Joachim Peiper

His father, Woldemar Peiper, had served as an officer in the Imperial German Army and fought in the 1904 campaign in German South West Africa.

He later contracted malaria and received a severe wound

which demobilised him from active duty in German Africa.

In 1907 Woldemar resumed active duty in the Prussian army.

He 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.

Poor health then demobilised Woldemar from active duty in Asia Minor.

Peiper's eldest brother, Hans-Hasso (b. 1910) was mentally ill, and his suicide attempt resulted in cerebral damage that reduced him to a persistent vegetative state.

Joachim Peiper (30 January 1915 – 14 July 1976) was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and war criminal convicted for the Malmedy massacre of U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs).

During the Second World War in Europe, Peiper served as personal adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, and as a tank commander in the Waffen-SS.

German historian Jens Westemeier writes that Peiper personified Nazi ideology, as a purportedly ruthless glory-hound commander who was indifferent to the combat casualties of Battle Group Peiper, and who encouraged, expected, and tolerated war crimes by his Waffen-SS soldiers.

As adjutant to Himmler, Peiper witnessed the SS implement the Holocaust with ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews in Eastern Europe; facts that 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 battles his eponymous battle group – Kampfgruppe Peiper – became notorious for committing war crimes against civilians and PoWs.

Joachim Peiper was born in Berlin on 30 January 1915.

He was the third son of a middle-class family from German Silesia.

During the European interwar period, Woldemar joined a company of mercenary soldiers within the paramilitary Freikorps and actively participated in suppressing the Polish Silesian Uprisings (August 1919–July 1921) which aimed to annex German Silesia to the Second Polish Republic.

In the Weimar Germany of the 1920s, the antisemitic canards of Nazi ideology – the Stab-in-the-back myth, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The International Jew, et cetera – had much appeal to the political conservatives and to the political reactionaries such as the Freikorps mercenary soldier Woldemar Peiper who were angry that Imperial Germany had lost the Great War.

Two of Woldemar's sons, Horst and Joachim, followed the same life-path of nationalist ideology and military service to Germany.

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.

Horst joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) and served in the SS-Totenkopfverbände as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp.

Interned to a hospital in 1931, Hans died of tuberculosis in 1942.

Joachim Peiper was eighteen years old when he joined the Hitler Youth in the company of Horst, his middle brother.

In October 1933, Peiper volunteered for the Schutzstaffel (SS) 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 (July–August 1941) in Byelorussia.

On 23 January 1934, he was promoted to SS-Mann (SS Identity Card Nr. 132.496), which made Peiper an “SS Man” before the Schutzstaffel 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 reputation attracted the notice of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, for whom 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.

The SS formally employed Peiper in January 1935, and later sent him to a military leadership course.

As an SS leadership-student Peiper received favourable and approving reviews 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 Peiper might become either a "difficult subordinate" or an "arrogant superior" in the course of his career in the SS.

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.

Besides military fieldcraft, the SS-Junker School taught the National Socialist (Nazi) worldview that centred upon anti-Semitism.

The paedagogic qualifications and competence of the instructors at the SS-Junker School was questionable.

Transferred to active duty as a Waffen-SS soldier, Horst fought in the Battle of France (1940) as part of the 3rd SS Panzer Division, and died in Poland in June 1941 in a never-fully-explained accident; rumour said that his fellow SS-men drove Horst to commit suicide because of his homosexuality.

In Italy, Peiper was accused of having committed the Boves massacre (1943); that investigation ended for lack of war-crime evidence that Peiper ordered the summary killing of Italian civilians.

Upon release from prison, Peiper worked for the Porsche and Volkswagen automobile companies and later moved to France, where he worked as a freelance translator.

Throughout his post-war life, Peiper was very active in the social network of ex-SS men centred upon the right-wing organisation HIAG (Mutual Aid Association of Former Members of the Waffen-SS).

In the Malmedy Massacre Trial, the U.S. military tribunal established Peiper's command responsibility for the Malmedy massacre (1944) and sentenced him to death, which later was commuted to life in prison, then 35 years.

In 1976, Peiper was murdered in France when anti-Nazis set his house on fire after the publication of his identity as a Waffen-SS war criminal.