1. Joachim Peiper was a German Schutzstaffel colonel, convicted war criminal and car salesman.
69 Facts About Joachim Peiper
1. 2.
German historian Jens Westemeier writes that Joachim Peiper personified Nazi ideology, as a purportedly ruthless glory-hound commander who was indifferent to the combat casualties of Battle Group Joachim Peiper, and who tolerated, expected, and indeed encouraged war crimes by his Waffen-SS soldiers.
3.
In 1976, Joachim Peiper died from asphyxiation after communist arsonists discovered his identity and set his house on fire.
4.
Joachim Peiper was born on 30 January 1915 in Wilmersdorf, a district of Berlin, part of the German Empire.
5.
Joachim Peiper was the third son of a middle-class family from German Silesia.
6.
Joachim Peiper later contracted malaria and received a severe wound which demobilised him from active duty in German Africa.
7.
Joachim Peiper rejoined the colours in the First World War and was for a time deployed to Ottoman Turkey, where he suffered chronic cardiac problems consequent to the previous malarial infection.
8.
Two of Woldemar's sons, Horst and Joachim Peiper, followed the same life path of nationalist ideology and military service to Germany.
9.
In 1926, the eleven-year-old Joachim followed his middle brother, fourteen-year-old Horst Peiper, to become a boy scout; eventually, Joachim became interested in becoming a military officer.
10.
Joachim Peiper was eighteen years old when he joined the Hitler Youth in the company of Horst, his middle brother.
11.
In October 1933, Joachim Peiper volunteered for the Schutzstaffel and joined the Cavalry SS, where his first superior officer was Gustav Lombard, a zealous Nazi, and later a regimental commander in the SS Cavalry Brigade, who were notoriously efficient at the mass murder of Jews in occupied Soviet Union, notably in punitive operations such as the Pripyat Marshes massacres in Byelorussia.
12.
Later that year, Joachim Peiper was promoted to SS-Sturmmann at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his reputation attracted the notice of Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, for whom Joachim Peiper personified Aryanism, the master-race concept promoted by the Nazism taught at the SS officer school.
13.
The military psychologists concluded that Joachim Peiper might become either a "difficult subordinate" or an "arrogant superior" in the course of his career in the SS.
14.
In June 1938, Joachim Peiper became an adjutant to Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler, which tour of duty Himmler considered necessary administrative training for a promotable SS leader.
15.
Joachim Peiper returned the admiration and by 1939, Joachim Peiper always was the adjutant of the Reichsfuhrer-SS at every official function.
16.
Adjutant Joachim Peiper travelled in the personal train of Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler.
17.
Joachim Peiper occasionally was the liaison officer to Hitler, when the Fuhrer travelled by train with Erwin Rommel, and when the Fuhrer met with Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS generals near the front lines of the Eastern Front.
18.
In later conversation with the explorer Ernst Schafer, Joachim Peiper rationalised the actions of the SS to hunt and kill the Polish intelligentsia by ascribing sole command responsibility to Hitler and his superior orders to Himmler.
19.
On 13 December 1939, in west-central Poland, at the village of Owinska, near Poznan, Himmler and Joachim Peiper witnessed the Aktion T4 poison-gas mass killing of mentally ill patients in a psychiatric hospital.
20.
In post-war interrogations by US Army JAG and military intelligence interrogators, Joachim Peiper was factual and emotionally detached in describing his eye-witness experience of mass murder:.
21.
In May 1940, Himmler and Joachim Peiper followed the Waffen-SS throughout the Battle of France.
22.
On 19 June 1940, Joachim Peiper was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class for audacious soldiering.
23.
On 21 June 1940, Joachim Peiper returned to his role of personal adjutant to Himmler.
24.
Joachim Peiper likewise delivered to Himmler the daily Einsatzgruppen murder statistics that compared the numbers of people killed against the pre-war projections of the timetable for depopulating the USS.
25.
Joachim Peiper rejoined the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler whilst they fought in the Eastern Front, in the vicinity of the Black Sea.
26.
Joachim Peiper's battalion left France in January 1943 for the Eastern Front, where the Wehrmacht had begun to lose the initiative, especially in the Battle of Stalingrad.
27.
On 6 May 1943, Joachim 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".
28.
In July 1943, the Panzergrenadier Division LSSAH participated in Operation Citadel in the area of Kursk, in which Kampfgruppe Joachim Peiper fought well against the Red Army.
29.
The recommendation for awarding the medal to Joachim Peiper described the scorched-earth attacks of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment, wherein tank commander Joachim Peiper "attacked with all weapons and flame-throwers from his SPW" armoured fighting vehicle to defeat the Red Army defenders, and then "completely destroyed" the village of Pekartchina.
30.
In 1956, the judicial authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany opened a war-crime case to investigate the accusation that Joachim Peiper deliberately killed some of his own Waffen-SS soldiers as a point of unit discipline.
31.
In 1966, Joachim Peiper claimed he knew nothing of it, and the lack of contradictory evidence and witnesses closed the case.
32.
From 18 July 1944, the Kampfgruppe Joachim Peiper regiment saw action, but Joachim Peiper rarely was at the frontlines, because of the uneven terrain and the requisite radio silence.
33.
Four combined-arms battle groups composed the 6th Panzer Division; Joachim Peiper commanded Kampfgruppe Joachim Peiper, the best-equipped battle group, which included the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion equipped with seventy-ton Tiger II tanks.
34.
Kampfgruppe Joachim Peiper was to seize the bridges on the Meuse river between the cities of Liege and Huy.
35.
Joachim Peiper's vehicles reached the point of departure at midnight, which delayed the attack by Kampfgruppe Joachim Peiper by almost twenty-four hours.
36.
The plan was to advance through Losheimergraben, but the two infantry divisions tasked to open the route for Kampfgruppe Joachim Peiper had failed to do so on the first day of battle.
37.
Joachim Peiper continued west until the road became impassable, a short distance from the town of Ligneuville; that detour compelled Joachim Peiper's units towards the Baugnez crossroads, near the city of Malmedy, Belgium.
38.
Joachim Peiper crossed Ligneuville and reached the heights of Stavelot on the left bank of the Ambleve River at nightfall of the second day of the operation.
39.
The US forces regrouped and blew up several bridges ahead of Joachim Peiper's advance, trapping the battle group in the deep valley of the Ambleve, downstream from Trois-Ponts.
40.
Joachim 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 Joachim Peiper at the head of the column and thus were unable to provide guidance to their own units.
41.
Joachim Peiper 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.
42.
In early 1945, in Hungary, Kampfgruppe Joachim Peiper fought in Operation Southwind and in Operation Spring Awakening in the battles of which, despite killing many enemy soldiers, Joachim Peiper's aggressive style of command cost many more wounded and dead Waffen-SS soldiers than were necessary to win the battle.
43.
On 1 May 1945, as the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler was forced into Austria, Joachim Peiper's men learned of the death of the Fuhrer the previous day.
44.
Joachim Peiper trekked home to Germany where American forces captured him on 22 May 1945.
45.
On 21 August 1945, Waffen-SS Standartenfuhrer Joachim Peiper was found and identified as the suspected author of the war-crime massacre of 84 US soldiers in a farmer's field near the city of Malmedy, Belgium.
46.
Joachim Peiper, had no command responsibility for the summary execution of American PoWs by his Waffen-SS soldiers.
47.
Joachim Peiper was released on parole on 22 December 1956.
48.
When Joachim Peiper was told he was being released by two US soldiers, he was so shocked that he stared at them silently.
49.
Thanks to the political influence of Albert Prinzing, an ex-functionary in the Sicherheitsdienst security service, Joachim Peiper was employed at the Porsche automobile company.
50.
On release from Landsberg Prison, Joachim Peiper acted discreetly and did not associate with known Nazis in public, especially with ex-Waffen-SS soldiers and the Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members ; privately, Peiper remained a true-believer Nazi and member of the secret community of Waffen-SS in the Federal Republic of Germany.
51.
In 1959, Joachim Peiper attended the national meeting of the Association of Knight's Cross Recipients.
52.
Joachim Peiper travelled with Walter Harzer, the HIAG historian, and reunited with Sepp Dietrich and Heinz Lammerding, who had been formally identified as Nazi war criminals.
53.
Joachim Peiper's attorney cited documents by Freda Utley, a Holocaust denier academic, which said that the US Army had tortured the Waffen-SS defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial.
54.
On 23 June 1964, the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes formally accused Joachim Peiper of perpetrating the Boves Massacre in 1943.
55.
In 1968, the German District Court in Stuttgart determined that Battle Group Joachim Peiper had set houses afire and that "a portion of the victims killed was from rioting that was committed by [the Waffen-SS soldiers]".
56.
Nevertheless, despite the battle group's collective culpability for the war-crime at Boves, there was no evidence of the individual command responsibility that SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Joachim Peiper, himself, had directly ordered the massacre of villagers at Boves, Italy.
57.
In 1938, Joachim Peiper met and courted Sigurd Hinrichsen, a secretary who was a friend of Lina Heydrich and a friend of Hedwig Potthast, secretary and mistress to Himmler.
58.
On 26 June 1939, Joachim Peiper married Sigurd in an SS ceremony; Himmler was the guest of honour.
59.
Under the pseudonym "Rainer Buschmann", Joachim Peiper worked as a self-employed English-to-German translator for the German publisher Stuttgarter MotorBuch Verlag, translating books of military history.
60.
In 1974, a member of the French Resistance recognised Joachim Peiper and reported his presence in metropolitan France to the French Communist Party.
61.
In 1976, the historian of the French Communist Party searched the Gestapo files for the personnel file of SS-Oberststurmbannfuhrer Joachim Peiper to determine his whereabouts.
62.
On 21 June 1976, anti-Nazi political activists distributed informational flyers to the Traves community informing them that Joachim Peiper was a Nazi war criminal residing among them.
63.
On 22 June 1976, an article in the L'Humanite newspaper confirmed that Joachim Peiper was living in the village.
64.
The confirmation of Joachim Peiper's Nazi identity and presence in France attracted journalists to whom Joachim Peiper readily gave interviews, wherein he claimed that he was a victim of Communist harassment due to his role in the war.
65.
Joachim Peiper said he was innocent of the earlier Boves massacre war crime in Italy.
66.
Joachim Peiper said, "In 1940, French people weren't brave, that's why I'm here".
67.
The anti-Nazi political group The Avengers claimed responsibility for the arson that killed Peiper; nonetheless, because of the destruction caused by the arson, some French police authorities remained unconvinced that Joachim Peiper was the person found.
68.
Joachim Peiper's military bearing, good looks, commanding presence, and a chestful of Nazi medals earned him many right-wing admirers in civilian society and in military society.
69.
The Washington Post and The New York Times newspapers 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.