A Peculiar Crusade

Willis M. Everett and the Malmedy Massacre

James J. Weingartner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814784730
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

In the wake of World War II, 74 members of the Nazi SS were accused of a war crime--soon to be known as the Malmedy Massacre--in which a large number of American prisoners of war were murdered during the Battle of the Bulge. All of the German defendants were found guilty and more than half were sentenced to death.

Yet none was executed and, a decade later, all had been released from prison. This outcome resulted primarily from the dogged efforts of Willis M. Everett, Jr., a prominent Atlanta attorney who jeopardized his status as a member of the social elite to defend with great zeal and commitment the accused Germans.

James Weingartner offers fresh insights into one of the most controversial episodes of World War II and in the process casts new light on the often convoluted politics of war crimes justice.

1
The Everetts of Atlanta

THE EVERETT FAMILY was not of the Old South, but, then, neither was Atlanta. Willis Mead Everett and his new bride settled there in 1888, less than fifty years after Atlanta was established as a railroad and commercial center. Everett was of old Yankee stock, with roots that extended back, on his father’s side, to seventeenth-century Massachusetts and, on his mother’s, to Kiliaen van Rennselaer, first patroon of Rennselaerwyck in New Holland. Timothy, his father, had commanded a company of the sixty-fourth New York Infantry during the Civil War, and it was in the midst of that terrible conflict that Willis was born, on November 18, 1863, in Randolph, New York, south of Buffalo and about twelve miles north of the border with Pennsylvania. He graduated from Chamberlain Institute and Female College in Randolph at the age of sixteen and, in 1885, received his A.B. from Allegheny College in Meadeville, Pennsylvania. While a student at Allegheny, he read law in the afternoons with Judge John H. Henderson, of the Pennsylvania Court of Appeals, although his initial postbaccalaureate employment was as professor of mathematics and German at Chamberlain. Also prior to graduation from Allegheny, he served as a passenger agent for steamboats plying Lake Chautauqua, a few miles west of Randolph, in the course of which he met his future wife, Mary Catherine Gillette, born in Schenectady but now of Atlanta, who may have been attending one of the enormously popular adult education sessions held nearby. In 1886, Everett moved to Cincinnati, where he was admitted to the Ohio bar and opened a law office with his brother, Charles. The practice does not appear to have prospered, as much of his income was earned by tutoring students in German, Latin, and mathematics. But his courtship of Mary Gillette was more successful. He visited her in Atlanta during the Christmas season of that year, and, following the death of her mother, the two were married on August 15, 1887. By then, Willis Everett had departed Cincinnati for Illinois and had opened a law office in Chicago. He and his bride remained there little more than a year before settling permanently in Atlanta in the fall of 1888.¹

The only direct surviving evidence to explain the motivation for the Everetts’ migration south is a much later comment, in their son’s hand, that notes laconically that “Chicago was too cold for Mother.”² A winter on Lake Michigan may well have been grim for one who had become accustomed to the mild climate of Georgia, but the reasons may have extended beyond the meteorological. The Atlanta of 1888 had long since recovered from the devastation of Sherman’s “visit” of 1864 and was booming. The 1880s were a pivotal period in the history of Atlanta; it was in that decade that the city emerged as the economic dynamo of the southeastern United States. Its population nearly doubled during the decade, to more than 65,000, and the volume of its commerce approximately tripled. Moreover, the commercial leaders of Atlanta energetically publicized their city’s economic dynamism beyond the South and assured northerners that an enthusiastic welcome awaited them. Even Sherman had been cordially received in 1879, when recollections of the unpleasantness of fifteen years earlier had been limited to jocular references to the guest’s “carelessness with matches!”³ In short, Atlanta offered in all respects an appealing climate. Everett was admitted to the Georgia bar and opened a law office in the Judge Marshall Clark Building on Alabama Street. His general practice was a profitable one, and Everett moved easily into the growing haute bourgeoisie of Atlanta. The concomitants of professional success and social acceptance—a bank directorship and membership in the prestigious Atlanta Lawyers’ Club—were combined with the kind of constructive community service expected of persons of “comfortable” circumstances and, in the case of the Everetts, freely given. They were both active in church affairs; Willis’s dedication was eventually rewarded by his election as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S. on the second ballot of its seventy-eighth convocation in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1938. Everett’s successful acculturation was reflected by a benevolent paternalism toward African Americans, which was common among Atlanta’s “better” families, and he provided long service as a trustee of two African American institutions, Clark University and Gammon Theological Seminary.⁴

Professional and social success was accompanied by tragedy. Between 1890 and 1900, Mary and Willis Everett produced four children, only one of whom survived beyond early adulthood. Their first-born, Charles, died at the age of eight, and a second son, Edward, did not live to see his second birthday. Mary Louise, on the other hand, born on February 16, 1898, blossomed into a young woman of accomplishment and promise. Described as “one of the most popular and beloved young women of Atlanta,” she was graduated from Washington Seminary, an elite private school for girls that numbered Margaret Mitchell, the future author of Gone with the Wind, among its alumnae, and prepared for a teaching career at Randolph Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. In May 1924, Mary Louise was completing plans to sail to China with her mother for an August wedding to Professor J. Howe, a chemist who had been a member of the faculty of nearby Washington and Lee University, where her brother had been a student, when she was killed by lightning at the family’s vacation retreat on St. Simons Island. The short history of Atlanta and the success with which the Everetts had been integrated into its elite was indicated by their daughter’s obituary, which identified her as “a descendant of one of Atlanta’s oldest and most prominent families.”⁵

Willis Mead Everett Jr. joined his parents in mourning for Mary Louise. He was two years his sister’s junior and, at the time of her death, had been married for two years to the former Mary Wooldridge, an attractive young Memphis woman whose debut, at “an elaborate dancing party” with more than three hundred guests, had been described as “one of the most brilliant affairs of the season.”⁶ His marriage had followed preparation for a comfortable niche in Atlanta’s “polite” society. The younger Everett’s graduation, in 1916, from Atlanta’s Peacock High School—segregated as to race, gender, and socioeconomic status (young men destined for manual occupations attended “Tech High”)—had been a prelude to separation from the family home on Piedmont Avenue that summer for matriculation at Washington and Lee. The small institution, set in the wooded hills of Lexington, Virginia, was suffused by an aura of southern, elite male culture bequeathed by its namesakes and, in particular, by Robert E. Lee, who was president of then Washington College from 1865 until his death in 1870 and whose grave, located in the campus chapel, must be saluted by passing cadets of neighboring VMI. Institutional mythology records that a newly enrolled student approached Lee for a copy of the college rules. Lee supposedly replied, “We have no printed rules. We have but one rule here, and it is that every student must be a gentleman.”⁷

Willis M. Everett Jr. was a gentleman, but no scholar. He entered Washington and Lee with the intention of preparing for a career in medicine, but his academic performance fluctuated between mediocre and catastrophic, no doubt a result, in part, of his frequent absences from class. The photograph of Willis in his yearbook shows a pleasant, boyish face with broadly spaced, deep-set eyes, a wide mouth, and a somewhat angular nose framed by the slicked-down hair of the period and slightly protruding ears. Maturity would make of it a face that, in combination with his blue eyes and light brown hair, some might consider handsome. At slightly under six feet and weighing about 150 pounds, he was slender and would remain so throughout his life. It was a physique suited to the athletic field and ballroom, and he made good use of it at Washington and Lee. The summary of his college career, which accompanied the yearbook photograph, notes with gentle sarcasm that “Willis has been on the cross-country squad and also given his services to the track team, although heavy laboratory work has always interfered with his athletic ambitions.” But it clearly interfered very little with his social life. Since his arrival, it was noted:

he has been gathering friends from every part of the campus, and can now boast a host of admirers in every part of the country. . . . But it is on the dance floor and in society’s vortex that the subject of this sketch is a shining light. Never absent from even the smallest hop and always glad to delight the ladies with his presence, Willis has made himself part of all such festivities here at Washington and Lee.⁸

If seriousness of purpose was not very much in evidence, it was not totally absent. It was during the spring of Everett’s freshman year that the United States declared war on Germany. Everett had already enrolled in the recently established Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and he drilled under the direction of an instructor from VMI until May 1918. The remainder of the spring and part of the summer were spent at Plattsburgh, New York, where the War Department had established one of a number of officers’ training camps to help provide the junior leadership needed for the mass army being deployed in Europe. He was not commissioned, probably because of his youth, and may not have completed the course. Neither his personal papers nor his military records provide much information. He returned to Washington and Lee early in the fall, served briefly as cadet captain in the campus Student Army Training Corps, and was then taken into the army as a private. He had probably been drafted, as the army had halted voluntary enlistments in August 1918. Again, the records are mute. But his service as an enlisted man was brief, limited to less than two months at the army’s coast artillery school at Fort Monroe, Virginia; he was honorably discharged on November 27, 1918. In any event, his academic career was disrupted by the war, and that, along with his generally uninspired academic performance, accounts for the fact that he did not receive his A.B. degree until 1921, after he had presided over the university’s Fancy Dress Ball in the company of the lovely Elizabeth Penn of Danville.⁹

A photographic portrait of Willis Everett Sr. in middle age shows the stern, bespectacled face of a man of sober character, appropriate to his standing in the legal profession and the Presbyterian Church. He could not have been pleased by his son’s performance at Washington and Lee. The son’s grades in the sciences were no better than average and, sometimes, considerably worse than that. A career in medicine was not a viable prospect. But his performance in the humanities and social sciences was no better, and even Bible study resulted in C’s and D’s. Willis Sr. may have suggested that he join him in his well-established law practice, and Willis Jr. appears to have lacked better prospects. A law school had been one of Robert E. Lee’s innovations at what later became Washington and Lee, but Everett’s dismal record may have precluded admission. More likely, his father decided that his son required closer paternal supervision. Conveniently, Atlanta had possessed an independent law school since 1890, which had produced a substantial number of successful local attorneys. Attendance at Atlanta Law School during the years 1922–1924, in combination with reading law in his father’s office, succeeded in acquiring for the young Willis an LL.B. and admission to the Georgia bar. In the company of his young wife, he could look forward to a secure and comfortable life as a partner in the law firm of Everett and Everett.¹⁰

Willis M. Everett Sr. was one of Atlanta’s most prominent attorneys, and the office that his son joined provided a comfortable income, if not much that could be characterized as exciting or adventurous. The younger Everett later candidly described his professional life as one that involved “abstracts and titles, estates, investments, corporation and civil law”—in short, the typical career of an attorney in general practice.¹¹ His father was the dominant personality within the firm and appears to have attempted to prolong a parent-child relationship with his son, perhaps because that son was the only one of four children still surviving, perhaps because he believed that his son still required parental supervision. It was a dependent relationship, reinforced by the fact that Willis Jr. and Mary lived in his parents’ home on Piedmont Avenue until sometime in 1925. A letter dated January 25, 1925, Willis Jr.’s twenty-fifth birthday, and addressed to “My Dearest Boy” contained assurances of “how much I love you” and an unspecified sum of money to permit his son to “buy something you would like.” The balance of the birthday missive suggests paternal concern for a son who was still struggling to attain maturity, self-discipline, and a sense of purpose. “I wish that there was something that I could do that would make you truly happy,” the father wrote, and continued with the hope that his son might “accomplish the many things that I have been unable to do.” What these might have been was unspecified but it appears they had a predominantly moral, rather than material or professional, character. The only worthwhile thing in life, he assured his son,

is to help and live for others. And when you have won success, be sure that you never become a “snob.” Don’t feel that you are better or above others, but be true and helpful to everyone. After all, you will find the purest gold among those who are always helping someone else and are thinking but little of themselves. God bless you and keep you gentle and true to the best in life.¹²

A cynic might pass off this advice as pietism or cant; it does, in any event, contain much of the United Declaration on Christian Faith and Social Service, adopted by Everett’s Presbyterian Church, in 1914.¹³ The father was clearly intent upon inculcating in his heretofore somewhat sybaritic son a sense of Christian stewardship, which, even if somewhat unsophisticated, would have significant consequences.

It was probably a combination of old-fashioned patriotism, stimulated by World War I, and a desire to establish an identity independent of his father’s (the elder Everett had seen no military service) that had led Willis Jr. to apply for a commission in the Officers’ Reserve Corps of the U.S. Army even before his admission to the bar. His application, routed through the Fourth Corps Area commander, headquartered in Atlanta, to the army’s Adjutant General in Washington, D.C., is reflective of a young man unsure of himself and, perhaps, eager to conceal a less than distinguished academic career. He claimed to have been awarded a certificate on the conclusion of his two months at Plattsburgh in 1918, which, he “believed,” entitled him to a commission on reaching the age of twenty-one. Whatever the case, the certificate had “since been mislaid.” In describing his qualifications for a reserve commission, he noted that he possessed a knowledge of civil engineering and had, in fact, taken two terms in that discipline with “gentleman Cs.” Less plausible was his claim to a “fair” speaking knowledge of Spanish, French, and German in light of his having completed introductory and intermediate courses in those languages at Washington and Lee, with grades primarily in the low passing to failing range.¹⁴

But his academic credentials were of little consequence. Although the National Defense Act of 1920, with the experience of World War I still fresh, had aimed to create an effective mass “citizen army” in which well-trained reserve officers were to play a key role, neither the legislative nor the executive branch of government was willing to support adequate funding for the program. After all, the United States had just fought and won “the war to end all wars,” and budgetary frugality was the enthusiasm of the day. As a consequence, the U.S. Army’s Officers’ Reserve Corps of the interwar period was a ramshackle affair. Preparation was at best haphazard, as the army lacked the financial resources even to require periodic training for all members. In practice, reserve officers volunteered for occasional instruction as they saw fit; some enrolled in correspondence courses, while the competence of others simply evaporated, if it had ever been established.¹⁵

It is clear that Willis M. Everett Jr.’s appointment as a reserve officer was more a statement of his position as a member of Atlanta’s “polite” society than it was a reflection of his suitability to command troops in the field. Franklin S. Chalmers, a partner in the Atlanta law firm of Chalmers and Stewart, wrote a letter in support of his candidacy to the Adjutant General. Chalmers observed that he had been “in personal contact with Mr. Everett and his family for about ten years. His father is one of the foremost members of the Atlanta Bar and Willis is now in his father’s office reading law, and from my observation I am satisfied that he will in time become a worth [sic] successor of his father.” The author had to admit that he had never seen Everett “on duty with troops,” but he had no doubt as to his “qualities of leadership.”¹⁶ Everett’s application was further buttressed by letters from the Lowry Bank and Trust Company, which assured those judging his suitability for a reserve commission that he had been “a satisfactory depositor in this institution for a long while,” and from William R. Hoyt, insurance broker and tenant along with the Everett law firm in Atlanta’s Connally Building, who “had never heard anything detrimental in any respect to his character” and deemed him “a high-class honorable gentleman worthy of any commission that might be conferred on him by you.”¹⁷ Following a seventy-minute oral examination before a board of reserve officers chaired by none other than “Lieutenant Colonel” Franklin S. Chalmers, Everett was commissioned a reserve second lieutenant of infantry effective May 14, 1923.¹⁸

Service in the army reserves would remain a feature of Willis Everett’s life for thirty years, while he and his wife raised two children: a daughter, Mary Campbell, born in 1923, and a son, Willis Mead III, who followed eleven years later. The younger Everetts became prominent figures in Atlanta society in their own right, evidenced by their eventual membership in Atlanta’s exclusive Piedmont Driving Club and in the fashionable First Presbyterian Church, at the corner of Peachtree and Sixteenth Streets, whose congregation included some of the city’s most influential families. Although his law practice kept him busy in Everett and Everett’s Connally Building office, Willis Jr. had time for his hobby of woodworking, which he pursued with a perfectionist passion; before prior to World War II, he built with his own hands a masonry addition to the elegant Spanish revival house on...