quite nicely until flummoxed by the Great Depression, which most economists now agree was a recession made both large and depressing by monetary, trade, and labor- policy mismanagement (For an introduction to this line of argument, see my Fubarnomics: A Lighthearted, Serious Look at America’s Economic Ills [2010], 149–176). Finally, policy historians realize that it is essential to un- derstand fully the industries that they study. Alas, McCar- thy seems not to understand the first thing about investing, which he likens to a “lottery” that determines “winners and losers” (14). In fact, investing, like other types of ex- change, is “win-win” and well-known, and easily imple- mented strategies can protect investors nearing retirement from market gyrations. (Articles abound. For a recent ex- ample, see Diane Harris, “How to Protect Your Retire- ment Investments,” Forbes [October 17, 2017], https:// www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2017/10/17/how-to-pro tect-your-retirement-investments/#d4527e2389bd.) That anyone postponed retirement due to the Panic (or Finan- cial Crisis) of 2008, as McCarthy asserts (13), is more a testament to the sorry state of financial education and reg- ulation of retirement funds in the U.S. than to high-level abstractions such as “capitalist markets” (14). (For an in- troduction to research on financial literary, see George Washington University’s Global Financial Literacy Excel- lence Center, http://gflec.org/research/.) In sum, few general, or more specialized business, eco- nomic, or policy, historians will find much of use or inter- est in this economic sociological treatment of America’s systems of public and private old-age security since the New Deal. ROBERT E. WRIGHT Augustana University STEVEN P. REMY. The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. viii, 342. $29.95. The Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, Adolf Hitler’s final attempt to reverse the situation in the west by split- ting Dwight D. Eisenhower’s armies, remains the iconic American battlefield victory of the Second World War. Despite grievous failings in Allied intelligence, the elite of the German army and SS were repulsed in the most costly engagement ever fought by the U.S. military. Among its 8,407 fatalities were 84 unarmed personnel who were mown down and butchered in a snowy field near the Belgian town of Malmedy by a regiment of the First SS Panzer Division (19–20). Reports of the massa- cre inflamed American public opinion. In The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy, Steven P. Remy draws on investigative and intelligence records to offer the most scholarly account to date of the U.S. army’s pursuit and trial of the Malmedy perpetrators. The bar is admittedly a low one, for the existing literature is tendentious and sensationalist. But Remy’s detailed analysis of the most controversial war-crimes trial in U.S. history also makes an important contribution to wider scholarship on both postwar justice and the first decade of the Cold War in Germany and America. The Malmedy massacre and trial have long been mired in conspiracy theories that continue to excite, as any on- line search will show, sundry neo-Nazis and “revision- ists.” The trial proceedings at Dachau, recorded as United States of America v. Valentin Bersin, et al., led to the con- viction of seventy-three SS defendants for violation of the laws of war under the Hague and Geneva conventions. Forty-three received death sentences, twenty-two life im- prisonment, and eight fixed terms. The controversy stemmed from the frank admission by the chief prosecu- tor, Burton Ellis, in his opening statement to the military court, that “all the legitimate tricks, ruses, and strata- gems” had been deployed by his team to break through the “conspiracy of silence” between the defendants (101). The defense counsel’s motion to have this evidence ex- cluded as lacking probative value was denied. But it helped to inspire a transatlantic smear campaign against the pretrial investigations as tainted by the methods of the Gestapo. In Germany a crusade for clemency by legal representatives for the convicted SS men resonated with a public increasingly restive under Allied occupation and weary of supposed “victor’s justice.” It won vocal support at the apex of both German churches in the figures of Protestant bishop Theophil Wurm and Catholic arch- bishop Johannes Neuha¨usler. On American soil the em- bittered and sickly chief defense counsel from the trial, Willis Everett, was supported by a tawdry cast of credu- lous hacks and preening self-publicists, among them Wis- consin senator Joseph McCarthy. What followed is a dispiriting lesson in the timeless vi- tality of fake news. Not a single defendant saw fit to men- tion coerced confessions during the trial itself. But their recollections of torture during pretrial detention at Schwa ¨bisch Hall became increasingly vivid. They re- ported broken jaws, shattered teeth, lit matches thrust under fingernails, and testicles trampled “beyond repair” (154). These farfetched and entirely baseless claims (159) were widely publicized by what Remy terms the “amnesty lobby” on both sides of the Atlantic, with publications as august as Time magazine complicit in a concerted politics of misinformation. With customary disdain for the facts, McCarthy, at a Senate hearing in 1949, denounced Ellis for “prostitut[ing] and pervert[ing] justice before the world” (236). McCarthy’s sympathies, of course, lay with the defeated Germans, and he was mindful of his many German American constituents (221). What Remy docu- ments particularly impressively is the antisemitic dimen- sion of the amnesty campaign. A number of Ellis’s pre- trialinvestigators wereJewish e´migre ´s from Nazi Ger- many. This is hardly surprising given the army’s need for intelligence officers fluent in the German language, but the amnesty advocates spoke in darkly coded terms of “recent Americans.” The SS perpetrators of a massacre against captured GIs were reinvented as young soldiers who had overreacted in the heat of battle and were now the victims of “avenging angels” (152). True to the impervious logic of conspiracy theorists, the failure of successive military and civilian investiga- tions to uncover any evidence of torture merely con- firmed the breadth of the alleged cover-up. The relentless 1644 Reviews of Books AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2017 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/122/5/1644/4724900 by guest on 18 December 2017