Joachim Peiper was a lieutenant colonel in the SS, a holder of the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, and one of the most famous and infamous Panzer officers of World War II. According to the popular image, he died with a pistol in his hand, fighting his enemies to his last breath.
The only problem with that picture is that Peiper did not die in World War II. He died in 1976, fighting for his life in his own living room. Even more bizarrely, that house was not in Germany but in France.
This is the story of the strange demise of one of the most famous soldiers of World War II. He was a Nazi poster boy and a relentless warrior whose reputation was deeply stained by war crimes and a long prison sentence.
Joachim Peiper was born in Wilmersdorf, Germany, on January 30, 1915, into a middle-class family. His father had been an officer in the German Imperial Army in Africa and served in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
After World War I, Peiper's father was active in Freikorps paramilitary groups, including taking part in the suppression of the Polish Silesian uprisings of 1919 to 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 at the SS Totenkopfverbände before serving in the 3rd SS Panzer Division in France in 1940. Horst Peiper 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, some rather unsavory aspects of Peiper's personality were noted by his instructors. He was egocentric and constantly name-dropped his relationship with Himmler.
SS psychologists concluded that Peiper was a difficult man. As a subordinate, he might prove troublesome, and as a superior, he would probably be arrogant. However, he was not dismissed, probably due to his relationship with Himmler.
In March 1936, Peiper completed his officer training and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. After attending SS officer school, he was thoroughly versed in the anti-Semitic worldview of the SS.
He joined the Nazi Party in 1938, contradicting his later contention that he had been an apolitical soldier during World War II. He was, in fact, a fully paid-up Nazi during the war.
In June 1938, Peiper was promoted onto Himmler's personal staff as an adjutant. He became Himmler's favorite adjutant and accompanied him everywhere he went.
During the invasion of Poland, Peiper was with Himmler aboard his armored train and sometimes acted as an adjutant to Hitler during front visits or at Führer headquarters.
Peiper first saw the true face of the regime on September 20, 1939, when he was present alongside Himmler at the execution of 20 Polish socialist leaders by an ethnic German defense militia commanded by SS officer Ludolf von Alvensleben.
On December 13, 1939, Peiper accompanied Himmler to a village near Posen in Poland and witnessed the gassing of mentally ill patients in a hospital there. This was part of the Action T4 euthanasia program.
He also accompanied Himmler on inspection tours of concentration camps, including Natzweiler and Sachsenhausen, and in 1940 Buchenwald and Flossenbürg, including witnessing another Action T4 gassing demonstration.
All of 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. 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 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. He was awarded the German Cross in Gold for his actions at Kharkov.
Peiper was involved in further massacres, at the village of Yefremovka and also at Semenovka. 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. At Himmler's urging, the German press 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 postwar, and indeed even today in certain quarters, as an apolitical soldier of exceptional abilities who happened to be in the Waffen-SS. The reality was a little 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, 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 Zhitomir, 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 and the Battle of the Bulge, when his battle group, Kampfgruppe Peiper, led the Sixth 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 advance on December 17, 1944, a convoy of 30 US vehicles was confronted at the Baugnez crossroads near the village of Malmedy. Over a hundred 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 prisoners of war and 111 civilians.
Hitler awarded Peiper the Swords to his Knight's Cross in January 1945. Toward the 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. He was tried at Dachau alongside 73 other defendants, including his old Sixth Panzer Army commander Sepp Dietrich, Dietrich's chief of staff Fritz Krämer, and the 1st 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 some pressure from various high-level sources, and instead he was 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 Knight's Cross holders, though he tended not to attend SS reunions.
Then, in the late 1960s, Peiper took the rather extraordinary step of moving to France, setting in train the events that led to his unlikely and violent end.