Joachim Peiper was born in Wilmersdorf, Germany, on January 30, 1915, into a middle-class family. His father had served as an officer in the German Imperial Army in Africa and, during World War I, in the Ottoman Empire.
After the war, Peiper's father was active in Freikorps paramilitary groups, including the suppression of the Polish Silesian Uprisings between 1919 and 1921. Joachim was determined to become an army officer like his father.
He had two older brothers. The middle brother, Horst, joined the SS and served as a concentration camp guard in the SS Totenkopfverbande before serving in the 3rd SS Panzer Division in France in 1940. Horst died in Poland in June 1941, believed to have taken his own life due to his homosexuality.
Peiper's eldest brother, Hans Hasso, was mentally unstable and also attempted to end his own life. He eventually died of tuberculosis in 1942.
Joachim Peiper joined the SS in October 1933, serving in the cavalry branch. He was promoted and, in 1934, came to the attention of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler himself.
Sent on a leadership course, Peiper displayed unsavory aspects of his personality that his instructors noted. He was egocentric and constantly name-dropped his relationship with Himmler. SS psychologists concluded that Peiper was a difficult man who might prove troublesome as a subordinate and probably arrogant as a superior.
He was not dismissed, likely due to his relationship with Himmler. In March 1936, Peiper completed his officer training and was commissioned as an Untersturmführer, or second lieutenant.
After attending SS officer school, he was thoroughly versed in the anti-Semitic worldview of the SS. He joined the NSDAP in 1938, contradicting his later contention that he had been an apolitical soldier during World War II.
In June 1938, Peiper was promoted onto Himmler's personal staff as an adjutant. He became Himmler's favorite adjutant and accompanied him everywhere.
From the invasion of Poland, Peiper was with Himmler aboard his armored train, and he sometimes acted as an adjutant to Hitler during front visits or at Führer headquarters.
Peiper first saw the true face of the regime he served on September 20, 1939, when he was present alongside Himmler at the execution of 20 Polish socialist leaders by ethnic German defense militia commanded by SS officer Ludolf von Alvensleben.
On December 13, 1939, Peiper accompanied Himmler to a village near Poznań in Poland and witnessed the gassing of mentally ill patients in a hospital there. This was part of the Aktion T4 euthanasia program.
He also accompanied Himmler on inspection tours of concentration camps including Neuengamme and Sachsenhausen, and in 1940 Buchenwald and Flossenbürg, including witnessing another Aktion T4 gassing demonstration.
This information is often lost in retellings of Peiper's SS service, with most people concentrating on Kampfgruppe Peiper and his activities in the Ardennes Offensive in 1944. But these early activities should be weighed against his later military service.
During the invasion of France in May 1940, Peiper was released to gain combat experience commanding a platoon of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the most prestigious unit in the SS, serving in the motorized regiment.
For his actions in capturing a French artillery battery, Peiper was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and promoted to Hauptsturmführer, or captain. Soon after, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. In June, he returned to his post as Himmler's adjutant.
In the months before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Peiper accompanied Himmler and his staff to Poland, Norway, Austria, and Greece, inspecting army and SS units.
He then took part in an SS conference during which Himmler outlined his plan to exterminate 30 million Slavs. Once the invasion was launched, Himmler and Peiper visited Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads operating behind the German front line, including watching actual mass executions.
One of Peiper's jobs was to deliver the daily death counts to Himmler, giving him intimate knowledge of the SS murder machine operating on the Eastern Front.
Peiper was next assigned to the 1st SS Panzer Division LSSAH. He commanded a tank company and was noted for his aggressive leadership style and for the high casualties among his own men. The LSSAH also assisted the Einsatzgruppen in murdering Soviet Jews, commissars, Red Army prisoners of war, and partisans.
In May 1942, the LSSAH was sent to France, and Peiper became a battalion commander. Back east in January 1943, Peiper's unit was highly commended during the Third Battle of Kharkov, rescuing a trapped German infantry division.
At the conclusion of the battle, Peiper's troops discovered that a small SS medical detachment of 25 men left behind in the village of Krasnaya Polyana had been killed, and some of them mutilated, by Soviet forces. Peiper ordered the village burned down and all of the inhabitants shot or burned alive, earning his unit the nickname of the blowtorch battalion.
Awarded the German Cross in Gold for his actions at Kharkov, Peiper was involved in further massacres at the village of Yefremovka and at Semyonovka. LSSAH troops under his command killed 872 men, women, and children, including burning alive 240 people in the Yefremovka church.
Peiper received the Knight's Cross on March 9, 1943. The German press, at Himmler's urgings, was quick to laud Peiper as the ideal German officer: handsome, brave, and a born leader.
This Nazi propaganda had a very long life and contributed to how Peiper was viewed post-war and even today in certain quarters, as an apolitical soldier of exceptional abilities who happened to be in the Waffen SS. The reality was different.
After fighting at the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, the LSSAH was transferred to northern Italy, taking part in Operation Achse, the German military takeover of Italy following Mussolini's fall from power.
Shortly after this, Peiper was involved in another massacre. During a gun battle with Italian partisans at Boves in Piedmont on September 19, 1943, during which two SS men were taken prisoner and one was killed, Peiper threatened to destroy the village if the men were not released immediately.
After desperate negotiations, the SS men were set free, but Peiper nonetheless ordered his men to kill 24 Italian men from the village in retaliation. One woman was also murdered.
Peiper's command methods have been questioned, particularly his poor use of tactics and his apparent disinterest in German casualties. During battles at the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr, Peiper commanded the 1st SS Panzer Regiment. His aggressive way of leading led to very heavy casualties among his own men.
He also caused so much damage to his equipment that he was transferred to a staff position immediately afterwards. However, on January 27, 1944, Hitler awarded Peiper the oak leaves to his Knight's Cross.
Redeployed to the west, the LSSAH saw extensive action in the Battle of Normandy. The division would lose every tank it possessed and 25 percent of its men during the weeks of fighting there.
From the fighting around the city of Caen, Peiper suffered a nervous breakdown and was evacuated and hospitalized for a long time, rejoining his regiment in October 1944.
Peiper is most famous for his activities in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge, when his battle group, Kampfgruppe Peiper, led the 6th Panzer Army's attack, making the deepest penetration in that sector until it was surrounded at the village of La Gleize in Belgium.
Forced to abandon all of his vehicles and tanks, Peiper and 717 of his men, out of 3,000 who started off, managed to fight their way out of the encirclement and get back to German lines.
During the Kampfgruppe's advance on December 17, 1944, a convoy of 30 US vehicles was confronted at the Baugnez crossroads near the village of Malmedy. Over 100 Americans were taken prisoner, and once Peiper and the Panzer Regiment moved off, firing broke out.
The US prisoners were then under guard by SS pioneers of the LSSAH, and 84 US soldiers were killed by the SS. This is the Malmedy massacre. The cause of the firing has never been fully established.
However, men under Peiper's command killed many US prisoners of war in the Ardennes, and also many Belgian civilians. It has been estimated that Kampfgruppe Peiper murdered 362 US POWs and 111 civilians during the massacre.
Hitler awarded Peiper the Swords to his Knight's Cross in January 1945. Toward war's end, Peiper fought in Hungary until May 1, 1945, then in Austria, where the LSSAH was informed of Hitler's death the day before in Berlin.
Keen for obvious reasons not to surrender to the Soviet Union, Peiper was ordered to surrender his unit to US forces on May 8. However, Peiper had no reason to be taken prisoner by the Americans either, and he made himself scarce and walked all the way home, but was apprehended by US military police on May 22, 1945.
The US Army investigated the Malmedy massacre in great detail and scoured POW camps to find LSSAH soldiers who had been involved. Peiper and many of his subordinates were placed on trial for war crimes.
Peiper was a devout Nazi. Under US interrogation in July 1945, when asked about the Poles and Jews during the war, Peiper became angry and said, "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."
Peiper took command responsibility for the crimes committed by his men. Tried at Dachau alongside 73 other defendants, including his old Sixth Panzer Army commander Sepp Dietrich, Dietrich's chief of staff Fritz Kramer, and the First SS Panzer commander Hermann Priess, Peiper and the others were sentenced on July 16, 1946.
The American military tribunal was determined to extract justice for their dead soldiers at Malmedy. Peiper was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death. He had a slight smile on his face as he received the sentence and as he marched away from the court.
In March 1948, the US authorities reviewed 43 death sentences of the 74 men tried at Dachau and upheld 12, including Peiper's. The rest were commuted to terms of imprisonment.
However, in 1951, Peiper's death sentence was also commuted after pressure from various high-level sources, and he was instead given 35 years imprisonment. Peiper was suddenly released early on December 22, 1956.
Searching for work, he used the Waffen-SS Mutual Aid Community organization, or HIAG, to help find such work. Peiper went to work for Porsche in Stuttgart in 1957 as a salesman.
He kept in contact with his SS subordinates and superior officers and attended many reunions of Knights' Cross holders, though he tended not to attend SS reunions.
Another allegation of war crimes, this time the Boves massacre in September 1943 in Italy, came to the fore in 1964. Though a lengthy inquiry did not produce any charges against Peiper, Italians working for Porsche complained to management and Peiper was let go.
He moved to another job, this time in sales at Volkswagen in Reutlingen. But the shadow of war crimes accusations committed by LSSAH troops under his command also caused him to be dismissed. Neither car firm wanted such people associated with them.
Some years before losing these jobs, Peiper had taken the extraordinary step of purchasing a small plot of land in eastern France near the village of Trave, 12 kilometers west of the town of Vesoul. In 1959, he had a small house built on the plot in woodland on the bank of the river Saône.
Peiper used the home as a holiday home until 1972, when he moved there permanently with his wife. He evidently knew that his presence in France might cause him trouble, for the house was designed with security in mind.
It backed onto a river, making approach from the rear very difficult. It was hidden in thick woodland and could not be seen from the main road. Any visitors along the track to the house would have to pass by kennels where Peiper kept two dogs, whose barking would give advance warning.
From the main road to the tree line where Peiper's house was hidden was completely open ground, affording him good observation of visitors during daylight. But the very woodland where the house was situated would screen anyone covertly approaching the property, particularly at night.
Peiper's income at this time came from two sources: his military pension and translation fees, as he translated military history books for a German publisher. His grown-up children and family friends visited occasionally, and the Peipers kept to themselves.
Considering that in 1972 the war had only been over for 27 years, it was an odd decision to move to a country that had suffered greatly from German occupation and where the SS were associated with brutality, massacres, and organizations like the Gestapo.
Peiper's nearest neighbor was another former SS officer, a man with the surname Kettelhut, who had been an SS artillery officer whose division had also been responsible for war crimes in Italy. Kettelhut lived in a large Bavarian-style house not far from Peiper's more discreet property.
The only evidence that Peiper's house was there were two things: a post box and power lines on poles. Word soon got around the local area that Germans lived in the two properties, former SS officers to boot.
In 1972, plenty of people in the region had taken part in the war, and some older resistance members would still have been about. Not to mention younger people, often extremely left-wing or even communists, who had great hatred for people like Peiper.
Many have suggested that Peiper was extremely arrogant to have assumed that such a high-profile SS veteran as himself, implicated in multiple war crimes and imprisoned for one, could move to their area and live as if nothing had ever happened. For locals who had lost loved ones or comrades to German occupation forces and security units, Peiper's presence was a huge red rag.
Peiper, for his part, had little contact with the locals. His wife would go into the village for groceries. Peiper also had weapons at the house, a hunting rifle and a pistol, plus the two dogs.
On April 18, 1975, in Paris, eight hooded men held a press conference. They warned that until the West German government ratified the Franco-German agreement on the prosecution of war criminals, they would be executed by direct methods.
Things remained quiet until 1976, when a local ironmonger in Vesoul, who sold Peiper nails, wire fencing and so on, came upon Peiper's name printed in an East German book that he owned called the Brown Book.
The ironmonger was a communist, and the Brown Book was a deliberate attempt by East Germany to humiliate West Germany post-war by showing how many suspected and convicted Nazi war criminals were living free in the West. The entry for Peiper gave details of his World War II activities.
Next, an article appeared in the French communist newspaper L'Humanité, questioning how the government had allowed someone like Peiper to reside in France. Then slogans began to be painted on roads around Trave that read "Peiper SS" in large white letters.
Leaflets were printed and posted through the letterboxes of the villagers, and Peiper himself found notes in his own letterbox, threatening letters. There were also anonymous threatening phone calls to his house. Evidently, a concerted campaign was underway to try to intimidate Peiper into moving out of France for his own good.
Naturally, Peiper was concerned, but he seems to have downplayed any threat, painting it as non-violent harassment that might blow over.
On July 13, Peiper's wife went to West Germany to stay with friends for a few days, leaving Peiper alone at the house. At some point very late on July 13 or early on July 14, a group of armed men in a car drove up the track to Peiper's house and surrounded it.
Police found an incendiary device outside the property, showing that this group intended to firebomb Peiper's house. Whether they also intended to murder him is open to conjecture. But it was clear to police afterwards that Peiper had exchanged fire with his assailants.
A conflagration had begun when a petrol bomb was thrown through a downstairs window. Peiper's charred corpse was found among debris in the living room. Police recovered Peiper's wristwatch and two weapons.
Outside the house, police found a .22 rifle that had recently been loaned to Peiper by his SS neighbor Kettelhut. It was lying on the house's terrace and had been fired several times, indicating that Peiper had first confronted the group outside his property.
It was clear to police that Peiper's body had fallen from the first floor, the second floor to US readers, as the fire destroyed the floor timbers and they collapsed as Peiper lay among them.
He was found with a US Smith & Wesson .38 revolver plus 13 boxes of cartridges, most of which had cooked off in the fire. An autopsy found that Peiper's lungs had traces of smoke in them, indicating that he was alive when the fire started.
He had no visible bullet wounds, but other injuries could not be determined due to the state of the body. The corpse's teeth matched those of Joachim Peiper. The two dogs were later found dead, one shot with a 6.35 mm bullet in the head.
The fire was reported at 2:30 a.m. on July 14, and the house was mostly destroyed before firefighters eventually arrived from Vesoul.
According to the French newspaper Le Rouge, the next day an anonymous phone call was received from a group called the Avengers, who claimed to have killed Peiper. That same day, Peiper's wife and two daughters visited the ruins of the property, collected what belongings they could, and left the town without comment.
After a period of silence regarding the killing, French Justice Minister Jean Lecanuet said that the authorities would make all possible efforts to punish whoever was responsible. But although an extensive investigation was conducted by the regional police and many suspects were questioned, no one was ever charged with a crime.
The case remains officially unsolved to this day, though it is suspected that local people knew full well who killed the 61-year-old SS colonel. The people have kept quiet up to the present day, which is understandable.
Peiper's body was later interred at the family plot in Landsberg in West Germany.