During the Second World War, a huge number of war crimes were committed by the armies
involved, and the German SS conducted huge scores of shootings and executions.
Many of these were committed by military units, and atrocities such as the Wormhoudt Massacre
or the Ardennes Abbey Massacre occurred.
A very few number of SS generals were ever brought to justice for their war crimes, and
one of these that evaded execution was Joachim Peiper, a tank commander in the Wafer SS.
Peiper had been also a personal assistant to SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler.
Peiper was killed after the war, as he was targeted whilst living inside of a French
village.
In 1976, French Anti Nazis attacked and torched his house and inside the burning building
the remains of the once SS officer was found charred.
But what did he do during his career inside of the military, and what crimes did he commit?
Join us as we find out and remember to support our channel, please make sure to subscribe.
At the age of 18, Joachim Peiper joined the Hitler Youth and he then in October 1933 volunteered
to join the SS and then was a member of the Cavalry SS.
He served under Nazi zealots who would ruthlessly execute Jews during the Second World War,
but Peiper’s skill as a military leader was noted.
He was sent on a leadership course, and it was concluded that throughout his career in
the SS he would be an arrogant superior.
He continued to train as a military officer, and became ingrained further in the Nazi Party’s
ideology.
But in June 1938, after impressing inside of the organisation, Heinrich Himmler recruited
Peiper to become one of his adjutants, and he accompanied the Head of the SS on a tour
of duty, and he took part in a number of administrative tasks and trained further to go higher inside
the SS.
He worked as a staff officer in the anteroom of the SS Main Officer, and grew close with
Himmler and Peiper had great respect for him also.
He accompanied Himmler on further visits, and as the Second World War broke out with
the Invasion of Poland on the 1st September 1939, Peiper travelled with Himmler himself
on his personal train.
He also would act as a go between for Himler and Hitler, and he met Adolf Hitler himself
a number of times.
As soon as the war broke out the war crimes began, with Himmler and Peiper personally
witnessing the executions of 20 Polish leaders who led resistance against the Nazis.
He personally witnessed the power that execution had to terrorise the population, and he encouraged
the executions of members of the Polish intellectual sector, and he also witnessed the methods
of ethnic cleaning used by the Germans to depopulate Polish lands.
On the 13th December he witnessed more killing at an Action T4 centre where mentally ill
patients were being gassed inside of the hospital.
He wrote of this, ‘The [gassing] action 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.’
Peiper then went with Himmler on inspections of concentration camps within Nazi Germany
and inside of occupied lands.
He visited Neuengammer and also Sachsenhausen, and he remained close with himmler.
Further visits to camps occurred at Buchenwald and Flossenburg, and Peiper kept witnessing
executions and killing conducted by the SS and other Nazi officials.
The pair would follow the Battle of France as the Germans captured France with ruthless
efficiency.
Peiper then became a platoon leader of a tank division and was noted for good service capturing
a French artillery Battery.
He was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st class because of his audacious soldiering,
and Peiper then stole a French sports car to use back home.
Peiper after the brief spell as a tank commander retuned to his assistant role with Himmler.
Himmler did praise Peiper and other tank commanders saying, ‘We had to have the toughness, this
should be said and soon forgotten, to shoot thousands of leading Polish people,’ and
he stressed the importance of psychological toughness with regards to the executions and
mass deportations the SS were carrying out.
Joachim Peiper was informed about Operation Barbarossa and the Invasion of the Soviet
Union.
He was then given 4 months to help prepare Waffen SS soldiers of his Kampfgrupper Peiper
to take the fight to the Red Army.
He also went with himmler further to Austria, Greece, Norway and Poland.
He visited the Lodz Ghetto and 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.”
He was also present at an SS conference where Himmler gave a speech outlining the plans
for killing 30 million Slavs in Eastern Europe, and following Operation Barbarossa Himmler
and Peiper inspected the work of the Einsatzgruppen who carried huge massacres of civilian populations.
But in October 1941, Peiper was reassigned as a tank commander, and he fought with the
1st SS Panzer Division Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler on the Eastern Front.
He took command of 11th Company, and was known for his aggressive leadership in battle, and
he had many victories but they did come at the price of German tanks and casualties.
Upon his advances, Einsatzgruppen D would follow and kill civilians, Jews and other
Comissars and Russian Red Army POWs.
Peiper continued to fight on, and was briefly transferred to France with his division before
he was sent back to the Eastern Front.
He fought in a number of different battles, including in hand to hand combat against Soviet
ski battalions.
But one of his crimes occurred in a village of Krasnaya Polyana.
As Peiper and his men entered the village, he found a number of his medical officers
slaughtered by soviet soldiers.
Peiper then responded by burning down the whole village, and he ordered every single
person there to be shot dead.
Further awards for combat came, and his unit became known as the ‘Blowtorch Battalion’
for their torching of 2 soviet villages, and shooting of the civilians there.
Many more civilians succumbed to the fire.
Kampfgruppen Peiper were transferred to Italy and Italy at the time were signing a surrender
and armistice with the Allies.
But on the 19th September 1943, during a fire fight with Waffem SS soldiers, partisan fighters
of the Italian Resistance Movement killed one soldier and captured 2 other German men
inside of Boves.
The SS tried to rescue their comrades, and Peiper and his soldiers then took control
of the roads in and out of Boves.
Peiper then threatened to destroy the village if the prisoners were not released.
They negotiated for the release and for the recovery of the SS soldier’s body, but despite
this being successful, Peiper ordered his men to kill 24 of the men inside the village
in retaliation, and they also slaughtered a woman when they looted and burned her house
down.
Peiper then returned back on the Eastern Front, and his aggressive leadership style led to
him attacking Red Army battalions with all weapons and even his flame thrower from his
armoured fighting vehicle.
His men then burned down another village.
He was a destroyer of settlements, and was then sent back to help defend Normandy.
To toughen up his soldiers, he instigated brutal training regimes and rituals, where
new soldiers were shot dead if they did not meet expectations.
Peiper then forced new recruits to stare at the corpses, and he even killed some of his
own SS soldiers to improve discipline.
Peiper did suffer a nervous breakdown and was relieved of command on the 2nd August
1944, and then during the battle of the bulge he was brought back.
Kampfgruppe Peiper fought on, and Peiper’s tank division fought heavily against the US
Army and tried to defend.
But on the 17th December 1944, Peiper’s tanks and half tracks came across a lightly
armed convoy of around 30 American vehicles at the Baugnez crossroads near Malmedy.
His soldiers overwhelmed the Allied men, and then they captured the prisoners and gathered
them together in a meadow.
The men were ordered to stand together, and then the Germans equipped with machine guns
fired into the Allied soldiers.
They were supposed to take prisoners, but Peiper was frustrated that the prisoners slowed
down his advancement so this is where the order came to kill them.
84 soldiers were killed and their bodies were left in the snow.
Peiper’s men continued to murder other American prisoners of war, and murders of POWs and
civilians occurred in scores of settlements in the middle of December 1944.
They were ruthless in their killings and were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of
Belgian civilians.
As the Second World War turned against the Germans, Peiper continued to fight, and he
was later captured by the Americans on the 22nd May 1945.
American investigators looked into the Malady Massacre, and Peiper was one of the most wanted
war criminals wanted by the US Army.
He was identified in Augusta 1945, and was placed on trial.
However, at his trial he complained that he was beaten and tortured badly for his confession,
and as these were obtained through inappropriate interrogations, Peiper who had initially been
sentenced to death was sent to prison instead.
He was later released in December 1956.
For his immense crimes of the Second World War, Joachim Peiper was never executed for
the huge amount of slaughter he had witnessed and been apart of.
He was considered one of the most wanted war criminals of the conflict, and was guilty
of a huge amount of war crimes.
As mentioned he was killed 40 years after the end of the conflict, when his house was
burned down.
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