Joachim Peiper

Joachim Peiper
Peiper in 1942
Born	(1915-01-30)30 January 1915 Berlin, German Empire
Died	14 July 1976(1976-07-14) (aged 61) Traves, Haute-Saône, France
Resting place	Schondorf, Bavaria, Germany
Known for	Malmedy massacre Boves massacre
Political party	Nazi Party
Criminal charge	War crimes
Trial	Malmedy massacre trial
Penalty	Death penalty (commuted)
SS career
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	SS-Verfügungstruppe Waffen-SS
Years of service	1934–1945
Rank	SS-Obersturmbannführer
Unit	Personal Staff Reichsführer-SS (as adjutant to Heinrich Himmler) 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler
Battles/wars	World War II
Awards	Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords
Other work	Manager at Porsche; sales trainer at Volkswagen

Joachim Peiper (30 January 1915 – 14 July 1976) was a German SS officer and a Nazi war criminal convicted for the Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war. During the Second World War in Europe Peiper served as personal adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, and thereafter was a Waffen-SS commander.

During his career with Himmler, Peiper witnessed the implementation of the Holocaust with the SS policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eastern Europe; facts he obfuscated and denied in the post–War period. As a tank commander, Peiper served in the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) in the Eastern Front and in the Western Front, first as a battalion commander and then as a regimental commander. Peiper fought in the Third Battle of Kharkov and in the Battle of the Bulge, from which actions his eponymous battle group — the Kampfgruppe Peiper — were notorious for committing war crimes against POWs and civilians.

In the Malmedy massacre trial, a U.S. military tribunal convicted Peiper of having committed the Malmedy massacre (1944) and sentenced him to death; later commuted to twelve years of imprisonment. In Italy, Peiper was accused of having committed the Boves massacre (1943); that war crime investigation ended for lack evidence that Peiper ordered the summary killing of civilians. Upon release from prison, Peiper worked for the Porsche and the Volkswagen automobile companies; and later moved to France, where he worked as a freelance translator. Throughout his post-war life, Peiper was a member of the social network of ex–SS men, including the right-wing political group HIAG (Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members). In 1976, Peiper was murdered in France when his house was set afire after the publication of his identity as a Waffen-SS war criminal.

Despite having been a minor combat leader in a large army, Peiper's idolization by WWII aficionados who romanticize the Waffen-SS in popular culture created a cult of personality that misrepresents the Nazi war criminal SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper as a war hero of Germany.^[1] That SS idolatry continues in the U.S. military; in 2019, the Facebook account of the U.S. Department of Defense featured a colourised photograph of the glamorous Waffen-SS officer Joachim Peiper included to the 75th-anniversary commemoration of the U.S. Army’s having fought the Battle of the Bulge against Nazi Germany.^[2][3][4] Despite his romanticized military persona, the egocentric Peiper personified Nazi ideology as a ruthless field commander who was indifferent to the combat losses of the Kampfgruppe Peiper and tolerated, encouraged, and expected war crimes from the soldiers of his command.^[5]

Early life[]

Family background[]

Joachim Peiper was born on 30 January 1915, the third son of a middle-class family from Silesia, in the German Empire. His father, Waldemar Peiper, soldiered in the Imperial German Army and fought in the colonial campaigns in German East Africa.^[6] After soldiering in the First World War (1914–1918) poor health retired the soldier Peiper from active duty in 1915; later, Waldemar joined the paramilitary Freikorps and participated in repressing the Polish separatist Silesian Uprisings to annex German Silesia to the Polish Republic.^[7] In 1920s Weimar Germany, the antisemitism of Nazi ideology appealed to political conservatives and to reactionaries, such as the Freikorps soldier Waldemar Peiper, hence, his son Joachim followed the same path of ideology and military service to Germany.^[8]

German Youth[]

In 1926, the eleven-year-old Peiper followed his elder brother Horst (b. 1912) to become a boy scout; eventually, Joachim became interested in becoming a military officer.^[9] Peiper's middle-brother, Horst, joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) and served in the SS-Totenkopfverbände as a guard in a concentration camp. Transferred to active-duty as a soldier, Horst fought in the Battle of France (1940) as part of the 3rd SS Panzer Division, and was killed in Poland in June 1941, in an accident never fully explained by the investigating authority; rumour had it that Horst was homosexual, and thus was compelled to suicide by other soldiers of his unit.^[10] Moreover, Peiper's eldest brother, Hans Hasso (b.1910) was mentally ill and had unsuccessfully attempted suicide in adolescence; consequent to his persistent vegetative state, Hans was interned to a hospital in 1931, and died in 1942.^[11]

Pre–War career[]

Fascist background[]

The eighteen-year-old Joachim Peiper joined the Hitler Youth in the company of his middle brother, Horst.^[12] In October 1933, Peiper volunteered for the SS and joined the Cavalry SS, where his first superior officer was Gustav Lombard, a zealous Nazi later promoted to regimental commander within in the SS Cavalry Brigade, notoriously efficient in the mass murder of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union,^[13] in punitive operations such as the Pripyat March.^[14]

On 23 January 1934, he was promoted to SS-Mann (Nr. 132.496), which made Peiper an “SS Man” before the Shutzstaffell was independent of the Sturmabteilung (SA) within the Nazi Party. Later that year, Peiper was promoted to SS-Sturmmann at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his personal reputation attracted the notice of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler,^[15] for whom Peiper personified Aryanism, the master-race concept promoted by Nazism; although not as tall, blond, and muscular as the Nordic SS recruits, Peiper compensated by being handsome, personable, and self-confident.^[16]

Beginning January 1935, Peiper was formally employed in the Shutzstaffel, and was sent to a military leadership course at a school of the LSSAH tank division.^[17] The leadership-student Peiper received favourable reviews of approval from the SS instructors, yet received only conditional approval from the military psychologists who noted Peiper's egocentricity, negative attitude, and continual attempts to impress them with his personal connection to Reichsführer-SS Himmler. The military psychologists concluded that SS-man candidate Peiper might become either a "difficult subordinate" or an "arrogant superior".^[18]

Officer candidate & Party member[]

In the April 1935–March 1936 period, Peiper trained as a military officer in the SS-Junker School, from which institution the director, Paul Hausser, graduated politically correct Nazi leaders for the Waffen-SS.^[19] Besides military fieldcraft, the SS-Junker School taught the National Socialist worldview that centred upon anti–Semitism; upon graduation, SS officer Peiper was posted to a unit of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) tank division. The paedagogic qualification and competence of the instructors at the SS-Junker School was questionable; thus Peiper was educated by the likes of Matthias Kleinheisterkamp (an alcoholic army has-been), and (future war criminal) Franz Magill from the SS Cavalry Brigade.^[20] Two years after becoming an SS man, Peiper was issued NSDAP I.D. Card Nr. 5.508.134 on 1 March 1938; in the post–War period, Peiper continually denied having been a smarty who joined the Nazi Party, because that fact contradicted his self-promoted image of a common man who was "merely a soldier" in the Second World War.^[21]

Staff officer[]

In June 1938, Peiper completed his tour of duty with the LSSAH tank division,^[6] for staff-officer duty as an adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Himmler, which tour of duty Himmler considered necessary administrative training for a promotable SS leader. In that time, the Personal Staff Reichsführer-SS were under the command of SS functionary Karl Wolff.^[22] As a staff officer, Peiper worked in the anteroom of the SS Main Office in Berlin; and became a favourite adjutant of Himmler, and Peiper requited the admiration; by 1939, Peiper always was the adjutant of the Reichsführer-SS at every official function.^[23] In the post–War period, U.S. Army interrogators learned that the inner-circle of the Reichsführer-SS — such as the SS functionary Karl Wolff — misrepresented the true nature of the administrative command responsibility of adjutant officers in realising superior orders; long service to Himmler granted personal connections and consequent political influence.^[24]

Private life[]

In 1938, Peiper met and courted Sigurd Hinrichsen, a secretary who was a friend of Lina Heydrich (Mrs Reinhard Heydrich) and a friend of Hedwig Potthast, secretary and mistress to Himmler.^[25] On 26 June 1939, Peiper married Sigurd in an SS ceremony; Himmler was the guest of honour.^[26] The Peipers lived in Berlin until the first Bombing of Berlin in World War II in 1940; Sigurd Peiper then went to live in Rottach-Egern, Upper Bavaria, near Himmler's second residence;^[27] they had three children.^[28]

Adjutant to Himmler[]

The SS in Occupied France: SS General Sepp Dietrich (left), Reichsführer Himmler, and adjutant Peiper (right) at Metz, September 1940

Mechanics of the Holocaust[]

On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany’s Invasion of Poland launched the Second World War in Europe. Adjutant Peiper travelled in the personal train of the Reichsführer; and occasionally was the liaison officer to Hitler, when the Führer travelled by train with Erwin Rommel, and when Hitler met with Wehrmacht generals near the front lines of the war.^[29]

On 20 September, in Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), Himmler and Peiper witnessed the public executions of 20 Poles, social leaders who might lead partisan resistance to Nazi occupation; the executions were organised by the SS functionary Ludolf von Alvensleben, leader of the local Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the ethnic German self-defence militia.^[30][31] In a later conversation, Peiper rationalised the actions of the SS to the explorer Ernst Schäfer that Hitler had ordered Himmler to eliminate the "Polish intellectuals".^[32]

In his participation in the conquest of Poland for German Lebensraum, Peiper witnessed the administrative refinement of the SS policies for more effective methods of ethnic cleansing to depopulate Poland for German colonisation.^[33] On 13 December 1939, in Owińska, near Poznań, Himmler and Peiper witnessed the poison-gas mass killing of a group of mentally defective patients in a psychiatric hospital. In post-war interrogations by the U.S. Army, Peiper was factual and emotionally detached in describing his eye-witness experience of mass murder:

The action [gassing] was done before a circle of invited guests. . . . The insane were led into a prepared casemate, the door of which had a Plexiglas window. 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 the gas. . . . Very soon, they no longer moved.^[34]

In 1940, Himmler and Peiper inspected the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, including the Neuengamme concentration camp and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp; then travelled to Occupied Poland to meet Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader, and his subordinate SS functionary, Odilo Globocnik, who was responsible for deporting the Jews from the cities of Warsaw and Lublin, and from the Polish territories already annexed as German Lebensraum.^[34] In April 1940, the Himmler and Peiper tour of concentration camps continued with inspections of the Buchenwald concentration camp and of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The SS and Police Leader Wilhelm Rediess and the SS official Otto Rasch sought to develop quicker methods for killing civilians in order to depopulate Poland for German colonisation. In May 1940, Globocnik demonstrtaed for Himmler and Peiper the efficacy of the Aktion T4 programme for the involuntary euthanasia of crippled and disabled people; and also discussed Globocnik's work in the Lublin Reservation programme for the control and confinement of the Jewish populations of the Greater German Reich.^[35]

The Spanish Head of State, Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is host to the Reich officials Karl Wolff, Joachim Peiper, and Reichsführer Himmler. (October 1940)

Combat decorations[]

In May 1940, Himmler and Peiper followed the Waffen-SS throughout the Battle of France. On 18 May, Peiper became a platoon leader in a unit of the LSSAH tank division. For audacious soldiering in his platoon's capturing a French artillery battery atop the hills of Wattenberg^{[disambiguation needed]}, south of Valenciennes, Peiper was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class, and promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain).^[36] On 19 June 1940, for audacious soldiering Peiper was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class.^[37] As further reward and remuneration, Peiper took back to Germany a French sports car for his personal use; Himmler ordered Peiper's sports car be included to the motor-pool inventory of his personal staff.^[38] On 21 June 1940, Peiper again was personal adjutant to Himmler.^[39]

On 7 September 1940, Himmler thanked the commanders of the LSSAH tank division for expelling the Jewish populations from Alsace, in eastern France: "We had to have the toughness — this should be said and soon forgotten — to shoot thousands of leading Poles", and stressed the psychological problems suffered by Waffen-SS soldiers when they are "carrying out executions", "hauling away people", and "evicting crying and hysterical women" in order to clear the lands of Poland for German colonisation.^[40] After an official visit to Francoist Spain to meet Generalíssimo Francisco Franco in October 1940, Peiper was promoted to First Adjutant on 1 November 1940.^[41]

Invasion of the Soviet Union[]

In February 1941, Himmler told Peiper about the German plan to invade the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. The following months were devoted to the preparation of the SS for this invasion. Thus, Himmler and his staff travelled to Poland, Norway, Austria, and Greece. The trip included a visit to the Łódź ghetto, about which Peiper wrote: "It was a macabre image: we saw how the Jewish Ghetto police, who wore hats without rims and were armed with wooden clubs, inconsiderately made room for us". This episode shows that Peiper was perfectly able to remember the details of the criminal process without forgetting anecdotes intended to prove that Jews were hitting other Jews which, by comparison, was supposed to reduce his own complicity.^[42] 

From 11 to 15 June, Peiper was present for the SS conference where Himmler spoke of the plans to eliminate 30 million Slavic people. The event had brought together senior SS and police commanders who were to become SS and Police Leaders in the occupied Soviet Union. Also present were Wolff; Kurt Daluege, head of the Order Police; Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, future Higher SS and Police Leader in occupied Byelorussia; and Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office.^[43] When the invasion began on 22 June 1941, Himmler transferred his headquarters to a special train and embarked on a tour of newly conquered territories with Peiper and other staff. Peiper accompanied Himmler on field inspections of various murder units. In Augustów, they were informed by the commander of the Einsatzkommando Tilsit about the shooting of 200 people, while in Grodno Heydrich, in their presence, berated the local death squad leader for having shot only 96 Jews on that day.^[44] 

In July, Peiper and Himmler were in Białystok where they reviewed the progress achieved by the Order Police battalions and met again with Bach-Zalewski. Himmler informed him about the arrival of the units of the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS (Himmler's Command Staff), half of whom would assist Bach-Zalewski in his area of command.^[45] The recently created body supervised Waffen-SS formations set up for Himmler's racial and ideological war.^[46] These formations included two motorized SS Infantry Brigades (1st and 2nd) and two SS Cavalry Regiments combined into the SS Cavalry Brigade, totalling about 25,000 Waffen-SS troops.^[47] The individual units were subordinated to local Higher SS and Police Leaders and used in the murder of Jews and other "undesirables", in addition to providing rear area security. In the former function, the units' activities were indistinguishable from the Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police battalions.^[48] 

The reports of the Kommandostab units were received daily, and it was Peiper's role to present them to Himmler every morning.^[46] For example, the 30 July report from Gustav Lombard's SS cavalry regiment announced that 800 Jews including women and children had been shot. On 11 August, Lombard reported the total number of shot "looters" (a code word for the Jews) was 6,526. As the first adjutant, Peiper's job included providing Himmler with the murder statistics from the Einsatzgruppen units each morning.^[49] The daily briefing included a review of operations; one surviving map shows a "cleansing action" (shooting) by the SS Cavalry Brigade. Peiper and Werner Grothmann, Second Adjutant, were aware of all incoming communications; all of Himmler's orders passed through their hands.^[50]

Peiper's role beside Himmler gradually came to an end beginning in the late summer of 1941.^[51] Himmler transferred Peiper's duties as the first adjutant to his successor, Grothmann. Although no longer Himmler's official First Adjutant, Peiper continued to update his appointment diary until mid-September 1941. During the transition time, Peiper likely served as Himmler's observer to LSSAH. Available records show that Peiper formally transferred to the LSSAH in early October 1941.^[51] He remained in close contact with Himmler as shown by their ongoing correspondence through to the end of the war; Himmler addressed Peiper as "my dear Jochen".^[46]

At the Eastern Front[]

When Peiper rejoined the LSSAH, it was engaged on the Eastern Front near the Black Sea. An injury to a unit commander soon gave him an opportunity to take command of the 11th Company.^[52] It fought at Mariupol and Rostov-on-Don. Peiper was noted for his fighting spirit, although his unit suffered high casualties as a consequence of his aggressive tactics.^[53] During its combat action, the LSSAH was followed by Einsatzgruppe D, with which the division shared winter quarters. Sepp Dietrich, LSSAH's commander, volunteered his troops to assist with the murder operations by sealing Taganrog and delivering Jews, Roma, and others to the death squads; the massacre of roughly 1,800 people took place on 29 October in the Gully of Petrushino.^[54] 

In May 1942, the LSSAH was transferred to France for rest and refit.^[55] En route to France, Peiper left his unit and met with Himmler at his headquarters on 1 June. In July 1942, Peiper again met with Himmler and did not rejoin his unit until August 1942.^[56] During its stay in France, the LSSAH was reorganized into a Panzergrenadier (mechanized infantry) division and Peiper was promoted to command its 3rd Battalion.^[57] Peiper continued to maintain a close relationship with Himmler, attending functions with high-ranking SS leaders. He even met with Himmler one-on-one.^[57]

Blowtorch Battalion[]

Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the German situation had seriously worsened, especially in the Battle of Stalingrad. Peiper's battalion left France in January 1943 for the Eastern Front.^[58] During the Third Battle of Kharkov, the battalion became known for an audacious rescue of the encircled 320th Infantry Division.^[59] In a letter home, Peiper described hand-to-hand fighting with a Soviet ski battalion in an effort to lead the division, including its sick and wounded, to safety.^[60] The rescue culminated with a fierce battle with the 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 rearguard medical detachment who had been left there had been killed and then mutilated. An SS sergeant in Peiper's ration supply company later stated that Peiper responded in kind: "In the village, the two petrol trucks were burnt and 25 Germans killed by partisans and Soviet soldiers. As a revenge, Peiper ordered the burning down of the whole village and the shooting of its inhabitants".^[59] (The testimony was obtained in November 1944 by the Western Allies.)^[61]

On 6 May 1943, Peiper was awarded the German Cross in Gold for his achievements in February 1943 around Kharkov, where his unit gained the nickname the "Blowtorch Battalion". Reportedly, the nickname derived from the torching and slaughter of two Soviet villages where their inhabitants were either shot or burned.^[62] Ukrainian sources, including surviving witness Ivan Kiselev, who was 14 at the time of the massacre, described the killings at the villages of Yefremovka and Semyonovka on 17 February 1943. On 12 February troops of the LSSAH occupied the two villages, where retreating Soviet forces had wounded two SS officers. In retaliation, five days later, LSSAH troops killed 872 men, women and children. Some 240 of these were burned alive in the church of Yefremovka.^[63] In August 1944, when an SS commander, formerly of LSSAH, was captured south of Falaise in France and interrogated by the Allies, he stated that Peiper was "particularly eager to execute the order to burn villages".^[64] Peiper wrote to Potthast in March 1943: "Our reputation precedes us as a wave of terror and is one of our best weapons. Even old Genghis Khan would gladly have hired us as assistants."^[65]

Propaganda hero[]

On 9 March 1943, Peiper was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, the most prestigious military decoration of the Third Reich, for which Reichsführer-SS Himmler congratulated him in a live radio broadcast: "Heartfelt congratulations for the Knight’s Cross, my dear Jochen! I am proud of you!"^[66] In that stage of the Second World War, Nazi propaganda portrayed tank commander Peiper as an exemplary military leader. The official SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps) reported that Peiper's actions in Kharkov demonstrated that he is a Waffen-SS tank commander who always is "the master of the situation, in all its phases". That Peiper's "quick decision-making" assured victory in the field through his "bold and unorthodox orders". That tank commander Peiper is "a born leader, one filled with the highest sense of responsibility for the life of every one of his men, but who [was] also able to be hard, if necessary" to complete the mission.^[67]

In the post–War period, such hyperbolic descriptions of the tactical prowess of the tank commander Peiper glamourised the Waffen-SS man into a war hero of Germany .^[68] In the SS hierarchy, Peiper was an SS man and military officer who received, obeyed, and executed orders with minimal discussion, and expected that his soldiers receive, obey, and execute his orders without question.^[69] In July 1943, the LSSAH tank division participated in Operation Citadel in the area of Kursk, in which Kampfgruppe Peiper fought well against the Red Army.^[70] After Operation Citadel failed, the LSSAH tank division was redeployed from the Eastern Front in Russia to the north of Fascist Italy.^[71]

In Italy[]

German occupation[]

On 8 September 1943, Fascist Italy (1922–1943) ceased being a belligerent power of the Rome–Berlin Axis upon the signing of the Armistice of Cassibile (3 September 1943), between the Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946) and the Allied Powers, in order to withdraw from fighting the Second World War in Italy proper. Consequently, Nazi Germany responded with Operation Achse (1943), wherein Wehrmacht forces, including the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) tank division, invaded and occupied the north of Italy, in order to forcibly disarm of the Italian army in situ; in August 1943, Kampfgruppe Peiper was stationed at the city of Cuneo, 6.0 km. north of the village of Boves, in the commune of Boves.^[72]

Massacre at Boves[]

On 19 September 1943, in a firefight with the Waffen-SS occupiers, partisan guerrillas of the Italian Resistance Movement killed one soldier and captured two other soldiers in the vicinity of Boves, in the Piedmont region of north-west Italy.^[73] In a later firefight with the partisans, a Waffen-SS infantry company failed to rescue their POW comrades from the partisans. After that failed rescue by the infantry, the armoured units of Kampfgruppe Peiper assumed strategic control of the streets and the roads into and out of the village of Boves, and Peiper then threatened to destroy the village of Boves if the partisans did not release their Waffen-SS POWs.^[74]

In effort to avoid the Nazis’ destruction of the Boves village, the local spokesmen of the Boves commune, the parish priest Giuseppe Bernardi and the businessman Alessandro Vasallo, successfully negotiated the partisans’ release of their Waffen-SS POWs and of the corpse of the SS soldier killed in the firefight earlier that day of 19 September.^[75] Despite the successfully negotiated release of the SS corpse and the Waffen-SS POWs, commander Peiper ordered the soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper to summarily kill 24 men of the Boves village in retaliation for the anti-Nazi resistance of the villagers. The Waffen-SS also killed a woman when they looted and burned her house.

In the after action report to the LSSAH, Kampfgruppe Peiper described the Boves massacre as Peiper's heroic defence against anti-German attacks by Communist partisans in which Waffen-SS soldiers battled, defeated, and killed 17 bandits and partisans, and that “during the fights [with partisans] the villages of Boves and Costellar were burned down. [That] in nearly all [the] burning houses [stores of] ammunition exploded. Some bandits were shot.”^[76]

Return to the Eastern Front[]

At the Eastern Front in November 1943, the Kampfgruppe Peiper fought in the battles at Zhytomyr. In due course, Peiper assumed command of the , in replacement of the dead tank commander; yet Peiper was inexperienced as a tank commander.^[77] In early December, Peiper was nominated for a medal for the 1st Regiment's battlefield successes with the destruction of Red Army artillery batteries and a division headquarters, and for capturing three POWs and having killed 2,280 Red Army soldiers. In a scorched-earth action by the Regiment, commander Peiper "attacked with all weapons and flame-throwers from his SPW [armoured fighting vehicle]" to defeat the Soviet defenders, and then "completely destroyed" the village of Pekartchina.^[78]

In his aggressive leadership of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment, tank commander Peiper disregarded the great numbers of Waffen-SS casualties, soldiers wounded and killed in the course of his victories in the Eastern Front. Without prior reconnaissance, Peiper's frontal attacks against the Red Army cost many SS casualties and lost too much matériel in battle;^[79] thus, after a month, Peiper's Panzer regiment only had 12 working tanks.^[80] In late December, he was ordered to division-level staff officer duty; so few working tanks voided his regimental command; on 22 December 1943, another Waffen-SS officer assumed command of the diminished 1st SS Panzer Regiment. On 20 January 1944, staff officer Peiper reported to the Führer’s headquarters, where Hitler presented the heraldic device of Oak Leaves for his Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross medal.^[81]

Battle of Normandy[]

In March 1944, the LSSAH was withdrawn from the Eastern Front and sent to be reformed in Belgium. New recruits, many of whom were teenagers, had little in common with fanatical SS volunteers of years past. The recruits underwent brutal training; five were sentenced to death for shirking their duties. Peiper gave the command to the executioners and later had recruits march past the bodies. In 1956, he was investigated by German authorities in connection with this event; Peiper denied everything, and the case was closed in 1966.^[82]

As the Allied Operation Overlord began, LSSAH was moved closer to the Channel Coast in anticipation of the "real" invasion at Pas de Calais. Transportation was limited, and the Allies had near-total air superiority.^[83] Thus, Peiper's regiment saw action from only 18 July. Peiper was rarely in the frontline command, due to the terrain and the need to maintain radio silence.^[84] As with the other German units in the area, they fought a defensive battle until the German front began to collapse following Allied Operation Cobra. Having gone to the front with 19,618 men, the LSSAH lost 25% of its men and all of its tanks.^[85]

Peiper was not in command of his Panzer regiment during Operation Luttich, the failed counter-attacks near Avranches. Suffering from a nervous breakdown, he was relieved of command on 2 August and dispatched to the rear. From September 1944 forward, he was in a military hospital in Upper Bavaria, not far from his family. He was discharged on 7 October.^[86]

Battle of the Bulge[]

In autumn of 1944, the Wehrmacht continually repelled the attempts of the Western Allies to breach, penetrate, and cross the Westwall, whilst Hitler sought opportunity to seize the initiative on the Western Front.^[87] The result was Operation Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine), a desperate gambit to defeat the Allies on the Western Front, whereby the German armies would break through the U.S. lines in the Ardennes forest, cross the River Meuse and seize the city of Antwerp in order to break and divide the Allied front.^[88]

The 6th SS Panzer Army, commanded by Gen. Dietrich, was the spearhead to penetrate the American lines between Aachen and the Schnee Eifel, in order to seize the bridges over the Meuse, on both sides of the city of Liège. The 6th Panzer Army designated the LSSAH as the army's mobile-strike force, commanded by SS-Oberführer Wilhelm Mohnke. The 6th Panzer Division was composed of four combined-arms battle groups; Peiper commanded the most substantially equipped Kampfgruppe Peiper, which included all armoured vehicle and tank sections of the Division, including the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion equipped with the 70-ton King Tiger tank. The mission of Kampfgruppe Peiper was to seize the bridges on the Meuse river between the cities of Liège and Huy. To address the perpetual shortages of fuel common to an army at war, headquarters provided tank commander Peiper with a map indicating the locations of U.S. Army fuel depots, where he could seize the fuel stores from the few U.S. Army soldiers manning the depots.^[89]

Advance[]

The route of Kampfgruppe Peiper: The black circle indicates the Baugnez crossroads where the Waffen-SS committed the Malmedy massacre on 17 December 1944.

The routes assigned to Kampfgruppe Peiper included narrow and single-lane roads, which compelled the infantry, armored vehicles, and tanks to travel as a convoy that was up to 25 kilometres (16 mi) long. Peiper complained that the roads assigned to his Kampfgruppe were suitable for bicycles, but not for tanks;^[90] Fritz Krämer, chief of staff for the 6th Panzer Army told him: "I don't care how and what you do. Just make it to the Meuse. Even if you've only one tank left when you get there."^[91]

Peiper's mechanized column reached their point of departure at midnight, which delayed the attack of the Kampfgruppe Peiper by almost 24 hours.^[92] Peiper had planned to advance through Losheimergraben, but the two infantry divisions tasked to open the route for Kampfgruppe Peiper failed to do so on the first day. In the early morning of 17 December, they captured Honsfeld and much-needed stores of fuel. Peiper continued west on his assigned route until he had to detour shortly before Ligneuville, because the assigned road was impassable; that detour compelled Peiper towards the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium.^[93]

Malmedy and other atrocities[]

Aftermath of the Malmedy massacre. American troops are recovering victims' bodies.

War correspondent Jean Marin looks at bodies of civilians massacred at the Legaye house in Stavelot.

During Peiper's advance on 17 December 1944, his armoured units and half-tracks confronted a lightly armed convoy of about thirty American vehicles at the Baugnez crossroads near Malmedy. The troops, mainly elements of the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, were quickly overcome and captured.^[94] Along with other American prisoners of war captured earlier, they were ordered to stand in a meadow before the Germans opened fire on them with machine guns, killing 84 soldiers, and leaving the bodies in the snow. The survivors were able to reach American lines later that day, and their story spread rapidly throughout the American front lines.^{[citation needed]}

The atrocities continued. In Honsfeld, Peiper's men murdered several American prisoners.^[95][96] Other murders of POWs and civilians were reported in Büllingen,^[95] Ligneuville and Stavelot,^[97] Cheneux, La Gleize, and Stoumont on 17, 18, 19 and 20 December.^{[citation needed]} On 19 December 1944, in the area between Stavelot and Trois-Ponts, while the Germans were trying to regain control of the bridge over the Amblève River (crucial for allowing reinforcements and supplies to reach them), men from Kampfgruppe Peiper killed a number of Belgian civilians. The battle group was eventually declared responsible for the deaths of 362 prisoners of war and 111 civilians.^[95]

Stall and retreat[]

Moving ahead, Peiper crossed Ligneuville and reached the heights of Stavelot on the left bank of the Amblève River at nightfall of the second day of the operation. The battle group paused for the night, allowing Americans to reorganize. After heavy fighting, Peiper's armour crossed the bridge on the Amblève. The spearhead continued on, without having fully secured Stavelot. By then, the surprise factor had been lost. The U.S. forces regrouped and blew up several bridges ahead of Peiper's advance, trapping the battle group in the deep valley of the Amblève, downstream from Trois-Ponts. The weather also improved, permitting the Allied air forces to operate. Airstrikes destroyed or heavily damaged numerous German vehicles. Peiper's command was in disarray: some units had lost their way among difficult terrain or in the dark, while company commanders preferred to stay with Peiper at the head of the column and thus were unable to provide guidance to their own units.^[98]

Peiper attacked Stoumont on 19 December and took the town amid heavy fighting. He was unable to protect his rear, which enabled American troops to cut him off from the only possible supply road for ammunition and fuel at Stavelot.^[99] Without supplies, and with no contact with other German units behind him, Peiper could advance no further. American attacks on Stoumont forced the remnants of the battle group to retreat to La Gleize. On 24 December, Peiper abandoned his vehicles and retreated with the remaining men. German wounded and American prisoners were also left behind.^[100] According to Peiper, 717 men returned to the German lines out of 3,000 at the beginning of the operation.^[101]

Despite the failure of Peiper's battle group and the loss of all tanks, Mohnke recommended Peiper for a further award. The events at the Baugnez crossroads were described in glowing terms: "Without regard for threats from the flanks and only inspired by the thought of a deep breakthrough, the Kampfgruppe proceeded ... to Ligneuville and destroyed at Baugnez an enemy supply column and after annihilation of the units blocking their advance, succeeded in causing the staff of the 49th Anti-Aircraft Brigade to flee.^[102] Rather than a stain on Peiper's honour, the killing of POWs was celebrated in official records.^[103] In January 1945, the Swords were added to his Knight's Cross. The great fame of Peiper as a Waffen-SS commander during the Battle of the Bulge was born.^[104]

End of the war[]

On 4 February, Peiper met for the last time with Himmler at his provisional headquarters. After that he fought in the Operation Southwind. His unit took part in Operation Spring Awakening, which failed. Although Peiper's unit inflicted a large number of casualties, due to his aggressive style of command he lost many men.^[105] On 1 May, as LSSAH was forced into Austria, Peiper's men were informed of Hitler's death. On 8 May, the LSSAH received the order to cross the Enns and surrender to the American troops.^[106] Instead of surrendering, Peiper chose to trek home. He was apprehended on 22 May by American troops.^[107]

Through July 1945, Peiper was held in a POW camp in Bavaria with about 500 other German soldiers and SS men.^[108] As an unofficial leader of the group, Peiper came to the attention of the commander of the camp,^[109] and then of higher command. When asked about the plight of Poles and Jews, Peiper reportedly responded: "All the 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 also lamented that the Americans refused to incorporate the SS into its army to "prepare to fight the Russians".^[110]

Meanwhile, an active investigation into the Malmedy massacre was launched at the end of June 1945 by American war crimes investigators.^[111] Crimes during the Battle of the Bulge were attributed to Kampfgruppe Peiper, resulting in American investigative teams searching POW camps for its men.^[95] Peiper topped the list of alleged perpetrators but was difficult to locate due to an enormous number of prisoners (four million) and haphazard communications.^[112] He was finally identified as a Malmedy suspect on 21 August 1945, after a transfer to a much larger camp where his file came to the attention of its commander by chance. Peiper was immediately transferred to a military intelligence interrogation centre in Freising.^[113]

War criminal[]

Interrogation[]

Jailed in Freising, Upper Bavaria, Peiper underwent his first interrogations, ^[114] and the interrogators quickly learned that, although the Waffen-SS were hardened soldiers, they were not trained to withstand interrogation.^[114] Being psychologically unsophisticated, some SS men freely gave the information that interrogators requested, while some SS men alleged having been tortured — threats, beatings, mock executions — and only then did they speak to the interrogators.^[114] In his testimony Peiper assumed command responsibility for the actions of the Waffen-SS soldiers under his command. In December 1945, Peiper was transferred to the prison at Schwäbisch Hall, where 1,000 ex-Waffen-SS soldiers of the LSSAH tank division were imprisoned and assembled for judicial processing for war crimes.^[114] On 16 April 1946, approximately 300 prisoners were moved from Schwäbisch Hall prison to Dachau Concentration Camp, where a military tribunal would hear their war-crime cases and defences.^[114]

Trial testimony[]

A military tribunal heard the Malmedy trial at the Dachau camp from 16 May to 16 July 1946. The group of 74 defendants present for trial included Sepp Dietrich, commander of the 6th SS Panzer Army; Fritz Krämer, Dietrich's chief of staff; Hermann Prieß, commander of the I SS Panzer Corps; and Peiper, commander of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment, the unit to which the war crimes were attributed.^[115] The prosecutor's accusations were based upon the sworn and written statements provided given by the SS defendants in the Schwäbisch Hall prison.

Joachim Peiper at the Malmedy massacre trial (1946).

To counter the evidence in the sworn statements of the SS commanders and the prosecution witnesses, the lead defence attorney, Lt. Col. Willis M. Everett, tried to show that the sworn statements of the defendants had been obtained by inappropriate methods of interrogation.^[116] Everett called Lt. Col. Hal D. McCown, commander 2nd Battalion, 119th Infantry Regiment, to testify about his war-time treatment — as a POW — by Peiper's Waffen-SS soldiers, at La Gleize, Belgium, after they captured him and his soldiers on 21 December 1944. At trial, Lt. Col. McCown testified that he had not witnessed Peiper's Waffen-SS soldiers mistreatment their U.S. POWs.^[117]

The prosecutor countered that, by the time of the capture of McCown and his unit on 21 December, Peiper, as commander of a battle group, was aware that his units' tactical situation (out-numbered and out-gunned) placed him and his soldiers in danger of being captured and made prisoners of war by the U.S. Army. That on 17 December 1944, at Malmedy, Peiper's aggressive units were advancing towards their military objective; whereas, by 21 December, the units of Kampfgruppe Peiper were separated and almost trapped by the U.S. Army at La Gleize; the vehicles had little fuel; and the companies of soldiers had suffered 80 percent casualty rates.

Defence counsel Everett called only Peiper to testify, who showed a calculated attitude towards the U.S. POWs, because they were useful to him. When Peiper's soldiers fled on foot from the town of La Gleize, he took hostage Lt. Col. McCown and other U.S. soldiers in order to protect his Waffen-SS soldiers from capture by the U.S. Army.^[118]

Despite the damning facts Peiper communicated to the military tribunal, the other defendant SS men, supported by their German lawyers, unwisely asked for the opportunity to testify; under the prosecutor's cross-examinations, the SS men behaved like "a bunch of drowning rats . . . turning on each other."^[116] The testimonies of the SS men accused of the Malmedy war crimes gave the military tribunal many reasons to sentence several of the defendants to death.^[116] The military tribunal were unconvinced by Peiper's testimony about his lack of command responsibility, as a Waffen-SS officer, for the murder of the U.S. POWs captured by his soldiers.^[116] Moreover, witnesses testified about two occasions when Peiper ordered his SS soldiers to summarily execute U.S. POWs.^[119] When the prosecutor questioned Peiper whether or not he gave the summary-execution orders, Peiper denied the veracity of the eye-witness testimony, because that testimony was coerced from men under mental duress and physical torture.^[120] When questioned about the summary murder of Belgian civilians by his soldiers, Peiper said the dead people were partisan guerrillas, not civilians.^[121]

Death sentence[]

Together with 42 other defendants, Joachim Peiper was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging on 16 July 1946. The sentences were automatically subject to review by the U.S. Army Review Board. In October 1947, the results were submitted, and many verdicts were subsequently changed. Starting in March 1948, sentences were further reviewed by General Lucius D. Clay, commander-in-chief in Germany. Clay confirmed twelve death sentences, including Peiper's.^[122]

The turmoil raised by this case caused the Secretary of the Army, Kenneth Royall, to create a commission chaired by Judge Gordon A. Simpson of Texas to investigate. The commission was interested in the Malmedy massacre trial and in other cases judged at Dachau. The commission arrived in Europe on 30 July 1948 and issued its report on 14 September. In this report, it recommended that the twelve remaining death sentences be commuted to life imprisonment. The commission confirmed the accuracy of Everett's accusations regarding mock trials but neither disputed nor denied his charges of torture of the defendants. The commission expressed the opinion that the pre-trial investigation had not been properly conducted. Its members felt that no death sentence should be carried out where such a doubt existed.^{[citation needed]}

The United States Senate launched its own investigations, which were opened in early 1950 by several Senate committees. One of them included Senator Joseph McCarthy, who prepared to launch his sensationalist career. Receiving encouragement and information from right-wing and antisemitic circles, McCarthy dominated the proceedings and grabbed headlines. He was probably encouraged by the right-wing judge, LeRoy van Roden, who saw the trials as a Jewish effort to take revenge on the Germans, and who had also served on the investigating commissions.^[123] The Senate Committee on Armed Services came to the conclusion of improper pre-trial procedures, including a mock trial, had indeed affected the trial process but not torture as sometimes stated. There was little or no doubt that some of the accused were indeed guilty of the massacre.^[124]

Release from prison[]

In 1951, in correspondence with a subordinate, ex-general Heinz Guderian campaigned for the political rehabilitation of Joachim Peiper:

At the moment, I'm negotiating with General Handy [in Heidelberg], because [he] wants to hang the unfortunate Peiper. McCloy is powerless, because the Malmedy trial is being handled by Eucom, and is not subordinate to McCloy. As a result, I have decided to cable President Truman and ask him if he is familiar with this idiocy.^[125]

Ultimately, judicial review of the trial verdicts of the military tribunal, commuted the war-crime death sentences for the SS and Waffen-SS defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial into life imprisonment, and Peiper's life-sentence later was commuted to time served in prison. In 1954, Peiper's death sentence was commuted to 35 years of imprisonment, but he was released in December 1956.^[123] The political lobbying of the network of SS men helped Peiper be freed early from prison and to find employment; the Mutual Aid Community of Former Members of the Waffen SS (HIAG) already had found employment for Mrs Peiper, near the Landsberg Prison that housed her husband. The political influence of , an ex-SS functionary in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) security service, Peiper was employed in the Porsche automobile company.^[126]

Return to civilian life[]

Following his release from Landsberg Prison, Peiper was careful not to associate too closely with former Waffen-SS men or HIAG, at least publicly. Privately, however, he maintained contact with and was closely involved with many former SS members. In 1959, he attended the national meeting of the Association of Knight's Cross Recipients. Travelling with HIAG's official historian Walter Harzer, he reunited with Sepp Dietrich and Heinz Lammerding at the closed-door meeting.^[127] Peiper was often seen at the funerals of personalities such as Dietrich, Kurt Meyer, and Paul Hausser.^[128] He assisted the efforts of HIAG to rehabilitate the Waffen-SS by hiding its criminal aspects and exalting its combat achievements, claiming that the SS were just like other soldiers. Peiper once told one of his friends: "I personally think that every attempt at rehabilitation during our lifetime is unrealistic, but one can still collect material."^[128]

On 17 January 1957, Peiper began work at Porsche in Stuttgart in its technical division.^[129] As he advanced within the company, he was accused by Italian union workers of the Boves massacre in Italy during the war. Ferry Porsche personally intervened and promised Peiper a senior management position, but the offer was derailed by the trade unions, who objected to convicted war criminals serving in the upper management of the company. The strong antipathy to Peiper, his association with Ferry Porsche, and the related negative effect on sales in Porsche's biggest market, the United States, forced the Porsche car company to fire Joachim Peiper.^[130]

On 30 December 1960, Peiper filed a lawsuit against the Porsche car company.^[130] In court documents, his attorney stated that Peiper was not a war criminal and that the Allies had used the trials to defame the German people. He asserted that the Nuremberg trial and the Malmedy massacre trial were merely propaganda. Citing documents published by the controversial scholar and Holocaust denier Freda Utley, Peiper asserted that the Malmedy massacre trial defendants had been tortured by the Americans. At the request of the court, Porsche and Peiper reached an agreement to terminate the employment contract, and Peiper received six months of wages as compensation. HIAG's official periodical, Der Freiwillige, capitalized on the award and wrote that Peiper had been "unfairly sentenced" for war crimes.^[131] Peiper became a car sales trainer for Volkswagen.^[132]​

Criminal investigations in the 1960s[]

At the beginning of the 1960s, the perception and opinion the public had of the Nazi crimes began to change. The German economic recovery did not allow SS men to hide, and holding a high position in society could raise questions that people like Peiper preferred to avoid.^[133] The Adolf Eichmann trial and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the first half of the 1960s (which had a large audience in West Germany) shone a new light on the Nazi period of German history.^[133] Prosecution was now initiated by the West German authorities themselves, not the Allies. The Federal Republic of Germany had several times extended the statute of limitations for the prosecution of Nazi war crimes, which made Nazi war criminals uncomfortable.^[133]

In the early 1960s, Peiper's name came up several times in war crimes trials in Germany. He was mentioned in the proceedings against Karl Wolff, Himmler's senior adjutant, which began in early 1962 and concluded in 1964 with a fifteen-year sentence. Werner Grothmann, Peiper's successor as Himmler's adjutant, was also under investigation. In both of these proceedings, the court heard testimony from Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, former Bandenbekämpfung chief for occupied Europe, covering Himmler's pre-invasion designs to "rid Russia of 30 million Slavic people" or his pronouncements, following the Minsk killings, that he was "determined to eliminate the Jews" (Peiper was with Himmler at that time but had gone to a field assignment following his brother's death).^[134]

In 1964, Peiper learned that the village of Boves had installed a memorial naming his command Kampfgruppe Peiper as the perpetrators of the Boves massacre. ; he immediately communicated with other Waffen-SS men from his old unit to co-ordinate a defence strategy. Peiper's defence blamed the Italian communists for manufacturing false accusations and insisting that the destruction of the village of Boves was the fault of the partisans in their fierce battle with the Waffen-SS.^[135] On 23 June 1964, criminal charges over the Boves massacre were filed against Peiper by the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, in Ludwigsburg.^[133] The charges included statements from two former Italian partisans who recognized Peiper from a book on the Battle of the Bulge and from a photograph of Peiper taken as the village of Boves burned below his position.^[136] In 1968, the German District Court in Stuttgart concluded that Peiper's unit, Kampfgruppe Peiper, had set houses afire and that "a portion of the victims killed was from rioting that was committed by [the SS men]".^[137] Nevertheless, the investigation was closed for lack of evidence that Peiper had issued the direct order to kill civilians and burn houses.^[133] The court also concluded that since the testimonies of the former SS men were so inconsistent, no collusion between them was possible.^[137]

In December 1964, Simon Wiesenthal made a highly damaging accusation that Kampfgruppe Peiper arrested Jews in Borgo San Dalmazzo. The Borgo San Dalmazzo investigation was closed in 1969. Peiper was later called as a witness during the Werner Best trial, where he was confronted about his role as Himmler's adjutant. He did not deny having had close contact with Himmler, but he managed to avoid being directly implicated in Nazi crimes by claiming memory failure.^[138]

Nazi idolatry[]

In the United States, Joachim Peiper is an idol of right-wing Americans who romanticize the Waffen-SS as German war heroes, rather than as Nazi war criminals.^[1] In the post–War period of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the cultural context — xenophobic Russo–American Cold War and reactionary McCarthyism — allowed historical, factual, and personal misrepresentations of Peiper to coalesce into the cult of personality (idolatry) practised by right-wing organisations, such as the HIAG (Mutual Aid Community for Former Members of the Waffen SS) who sought his early release from war-crime imprisonment in West Germany. In American popular culture, Peiper's military bearing, good looks, commanding presence, and chestful of Nazi medals earned him many right-wing admirers in civilian society and in military society.^[139]

In the U.S. military, the idolatry of Joachim Peiper penetrated the official publications of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In 2019, the DoD Facebook account included a colorised military photograph of Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper into an audiovisual commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Army fighting Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge — which included the Malmedy Massacre (1944) committed by Kampfgruppe Peiper. That Waffen-SS photograph of Peiper provoked "widespread backlash on social media" because the DoD publication appeared to celebrate a Nazi war criminal as a hero of the Second World War; the DoD apologised and deleted the photograph. Despite that political mis-step, the Pentagon used Peiper's Waffen-SS photograph to represent the German enemy fighting the U.S. Army airborne corps in the Battle of the Bulge.^[2] Moreover, the Facebook page of the Army's 10th Mountain Division also featured Peiper's colorised Waffen-SS military photograph to represent the German enemy they fought in the Second World War.^[2][3][4]

The Washington Post and The New York Times quoted Facebook commentators who said that the DoD's positive military biography of the war criminal Joachim Peiper was a "vile and disturbing" exercise in historical negationism, which had the tone of a “ ‘fanboy-flavoured’ piece” of right-wing propaganda.^[3][2] Moreover, Washington Post researchers traced the source of the colorised photograph of Peiper to the Twitter account of a pro–Nazi artist who publishes photographs of Nazis, with captions of supportive praise for Nazism and Hitler, and concluded that:

It remains unclear how Pentagon and Army officials cleared an image, apparently created by an artist who celebrates Nazi propaganda online, to be published alongside a tribute to the American soldiers who fought and died to defeat a fascist regime 75 years ago. But the mis-step is just the latest in a month of embarrassing incidents for the U.S. Army, which has been recently slammed with multiple allegations of white supremacist activity.^[3]

Later life and death[]

In 1972, Joachim Peiper moved to Traves, France, where he owned a house. Under the pseudonym “Rainer Buschmann”, Peiper worked as a self-employed English-to-German translator for the publisher Stuttgarter Motor-Buch Verlag, translating books of military history.^[28] Despite his biography, Peiper and Mrs Peiper tried to live a quiet life under his German name, “Joachim Peiper”, which proved unwise.^[28]

In 1974, a member of the French Resistance recognised the Waffen-SS war criminal Loachim Peiper and reported his presence in France to the French Communist Party. In 1976, the historian of the French Communist Party searched the Gestapo files for the personnel Peiper's file.^[140] On 21 June 1976, anti-Nazi political activists distributed informational flyers to the Traves community that the Nazi war criminal Joachim Peiper was residing in the village of Traves. On 22 June 1976, an article in L'Humanité confirmed Peiper's presence in the village.^[140] Confirmation of his identity and presence in France attracted journalists to whom Peiper readily granted interviews, wherein he, Peiper, was a victim of Communist harassment over the past War. In the interview titled J’ai payé, Peiper defended himself as an innocent man who had paid for his war crime, the Malmedy massacre (1944), with twelve years of imprisonment, and that likewise he was innocent of the earlier Boves massacre (1943) war crime in Italy. In response to death threats in France, the Piepers repatriated to the German Federal Republik.^[141]

In the morning of 14 July 1976, anti-Nazis attacked and set afire the house of the Waffen-SS war criminal Joachin Peiper; after the fire, the firemen found a charred corpse holding a pistol and a .22 calibre rifle.^[132]​ The investigators of the house fire determined that the smoke suffocated and killed Peiper.^[142] In the event, “The Avengers” an anti-Nazi political group, claimed responsibility for having set the house fire that killed a Nazi war criminal; nonetheless, because of the completeness of the destruction of the house by the arson, the French police authorities remained unconvinced that Joachim Peiper was dead.^[82]

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