He Named Them in Congress - Joe McCarthy Knew About German POW Deaths

His fascination grew out of a seemingly genuine fear that Germans were being mistreated in the wake of the war. It was an unusual posture for a returning GI, although he’d fought the Japanese as a Marine in the South Pacific, never the Nazis. During his 1946 Senate campaign, he’d charged that more than 100,000 German POWs were dying from “ill treatment and lack of food.”
A more troubling theory popular with his critics holds that McCarthy’s actions regarding Malmedy were driven by anti-Semitism. As evidence, they pointed to his casual and frequent use of anti-Jewish slurs, which even his closest friends acknowledged to biographers. Les Chudakoff, his lawyer, was “a Hebe.” A Jewish businessman McCarthy suspected of cheating him was “a little sheeny.” And, according to Army General Counsel John Adams, the senator repeatedly referred to a Jewish staffer he disdained as a “no good, just a miserable little Jew.”