Take No Prisoners

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In December 1944, Frank Hartzell was a young soldier pressed into fierce fighting during the Battle of the Bulge. He was there battling Nazi soldiers for control of the Belgian town of Chenogne, and he was there afterward when dozens of unarmed German prisoners of war were gunned down in a field.

Reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway travels to Belgium to tour Chenogne with Belgian historian Roger Marquet. Then he sits down with Bill Johnsen, a military historian and former dean of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to ask why the Patton Papers don’t accurately reflect Gen. George S. Patton’s diary entries about Chenogne.

The massacre at Chenogne happened soon after the Malmedy massacre, during which Nazi troops killed unarmed American POWs. The German soldiers responsible were tried at Dachau, but the American soldiers who committed the massacre at Chenogne were never held accountable. Harland-Dunaway interviews Ben Ferencz, the last surviving lawyer from the Nuremberg Trials, about why the Americans escaped justice.

And finally, Harland-Dunaway returns to Hartzell to explain what he’s learned and to press Hartzell for a full accounting of his role that day in Chenogne.

This episode was originally broadcast July 28, 2018.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Ledson.
0:05.9	Back in 2016, Chris Harland-Dunaway was between two worlds.
0:10.6	Well, I just finished my first year in journalism school, and I had been a semi-pro bike racer for six years.
0:18.8	Chris was in his mid-20s. He was thinking more seriously about his career in journalism,
0:23.5	but he also wasn't quite ready to give up on bike racing. I had always dreamt of racing my bike in
0:28.9	Europe because that's the heartland, and I decided, well, this is my opportunity. So in the middle
0:35.6	of grad school, Chris made a go of it.
0:38.2	He flew to Belgium and got a little apartment and began testing himself against the elite
0:42.8	riders in a place where bicycle racing is a really big deal.
0:46.7	It's full of traditions and idiosyncrasies like the Rodania car that drives ahead of
0:51.5	Belgium bike races, blaring an ad for Rodania watches.
0:58.7	It's the ice cream truck of Belgium.
1:00.9	Everyone hears that call, and they hear the Rodania, and they know there's a bike race happening just out their front door.
1:09.6	And so they gather alongside with their paper cones of fries and beer and watch
1:15.5	the racing.
1:16.8	So there's Chris doing this thing he's always dreamed of doing.
1:20.6	And he's performing really well, placing in races and just training all the time.
1:24.8	Taking these long rides on narrow ribbons of road through the Ardenne,
1:28.9	a region stretching from Belgium, through France, Luxembourg, and into Germany.
1:32.9	I would go on these rides and I would pass through the spruce forests. It's so peaceful.
1:39.6	And I couldn't help thinking whenever I sort of encountered these moments out there that this is also this place where there's this unbelievable carnage happened there during World War II.
1:52.9	And this is where Chris's curiosity and love for journalism began creeping back into focus.
	...

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