Dachau trial, buttressed McCarthy’s case when he testified that Perl “had a really sadistic, brutal streak…. He was an Austrian whose wife had been in a concentration camp.” Bailey said he had seen Perl knee men in the groin.
McCarthy eagerly elaborated: “You know it was claimed that these men sentenced to death were crippled for life because they had been kicked in the genitals.”45
On May 4, Judge van Roden, whose inflammatory article in The Progressive was partly responsible for the hearings, took the stand. He said he felt the confessions were coerced. He also repeated the claim that “some of them had been injured in the testicles.”
“There will be testimony here to the effect that of the 139 men who were sentenced to die,” McCarthy shot in, “about 138 were irreparably damaged, being crippled for life, from being kicked or kneed in the groin.” Bailey, who had been there, said quietly, “In my opinion, that is a gross exaggeration.”
But McCarthy wasn’t listening. He continued his rant: “…Convicted with these fake confessions, these fake hangings, the kneeing and kicking to get confessions…. I believe it would be a mistake to continue executing these men.”
Baldwin: “I am wondering what chance for an appeal and review the men who gave their lives at Malmédy crossroads and were shot had?”
McCarthy: “What about those 15 or 16 year-old boys [SS] who were kicked in the testicles, crippled for life…. Shall those men of the losing nation have a fair trial?…The Army acted with the utmost malice.”
It was at this point that, under questioning by the subcommittee counsel, the retired Marine Colonel Joseph M. Chambers, van Roden provided the most shocking surprise of the hearing. McCarthy had repeatedly cited van Roden’s article as evidence of injuries to the testicles. But van Roden admitted that though the article had appeared under his byline, he had not written it. It was written by his journalist crony Finucane, who had made most of it up. Van Roden explained: “Now in the next paragraph, where it says, ‘All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair,’ I did not say that. What I said was that all but two were recommended for commutation to life imprisonment…. I do not know how many may or may not have been kicked or kneed in the testicles…. That figure is absolutely wrong.”46
Upon having his argument deflated, McCarthy left the hearing room, knowing that his case was in shreds. But he recovered when Dwight Fanton, the chief of the Schwabisch Hall interrogators, took the stand on May 5. McCarthy had learned that Fanton, a graduate of Yale Law School, was a member of Senator Baldwin’s Bridgeport law firm. This was more ammunition he could use to label the hearings a whitewash. Fanton refuted the “vicious charges” made in Everett’s petition and likened his description of the mock trials to “an Orson Welles dramatization.” Accounts of beatings and starvation were “pure fabrications,” he said. Violence would only have thwarted the urge to confess.
Joe jumped in with his usual pugnacity: “Is it true that you couldn’t have convicted a man unless you beat the hell out of him in a cell?”
Fanton: “Wait a minute there.”
McCarthy: “I am going to get this from you if I have to keep you here a week.”
Senator Hunt: “Let’s be a little more courteous with the witness. Let’s not attempt any browbeating.”47
Fanton, however, refused to be browbeaten. He had closely observed the interrogators and their techniques, he explained, and had seen no duress. Perl, he said, had been a lawyer in Vienna, and “was quite above sadism and taking unfair advantage.”
On May 17, William Perl, who in civilian life was an industrial psychologist, testified that he was “strictly instructed not to promise immunity…. There was no physical force whatever used.”
McCarthy said: “I think of the 10 interrogators he is one of the three accused of most of the brutality.” He then proceeded to charge Perl with making false statements, and proposed that he take a lie detector test. “That is the only way we can close this matter,” he said.
Perl: “If it is so reliable, we should have used it from the beginning. Why have a trial at all? Get the guys and put lie detectors on them. ‘Did you kill this man?’ The lie detector says ‘Yes,’ go to the scaffold. If it says ‘No,’ go back to Bavaria.”
McCarthy: “I think you are lying. I do not think you can fool the lie detector…. You are not smart enough to beat it.” Baldwin said it would accomplish nothing to give Perl a lie detector test.
McCarthy: “That’s certainly an unusual statement on the part of the chair.”
Baldwin: “It is not the purpose of this committee to protect anybody.” The statements of mistreatment had come from the affidavits of SS prisoners. They too should take the test.
McCarthy went into his snarling mode: “The chair seems to be afraid of the results of that test. This committee is afraid of the facts and is sitting here solely for the purpose of a whitewash of the Army. It is inexcusable for the chairman not to allow the tests.”
Baldwin maintained his composure. “Let us keep this thing on an even, level tone,” he said. “Let me remind the senator that he was invited to sit in on these hearings. He has been permitted…to cross-examine witnesses…. To be faced with the charge that we are trying to whitewash anybody—”
“The committee does not want the facts,” McCarthy cut in. “The committee is afraid of the facts, and the committee is sitting here to whitewash those involved…. Over in the House, Alger Hiss was asked whether he would submit to a lie detector test and he did not have the courage to.” This was another of his tactics, to compare two unrelated cases to establish a spurious connection between Alger Hiss and William Perl.
Senator Hunt said he did not want to set aside his own judgment “for a mechanical machine.”
McCarthy said he felt thwarted. “I was very disturbed when I found out the chairman of this subcommittee was the law partner of one of the men who was in charge of the Malmédy trials. I felt the senator should not sit as chairman of this committee…. I felt the committee was trying to protect the men charged with wrongdoing.”
Baldwin: “I am surprised at the senator’s charges…he has had every opportunity to go into the thing very thoroughly.”
McCarthy caught himself. He had gone too far, questioning the ethics of the committee chairman who had permitted him to sit in on the hearings. Changing course, he said: “I have a tremendous amount of admiration and considerable affection for the senator from Connecticut.” The chair had done much to oblige him.
Back on the stand, Perl said that Wichmann, an SS who shot an American sergeant in the back, “was the only one who actually repented of his crime.”
McCarthy: “You did lie in order to get confessions. Tell me, yes or no.”
Perl: “I would like to protest against the use of the word ‘lie.’ If an American officer is trying to find who killed 400 of his co-soldiers and uses perfectly legal methods, that is not a lie.”
McCarthy: “Give me some other word I can use so that I will not insult your sensibilities, will you? What word can I use?”
Perl: “Winston Churchill in the House of Commons in 1906 referred to a ‘terminological inexactitude.’ ”
On May 18, with Perl still on the stand, McCarthy called him “a master of evasion.” Joe returned to his favorite topic, damaged testicles. The affidavit of Rieder, who had been sentenced to death for killing a Belgian woman, said he had been kicked in the testicles. Rieder had not taken the stand at the trial, and Perl insisted the affidavit was false. “I never kicked him,” he said. “I do not think it ever happened.”48
Baldwin had to remind Joe not to use uncorroborated allegations.
McCarthy: “I think I am competent to ask my questions.”
“Do you think it is fair for the chair to ask a question?” an exasperated Baldwin responded.
Joe kept badgering Perl, and coming back to the lie detector, and comparing Perl to Alger Hiss, then saying Perl was lying.
Baldwin: “That is a very serious charge to make against a man who wore the Army uniform of the United States.”
McCarthy: “One hundred and eighty million men wore the uniform, senator. I wore it too. I do not claim it made me better or worse.”
Baldwin had finally reached the breaking point. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You have done a lot of talking here…. We are not going to prejudge this case in any way.”
McCarthy heedlessly repeated that Perl had obtained false confessions.
On May 19, all three members of the subcommittee, in a united anti-McCarthy front, expressed their opposition to the lie detector as “a marked departure from Congressional procedures.” All the members of the full Armed Services Committee were also opposed. “It would be unfair to subject them,” they said of Perl and the other interrogators, “unless we also subjected their German accusers.”
McCarthy was disgruntled, but struggled on. The prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel Burton Ellis, was back on the stand on May 19. Joe asked him why Pletz, an SS man charged with killing captive Americans from a machine gun mounted on his tank, had had his sentence reduced from life to twenty years.
Ellis said it was his age—he was twenty-one. Even though “he was charged with the most unwarranted murder of American boys…. Out of pure viciousness he mowed down fifteen or twenty.”
Eyeball-to-eyeball with Ellis, McCarthy argued that he had let Pletz off because he was not guilty. “Is it not a fact that you were deliberately deceiving us?” he roared. “It is obvious that this man is not telling us the truth.”49
Then Joe added his own peculiar line of reasoning: “What if he were 22? What if he were 21 and a half?” With his outbursts and his bizarre defense of the SS, McCarthy had become the focus of the proceedings. Among the witnesses who refused to be intimidated by his tactics was Ralph Shumacker, an assistant prosecutor at the Malmédy trial. “There are those who have become quite sympathetic to the German nation,” he said. “I have viewed the rows of white crosses and Stars of David which mark the graves of those victims who cannot speak. They were mute testimony to the righteousness of our nation in bringing to justice those who needlessly and with sheer delight took their lives.”
Shumacker added that “Perl was an excellent interrogator…. He was always thinking of some trick or some new angle…. It was always a matter of cleverness.” Bailey, the court reporter, on the other hand, “was drawing on his imagination.”
On May 20, Joe was back at his most rambunctious, charging that “American Army officers in charge of war crime trials were in effect tearing a page from the books of Hitler and Stalin in order to get confessions.” He said that Ellis “had received the Legion of Merit for his prostitution and perversion of justice before the world.” The interrogators were “refugees from Hitlerism,” a coded term for Jews. Baldwin’s refusal of a lie detector test indicated “a whitewash of the Army officers involved.”
At this point, McCarthy announced that he was abandoning his own sinking ship. The hearings had “degenerated into such a shameful farce,” he said, “that I can no longer take part in them.”
Baldwin’s response was as levelheaded as Joe’s had been offensive. “Mr. McCarthy has lost his temper and with it his sound impartial judgment,” he said. “The chairman does not propose to have any of the exaggerations on the part of the junior senator from Wisconsin affect his judgment. More than 120 unarmed and surrounded American soldiers were brutally shot down in cold blood by German SS troops. To this day, no one has been executed for this crime…. The junior senator from Wisconsin has proceeded from the assumption that the charges made…have all been proven and that the Army is guilty. Oddly enough, he has been quick to accept and espouse the affidavits made by convicted war criminals two years after the completion of the trials…. He has overlooked the fact that affidavits of this type have little or no value in an American court. In the meantime, he has stated that he believes American officers testifying under oath were not telling the truth…though no proof was offered…. He accepted the unsupported affidavits of German SS troopers, some of whom unquestionably were guilty of the cold-blooded murder of American POWs, as against the sworn testimony of American officers.”50
Baldwin’s words were like the spanking of an unruly first-grader. McCarthy, his brow spotted with perspiration, responded with a threat. “I might say that the day is going to come when the chairman is going to bitterly regret this deliberate and very clever attempt to whitewash,” he said. “I think it is a shameful farce, Mr. Chairman, and inexcusable.” With that, he said “Goodbye, sir,” and stomped out of the hearing room, leaving the subcommittee to proceed without his disruptive presence. McCarthy’s career as an apologist for the SS and a mouthpiece for his pro-Nazi backer Harnischfeger was over, but in his attack on the Army there would be a reprise.
After recessing over the summer, the subcommittee traveled to Munich in September with several doctors, who examined fifty-nine SS men in Landsburg Prison. About ten had old war wounds or skin rashes, but there was no evidence of the allegations made in the affidavits. Lieutenant Colonel Edwin J. Carpenter, who had investigated the allegations after the trial, testified that “those statements were made to delay the execution of the sentence of the court.”51
Thus ended the Malmédy hearings, during which McCarthy provided a subplot that showed him at his posturing, blustering, wrongheaded worst. But even then he was not done. In July, when the hearings were recessed, he took the Senate floor and accused Baldwin of a whitewash, which led the Armed Services Committee to pass a resolution expressing confidence in Baldwin, “because of the unusual, unfair, and utterly undeserved comments…that had been made.” The resolution was signed by Senate leaders such as Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Millard Tydings, and Republicans Styles Bridges and Leverett Saltonstall.
In mid-October 1949, Baldwin delivered the subcommittee’s final report. “I am convinced the Army did the best job it could,” he told the Senate. McCarthy broke in repeatedly, exclaiming that “the system of justice…was fundamentally wrong,” and that “a conquering nation which has the power of life and death over people must be very meticulous in protecting these liberties.”52 Baldwin had said prior to the hearings that he would resign his Senate seat in mid-term to take a judicial appointment in his native state. McCarthy’s behavior gave him no incentive to change his mind. What was behind this behavior? Why so much passion to defend SS murderers? To revive his flagging career? To pay a debt to his German backers in Wisconsin? Because he was not equipped with the usual restraints? Dwight Macdonald, then a New Yorker writer, reflecting on the hearings in a letter to a friend, called Joe “a master-hand at doubletalk…. He couldn’t resist falsification…. Something pathological there.”53
Les Fossel, one of Baldwin’s aides, later said that “most of the Americans charged were Jewish, and there was an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the whole business…. One indication of why Joe got interested is that he blossomed out with a new administrative assistant, Thomas W. Korb, who was Harnischfeger’s legal counsel.” Fossel related an exchange that was not in the transcript. Marine Colonel Joseph Chambers, the committee counsel, confronted Joe with false passages in his statements and said, “You just lied, you son of a bitch.” “Sure I did,” Joe replied, “but I got away with it, didn’t I?” Fossel said of Joe: “Take any good, genial Irishman, remove his conscience, and you’ve got McCarthy.”54
The hearings had not helped Joe. Among his fellow senators he was viewed as a loose cannon. Back home, he was relentlessly attacked by the Capital Times, which he denounced as “lower than a darky with a shovel and hoe.”55 He was generally viewed as unlikely to win reelection in 1952.