The war crimes of Joachim Peiper

The poster boy of the Waffen-SS

After the Great War, Woldemar joined a Freikorps, a paramilitary unit comprising conservative veterans who were angry over the country’s defeat and were quick to blame the Jews and the Communists for it. He actively helped suppress a Polish uprising that intended to join Silesia with newly established independent Poland.
 
With a family background like that, it’s no surprise that young Joachim quickly found his way to National Socialism. At the age of eleven, he followed his middle brother Horst in joining first the boy scouts, then the Hitler Youth, and eventually the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi Party’s major paramilitary organization. (Horst served as a concentration camp guard, fought in the Battle of France, and died under unclear circumstances in 1941, possibly driven to suicide by his fellow SS-men because of his homosexuality.)

Joachim caught the eye of SS leader Heinrich Himmler at the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally. Handsome, pleasant-mannered and a self-confident SS officer by the time, Peiper seemed like the poster boy of the true Aryan to Himmler, who took him under his wing. Peiper was sent on a military leadership training course, where he received favorable reviews, with one blemish: while the military psychologists also gave their stamp of approval, they noted that he was egocentric, had a negative attitude, and was constantly trying to impress people with his personal relationship to Himmler; they stated that he might become a difficult subordinate or an arrogant superior.

Peiper became an adjutant to Himmler in 1938, a position the latter considered necessary for every SS officer suitable for higher ranks. Peiper travelled with Himmler a lot, and occasionally also served as liaison to Hitler. While at Himmler’s side, he witnessed the execution of Polish leaders who were thought to be potential future partisans, the gassing of mentally ill patients, the operation of concentration camps, and the SS’s gradual administrative refinement of ethnic cleansing methods.
 
In May 1940, during the invasion of France, Peiper was given a combat position as platoon leader in the motorized regiment of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (“LSSAH”) a division that began its existence as Hitler’s personal bodyguard unit. He was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) and decorated the Iron Cross 2nd class for his courage during the capture of a French artillery battery. In late June, with France conquered, he returned to his position as personal adjutant to Himmler. Promoted to First Adjutant in late 1940, he accompanied Himmler on a tour of German-occupied territories to check on the state of SS and Waffen-SS operations, and participated in a conference where Himmler presented plans to kill 30 million Slavs in Eastern Europe. As Himmler’s first adjutant, Peiper delivered to him the daily kill counts of the ongoing ethnic cleansing.

Peiper was reassigned to the motorized regiment of the LSSAH again in the summer of 1941. Fighting in the Soviet Union near the Black Sea, Peiper earned a reputation as an aggressive commander, but one whose victories came at the cost of many SS-men’s lives. During the Third Battle of Kharkov in early 1943, Peiper’s battalion rescued an encircled German infantry division in an operation that came down to hand-to-hand fighting with Soviet ski troops. During the rescue mission, Peiper discovered that a small German medical unit that was left behind in a village was killed and mutilated by the Soviets. He responded by burning down the village and shooting its inhabitants.

Peiper’s unit, Kampfgruppe (“combat group”) Peiper participated in the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 (Read our earlier article), and was then transferred to Italy, the Axis ally that was already teetering due to the Allied invasion of Sicily. The unit was stationed in Northwest Italy, not far from the village of Boves. When the Italian government deposed Mussolini and surrendered to the Allies in early December 1943, the LSSAH invaded Northern Italy and took control of it before it could join the Allied war effort. On September 19, Italian guerillas killed an SS-man and captured two others in a firefight in Boves. Peiper surrounded the village and threatened to destroy it if the two captives were not released. The local parish priest and a businessman negotiated the release of the prisoners and the dead body of the third man, but Peiper still ordered the execution of 24 men (one woman was also killed when the SS looted and torched her house).

Kampfgruppe Peiper’s massacres began in the early morning of December 17, 1944, with LSSAH already 16 hours behind schedule. Low on fuel, Peiper’s unit deviated from its planned course to capture a small Allied fuel depot in Büllingen, where they executed 59 captured soldiers and a civilian.
 
Between noon and 1 p.m. on the same day, the group came upon an American convoy of about 30 vehicles, mainly transporting members of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, at the Baugnez crossroads two miles from the city of Malmedy. German tank fire quickly immobilized the first and last vehicles, trapping the rest on the road and forcing the passengers to surrender.

Peiper’s tank column moved on, leaving behind some soldiers to guard the approximately 120 American POWs. The captives were herded into a field, where SS men cut them down with machine guns, and executed the survivors with a shot to the head. Some Americans were able to run away and hide in a nearby café, but the Germans set fire to the building and shot anyone coming out. Eighty-six POWs were murdered, but another 43 managed to run into the forest and eventually made contact with other U.S. units. By late evening, news of the Germans massacring captives started circulating among forward American divisions, along with unofficial orders not to take SS-men or Wehrmacht soldiers alive. (In fact, American soldiers massacred some 80 German prisoners of war in a very similar manner on January 1, 1945, as retaliation for the events at Malmedy.)

Of Kampfgruppe Peiper’s further massacres, the ones occurring at and around the town of Stavelot stand out with the murder of around a hundred civilians and eight POWs in total. On one particular occasion, some 20 civilians, mainly women and children, were hiding in the cellar of a building that was later chosen by Allied troops as a defensive point. After the Allies were defeated, the Germans tossed two grenades down the cellar door. The explosion only wounded a single person, but the screams of panic alerted the soldiers. They herded the civilians up and out of the house, claiming that they must have been firing at them before. The victims, 23 in number, were lined up against a hedge and shot, with only a German-speaking woman and her daughters spared.

The house were the victims of the Stavelot massacre were hiding.
(Photos: battle-of-the-bulge.be)

Another massacre, smaller in scope and largely forgotten until the 21st century, was that of the Wereth 11. These eleven U.S. soldiers were African American men from the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, a segregated unit highly regarded for the combat experience they gained since D-Day. On December 17, 1944, Battery C of the battalion was overrun by the Germans, with most defenders killed or taken captive. Eleven men, however, managed to get away and made it to the village of Wereth after six hours of marching in freezing rain. A friendly couple there offered them shelter and hot food. Wereth, however, had been part of Germany before World War I and some families were German sympathizers. An unknown local alerted nearby German forces of the presence of the African American soldiers and a patrol soon arrived to capture them. The men were forced to run to a nearby field with the Germans following them in a car and were never seen alive again.

When the bodies were found two months later, they bore signs of torture. Some had their legs broken and skulls cracked by rifle butts. Others had their fingers cut off or eyes gouged out. Still others had multiple stab wounds. Today, a memorial honors the sacrifice of these men, thanks in no small part to the then-12-year-old son of the couple who sheltered them, who tracked down the victims’ names in the 1990s. According to a U.S. Senate subcommittee report, 362 POWs and 111 civilians were murdered by the SS in the series of killings, though other sources claim more victims, possibly 500-750 POWs alone. Peiper’s action during the battle earned him the Swords for his Knight’s Cross, and the atrocities committed by his troops celebrated in official records.
 
Peiper last led troops in February and March 1945, fighting against the Red Army in Hungary. With the war essentially lost, the LSSAH was ordered to surrender to American forces in early May. Peiper defied the order and traveled home, but was captured within the month and charged with war crimes in 1946. 43 out of 73 members of Kampfgruppe Peiper, including Peiper himself, were sentenced to death by hanging. Two witnesses testified that Peiper had personally given orders to execute POWs on two occasions.

Peiper was never hanged, as his sentence, and those of several of his men, were commuted to life imprisonment. That, in turn, was later reduced to 35 years in prison, and he was released on parole in 1956, a mere 10 years after his original sentencing. Once out, he became active in the circles of former Waffen-SS veterans who were helping each other out and covering up their wartime records. He briefly worked at the Porsche automobile company, but was dismissed because Italian trade union workers refused to work with the man who ordered the killing of civilians at Boves.
 
Peiper moved to a village in Southern France in 1972 and worked as an English-to-German translator of military history books. He was recognized by a former member of the French Resistance, and his presence was made public. He happily gave interviews to the journalists who turned up at his home, claiming to be innocent of the Boves massacre, to be a victim of Communist harassment, and to have already paid for his crimes with his prison time. He also made disparaging comments about the French, such as "In 1940, French people weren't brave, that's why I'm here."
 
In the early hours of July 14, 1976, French anti-Nazis burned down Peiper’s house. It was probably not coincidental that the day was Bastille Day, the national celebration of the French Revolution of 1789. Firefighters found the charred body of a man, still holding a pistol and a rifle as if trying to protect himself, and apparently having died of smoke inhalation. While the body was generally assumed to have been Peiper’s, it could not be identified with certainty.

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