Joachim Peiper (30 January 1915 – 14 July 1976) was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) commander and a Nazi war criminal convicted for the Malmedy massacre of U.S. Army prisoners of war. 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.
As adjutant to Himmler, Peiper witnessed the SS implement the Holocaust with the 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 on the Eastern Front and on 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.
In the Malmedy Massacre Trial, the US military tribunal established Peiper's command responsibility for the Malmedy massacre (1944) and sentenced him to death, a sentence later commuted to life in prison, then 35 years. 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 active in the network of ex–SS men, including the right-wing political group HIAG (Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members). In 1976, Peiper was murdered in France when his house was set afire after the publication of his identity as a war criminal.
Despite having been only a minor combat leader, Peiper's idolization by fans of the Second World War who romanticise the Waffen-SS in popular culture developed a cult of personality that views Peiper as a war hero of Germany. According to the historian Jens Westemeier, Peiper personified Nazi ideology as a 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 troops.
Joachim Peiper was born on 30 January 1915 in Wilmersdorf, a district of Berlin, part of the German Empire. He was the third son of a middle-class family from German Silesia.
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 served again 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.
During the European interwar period, Woldemar joined 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 Freikorps 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 11-year-old Joachim followed his middle brother, 14-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. Transferred to combat duty in the Waffen-SS, 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.
Peiper's eldest brother, Hans-Hasso (b. 1910) had a mental illness, and his suicide attempt resulted in cerebral damage that reduced him to a persistent vegetative state. Interned to a hospital in 1931, Hans died of tuberculosis in 1942.
Joachim Peiper was 18 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 the 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 ideologically complicit Nazi leaders for the Waffen-SS. Besides military fieldcraft, the SS-Junker School taught the Nazi worldview that centred upon anti-Semitism.
The Nazi Party issued Peiper his NSDAP Identity Card Nr. 5.508.134 on 1 March 1938, two years after he became an SS man. In the post-war period, Peiper continually denied having been a member of the Nazi Party, because that fact contradicted his self-promoted image of a common man who was "merely a soldier" in the Second World War.
In June 1938, Peiper became an adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Himmler, which tour of duty Himmler considered necessary administrative training for a promotable SS leader. In that time, the officers working within the Personal Staff Reichsführer-SS were under the command of SS functionary Karl Wolff. As a staff officer, Peiper worked in the anteroom of the SS Main Office in Berlin and became a favourite adjutant of Himmler. Peiper returned the admiration and by 1939, Peiper always was the adjutant of the Reichsführer-SS at every official function.
On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland started the Second World War in Europe. Adjutant Peiper travelled in the personal train of Reichsführer-SS Himmler. Peiper occasionally was the liaison officer to Hitler, when the Führer travelled by train with Erwin Rommel, and when the Führer met with Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS generals near the front lines of the Eastern Front.