the time of the Battle of the Bulge. In the course of the Malmedy Massacre Trial, six Waffen-SS defendants, including Peiper, complained to the tribunal that they had been victims of physical violence and threats of violence meant to compel them to confessions of their war crimes. The military tribunal asked the defendants to confirm their sworn statements; of the nine Waffen-SS officers who testified, three claimed to have been mistreated by U.S. Army jailers. For the majority of the Nazis on trial, the defense argued they either had not participated in the massacres, or that superior orders had compelled them to participate in the massacres. Verdicts On 16 July 1946 the verdict was delivered on 73 members of the Kampfgruppe Peiper. 43 were sentenced to death by hanging, including Peiper. Peiper's sentence was commuted to 35 years in 1954, and he was released in December 1956. Approximately sixteen months after the end of the trial, almost all the defendants presented affidavits repudiating their former confessions and alleging aggravated duress of all types. Review procedure Pursuant to procedure, an in-house review was undertaken by the American Occupation Army in Germany; the trial was carefully examined by a deputy judge. Colonel Everett was convinced that a fair trial had not been granted to the defendants: in addition to alleged mock trials, he claimed that "to extort confessions, U.S. prosecution teams 'had kept the German defendants in dark, solitary confinement at near starvation rations up to six months; had applied various forms of torture, including the driving of burning matches under the prisoners' fingernails; had administered beatings which resulted in broken jaws and arms and permanently injured testicles'." These allegations of torture were later proved false. The Simpson Commission The turmoil raised by this case caused the Secretary of the Army, Kenneth Royall, to create a commission, chaired by Justice Gordon Simpson of the Texas Supreme Court, to investigate. The commission supported Everett's accusations regarding mock trials and neither disputed nor denied his charges of torture of the defendants. The Commission expressed the opinion that the pre-trial investigation had not been properly conducted and that the members felt no death sentence should be executed in any instance where such doubts existed. One member of the commission, Judge Edward L. Van Roden of Pennsylvania, made several public statements alleging that physical violence had been inflicted on the accused and questioned the validity of