n 17 December, Battery C was flanked and overrun. Most of the men were killed or captured. Eleven soldiers became separated from the unit after it was overrun early on the second day of the battle. They tried to find the American lines but were unable to do so. When they reached the hamlet of Wereth, Belgium, farmer Mathias Langer offered them shelter.[4] The area they were in had been part of Germany for hundreds of years, until it was annexed by Belgium after World War I, and three of the nine families in the village were known to be still loyal to Germany. The wife of a German soldier who lived in Wereth told members of the notorious 1st SS Division that black American soldiers were hiding in her village. The SS troops quickly moved to capture the Americans, who surrendered without resistance. The SS men then marched their prisoners to a nearby field, where they were beaten, tortured, and finally shot. The frozen bodies of the victims were discovered six weeks later, when the Allies re-captured the area. The SS troops had battered the black soldiers' faces, broken their legs with rifle butts, cut off fingers, stabbed some with bayonets, and had shot at least one soldier while he was bandaging a comrade's wounds.[ The survivors of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion were ordered to Bastogne, where they were incorporated into the 969th Field Artillery Battalion. Both battalions had provided fire support for the 101st Airborne Division during the Siege of Bastogne, for which they received the Presidential Unit Citation, the Army's highest unit award. Because it had been overrun, the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion suffered more casualties during the Battle of the Bulge than any other artillery unit in the VIII Corps. Six officers (including the commander) and 222 enlisted men had been either killed or become prisoners of war. The 333rd Field Artillery Group subsequently served in the Central Europe campaign to the end of the war, while the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion took part in the Rhineland Campaign.