McCarthy (R-WI) had obtained from the subcommittee's chairman authorization to attend the hearings. McCarthy's state, Wisconsin, had a large population of German heritage, spurring allegations that McCarthy was politically motivated in his work on behalf of the Malmedy defendants. He used an extremely aggressive questioning style during the proceedings. McCarthy's actions further inflamed a split between the American Legion, which took a hardline position after Malmedy and generally supported upholding the death sentences, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who supported more lenient penalties for the Waffen-SS members under Peiper. The last clash took place in May 1949 when he asked that Lieutenant William R. Perl be given a polygraph test. As this had been rejected by Baldwin, McCarthy left the session claiming Baldwin was trying to whitewash the American military. In May and June 1949, Van Roden indicated that he had been misquoted in the statements that 137 Germans had been "kicked in the testicles beyond repair" and that this was "standard operating procedure." He testified to the subcommittee that the statement that all but two of the men had been injured for life was "exaggerated" and "absolutely wrong," that the Commission "did not find that," that some of the men had been injured in their testicles but the Commission could not find out how many, that he never said a specific number of men were kicked, that he did not know how many were kicked, that what he had said was that the Commission had recommended commutation of the death sentences to life imprisonment in all but two cases (with commutation to finite prison sentences recommended in the last two), that he categorically denied that all but two were kicked in the testicles, that these two sentences should have been deleted from the article before publication, and that his failure to object to them earlier was an "oversight." Chairman Senators Raymond Baldwin and Lester C. Hunt (D-WY) were later accused by historian David Oshinsky of being "determined to exonerate the Army at all costs". Oshinsky alleged the third member of the three man committee, Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN), displayed a lack of interest in the case, attending only two of the first fifteen hearings. McCarthy sought to denounce Baldwin in front of the whole Senate, but his efforts were repudiated by the Commission on Armed Forces, which clearly showed its support for Baldwin and eventually adopted the subcommittee's