WWII PROSECUTOR VIVIDLY RECALLS NAZI CRIMES.

Byline: Joe Bigham Associated Press 

He'll be 93 years old in a few days, but Col. Burton Ellis still vividly remembers dates and details of the Nazi war crimes trials half a century ago.

As a World War II military lawyer, Ellis helped investigate and prosecute crimes against humanity that shocked the world. The war crimes trials helped expose Nazi concentration camp horrors, including grisly human experiments and the extermination of Jews.

``Everything you have read about atrocities committed by camp personnel - and in some instances German civilians who captured American fliers - all of it is true,'' Ellis said. ``They were all committed - just horrible things.''

The first war crimes case the United States military tried after the war involved an experiment in which kerosene was injected into prisoners.

``They just died a horrible death,'' Ellis recalled.

Ellis was assigned to Dachau for trials of Nazi defendants who ironically were imprisoned in their own death camps. Ellis said the trials of prominent Nazi policy makers were held at Nuremberg, giving the world the shorthand phrase the Nuremberg Trials.

Overall, about 1,700 cases were tried before the operation was shut down at the end of 1947, Ellis said. Most of the time Ellis gathered evidence, but he was the lead prosecutor on one case called the ``Malmedy Massacre.''

``I asked to try it,'' Ellis said. ``I had been real active in the five- or six-month investigation of evidence in that case. It would have been hard for another prosecutor to come in and get that case together.''

The Malmedy Massacre occurred in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, the last major Nazi attempt to push back the Allied troops advancing on Germany in December 1944.

About 100 U.S. servicemen were captured and herded into a field. A machine gunner was placed at one point to guard them, Ellis said.

German troops then drove up, and one soldier in a weapons carrier took a shot at the prisoners.

``The Americans started to run, and the machine gun opened up, and Germans from all the weapons carriers opened fire,'' Ellis said. ``After the shooting was over, they went into the field, and anybody who looked alive was shot (in) the helmet.''

He said one downed soldier's helmet had partly slipped off his head, so he survived even though two bullets were fired into the helmet.

``After about two hours, those who could jumped up and ran,'' Ellis continued. ``They got back to American lines and told what happened.''

The stories 17 survivors told helped convict 73 German soldiers, but Ellis also brought in testimony that the same soldiers had killed 150 Belgian civilians during their advance.

``They herded Belgians out of basements and didn't kill the ones who spoke German,'' Ellis said. ``The rest of them, they executed right there - women, children and old men. That was part of the evidence we used.''

A 74th German - who Ellis said fired the first shot - was extradited by the French Occupation Forces and wound up being acquitted, Ellis said.

Forty-three soldiers convicted of the Malmedy Massacre were sentenced to be executed.

``All the death sentences eventually were commuted,'' Ellis said.

After the Malmedy prosecution, Ellis served as chief of operations and trials at Dachau, then was transferred to the Presidio at San Francisco until the Korean War. He became a full colonel then, and retired on Dec. 31, 1955, after 13 years in the Army.

Ellis and his wife moved to Merced, where he developed an almond orchard and practiced law until the early 1980s. Even after retirement, he had one client who ``kept having problems,'' so Ellis occasionally went to court to help that client before finally quitting two years ago at age 90.

Surrounded by an office filled with military mementos, Ellis, who was born Sept. 13, 1903, recalled that an irregular heartbeat cost him an appointment to West Point and a spot in his college's advanced Reserve Officers Training Corps. Instead, he became a lawyer.

``But when it came to the regular Army during World War II, the doctor gave me a waiver,'' he said.

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Photo: Burton Ellis

Exposed German atrocities