Another excerpt from Citizen Soldiers - The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany by Stephen E. Ambrose.

The SHAEF War Crimes Files are stuffed with incidents: "Case 6-123, Company B, 394th Infantry. Near Losheim on 17 December the Germans surrounded a platoon. The GIs raised a white flag, but German tanks nevertheless overran the position, covering some men with earth and firing into the foxholes. Somehow 22 men managed to surrender. The Germans herded them into a nearby draw and gunned them down. Only the aid man escaped.

"Case 6-156. Witness: Pvt. Andrew S. Protz. At Honsefeld, 5 US soldiers raised a white flag and came forward. The Germans opened fire, killing 4 and wounding 1, whereupon a German tank deliberately ran over the wounded man as he begged for help."

Pvt. Edward Webber of the 47th Infantry Regiment described a gruesome, but hardly unique, incident. He was advancing on a damaged German tank. The crew had ceased firing its machine gun, opened the turret, and were waving a white flag. Webber and his buddies moved forward. The machine gun began firing again probably by some young fanatic who refused to give up with the rest. Webber's squad fired back. "The crew came pouring out of the bottom escape hatch," Webber said. "They were hollering “Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!” But by this time we were in an infuriated rage. The crewmen were lined up on their knees and an angry soldier walked along behind them and shot each in the back of the head. The last to die was a young, blond-headed teenager who was rocking back and forth on his knees, crying and urinating down both trouser legs. He had pictures of his family spread on the ground before him. Nevertheless, he was shot in the back of the head and pitched forth like a sack of potatoes."

Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd Airborne treated POWs differently. "We had developed an intense hatred for anything and everything German," he wrote in a memoir. "We were particularly unhappy about sending them, as prisoners, to our rear. We had to stay up there and resented anyone going back to shelter and warmth. So, we always cut their belts and, with our jump knives, cut the buttons off their pants, so that they had to hold up their pants in order to keep them. It was humiliating for them, particularly the officers."

Both the American and the German army outlawed the shooting of unarmed prisoners. Both sides did it, frequently, but no courts-martial were ever convened for men charged with shooting prisoners. It is a subject everyone agreed should not be discussed, and no records were kept. Thus all commentary on the subject is anecdotal.