The Malmedy massacre trial (U.S. vs. Valentin Bersin, et al.) was held in May–July 1946 in the former Dachau concentration camp to try the German Waffen-SS soldiers accused of the Malmedy massacre of 17 December 1944. The highest-ranking defendant was the former Waffen-SS general Sepp Dietrich. Malmedy massacre The Malmedy massacre (17 December 1944) was a series of war crimes committed by the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper against American prisoners of war and Belgian civilians during the Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945). The Waffen-SS massacre of 84 U.S. Army POWs near Baugnez was the primary subject of the war-crime trial, which was one of a series of war crimes that the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper committed between mid-December 1944 and mid-January 1945. In the course of their massacres, the Waffen-SS murdered POWs with close-range gunshots to the head; the actual number of dead was 362 American POWs and 111 Belgian civilians. The U.S. soldiers who survived the Malmedy massacre said that on 17 December 1944, in the vicinity of Baugnez, the armored advance of the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper surprised approximately 120 U.S. Army soldiers from the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion (FAOB) who surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS then assembled their U.S. POWs in a field near the Baugnez crossroads, and then used machine guns to kill them. The SS machine gun fire alerted and panicked the U.S. Army POWs; some soldiers fled the killing field, other soldiers were killed where they stood; and other soldiers ran to and hid in a café at the Baugnez crossroads, which the Waffen-SS soldiers set afire, and then shot dead every U.S. soldier who tried to escape the burning building. Meanwhile, at the killing field, the Waffen-SS soldiers walked among the American corpses to find and kill any G.I. pretending to be dead. Among the 84 murdered soldiers, many corpses had head-shot wounds consistent with a massacre rather than with wounds suffered in self-defense or with wounds suffered while escaping summary execution by machine gun. On 13 January 1945, the U.S. Army secured the crossroads at Baugnez where the Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper had massacred their U.S. Army POWs. The corpses of the soldiers of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion were recovered on 14–15 January 1945; the winter weather preserved the flesh and the wounds. The autopsies revealed that approximately twenty of the murdered American soldiers had