Joachim Peiper was a German SS officer and the main perpetrator of a series of atrocities committed between mid-December 1944 and mid-January 1945. These killings became known as the Malmedy massacre, during which SS officers and soldiers deliberately participated in the killing, shooting, and torturing of some 350 unarmed American soldiers and about 100 Belgian civilians.
On July 16, 1946, at the former Dachau concentration camp in Germany, the US Military Tribunal delivered verdicts on 73 former Waffen SS officers and soldiers for those crimes.
Peiper was born on January 30, 1915, in Vmesdorf, then part of the German Empire. He was the third son of an officer in the Imperial German Army.
His father, Voldemar, served in the army of Kaiser Wilhelm II and felt betrayed and angry that Germany lost the First World War, which ended on November 11, 1918, when German leaders signed the Armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France.
After the war, Germany experienced great political turmoil. The Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh terms on the defeated country, and the monarchy was overthrown, replaced by the new Weimar Republic, a democratic government.
Racist and anti-Semitic groups sprang up on the radical right and falsely claimed that Jews and Communists were to blame for Germany's problems. One such group was the Nazi Party.
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in January 1933, they made the "stab in the back" myth an integral part of their official history. The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory maintained that the Imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front, especially Jews and revolutionary socialists.
The Nazis denounced the German government leaders who signed the Armistice as the "November criminals" who had stabbed the nation in the back. Historians inside and outside Germany unanimously reject the myth, pointing out that the Imperial German Army was out of reserves, was being overwhelmed by the entrance of the United States into the war, and had already lost the war militarily by late 1918.
The stab-in-the-back myth appealed to many German nationalists such as Voldemar Peiper. His two sons followed the same life path of nationalist ideology and military service to Germany.
One son, Horst, fought in the Battle of France in 1940 and died one year later, in June 1941 in Poland, in a never fully explained accident. It is believed that his fellow SS man drove Horst to commit suicide because of his alleged homosexuality.
Joachim's eldest brother, Hans, was mentally ill. His suicide attempt resulted in a brain injury that reduced him to a persistent vegetative state, and he eventually died of tuberculosis in 1942.
On January 30, 1933, the same day Peiper turned 18, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Peiper then joined the Hitler Youth, the Nazi-organized youth movement.
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization designed to train boys as future fighters and soldiers for war. As an official organization of the Nazi state, it had a military structure at the local, regional, and national levels.
The boys practiced military drills and learned how to handle weapons. They also worked on farms in the summer and participated in competitive sports, especially boxing.
Some boys enjoyed the physical challenge, competition, and camaraderie. Others found the constant focus on preparing for war and sacrificing themselves for the Fatherland very difficult.
In October 1933, Joachim Peiper joined the SS. He was ambitious and egocentric, and at the 1934 Nuremberg rally his reputation attracted the notice of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.
For Himmler, Peiper personified Aryanism, the master race concept promoted by the Nazis and taught at the SS officer school. Despite not being as tall, blonde, and muscular as the Nordic recruits to the SS, Peiper compensated by being a handsome, personable, and self-confident SS officer.
From April 1935 to March 1936, Peiper trained in one of the SS Junker schools, educational institutions established by the SS to train and educate future SS officers. In March 1938 he joined the Nazi Party, and in June of the same year he became an adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
Because he was Himmler's favorite, by 1939 Peiper was his adjutant at every official function. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Peiper traveled in Himmler's personal train and occasionally served as liaison officer to Hitler when the Führer met with Army and Waffen SS generals near the front lines of the Eastern Front. The Waffen SS was the military branch of the SS.
On September 20, 1939, in the northern Polish city of Bydgoszcz, Himmler and Peiper witnessed the public execution of 20 Polish social leaders who might lead partisan resistance to Nazi occupation.
On December 13, 1939, in west-central Poland in the village of Wieniawa near Poznań, Himmler and Peiper observed the Nazi euthanasia program, code-named T4, the poison gas mass killing of mentally ill patients in psychiatric hospitals.
In post-war interrogations by the US Army, Peiper was factual and emotionally detached in describing his eyewitness experience of mass murder. He said the gassing action was done before a circle of invited guests.
The insane were led into a prepared casemate whose door had a plexiglass window, he said. After the door was closed, one could see how in the beginning the insane still laughed and talked to each other, but soon they sat down on the straw, obviously under the influence of gas. Very soon they no longer moved.
In May 1940, Himmler and Peiper followed the Waffen SS throughout the Battle of France, and on May 18 Peiper became a platoon leader in the 1st SS Panzer Division's motorized regiment. For audacious soldiering he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, and one month later the Iron Cross First Class.
As a further award and remuneration, Peiper took back to Germany a French sports car for his personal use. In June 1940 he returned to his role of personal adjutant to Himmler.
In September 1940, Himmler thanked the commanders of the 1st SS Panzer Division's motorized regiment and said, "We had to have the toughness. This should be said and soon forgotten," referring to the shooting of thousands of leading Poles.
Himmler also stressed the psychological problem suffered by Waffen SS soldiers when carrying out executions, hauling away people, and evicting crying and hysterical women in order to clear the lands of Poland for German colonization.
In February 1941, Himmler informed Peiper about the upcoming Operation Barbarossa, the invasion, conquest, and German colonization of the Soviet Union. From June 11 to 15, 1941, Peiper participated in the SS conference where Himmler presented plans for the killing of 30 million Slavs in Eastern Europe, especially Russia.
Peiper's time as Himmler's adjutant ended in the summer of 1941. In October of the same year he was reassigned to the 1st SS Panzer Division's motorized regiment, with which he fought on the Eastern Front in the vicinity of the Black Sea.
Peiper gained a reputation for his fighting spirit and aggressive leadership in battle, but his victories came at the cost of many German tanks and casualties among the Waffen SS infantry. During the Third Battle of Kharkov, from February 19 to March 15, 1943, Peiper's unit became known for its audacious rescue of the encircled 320th Infantry Division.
In a letter home, Peiper described hand-to-hand fighting with a Soviet ski battalion to lead the division, including its sick and wounded, to safety. The rescue culminated with a fierce battle with Soviet forces at the village of Krasnaya Polyana.
Upon entering the village, Peiper's troops made a terrible discovery: all the men in his small rear-guard medical detachment who had been left there had been killed and then mutilated. As revenge, Peiper ordered the burning down of the whole village and the shooting of its inhabitants.
Peiper's reputation preceded him, and his unit gained the nickname the "Blowtorch Battalion." The nickname was derived from the torching and slaughter of two Soviet villages in February 1943, where, in revenge for the wounding of two SS officers, Peiper ordered the killing of 872 men, women, and children, 240 of whom were burned alive in a church.
In March 1943, for his heroism and bold and unorthodox orders, Peiper was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, the most prestigious military decoration of the Third Reich.
In July 1943, after the Battle of Kursk, when the Red Army gained the initiative on the Eastern Front, Peiper's unit was redeployed from Russia to northern Fascist Italy. In September 1943, following Italy's surrender to the Allies, German forces quickly moved to occupy northern and central Italy to prevent Allied forces from gaining a foothold in the region.
The Germans established the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, who had been rescued from captivity. The occupation resulted in a brutal and oppressive regime, with mass arrests, executions, and confiscation of resources, while also encountering fierce resistance from Italian partisan groups.
On September 19, 1943, in a firefight with the Waffen SS occupiers, partisan guerrillas in the Italian resistance movement killed one soldier and captured two others in the vicinity of Boves in northwest Italy. After this, Peiper and his unit were called in to free the German soldiers and took up positions in Boves, controlled access to the town, and threatened to destroy the town and its inhabitants should their demands not be met.
Peiper committed to sparing the town if the German soldiers were freed. The parish priest of Boves, Giuseppe Bernardi, and a local businessman, Antonio Vassallo, who had acted as negotiators between Peiper and the Italian soldiers and partisans, successfully secured the release of the prisoners and the return of the body of the killed German soldier.
Despite promises to the contrary, Peiper wanted revenge and ordered his men to open fire on the town. The parish priest Bernardi and the local businessman who arranged the release of the prisoners were doused with petrol and burned alive.
Other victims consisted mostly of old, sick, or infirm civilians, as everyone else had left the town before the massacre. To hide the SS soldiers did not spare anyone, and they killed even a deaf mute when he tried to put out the fire after Peiper's men set his house alight.
They also murdered a disabled veteran who was shot dead while trying to escape through the fields, and an 87-year-old woman who could not move from her bed was burned alive when Peiper's men set her house on fire. The deputy parish priest, Don Mario Giolo, was killed while giving absolution to an old man who had been shot by a German soldier.
In total, 23 civilians were murdered and 350 houses destroyed in retaliation for the resistance of the villagers.
In November 1943, Peiper returned to the Eastern Front. Although he lacked experience in leading tanks, he replaced the regiment's dead commander and assumed command of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment.
Peiper's overaggressive style of leadership caused him to disregard tactical common sense in deploying the tanks and infantry forces of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment in battle against the Red Army. His battlefield victories cost more Waffen SS casualties than would have been lost with textbook tactics to achieve the same victory.
After a month of Peiper's command, the 1st SS Panzer Regiment had only 12 working tanks. In December 1943, because of his destructive leadership of the regiment, Peiper was relieved of combat duty and transferred to the division headquarters to work as a staff officer.
In March 1944, the 1st SS Panzer Division had been withdrawn from the Eastern Front, and three months later it was deployed to the coast of the English Channel to confront the expected Allied invasion.
On June 6, 1944, under the code name Operation Overlord, US, British, and Canadian troops crossed the English Channel and landed on the beaches of Normandy, France. This operation became known as D-Day and was the largest amphibious invasion in history.
More than 160,000 Allied troops on air, land, and sea took part, supported by 50,000 vehicles, some 5,000 naval craft, and more than 11,500 aircraft. This largest seaborne invasion in history was one of the main turning points of World War II.
Peiper's unit fought defensively until late July 1944, when the US Army destroyed every town of the 1st SS Panzer Division and killed 25 percent of the force of nearly 20,000 soldiers. After suffering a nervous breakdown, Peiper was relieved of his command in August 1944, and in the following months he was in hospital to treat his nervous collapse.
On December 16, 1944, the German military launched the Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, the largest major German military offensive campaign in Western Europe. Hitler hoped a German counterattack would surround the British and American armies and stall the Allied offensive against Germany.
However, the German offensive in the Ardennes region of Belgium was only temporarily successful in halting the Allied advance. Despite dreadful losses, US forces managed to delay the enemy sufficiently to permit reinforcements to be moved into position to halt the German drive.
On December 17, 1944, the 1st SS Panzer Division, commanded by Joachim Peiper, was heading west from Büllingen, Belgium. This movement was part of the general German advance during the Battle of the Bulge.
At the same time, a US convoy of 30 vehicles and nearly 140 men of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion was heading south from the Hürtgen Forest toward Ligneuville. The two forces converged just before noon at the crossroads hamlet of Baugnez, 4 kilometers south of Malmedy.
The SS soldiers immediately began firing upon the US troops, who panicked. Those who did not escape, including medical personnel, quickly surrendered after being searched and relieved of their personal possessions.
The US soldiers were lined up in eight rows in a field at the crossroads. Survivors of the atrocity recall that a group of approximately 120 US prisoners of war stood in the farmer's field when the SS soldiers fired machine guns at the group.
Panicked by the machine gun fire, some prisoners ran and fled the field, but the SS soldiers shot and killed most of the grouped men where they stood. Some prisoners dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead.
Nonetheless, after the initial machine gunning, the SS soldiers walked among the lying corpses searching for wounded survivors to finish them off with a shot to the head. Moreover, some of the American soldiers who fled the farmer's field had run to and hidden in a cafe at the Baugnez crossroads, but the SS soldiers then set the cafe on fire and killed every US soldier who escaped the burning building.
When the Germans left the site, at least 84 US soldiers were dead. Just over 40 Americans survived the incident known as the Malmedy massacre, either by fleeing into the woods or pretending to be dead.
Other murders of prisoners of war and civilians were reported on December 17, 18, 19, and 20. The SS group was eventually declared responsible for the deaths of some 350 unarmed American soldiers and about 100 Belgian civilians.
On May 1, 1945, while deployed in Austria, Peiper's men learned of the death of their Führer, Adolf Hitler, the previous day. On May 8, the German High Command ordered the units of the 1st SS Panzer Division to surrender to the US Army.
Peiper was captured by American forces on May 22, 1945, and later interrogated in July 1945. During his interrogations, Peiper revealed his commitment to Nazism.
When Army interrogators asked his opinion about the plight of the POWs and the Jews, Peiper anxiously replied that all Jews are bad and all POWs are bad. He said, "We have just cleansed our society and moved these people into camps and you let them loose."
Moreover, as a Waffen SS officer, Peiper lamented to the Army interrogators that the US government was wrong in having refused to incorporate the Waffen SS into the US Army to prepare to fight the Russians in defense of Western Civilization.
On May 16, 1946, the trial of the SS members who had taken part in the Malmedy massacre and other killings during the Battle of the Bulge began. All of the defendants, including Joachim Peiper, were charged with violation of the laws and usages of war and with deliberately participating in the killing, shooting, and torturing of US soldiers and unarmed civilians.
Two months later, on July 16, 1946, the American Military Court at Dachau sentenced 46 members of the Waffen SS, including Joachim Peiper, to death by hanging. Another 23 received life in prison, and the remaining men received sentences between 10 and 20 years.
However, the convicted SS men claimed that the American interrogators used unlawful methods and even torture, and that all the statements given were forced. There were allegations that all but two of the Germans in the 139 cases the Americans investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair.
A commission was organized to investigate these allegations, and some members of the commission questioned the validity of the whole trial. In 1948, the judicial reviewers of the trial verdicts of the Military Tribunal commuted the war crime death sentences of some Waffen SS defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial to life imprisonment.
In 1951, Peiper's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1954 it was further commuted to 35 years imprisonment, and eventually he was released on parole on December 22, 1956.
When Peiper was told he was being released by two US soldiers, he was so shocked that he stared at them silently.
Upon release from prison, Peiper found a job at the Porsche automobile company. But Italian trade union workers formerly complained that Peiper was unacceptable as a coworker because he remained a Nazi and because of the wartime Boves massacre committed by his command.
The owner of the car company, Ferry Porsche, personally intervened to promote Peiper into a management job, but the trade unions again legally refused to work with Peiper. Despite the friendship with Porsche, and because of lost sales of cars in the US for employing a Nazi war criminal, the Porsche automobile company dismissed Peiper from his employment in 1972.
Joachim and his wife Sigurd moved to Traves in eastern France, where he owned a house. Peiper worked as a self-employed English-to-German translator of military history books in France.
Peiper lived under his real name and quickly drew the attention of anti-fascists. In June 1976, anti-Nazi political activists distributed informational flyers to the Traves community informing them that Peiper was a Nazi war criminal.
The confirmation of Peiper's Nazi identity and presence in France attracted journalists, to whom Peiper readily gave interviews. In them he claimed that he was a victim of communist harassment due to his role in the war.
He claimed that he had paid for his war crimes with 12 years in prison and said, "In 1940 French people weren't brave. That's why I'm here." These insulting remarks angered the press as well as the residents.
One month later, Peiper would finally pay for his war crimes. On July 14, 1976, a group of French anti-Nazis calling itself The Avengers attacked his house and set it on fire.
Joachim Peiper, then 61 years old, was burned alive due to the intense heat generated by the fire. Peiper's body had shrunk to a length of about 60 cm and was barely recognizable as that of a human being.
When his neighbor saw the body, he said, "It is him, but he is miniaturized." There were no tears shed for Joachim Peiper.