Episode 4: Spectacle 43:48

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Okay, to be different. Back-to-back documentaries, Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC. The cartoon appeared on the front page, right in the middle, above the fold. Already we are having sentences passed, passed on the defendants who were found guilty this morning.

It's the day after the Nuremberg verdicts in October 1946. The surviving leadership of the Nazi regime has been convicted of war crimes, many of them sentenced to death. On account of the indictment on which you have been convicted, the tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.

The cartoon that appeared on the front page of the newspaper right after those verdicts showed a Nazi soldier standing on top of a makeshift pedestal. And on the pedestal, it says, quote, German martyr. Below that, it says, Nazi criminal convicted by a biased court composed of Germany's enemies in an illegally conducted trial upon unlawful evidence illicitly procured.

It's the day after the Nuremberg verdicts. And on the front page of this newspaper, the convicted Nazis are martyrs. The publication that ran that cartoon on the front page that day, it was not a German newspaper. It was not some old Nazi paper somehow still being published over there. No, this was the Chicago Tribune.

According to the front page of the Chicago Tribune, right after the Nuremberg verdicts are announced, when the Nazi war criminals are convicted, among other things, for orchestrating the Holocaust, on the front page of the Tribune, those Nazis are the martyrs. And the real crime here is the fact that the Allies put the Nazis on trial at all.

The Chicago Tribune in the 1930s and 1940s was a Goliath. It was one of the most widely read newspapers in the whole country. Every edition of the paper featured an American flag at the top with a tagline, an American paper for Americans. And the paper had an unmistakable editorial bent. You have just heard Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune.

Robert R. McCormick had inherited this important newspaper from his grandfather and his father. He was an intimidating six-foot-four. He was very, very, very sure of his own brilliance. His politics were sometimes described as Republican, but it was probably closer to the mark to call them reactionary. One critic famously said that Robert McCormick had, quote, "...the greatest mind of the 14th century."

In the 1920s, McCormick's Chicago Tribune editorials repeatedly praised Mussolini, saying, quote, When Rhode Island named what he considered to be too many Democrats as judges, McCormick ordered that one star — the star representing Rhode Island — should be physically ripped out of the American flag in the Chicago Tribune's lobby.

He only relented on that one after being told that mutilating the flag was a federal crime. Under Robert McCormick, the Chicago Tribune called an African-American murder suspect a, quote, "'jungle beast' and pointed to the darkness of his skin tone to suggest explicitly that he might not be fully human."

McCormick and his newspaper picked all kinds of fights. The senator asked if Al Capone was at one time on the Tribune's payroll. Al Capone was never on the Tribune's payroll. As a business, the Chicago Tribune, under Robert McCormick, was repeatedly accused of gangster tactics against its competitors. I will say that the senator's statements were without basis in fact, and in particular that Mr. Annenberg did not ever shoot or shoot at an officer or employee of a competing newspaper.

That was Robert McCormick. And by the 1940s, his big, pugnacious, controversial newspaper was the beating heart of the American right. We have chosen to fight New Deal communism.

McCormick and his Chicago Tribune were vocal critics of FDR, of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were vocal supporters of the America First Committee, which tried to stop America from joining the war against the Nazis. I only wish there were more Americans in the United States of America that loved America first.

Once the war had been fought and won by America and its allies, McCormick and his very profitable, very influential paper decided to take up a strange new hobby horse, a new cause.

sympathy for Nazi war criminals. History revenue page and responsibility for looking war today as the war crimes trial of 20 former top Nazi and German military leaders opened at Nuremberg. The Chicago Tribune argued vociferously, repeatedly, against prosecuting the Nazis. One Easter Sunday, the Tribune editorialized that the Nuremberg trial was so corrupt it would have, quote, "'gagged' Pontius Pilate.'"

And the Tribune was not alone in this effort. Republican Congressman Claire Hoffman of Michigan had been a loud, proud member of the America First movement. Unless we adhere strictly to these provisions in the Constitution, we'll have a dictator right here in Washington. In fact, we almost have one now. When Americans during the war were put on trial for sedition for working with the Nazis, Claire Hoffman was one of the congressmen who came to their defense and criticized the trial.

Now, after the war, he was railing against putting the German Nazi leadership on trial as well. But it was more than just the right-wing juggernaut Chicago Tribune and far-right congressmen like Claire Hoffman.

Distinguished United States Senator from the state of Ohio, the Honorable Robert Taft. Senator Robert Taft was such a titan of Republican politics, his nickname was Mr. Republican. He was the son of Republican President William Howard Taft. He was expected by many people to be president himself one day. Senator Taft had also been among the members of Congress who had railed against the sedition trial during the war.

Then, after the war, Taft also launched a very public crusade against Nuremberg. Taft started giving speeches saying that prosecution was not derived from, quote, Anglo-Saxon heritage. He said it was motivated by a spirit of vengeance. He said America would long regret its involvement in prosecuting Nazis for war crimes. ♪

And as strange as that sounds today, because America by and large does not regret its involvement in prosecuting Nazis, that line of argument actually came off a little strange then, too. President Harry Truman said he would have no comment on these Republicans making such a big show of opposing the prosecution of Nazis, but he no commented it with such a look of satisfaction on his face that it got a big round of laughter from reporters in the White House press corps.

But as crazy as their arguments seemed, morally and honestly politically, this idea did take hold in part of the Republican Party. And they were willing to push through the initial negative response to it.

because it was important to them. This argument, that the Nazis were being unfairly persecuted by the United States. Both our pro-Nazi groups over here and the actual German Nazis over there. It was our government that was the bad guy. With that case to make, as unpopular and as radical as it was, things were about to get weird in Washington. And two very different politicians

We're about to be set on a fatal collision course. This is Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra.

We're about to hear an address delivered before a meeting of the America First Committee in Madison Square Garden in New York City. Most of these people were fascists, were aligned with the fascist cause. Today's guest, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. What he wanted was an investigation. The problem was he did not know what he was talking about.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. When I was working in the Senate, I didn't realize that it's the perfect training for the job that I have now. Covering government, covering politics, the complexity of it all. Mastering the detail is crucial to being able to present anything.

that happens in Senate buildings or any of the other news centers that we have to focus on every day. The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, weeknights at 10 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC. Today's news requires more facts, more context, and more analysis. The world's never been harder to understand. That's why it's never been more important to try. MSNBC. Understand more. Episode 4. Spectacle.

I present to you a great American, Colonel Charles Lindbergh. Ahead of World War II, the famous American pilot Charles Lindbergh had led the America First Committee, arguing that we weren't at any risk in this war, that we shouldn't join it, that we would lose the war if we did. We are on the verge of war, for which we are still unprepared, against armies stronger than our own.

When America was attacked, and America did join the war, that put Lindbergh and his organization in a tough spot. The America First Committee formally disbanded itself just after the Pearl Harbor attack. Lindbergh himself even briefly attempted to re-enlist in the military.

But once we were in the war, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the White House that even though America First had officially dissolved, some of the group's leadership kept meeting during the war in secret. In his words, they had gone underground.

FBI files record that at one of their underground meetings in New York, Lindbergh told the group that they should, quote, keep on the alert and be ready to reemerge because soon the American people would see how they'd been betrayed by their own government. In other words, these guys were still expecting us to lose the war to Hitler and the Nazis, whereupon they were planning to reemerge as the Americans who would work things out with Hitler.

They thought they would be the ones to make the arrangements for America's surrender, a negotiated peace with the Nazis. Had the war gone that way, who knows? Maybe they might have. But things didn't go that way. America won the war. Where did that leave members of the America First movement?

Many America First lawmakers were voted out of office after they were implicated in the huge Nazi propaganda scheme in Congress that had involved some of the defendants in the Great Sedition Trial during the war. Sedition trial opens in Washington. Some lawmakers, like Congressman Claire Hoffman, were even hauled in to testify to the grand jury in that case. 30 in all charged with scheming to establish a Nazi government in the United States.

But despite their participation in that conspiracy to push Nazi propaganda through Congress and feed it to the American people, no criminal charges were ever brought against any members of Congress for that. We just let it be and moved on. And so, a bunch of powerful forces and figures who'd been involved in America First before the war, they got to work on this brand new project after the war.

coming to the defense of the now-defeated Nazis. Here's historian John Jackson. Henry Regnery was part of the isolationist crowd before World War II. Henry Regnery was a prominent member of the America First Committee before the war. He was from a very rich family. His father had co-founded and funded America First. Henry Regnery, the son, helped found a right-wing magazine called Human Events.

Just one day after the Nuremberg trial started, the magazine railed against that prosecution as a, quote, Regnery then launched his own conservative publishing company, which is still around to this day.

The first books he published argued that the Nazis were being treated very unfairly, that the supposed atrocities committed by the Nazi regime were really no worse than what anyone else did. He was searching around for authors who would make that case, that equivalent sort of atrocities were committed by the Allies as the Axis powers.

Problem-wise, most of these people that Regnery publishes in the late 40s, early 50s were fascists, were aligned with the fascist cause, with Hitler's cause. It's one thing to be opposed to the Nuremberg trials on legal grounds, to be wary of the idea of any sort of ad hoc post-war legal proceeding. There were definitely some people making those good-faith arguments at the time, right, left, and center.

But you could tell when it was something else, when it wasn't just the defeated Nazis overseas that they were taking up for. It was for our Nazis here at home as well. American justice returns a verdict of guilty in the trial of William Dudley Pelley, silver shirt leader. The defendants in the Great Sedition Trial had mostly been freed after their case ended in a mistrial. But by the time the war was over,

there was one of them still behind bars, William Dudley Pelley. He wants to build an American version of fascism. That's historian Bradley Hart. Pelley's people were ready to rise up and fight on behalf of the Nazis domestically. And he really didn't even conceal the fact that that was what he had in mind. Pelley was the founder of the Silver Shirts, which was an anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi armed militia in the United States before World War II.

He repeatedly ran into legal trouble for fraud, for grifting and conning his own supporters. But Pelley ended up in prison for most of the war, specifically for his conviction for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government.

This is a group that I think is a very serious national security threat. I mean, there's really no veneer of this being in any way interested in anything other than violence and political revolution. It's hard to imagine a less appealing political poster child than William Dudley Pelley. He actually says outright, I intend to overthrow the U.S. government. He's open about these objectives.

But at the end of World War II, there was a groundswell of support among the old America First movement to free Pelley, to spring him from prison. The campaign was led by the Chicago Tribune, which began editorializing in favor of getting Pelley paroled. They published letters describing Pelley as a political prisoner. His cause was also taken up by America First members of Congress.

Tonight from Washington, D.C., you are to hear an address by the Honorable William Langer, twice governor and now Republican senator from North Dakota. During the war, Republican Senator Bill Langer had turned up at the courthouse in D.C. to show off his support for the defendants in the sedition trial. The pick of the bunch of pro-Hitlerites is Mrs. Lois De Lafayette Washburn, who rips off a Nazi salute to her here... He sang their praises on the Senate floor. He helped arrange their legal defense.

After the war was over, Langer took up the cause of getting parole for William Dudley Pelley for this fascist leader. He made a personal visit to the federal prison in Indiana where Pelley was serving his sentence. When Pelley was denied parole, Langer introduced a Senate resolution to look into why it was that Pelley was being persecuted so unfairly.

After pressure from Langer and other Republican members of Congress and from the Chicago Tribune and other parts of the conservative press, William Dudley Pelley did get parole. They got him out. Along the way, that campaign to free him attracted the support of one young up-and-coming member of the United States Senate.

A new Republican senator from the state of Wisconsin. Today's guest, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy was in his first term. He had just been elected to the Senate after unseating a longtime popular incumbent. After that upset victory, one of the first things McCarthy did was run to Chicago to go kiss the ring of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick.

Then McCarthy got to work in the Senate, aligning himself with some of the Tribune's pet causes, like parole for American fascist leader William Dudley Pelley, like opposition to the Nuremberg prosecution of high-ranking Nazis. McCarthy described Nuremberg as a, quote, sorry spectacle. And then McCarthy jumped headlong into what would become a brand new crusade. It had to do with one of the most notorious crimes against American soldiers in the whole war.

The military court at Dekau in Germany has just finished that trial of Hitler's SS men who were charged with the slaughter of American prisoners at Malmedy in Belgium. The Malmedy Massacre. The Nazi soldiers who had carried out the Malmedy Massacre of unarmed American POWs, they had been put on trial and convicted and sentenced.

In the wake of their convictions, though, the convicts and their Nazi lawyer had cooked up an elaborate false story that they had all been tortured, horribly mistreated by Jewish investigators and interrogators in the U.S. Army. Here's historian Stephen Remy. That they had had limbs broken, that they had been assaulted, that their testicles had been damaged.

The bones had been broken. It was very graphic. The claims were very graphic. They were also very false. The men who initially made these false claims admitted they were false. Their defense lawyer at trial admitted they were false. And they'd been proven baseless by no fewer than four separate American reviews of the case. They all conclude that there was no torture. But for the convicted men and their Nazi supporters inside Germany...

These false claims about them having been tortured, it served their direct purpose of trying to overturn their convictions and get out of jail. German lawyers were feeding these stories of torture to really any American who would listen. It also served a larger purpose, portraying the Nazis as the real persecuted victims and hopefully monkey-wrenching the whole process of holding Nazis accountable for their crimes.

What American would want to be part of that, would want to help with that? One of those was the McCormick family's Chicago Daily Tribune. The Chicago Tribune.

The torture stories were headline-getters. The Tribune ran detailed stories with all of these graphic allegations about how those Malminy Massacre defendant Nazi officers had been tortured by Americans. So did the conservative New York Daily News, the sister paper of the Chicago Tribune, run by Robert McCormick's cousin.

These outlets breathlessly, credulously reported about Malmedy defendants who had suffered broken jaws and broken arms, permanently injured organs, burning matches driven under their fingernails. They had no evidence to support any of this. These were very serious accusations of extreme forms of physical and psychological abuse. They did nothing to confirm the accusations themselves.

They presented them as factual. Not too far behind was Regnery Publishing, which began putting out books about how terrible and evil the American interrogators had been to those poor Nazi SS officers in the Malmedy trial. The America First movement may have lost the fight to keep America from going to war against the Nazis in the first place.

But this was kind of their next project, accelerating these false claims about evil Americans and innocent Nazis. The people pushing this hoax would find the most help among sympathetic members of Congress. A small number of American congressmen start picking up on this story. That included Republican Senator Bill Langer, fresh off his efforts to free fascist militia leader William Dudley Pelley.

Langer started promoting these baseless torture claims, including all the horror movie details the Nazis had invented to try to really sell the story. Like, for example, the guy who said he had the burning matchsticks shoved under his fingernails.

Not only was that proven to be false, but that guy was never even in prison with the Malmedy defendants. Now, Langer is very confused. He presented a highly distorted account of what supposedly had gone on during the investigation and the trial.

This was propaganda manufactured inside Germany, pushed by well-connected operators who were trying, among other things, to return Nazism to power there. In the United States Congress, there was a select group that was more than willing to repeat that stuff, to give it their personal stamp of validation. It was the exact same play the Nazis had run with their favorite members of Congress before the war. Now here it was again.

Joining the chorus on Malmedy was Bill Langer's new wingman in the Senate, young Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy at that time was relatively unknown, still relatively unknown junior senator. Joe McCarthy was a fairly unremarkable, under-the-radar Republican senator. He had taken down a big name in order to get himself into the Senate, though.

And now that he was there, he saw an opportunity to make a big name for himself. He was looking for a way to raise his visibility, and he caught wind of the Malmedy case. McCarthy had a sizable German-American population back home in Wisconsin. He also had a particular German-American to whom he paid lots of extra attention.

It was his largest donor, someone who not only supported McCarthy's campaign, he'd also personally bailed McCarthy out by posting collateral for the senator when he fell into financial trouble early in his Senate career. He was a businessman whose company had been in trouble under FDR for advertising that it only wanted job applicants if they were white and Gentile.

When the Nazi propaganda hoax about the supposed torture of the Malmedy defendants started to make news in the United States, McCarthy's big donor told the senator that he was sending a lawyer from his own company in Wisconsin to Washington to go work in McCarthy's office specifically on that issue.

McCarthy, at that point, looking to make a splash, hoping to get some press, trying to curry favor both back home and with right-wing kingmaker publications like the Chicago Tribune, he had started repeating these baseless claims that Nazi officers had been the victims of abuse and torture at the hands of vengeful, mostly Jewish American GIs.

McCarthy said that he had important information indicating that the actions of the Americans involved was, quote, more than improper.

His partner on this in the Senate, Bill Langer, described the Malmedy case as shocking. He said it was one of the most deplorable miscarriages of justice in history. What he wanted was an investigation. He wanted one of the committees of the Senate to carry out an investigation of the whole sordid affair. Bill Langer and Joe McCarthy wanted an official Senate investigation of these allegations. And that is what they got.

By echoing and amplifying these false Nazi torture claims, they got the Senate Armed Services Committee to agree to formally look into it. The investigation would be chaired by Republican Senator Raymond Baldwin of Connecticut, along with Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and also a young freshman senator who had only been sworn into the Senate a few months earlier, Democratic Senator Lester Hunt.

This investigation was his first major assignment as a new senator. Well, he was one of three members of the committee. Quite a coup for a freshman. He had been in the Senate only a couple of months. Baldwin, Kefauver, and Hunt. Those were the three senators who would look into these allegations. At least that was the plan.

Senator Joe McCarthy had other ideas. That was Lester Hunt's introduction to Joe McCarthy. And it was quite ugly. That's next. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts to get new episodes of Morning Joe and the Rachel Maddow Show ad-free. Plus ad-free listening to all of Rachel Maddow's original series, Ultra, Bagman, and Deja News.

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At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex.

Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. Lester Hunt had been in the Senate only a couple of months when the Senate decided it would investigate the Malminy Massacre.

It's his first major assignment in Washington as a brand new U.S. Senator. One of the prosecutors of the Nazi stormtroopers, sentenced for their role in the Malmedy massacre, has been invited to testify before the Senate committee, now checking into the trial.

After a massacre of unarmed American prisoners of war, after the perpetrators were caught and put on trial and convicted, after four separate reviews of the investigation and the trial and the convictions found them all to be legit, found them all to be sound, now the U.S. Senate is doing its own additional investigation. Basically, because of a foreign influence operation that worked.

The senators are probing reports that the Germans were beaten and starved to get confessions from them. The torture stories began to be fed to the United States and picked up by the American press and by other sympathetic and interested Americans, including some members of Congress. The Senate hearings began in earnest in April 1949.

The Armed Services Committee had appointed three senators to investigate, Raymond Baldwin, Estes Kefauver, and Lester Hunt. They're from different parties, different parts of the country.

But they're united in their determination that they're going to do this properly. The three members of the subcommittee, Baldwin in particular, was determined to make this investigation as thorough as it possibly could be. That earnest determination from these three senators soon runs right into the equal and opposite force that was Joe McCarthy. ♪

For reasons that aren't clear, Joe McCarthy somehow wiggled himself onto the committee and convinced the leadership to let him come to the committee hearings as a special observer. Once the hearings start, though...

He sheds any pretense that he's there just to observe. He, in a very belligerent and forceful way, hijacked the hearings and made them very difficult for anybody to find the truth. The transcript of the hearings is wild.

McCarthy over and over again interrupts the senators who are actually doing the investigation. He speaks more words in the transcript than some of the actual members of the committee. He objects to American GIs, the survivors of the Malmedy massacre, being called to testify. When witnesses do testify, he speaks over them too. Some of them he just berates. Right from the jump, he turns this whole investigation into a spectacle.

He basically bullied himself into the hearing room in the first place. Once he was there, he was determined to get his money's worth.

McCarthy thought this was an easy way to score an easy and cheap political victory. When you read through the manuscripts, as I did, the picture you get is Hunt rather reserved, using his time to ask questions that were penetrating and designed to get evidence, but confronted with this brawler, Joe McCarthy.

This strategy, of course, would become a hallmark later in McCarthy's Senate career. But this is where it starts, the Malminy Massacre.

Joe McCarthy and others spreading to the American people pro-Nazi propaganda, straight-up lies cooked up in Germany specifically to undermine and mess with the United States. Almost inexplicably, Joe McCarthy took the side of the Nazis and advocated their position. McCarthy announced in the Senate all the Nazis' horror movie claims as if they were proven fact.

They were not. He said the vast majority of the Nazi defendants had been, quote, crippled for life by the supposed torture. None of them were. Weirdly, he embellished even that, saying the crippled-for-life Nazis were kids. They were 15 and 16 years old. That wasn't true either.

But by then, he apparently was just riffing, just making stuff up. In the Malmedy case, the army denied any brutality to obtain confessions. And then he goes even further. He zeroes in on U.S. soldiers who had been involved in the investigation, in questioning the Nazi defendants. He

He zeroes in on very specific U.S. soldiers. McCarthy learns about the background of some of the interrogators, and he makes a connection that some of the investigators were Jewish.

He starts to parrot some of the same anti-Semitic narratives, and he tries very clumsily and ineffectively to introduce this into the dialogue. He calls U.S. soldiers who were Jewish, who were investigators on the case, quote, a vengeance team. He said they had committed, quote, brutalities greater than any we have ever accused Hitler Germany of employing. He said the soldiers who obtained confessions from the Nazis were...

were, quote, non-Aryans who, quote, intensely hated the German people as a race. This Senate performance by Joe McCarthy, his takeover of the investigation, his amplification, even his embellishment of these lurid Nazi talking points, it made for a real spectacle.

even more so when he made a big show out of storming out of the proceedings. He quit and storms out of the committee very dramatically and very publicly and accuses the army of a cover-up and a whitewash.

When he stormed out of the hearing, McCarthy went straight to the press. He accused the U.S. Army of terribly mistreating the Nazis. He said the Senate investigation was rigged. He said what the U.S. Army did in the Malmedy trial was, quote, a brand of brutalitarianism worse than that practiced by the most morally degenerate in Hitler's camp.

He said the day is going to come when the chair of the Senate investigation, Senator Baldwin, would, quote, bitterly regret what McCarthy called his criminal responsibility for a whitewash. This Nazi propaganda, this hoax, was a cause that had been championed by the Chicago Tribune and by trailing ends of the America First movement, by those who had taken up for the pro-Nazi sedition trial defendants during the war.

And now, here was Joe McCarthy getting his first national attention as a senator for grabbing that same mantle. It got him a big picture in the New York Times. The caption was, "'An irate senator takes a walk.'"

The senators on the committee, as shocked as they were by McCarthy buffaloing his way through the hearings and storming out theatrically and uncritically shoveling all the claims made by the Nazis, they knew they still had an investigation to complete, with or without him. They brought the investigation all the way to Germany to talk firsthand to the Nazis who were claiming they had been tortured by Americans.

They talked to the Nazi lawyer who had been spreading those claims so effectively, both in Germany and the United States.

They interviewed medical personnel and reviewed medical records to look into all those supposedly severe and permanent injuries. The medical exams simply showed no evidence of the kind of physical damage to bones, to testicles that the prisoners had claimed in their affidavits. Senator Lester Hunt himself proved particularly valuable to that part of the investigation, thanks of all things to his background as a dentist.

He reviewed medical records from their period of confinement to determine whether he saw any evidence of torture. And he was specifically assigned that because of his medical background. The Senate's investigation of the Malmedy trial was the most thorough review that was done of the entire affair. The official record of the hearings alone is nearly 2,000 pages. They interviewed more than 100 witnesses, including every investigator who questioned the Nazi defendants.

They spoke to the officials who ran the prison where the defendants had been held. They spoke directly to the Nazi soldiers who claimed they'd been tortured by the Americans. They spoke to doctors who had treated them. They spoke to the assistants of the doctors, at least one of whom bluntly admitted that the affidavit filed in her name had been written up by the Nazi lawyers who had taken over the case without even consulting her.

In the end, the findings of the investigation were clear. The committee concluded that the torture claims were baseless. Baseless. Like every review that had come before it. No matter what Joe McCarthy and Bill Langer and the Chicago Tribune and all the old America First guys were trying to sell, it just did not happen.

Some of the convicted men themselves later admitted that they had lied or that they had grossly exaggerated what had happened to them. As part of their investigation, the senators had asked U.S. Army counterintelligence in Germany to look into the origin of these false claims.

Counterintelligence reported back that, quote, a number of former ex-Nazis, particularly high-ranking ones, are financing and supporting campaigns against the Malmedy case. Groups of ex-Nazis worked to undermine both the project of de-Nazification, purging German society of all traces of national socialism itself,

They also fought very hard to undermine war crimes trials. This was mainly because not only were they unrepentant Nazis, they considered Germans to be victims. Victims of the Jews.

The Senate committee wrote in their final report that the torture claims had been ginned up in Germany as part of what they called an organized effort to revive the nationalistic spirit in Germany through every means possible. An effort to revive the nationalistic spirit. The Associated Press put a bit of a finer point on it. Their headline was, quote, Senators see Malmedy case as dangerous pro-Nazi plot. So...

The torture claims, they were not just frivolously made up. They were deliberately created for a reason, not only to free the members of the Nazi SS blowtorch battalion, but also to try to free all of the Nazis, to try to vindicate the Nazis and to discredit the Allies, and in Germany, to try to return Nazism to power.

Why were there Americans who were willing to get on board with this, including this World War II veteran, this ambitious young senator, Joe McCarthy? Why did he become involved in this? And that's an interesting question. Joe McCarthy's speeches about Malmedy, his repetition and exaggeration of the false torture claims, his accusations that the investigation in the Senate was a big cover-up,

These claims by McCarthy not only got him attention in the United States, they were getting picked up and broadcast all over Germany. This U.S. senator validating, legitimizing the Nazis' claims about the terrible allies, the terrible Americans, doing to the innocent Nazis things that were worse than anything Hitler ever did.

One Washington columnist wrote, "...throughout Germany today, and particularly in underground SS and reviving Nazi channels, Germans are circulating savagely anti-American propaganda. This propaganda represents Americans as brutal, gangster-like oppressors. Senator Joseph McCarthy gave this propaganda an important assist."

That was columnist Marquis Childs. And as he and other members of the press tried to sound the alarm about the consequences of what McCarthy was doing, one senator who knew exactly what McCarthy was up to was deciding what to do about it. I suspect he was a little shell-shocked by McCarthy's tactics. He was not bound by the truth or by facts.

He would say anything at any time. That was something that Lester Hunt, both on a personal level and in political experience, had never encountered.

Lester Hunt was disgusted with what he saw from Joe McCarthy. When McCarthy released his own report on Malmedy, repeating the torture allegations and alleging, again, some sinister cover-up in the Senate, Senator Hunt went through it line by line, and he wrote in the margins where McCarthy was wrong, where he was definitely lying, and must have known he was lying.

He'd only been in the Senate such a short period of time and then didn't quite know what to make of it or how to challenge it. It just wasn't Hunt's style to engage in that sort of verbal combat. You know, that's not the way they did things back in Wyoming. And he wasn't accustomed to that. And this was his first time on that stage with people of that kind.

Lester Hunt did mostly hold his fire while the Senate investigation was ongoing. But when it was over, he decided he did need to take a stand against McCarthy. He accused him publicly of hitting below the belt with his attacks. He said he personally resented McCarthy's efforts to delegitimize the Senate investigation.

He was not shy at all about telling the country what he thought about McCarthy. He called him an opportunist, said he was a liar and a drunk. He was pretty blunt about it. Lester Hunt standing up to McCarthy in this way, it would end up costing him. Because Hunt and his colleagues on that committee and members of the press, they soon discovered what exactly McCarthy had been up to with this Malmedy stunt, who he had been involved with.

Joseph McCarthy's maiden voyage into the national spotlight, this strange defense of the Nazis, it was not a one-off for him. In many ways, it was a sign of what was yet to come.

He would take information wherever he could find it. And if it meant working with, you know, far-right people with a specific agenda, then he would do that. McCarthy was about to open the door to some of the darkest elements on the American ultra-right. Groups who wanted to end American democracy. He would start his meetings by hiling Hitler and then hiling McCarthy.

and a man who at that very moment was on the run from U.S. authorities over his explicit ties to the Nazis. "Yaki assumes a number of identities, keeps moving. First he's over here, then he's over there." Francis Yaki, the fugitive American fascist, was about to reemerge in a way that would leave American authorities in something approaching a panic. "If any journalist had learned about this connection, I think Joe McCarthy's career would have been severely damaged right then and there."

But the fact is, no one found out. That is next time. Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra is a production of MSNBC. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It's produced by Kelsey Desiderio and Jen Mulraney Donovan.

Our associate producer is Vassilios Karsalakis. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory and Katherine Anderson. Our head of audio production is Bryson Barnes. Our senior executive producers are Corey Nazo and Laura Conaway. Our web producer is Will Femia. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MSNBC Audio. Rebecca Cutler is the senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC.

Archival radio material is from NBC News via the Library of Congress. You can find much more about this series at our website, msnbc.com slash ultra.

Senator Josh Hawley has found a new publisher after his book deal was dropped in the wake of the Capitol riot, Regnery Publishing. Senator Hawley has been widely criticized for objecting to the presidential election results despite a lack of evidence, and some say he has blood on his hands for the riots at the Capitol. Simon & Schuster was supposed to publish the book before backing out of the deal.

Sunday on MSNBC. Two documentaries. At 9, To Be Destroyed. The story of one community's fight against book banning. Followed by It's Okay. A short film about embracing differences in small-town America. Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.