One of Nazi Germany’s most notorious war criminals, SS Lt. Col. Joachim Peiper, has died in a fire at his home in eastern France, bringing a violent end to a man whose name became synonymous with the cold-blooded murder of American prisoners of war during the Battle of the Bulge.
Peiper, 61, was killed on the night of July 14, 1976, when his house in the village of Traves, in the Haute-Saône region of eastern France, was set ablaze by a group of anti-Nazi activists calling themselves “The Avengers.” The former SS officer, who had lived quietly in the area under his real name, was trapped inside as flames consumed the structure.
Firefighters who reached the scene found the building reduced to charred ruins. Inside, they discovered a body so severely burned and shrunken by the intense heat that it measured barely 60 centimeters in length and was nearly impossible to identify as human. A neighbor who was summoned to view the remains offered a grim confirmation: “It is him, but he is miniaturized.”
The killing has stunned French authorities and reopened one of the darkest chapters of the Second World War. Peiper was the principal architect of the Malmedy Massacre, the December 1944 atrocity in which troops under his command gunned down unarmed American soldiers at a crossroads in Belgium and then hunted down survivors through the surrounding fields.
According to survivor testimony, approximately 120 American prisoners of war were lined up in a farmer’s field near the crossroads hamlet of Baugnez, about four kilometers south of Malmedy, on December 17, 1944. Without warning, SS soldiers opened fire with machine guns. Men who dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead were later shot in the head at close range as the Germans walked among the bodies searching for signs of life.
Some Americans fled into a nearby cafe, only to be burned alive when SS troops set the building on fire and shot anyone who tried to escape the flames. When the Germans finally left the site, at least 84 American soldiers lay dead. Just over 40 survived by fleeing into the woods or feigning death amid the corpses.
The killings were not an isolated incident. In the days that followed, from December 17 to December 20, 1944, Peiper’s unit was responsible for further murders of prisoners of war and civilians. In total, the SS group was eventually declared responsible for the deaths of some 350 unarmed American soldiers and about 100 Belgian civilians.
Joachim Peiper was born on January 30, 1915, in Wilmersdorf, then part of the German Empire, the third son of an officer in the Imperial German Army. His father, Waldemar, served under Kaiser Wilhelm II and felt betrayed by Germany’s defeat in the First World War. That bitterness, combined with the antisemitic “stab in the back” myth that blamed Jews and socialists for the loss, shaped the household in which the young Peiper was raised.
Peiper joined the Hitler Youth on the very day Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, January 30, 1933, which also happened to be his eighteenth birthday. In October of that year, he joined the SS. Ambitious and egocentric, he caught the attention of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, at the 1934 Nuremberg rally.
For Himmler, Peiper embodied the Aryan master race concept promoted by Nazism.
Despite not being as tall, blonde, or muscular as the Nordic recruits the SS favored, Peiper compensated through charm, confidence, and ruthless efficiency. He trained at an SS Junker school from April 1935 to March 1936, joined the Nazi Party in March 1938, and by June of that year had become an adjutant to Himmler. By 1939, he was at Himmler’s side at every official function.
When World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Poland, Peiper traveled in Himmler’s personal train and occasionally served as liaison officer to Hitler. 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 have led partisan resistance.
On December 13, 1939, in the village of Wierzonka near Poznan, Himmler and Peiper observed the Nazi euthanasia program code-named T4, the mass killing of mentally ill patients in psychiatric hospitals. In postwar interrogations by the US Army, Peiper described the gassing with chilling detachment. “The insane were led into a prepared casemate, the door of which 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.”
Peiper fought in the Battle of France in May 1940, earning the Iron Cross Second Class and then the Iron Cross First Class. He also took back to Germany a French sports car for his personal use. In February 1941, Himmler informed him of the upcoming Operation Barbarossa, the invasion and conquest of the Soviet Union.
Between June 11 and 15, 1941, Peiper attended an SS conference where Himmler presented plans for the killing of 30 million Slavs in Eastern Europe.
On the Eastern Front, Peiper gained a reputation for aggressive leadership, but his victories came at enormous cost. During the Third Battle of Kharkov in early 1943, his unit rescued the encircled 320th Infantry Division but then discovered that members of his rear guard medical detachment had been killed and mutilated. In revenge, Peiper ordered the burning of the entire village of Yefremovka and the shooting of its inhabitants.
His unit earned the nickname “the Blowtorch Battalion” after 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. Of those, 240 were burned alive inside a church. In March 1943, for his heroism and unorthodox orders, Peiper was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, the most prestigious military decoration of the Third Reich.
In September 1943, after Italy’s surrender to the Allies, Peiper’s unit was deployed to northern Italy. On September 19, 1943, in the town of Boves in the Piedmont region, partisans killed one German soldier and captured two others. Peiper took up positions in the town and threatened to destroy it unless the prisoners were released.
The parish priest, Giuseppe Bernardi, and a local businessman, Antonio Vassallo, negotiated the release and the return of the dead soldier’s body.
Despite promises to spare the town, Peiper ordered his men to open fire. The priest and the businessman were doused with petrol and burned alive. Other victims were mostly elderly, sick, or infirm civilians, as everyone else had fled.
SS soldiers killed a deaf-mute man who tried to put out the fire, shot a disabled veteran as he fled through the fields, and burned alive an 87-year-old woman who could not leave her bed. In total, 23 civilians were murdered and 350 houses destroyed.
In November 1943, Peiper returned to the Eastern Front and assumed command of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment despite lacking experience in leading tanks. His overaggressive style cost more casualties than necessary, and after a month his regiment had only 12 working tanks. In December 1943, he was relieved of combat duty and transferred to a staff position.
By June 1944, his division 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 Channel and landed on the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious invasion in history. 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 its nearly 20,000 soldiers.
After suffering a nervous breakdown, Peiper was relieved of his command in August 1944.
On December 16, 1944, the German military launched the Battle of the Bulge, the largest major German offensive campaign in Western Europe. Hitler hoped to surround the British and American armies and stall the Allied advance. On December 17, Peiper’s 1st SS Panzer Division was heading west from Büllingen, Belgium, when it converged with a US convoy of 30 vehicles and nearly 140 men of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion near the crossroads hamlet of Baugnez.
The SS soldiers immediately opened fire. Those Americans who did not escape, including medical personnel, quickly surrendered. After being searched and stripped of their personal possessions, the US soldiers were lined up in eight rows in a field.
Survivors recalled that a group of approximately 120 prisoners stood in the farmer’s field when the SS soldiers fired machine guns into the group. Panicked prisoners ran and fled, but the SS soldiers shot and killed most of them where they stood.
After the initial machine-gunning, the SS soldiers walked among the lying corpses searching for wounded survivors to finish off with a shot to the head. Some Americans who fled the field hid in a cafe at the crossroads, but the SS soldiers 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.
Peiper was captured by American forces on May 22, 1945, and interrogated in July 1945. During his interrogations, he revealed his commitment to Nazism. When Army interrogators asked his opinion about the plight of Poles and Jews, Peiper replied that “all Jews are bad and all Poles are bad.
We have just cleansed our society and moved these people into camps, and you let them loose.” He also lamented that the US government had refused to incorporate the Waffen SS into the US Army to prepare to fight the Russians in defense of Western Civilization.
The Trial of the SS members who had taken part in the Malmedy Massacre and other killings during the Battle of the Bulge began on May 16, 1946. All of the defendants, including 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 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 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 questioned the validity of the whole trial.
In 1948, the judicial reviewers of the trial verdicts 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, 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 formally 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 him.
Despite his 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.
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. He 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 residents that Peiper was a Nazi war criminal.
The confirmation of Peiper’s identity and presence in France attracted journalists, to whom he 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, on July 14, 1976, a group of French anti-Nazis calling themselves The Avengers attacked his house and set it on fire. Peiper, then 61 years old, was burned alive due to the intense heat generated by the fire. His body had shrunk to a length of about 60 centimeters 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. The man who ordered the murder of hundreds of unarmed American soldiers and Belgian civilians, who burned villages and their inhabitants alive, and who never expressed remorse for his crimes, died as he had lived, by fire and violence. French authorities have opened an investigation into the arson, but no arrests have been made.
The Avengers group has not been heard from since.
The Malmedy Massacre remains one of the most notorious war crimes committed against American forces during the Second World War. The survivors and the families of the victims have waited decades for justice. For many of them, the fire in Traves on that July night was not a murder but a reckoning, a final verdict delivered outside any courtroom, by men who decided that the man who had escaped the gallows would not escape history.