The fire was reported at 2:30 in the morning on the 14th of July, 1976. By the time firefighters arrived from Vesoul, the house in the woods above the river Saône was mostly destroyed. In the debris of the living room, police found the charred corpse of Joachim Peiper, the 61-year-old former SS colonel who had chosen to spend his final years in eastern France, a few kilometers from villagers who remembered what men like him had done. Near the body lay a US-made Smith & Wesson .
38 revolver and thirteen boxes of cartridges, most of which had cooked off in the heat. Peiper’s lungs contained traces of smoke: he had been alive when the fire began. He had no visible bullet wounds, though other injuries could not be determined because of the condition of the body. Outside, on the terrace, the police found a .
22 rifle that had been loaned to Peiper by his neighbor, another former SS officer named Kettelhut. It had been fired several times. The two dogs Peiper kept in kennels by the track were found dead, one of them shot in the head with a 6. 35 mm bullet.
How the most famous Panzer officer of the Waffen-SS came to die alone in a burning house in France, pistol in hand, in the summer of 1976, is a story that begins more than four decades earlier, in a different Germany. Joachim Peiper was born in Wilmersdorf on the 30th of January, 1915, into a middle-class family. His father had served as an officer in the German Imperial Army in Africa and, during the First World War, in the Ottoman Empire. After the war, the elder Peiper had been active in the Freikorps paramilitary groups, including the suppression of the Polish Silesian Uprisings of 1919 to 1921.
Joachim determined to become an army officer like his father. He had two older brothers. The middle brother, Horst, joined the SS and served as a concentration camp guard in the SS Totenkopfverbande, later serving in the 3rd SS Panzer Division in France in 1940. Horst Peiper died in Poland in June 1941, believed to have taken his own life because of his homosexuality.
The eldest brother, Hans Hasso, was mentally unstable and also attempted suicide; he died of tuberculosis in 1942. Joachim had joined the SS in October 1933, serving in the cavalry branch. Promoted through the ranks, he came to the attention of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler himself in 1934. Sent on a leadership course, Peiper’s instructors noted some rather unsavory aspects of his personality: he was egocentric and constantly name-dropped his relationship with Himmler.
An SS psychologist concluded that Peiper was a difficult man, troublesome as a subordinate and probably arrogant as a superior. He was not dropped from the program, likely because of his connection to Himmler, and in March 1936 he completed his officer training, commissioned as an Untersturmführer, a second lieutenant. After SS officer school, he was thoroughly versed in the anti-Semitic worldview of the SS. He joined the NSDAP in 1938, which contradicted his later contention that he had been an apolitical soldier during the war.
He was, during those years, a fully paid-up Nazi. In June 1938, Peiper was promoted onto Himmler’s personal staff as an adjutant. He became Himmler’s favorite adjutant, accompanying him everywhere. From the invasion of Poland, Peiper was with Himmler aboard his armored train, and he sometimes acted as adjutant to Hitler during front visits or at Führer headquarters.
On the 20th of September 1939, Peiper was present alongside Himmler at the execution of twenty Polish socialist leaders by ethnic German defense militia commanded by SS officer Ludolf von Alvensleben. On the 13th of December 1939, he accompanied Himmler to a village near Poznań and witnessed the gassing of mentally ill patients in a hospital there, part of the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. He also accompanied Himmler on inspection tours of concentration camps, including Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, and, in 1940, Buchenwald and Flossenbürg, where he witnessed another Aktion T4 gassing demonstration. These early activities are often lost in retellings of Peiper’s SS service, which usually concentrate on Kampfgruppe Peiper in the Ardennes in 1944.
But the man knew what he was fighting for, and for whom. During the invasion of France in May 1940, Peiper was released from his staff post to gain combat experience, commanding a platoon of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the most prestigious unit in the SS. For his actions in capturing a French artillery battery, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and promoted to Hauptsturmführer, or captain. Soon after, he received the Iron Cross First Class.
Then, in June, he returned to his post as Himmler’s adjutant. In the months before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, launched in June 1941, Peiper accompanied Himmler and his staff to Poland, Norway, Austria, and Greece, inspecting army and SS units. He took part in an SS conference during which Himmler outlined his plan to exterminate thirty million Slavs. Once the invasion was underway, Himmler and Peiper visited the Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads operating behind the German front line, including watching actual mass executions.
One of Peiper’s jobs was to deliver the daily death counts to Himmler, giving him intimate knowledge of the SS murder machine on the Eastern Front. Peiper was next assigned to the 1st SS Panzer Division LSSAH. He commanded a tank company and was noted for his aggressive leadership style and for the high casualties among his own men. The LSSAH also assisted the Einsatzgruppen in murdering Soviet Jews, commissars, Red Army prisoners of war, and partisans.
In May 1942, the division was sent to France, and Peiper became a battalion commander. Back east in January 1943, Peiper’s unit was highly commended during the Third Battle of Kharkov, rescuing a trapped German infantry division. At the conclusion of the battle, his troops discovered that a small SS medical detachment of twenty-five men, left behind in the village of Krasnaya Polyana, had been killed and some of them mutilated by Soviet forces. Peiper ordered the village burned down and all of the inhabitants shot or burned alive.
The action earned his unit the nickname of the blowtorch battalion. Awarded the German Cross in Gold for his actions at Kharkov, Peiper was involved in further massacres at the villages of Yefremovka and Semyonovka. LSSAH troops under his command killed 872 men, women, and children, including burning alive 240 people inside the Yefremovka church. Peiper received the Knight’s Cross on the 9th of March 1943.
At Himmler’s urgings, the German press was quick to laud Peiper as the ideal German officer: handsome, brave, and a born leader. This Nazi propaganda had a very long life, contributing to how Peiper was viewed after the war and even today in certain quarters: an apolitical soldier of exceptional abilities who happened to be in the Waffen-SS. The reality was a little different. After fighting at the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, the LSSAH was transferred to northern Italy, taking part in Operation Achse, the German military takeover of Italy following Mussolini’s fall from power.
Shortly after, Peiper was involved in another massacre. During a gun battle with Italian partisans at Boves in Piedmont on the 19th of September 1943, during which two SS men were taken prisoner and one was killed, Peiper threatened to destroy the village if the men were not released immediately. After desperate negotiations, the SS men were set free, but Peiper nonetheless ordered his men to kill twenty-four Italian men from the village in retaliation. One woman was also murdered.
Peiper’s command methods came under question, particularly his poor use of tactics and his apparent disinterest in German casualties. During battles around the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr, he commanded the 1st SS Panzer Regiment. His aggressive way of leading led to very heavy casualties among his own men, and he caused so much damage to his equipment that he was transferred to a staff position immediately afterwards. However, on the 27th of January 1944, Hitler awarded Peiper the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross.
Redeployed to the west, the LSSAH saw extensive action in the Battle of Normandy. The division lost every tank it possessed and twenty-five percent of its men during the weeks of fighting. From the fighting around the city of Caen, Peiper suffered a nervous breakdown and was evacuated and hospitalized for a long time, rejoining his regiment in October 1944. Peiper is most famous for his activities in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge, when his battle group, Kampfgruppe Peiper, led the 6th Panzer Army’s attack and made the deepest penetration in that sector until it was surrounded in the village of La Gleize in Belgium.
Forced to abandon all of his vehicles and tanks, Peiper and 717 of his men, out of the 3,000 who had started off, managed to fight their way out of the encirclement and return to German lines. During Kampfgruppe Peiper’s advance on the 17th of December 1944, a convoy of thirty US vehicles was confronted at the Baugnez crossroads near the village of Malmedy. Over one hundred Americans were taken prisoner. Once Peiper and the Panzer Regiment moved off, firing broke out, the US prisoners then under guard by SS pioneers of the LSSAH.
Eighty-four US soldiers were killed by the SS. This was the Malmedy massacre. The cause of the firing has never been fully established. However, men under Peiper’s command killed many US prisoners of war in the Ardennes, and also many Belgian civilians.
It has been estimated that Kampfgruppe Peiper murdered 362 US POWs and 111 civilians during the offensive. Hitler awarded Peiper the Swords to his Knight’s Cross in January 1945. Towards the end of the war, Peiper fought in Hungary until the 1st of May 1945, when, in Austria, the LSSAH was informed of Hitler’s death the day before in Berlin. Keen, for obvious reasons, not to surrender to the Soviet Union, Peiper was ordered to surrender his unit to US forces on the 8th of May.
But Peiper had no reason to be taken prisoner by the Americans either. He made himself scarce and walked all the way home, but was apprehended by US military police on the 22nd of May 1945. The US Army investigated the Malmedy massacre in great detail, scouring POW camps to find LSSAH soldiers who had been involved. Peiper and many of his subordinates were placed on trial for war crimes.
Peiper was a devout Nazi. Under US interrogation in July 1945, when asked about the Poles and Jews during the war, Peiper became angry and said, “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. ”
Asked about the shooting at Bullingen, Peiper replied that he had driven past houses underneath the windows and had to get his head down several times.
Asked if he saw any eighty-year-old women firing at him, he said that in those short moments he had no occasion to determine the age of the persons firing. Asked if he saw any one-year-old babies firing at him, he answered, “No, not even Russia did I see any 1-year-old babies firing. ”
Peiper took command responsibility for the crimes committed by his men. Tried at Dachau alongside seventy-three other defendants, including Peiper’s old Sixth Panzer Army commander Sepp Dietrich, Dietrich’s chief of staff Fritz Kramer, and the 1st SS Panzer commander Hermann Priess, Peiper and the others were sentenced on the 16th of July 1946.
The American military tribunal was determined to extract justice for their dead soldiers at Malmedy. Peiper was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death. He had a slight smile on his face as he received the sentence and as he marched away from the court. In March 1948, US authorities reviewed the forty-three death sentences of the seventy-four men tried at Dachau and upheld twelve, including Peiper’s.
The rest were commuted to terms of imprisonment. However, in 1951, Peiper’s death sentence was also commuted after pressure from various high-level sources, and he was given thirty-five years’ imprisonment instead. He was suddenly released early, on the 22nd of December 1956. Searching for work, Peiper used the Waffen-SS Mutual Aid Community organization, known as HIAG, to help find employment.
He went to work for Porsche in Stuttgart in 1957 as a salesman. He kept in contact with his SS subordinates and superior officers and attended many reunions of Knight’s Cross holders, though he tended not to attend SS reunions. Another allegation of war crimes, this time the Boves massacre of September 1943 in Italy, came to the fore in 1964. Though a lengthy inquiry did not produce any charges against Peiper, Italians working for Porsche complained to management, and Peiper was let go.
He moved to another job, this time in sales at Volkswagen in Reutlingen. But the shadow of war crimes accusations committed by LSSAH troops under his command also caused him to be dismissed. Neither car firm wanted such people associated with them. It was bad for business in the new Germany.
Some years before losing these jobs, Peiper had taken the extraordinary step of purchasing a small plot of land in eastern France near the village of Trave, twelve kilometers west of the town of Vesoul. In 1959, he had a small house built on the plot, in woodland on the bank of the river Saône. Peiper used the home as a holiday house until 1972, when he moved there permanently with his wife. Peiper evidently knew that his presence in France might cause him trouble, for the house was designed with security in mind.
It backed onto a river, making approach from the rear very difficult. It was hidden in thick woodland and could not be seen from the main road. Any visitors along the track to the house would have to pass by the kennels where Peiper kept two dogs, whose barking would give advance warning of anyone approaching. From the main road to the treeline where the house was hidden was completely open ground, giving Peiper good observation of visitors during daylight.
But the very woodland that screened the house would conceal anyone approaching covertly, particularly at night. Peiper’s income at this time came from two sources: his military pension and translation fees, as he translated military history books for a German publisher. His grown-up children and family friends visited occasionally, and the Peipers kept to themselves. Considering that in 1972 the war had only been over for twenty-seven years, it was an odd decision to move to a country that had suffered greatly from German occupation and where the SS were associated with brutality, massacres, and organizations like the Gestapo.
Peiper’s nearest neighbor was another former SS officer, a man named Kettelhut, who had been an SS artillery officer whose division had also been responsible for war crimes in Italy. Kettelhut lived in a large Bavarian-style house not far from Peiper’s more discreet property. In fact, the only evidence that Peiper’s house was there were two things: a postbox and power lines on poles. Word soon got around the local area that Germans lived in the two properties, former SS officers to boot.
In 1972, plenty of people in the region had taken part in the war, and some older resistance members would still have been about, not to mention younger people, often extremely left-wing or even communist, who had great hatred for people like Peiper. Many have suggested that Peiper was extremely arrogant to assume that such a high-profile SS veteran as himself, implicated in multiple war crimes and imprisoned for one, could move to the area and live as if nothing had ever happened. For locals who had lost loved ones or comrades to German occupation forces and security units, Peiper’s presence was a huge red rag. Peiper, for his part, had little contact with the locals.
His wife would go into the village for groceries. Peiper also had weapons at the house: a hunting rifle and a pistol, plus the two dogs. On the 18th of April 1975, in Paris, eight hooded men held a press conference. They warned that until the West German government ratified the Franco-German agreement on the prosecution of war criminals, they would be executed by direct methods.
Things remained quiet until 1976, when a local ironmonger in Vesoul, who sold Peiper nails, wire fencing, and so on, came upon Peiper’s name printed in an East German book he owned, called the Brown Book. The ironmonger was a communist, and the Brown Book was a deliberate attempt by East Germany to humiliate West Germany postwar by showing how many suspected and convicted Nazi war criminals were living free in the West. The entry for Peiper gave details of his World War II activities. Next, an article appeared in the French communist newspaper L’Humanité, questioning how the government had allowed someone like Peiper to reside in France.
Then slogans began to be painted on roads around Trave reading “Peiper SS” in large white letters. Leaflets were printed and posted through the letterboxes of the villagers, and Peiper himself found notes in his own letterbox, threatening letters. There were also anonymous threatening phone calls to his house. Evidently, a concerted campaign was underway to try to intimidate Peiper into leaving France for his own good.
Peiper was concerned, but he seems to have downplayed any threat, regarding it just as non-violent harassment that might blow over. On the 13th of July, Peiper’s wife went to West Germany to stay with friends for a few days, leaving Peiper alone at the house. At some point, very late on the 13th of July or early on the 14th, a group of armed men in a car drove up the track to Peiper’s house and surrounded it. Police later found an incendiary device outside the property, showing that the group intended to firebomb the house.
Whether they also intended to murder him is open to conjecture. But it was clear to police afterwards that Peiper had exchanged fire with his assailants. A conflagration had begun when a petrol bomb was thrown through a downstairs window. Peiper’s charred corpse was found amongst the debris in the living room.
Police recovered Peiper’s wristwatch and two weapons. The . 22 rifle outside, loaned by Kettelhut, had been fired several times, indicating that Peiper had first confronted the group outside his property. It was clear to police that Peiper’s body had fallen from the first floor as the fire destroyed the floor timbers and collapsed, leaving him lying among the burned timbers.
The fire was reported at 2:30 a. m. on the 14th of July, and the house was mostly destroyed before firefighters arrived from Vesoul. A simple scenario of Peiper’s last minutes can be guessed at from the evidence.
According to the French newspaper Le Rouge, the next day an anonymous phone call was received from a group calling itself the Avengers, who claimed to have killed Peiper. That same day, Peiper’s wife and two daughters visited the ruins of the property, collected what belongings they could, and left the town without comment. After a period of silence regarding the killing, French Justice Minister Jean Lecanuet said that the authorities would make all possible efforts to punish whoever was responsible. Although an extensive investigation was conducted by the regional police and many suspects were questioned, no one was ever charged with a crime.
The case remains officially unsolved to this day, though local people likely knew full well who killed the 61-year-old SS colonel. The people have kept quiet up to the present day, which is understandable. Peiper’s body was later interred at the family plot in Landsberg in West Germany.
