In January 1945, Allied soldiers found 82 frozen American POWs near Malmedy, executed during the Battle of the Bulge. Suspicion fell on SS commander Joachim Peiper, whose armored unit, nicknamed the Blowtorch Battalion, had cut a path of burned villages and dead prisoners through the Ardennes. This film traces the massacre, then follows the case into the Dachau war crimes trial, where Peiper and his men were convicted, and into the political storm that followed when Senator Joseph McCarthy took up their defense and accused American investigators of coercing confessions. That controversy, and doubts about how the trial was conducted, eventually helped secure Peiper's release from prison years later. The documentary closes with his final years in rural France, living under a false sense of security, and the unresolved, violent circumstances of his death. Along the way it uses period photographs, courtroom records, and historian interviews to weigh what the Malmedy case says about the limits of American justice after the war.