16 July 1946, the former Dachau
concentration camp, Germany.

The US military tribunal delivers verdicts on
73 former Waffen-SS officers and soldiers, who between mid-December 1944 and mid-January
1945 committed a series of atrocities known as the Malmedy Massacre during which they
deliberately participated in the killing, shooting, and torturing of some 350 unarmed
American soldiers and about 100 Belgian civilians.

The main perpetrator of these atrocities
is a German SS officer Joachim Peiper.

Joachim Peiper, the third son of an
officer in the Imperial German Army, was born on the 30th of January 1915, in
Wilmersdorf, then part of the German Empire.

The First World War began on the 28th of July
1914.

Peiper’s father Woldemar served in the army of Kaiser Wilhelm II and felt betrayed and angry
that Germany lost the war which ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the German leaders signed
the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France.

After World War I ended, Germany experienced
great political turmoil.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh terms on Germany, which
had lost the war.

In addition, the country saw the overthrow of its monarchy.

In its place was
the new Weimar Republic, a democratic government.

Racist and antisemitic groups sprang up on the
radical right and they falsely claimed that Jews and Communists were to blame for Germany’s
problems.

One such group was the Nazi Party.

When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power
in January 1933, they made the stab-in-the-back myth – an antisemitic conspiracy theory, which
maintained that the Imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield, but was
instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front—especially Jews and revolutionary socialists
– an integral part of their official history of the 1920s.

The Nazis denounced the German
government leaders who had signed the Armistice of 11 November 1918 as the “November criminals”
who had “stabbed the nation in the back” in order to seize power.

Historians inside and
outside of Germany unanimously reject the myth, pointing out that the Imperial German Army was
out of reserves, was being overwhelmed by the entrance of the United States into the war, and
had already lost the war militarily by late 1918.

The Stab-in-the-back myth had much appeal to
many German nationalists such as Woldemar Peiper.

His 2 sons, Horst and Joachim, followed
the same life-path of nationalist ideology and military service to Germany.

Horst fought in the Battle of France in 1940 and died one year later in June 1941 in Poland in
a never-fully-explained accident.

It is believed that his fellow SS-men drove Horst to commit
suicide because of his alleged homosexuality.

Joachim’s eldest brother, Hans, was mentally ill,
and his suicide attempt resulted in brain injury that reduced him to a persistent vegetative state,
and he eventually died of tuberculosis in 1942.

On 30 January 1933, the same day Peiper turned 18,
Adolf Hitler become chancellor of Germany.

He then joined the Hitler Youth, the Nazi-organized youth
movement.

The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization designed to train boys as future
fighters and soldiers for war.

As an official organization of the Nazi state, the Hitler Youth
had a military structure at the local, regional, and national levels.

The boys practiced military
drills and learned to handle weapons.

They also worked on farms in the summer and participated in
competitive sports, especially boxing.

Some boys enjoyed the physical challenge, competition, and
camaraderie.

Others, however, found the constant focus on preparing for war and sacrificing
themselves for the fatherland very difficult.

In October 1933, Joachim Peiper joined the SS.

Peiper was ambitious and egocentric and at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally his reputation attracted the
notice of Heinrich Himmler – the head of the SS.

For Himmler, Peiper personified Aryanism, the
master-race concept promoted by the Nazism taught at the SS officer school.

Despite not being as
tall, blond, and muscular as the Nordic recruits to the SS, Peiper compensated by being a handsome,
personable, and self-confident SS officer.

In the April 1935 – March 1936 period Peiper
trained in one of the SS-Junker Schools, which were educational institutions established
by the SS to train and educate future SS officers.

In March 1938 he joined the Nazi Party and in
June of the same year he became an adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

Because
he was Himmler’s favorite, by 1939 Peiper was his adjutant at every official function.

World War II began on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Peiper travelled in the personal train of Himmler and occasionally was the liaison
officer to Hitler, when the Führer met with army and Waffen-SS generals near the front lines of
the Eastern Front.

The Waffen-SS was the military branch of the SS.

On 20 September, in the northern
Polish city of Bydgoszcz, Himmler and Peiper witnessed the public executions of twenty Polish
social leaders who might lead partisan resistance to Nazi occupation.

On 13 December 1939, in
west central Poland, in the village of Owińska, near Poznań, Himmler and Peiper observed
the Nazi Euthanasia Program, code-named T4, the poison-gas mass killing of mentally
ill patients in a psychiatric hospitals.

In post-war interrogations by U.

S.

Army, Peiper was
factual and emotionally detached in describing his eye-witness experience of mass murder.

He said:
’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’.

In May 1940, Himmler and Peiper followed the
Waffen-SS throughout the Battle of France and on 18 May, Peiper became a platoon leader in the
1st SS Panzer Division motorized regiment.

For audacious soldiering he was awarded the Iron Cross
2nd class and one month later the Iron Cross 1st class.

As further reward and remuneration, Peiper
took back to Germany a French sports car for his personal use and in June 1940, he returned to his
role of personal adjutant to Himmler.

In September 1940, Himmler thanked the commanders of the 1st
SS Panzer Division motorized regiment and said: “We had to have the toughness – this should be
said and soon forgotten – to shoot thousands of leading Poles”.

Himmler also 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 colonization.

In February 1941, Himmler informed Peiper
about the upcoming Operation Barbarossa, for the invasion, conquest, and German colonization of
the Soviet Union.

In the 11–15 June 1941 period, adjutant Peiper participated in the SS conference
wherein Himmler presented plans for killing of 30 million Slavs in Eastern Europe, especially
Russia.

Peiper’s adjutancy to Himmler ended in summer of 1941 and in October of the same year
he was reassigned to the 1st SS Panzer Division motorized regiment with which he fought in the
Eastern Front, in the vicinity of the Black Sea.

Peiper gained reputation for his fighting
spirit and aggressive leadership in battle, but his victories came at the cost of many German
tanks and casualties among Waffen-SS infantries.

During the Third Battle of Kharkov, from 19
February to 15 March 1943, Peiper’s military unit became known for an audacious rescue of the
encircled 320th Infantry Division.

In a letter home, Peiper described hand-to-hand fighting
with a Soviet ski battalion to lead the division, including its sick and wounded, to safety.

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.

As a
revenge, Peiper ordered the burning down of the whole village and the shooting of its inhabitants.

Peiper’s reputation was preceding him, and his unit gained the nickname the “Blowtorch
Battalion”.

The nickname was derived from the torching and slaughter of two Soviet villages in
February 1943, where as a revenge for wounding 2 SS officers Peiper ordered the killing of
872 men, women and children, 240 of which were burned alive in the church.

In March 1943,
for his heroism and bold and unorthodox orders Peiper was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron
Cross, the most prestigious military decoration of the Third Reich.

In July 1943, after the Battle of
Kursk, when the Red Army gained initiative on the eastern front, Peiper’s unit was redeployed
from Russia to the north of Fascist Italy.

In September 1943, following Italy’s surrender to
the Allies, German forces quickly moved to occupy northern and central Italy to prevent Allied
forces from gaining a foothold in the region.

The Germans established the Italian Social Republic,
a puppet state under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, who had been rescued from captivity.

The occupation resulted in a brutal and oppressive regime, with mass arrests, executions, and
confiscation of resources, while also encountering fierce resistance from Italian partisan groups.

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 others in the vicinity of Boves,
in north-west Italy.

After this, Peiper and his unit were called in to free the German soldiers
and took up positions in Boves, controlled access to the town and threatened to destroy the town
and its inhabitants should their demands not be met.

Peiper committed to sparing the town if the
German soldiers were freed.

The parish priest of Boves, Giuseppe Bernardi, and a local businessman
Antonio Vassallo, who had acted as negotiators between Peiper and the Italian soldiers and
partisans, successfully secured the release of the prisoners and the return of the body of the killed
German soldier.

Despite promises to the contrary, Pieper wanted revenge and ordered his men to open
fire on the town.

The parish priest Bernardi and the local businessman, who arranged the release
of the prisoners, were doused with petrol and burned alive.

Other victims consisted mostly of
old, sick or infirm civilians, as everyone else had left the town before the massacre to hide.

The SS soldiers did not spare anyone, and they killed even a deaf-mute when he tried to put out
the fire after Peiper’s men had set his house on fire.

They also murdered a disabled veteran, who
was shot dead while trying to escape through the fields and an 87-year-old woman who could not move
from her bed, was burned alive when Peiper’s men set fire her house on fire.

The deputy parish
priest, don Mario Ghibaudo, was killed while giving the absolution to an old man who had been
shot by a German soldier.

In total 23 civilians were murdered, and 350 houses destroyed in
retaliation for the resistance of the villagers.

In November 1943, Peiper returned to the Eastern
Front and although he lacked experience in leading tanks Peiper replaced the regiment’s dead
commander and so assumed command of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment.

Peiper’s over-aggressive style of
leadership caused him to disregard tactical common sense in deploying the tanks and infantry forces
of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment in battle against the Red Army.

Peiper’s battlefield victories
cost more Waffen-SS casualties than would have been lost with textbook tactics to achieve the
same victory.

After a month of Peiper’s command, the 1st SS Panzer Regiment had only
twelve working tanks.

In December 1943, because of his destructive leadership of the
1st SS Panzer Regiment Peiper was relieved of combat duty and transferred to the division
headquarters to work as a staff-officer.

In March 1944, the 1st SS Panzer Division, had
been withdrawn from the Eastern Front and 3 months later it was deployed to the coast of the English
Channel to confront the expected Allied invasion.

On 6 June 1944, under the code name
Operation “Overlord,” US, British, and Canadian troops crossed the English Channel
and landed on the beaches of Normandy in France.

This operation became known as “D-Day” and was
the largest amphibious invasion in history, deploying more than 160,000 Allied troops
on air, land, and sea.

50,000 vehicles, some 5,000 naval craft and more than 11,500
aircraft supported the initial invasion.

This largest seaborne invasion in history was
one of the main turning points of WWII .

Peiper’s unit fought defensively until late
July 1944 when the U.

S.

Army destroyed every tank of the 1st SS Panzer Division and killed
25 per cent of their force of nearly 20,000 soldiers.

After suffering a nervous breakdown,
Peiper was relieved of his command in August 1944 and in the following months he was
in hospital to treat his nervous collapse.

On the 16th of December, the German
military launched the “Battle of the Bulge”, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, which
was the last major German military offensive campaign in western Europe.

Hitler hoped that
the German counter-attack would surround the British and American armies and stall the
Allied offensive against Germany.

However, the German offensive in the Ardennes region
of Belgium was only temporarily successful in halting the Allied advance.

Despite taking
dreadful losses, US forces managed to delay the enemy sufficiently to permit reinforcements to
be moved into position to halt the German drive.

On 17 December 1944, the 1st SS Panzer
Division, commanded by Joachim Peiper, was heading west from Büllingen, Belgium.

This
movement was part of the general German advance during the Battle of the Bulge.

At the same
time, a US convoy of thirty vehicles and nearly 140 men of the 285th Field Artillery Observation
Battalion was heading south from Hürtgen Forest toward Ligneuville.

The two forces converged just
before noon at the crossroads hamlet of Baugnez, 4 kilometers south of Malmedy.

SS soldiers
immediately began firing upon the US troops, who panicked.

Those who did not escape, including
medical personnel, quickly surrendered.

After being searched and relieved of their personal
possessions, the US soldiers were lined up in eight rows in a field at the crossroads.

Survivors of the atrocity recalled that a group of approximately 120 U.

S.

prisoners of war stood
in the farmer’s field when the SS soldiers fired machine guns at the grouped Americans.

Panicked by the machine gun fire, some prisoners ran and fled the field, but the
SS soldiers shot and killed most of the grouped men where they stood.

Some prisoners dropped to
the ground and pretended to be dead.

Nonetheless, after the initial machine-gunning, the SS soldiers
walked amongst the lying corpses, searching for wounded survivors to finish them with shot to the
head.

Moreover, some of the American soldiers who fled the farmer’s field had run to and hidden
in a café at the Baugnez crossroads, but the SS soldiers then set the café afire, and killed every
U.

S.

soldier who escaped the burning building.

When the Germans left the site, at
least 84 US soldiers were dead.

Just over 40 Americans survived the incident,
known as the Malmedy Massacre, either by fleeing into the woods or pretending to be dead.

Other murders of prisoners of war and civilians were reported on 17, 18, 19 and 20 December.

The
SS group was eventually declared responsible for the deaths of some 350 unarmed American
soldiers and about 100 Belgian civilians.

On 1 May 1945, whilst deployed in Austria,
Peiper’s men learned of the death of their Führer Adolf Hitler the previous day.

On 8 May,
the German high command ordered the units of the 1st SS Panzer Division to surrender to the U.

S.

Army.

Peiper was captured by American forces on 22 May 1945 and later interrogated.

In
July 1945, during his interrogations, Peiper revealed his commitment to Nazism.

When
the Army interrogators asked his opinion about the plight of the Poles and the Jews, Peiper
anxiously replied that: “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!” Moreover, as a
Waffen-SS officer, Peiper also lamented to the Army interrogators that the U.

S.

government
was wrong in having refused to incorporate the Waffen-SS into the U.

S.

Army to prepare to fight
the Russians in defense of Western civilization.

On May 16, 1946, the trial of the SS members who
had taken part in the Malmedy massacre and other killings during the Battle of the Bulge began.

All of the defendants, including Joachim Peiper, were charged with violation of the laws
and usages of war and with deliberately participating in the killing, shooting, and
torturing of US soldiers and unarmed civilians.

Two months later on 16 July 1946, the American
military court at Dachau sentenced 46 members of the Waffen SS, including Joachim Peiper, to
death by hanging.

Another 23 received life in prison and the remaining men received sentences
between 10 and 20 years.

However, the convicted SS men claimed that American interrogators used
unlawful methods and even torture and that all the statements given were forced.

There were
allegations that all but two of the Germans in the 139 cases that Americans investigated had
been kicked in the testicles beyond repair.

A commission was organized to investigate
these allegations and some members of the commission questioned the validity of the whole
trial.

In 1948, the judicial reviewers of the trial verdicts of the military tribunal commuted
the war-crime death sentences of some Waffen-SS defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial to life
imprisonment.

In 1951, Peiper’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

In 1954, it
was further commuted to 35 years imprisonment and eventually he was released on parole on
22 December 1956.

When Peiper was told he was being released by two U.

S.

soldiers, he was
so shocked that he stared at them silently.

Upon release from prison Peiper found a job at
Porsche automobile company but Italian trade union workers formally complained that Peiper was
unacceptable as a co-worker because he remained a Nazi and because of the wartime Boves massacre
committed by his command.

The owner of the car company, Ferdinand Porsche, personally intervened
to promote Peiper into a management job, but the trade unions again legally refused to work
with Peiper.

Despite the friendship with Porsche, and because of lost sales of cars in the U.

S.

—
for employing a Nazi war criminal — the Porsche automobile company dismissed Peiper from his
employment.

In 1972 Joachim and his wife Sigurd moved to Traves, in eastern France, where he
owned a house.

Peiper worked as a self-employed English-to-German translator of military history
books.

In France Peiper lived under his real name, and = quickly drew the attention of
anti-fascists.

In June 1976 anti-Nazi political activists distributed informational
flyers to the Traves community informing them that Peiper was a Nazi war criminal.

The
confirmation of Peiper’s Nazi identity and presence in France attracted journalists
to whom Peiper readily gave interviews, wherein he claimed that he was a victim
of Communist harassment due to his role in the war.

He claimed that he had paid for his
war crimes with 12 years of prison and said: “In 1940, French people weren’t brave, that’s why
I’m here”.

These insulting remarks angered the press as well as residents and one month later
Peiper would finally pay for his war crimes.

On 14 July 1976, when a group of
French anti-Nazis calling itself “the Avengers” attacked his house
and set it on fire, Joachim Peiper, then 61 years old, was burnt alive.

Due
to the intense heat generated by the fire, Peiper’s body had shrunk to a length of about
60 cm and was barely recognizable as that of a human being.

When his neighbour saw the body,
he said: “It is him but he is miniaturized.

” There were no tears shed for Joachim Peiper.

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