Jump to content

Joachim Peiper: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
Koalorka (talk | contribs)
16,166 edits
Undid revision 260984315 by 86.142.176.182 (talk)Poor photo, stop reinstating it.
Undid revision 260994203 by Koalorka (talk)
Line 2: Line 2:
|name=Joachim Peiper
|name=Joachim Peiper
|lived={{birth date|1915|1|30|df=y}} — {{death date and age|1976|7|13|1915|1|30|df=y}}
|lived={{birth date|1915|1|30|df=y}} — {{death date and age|1976|7|13|1915|1|30|df=y}}
|image=[[Image:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R65485, Joachim Peiper.jpg|250px]]
|image=[[Image:Peiper202.jpg|270px]]
|caption=SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper
|caption=SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper
|placeofbirth=[[Berlin]], [[Prussia]]
|placeofbirth=[[Berlin]], [[Prussia]]

Revision as of 14:10, 31 December 2008

Joachim Peiper
File:Peiper202.jpg
SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper
Nickname(s)Jochen
AllegianceNazi Germany
Service/branchWaffen-SS
Years of service1933-1945
RankStandartenführer
Unit1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler
Battles/warsWorld War II
AwardsKnight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords

Joachim Peiper (IPA: [joˈaχɪm ˈpaɪpər]) (30 January 1915 - 13 July 1976) more often known as Jochen Peiper from the common German nickname for Joachim, was a senior Waffen-SS officer in World War II and a convicted war criminal. By the end of his military career in 1945, Peiper was the youngest regimental colonel in the Waffen-SS, holding the rank of SS-Standartenführer. He also served as personal adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, in the period April 1938 to August 1941.

Early life

Peiper was born in Berlin. His father was a career Army officer who fought in East Africa during World War I. Peiper had two brothers, Hans-Hasso and Horst.

World War II

Peiper was recruited into the SS-Verfügungstruppe in 1933. Sepp Dietrich reviewed his application and admitted him into the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) honour guard regiment. In 1935 Peiper attended the SS officer's training school (Junkerschule) at Braunschweig and was commissioned the following year. Peiper was appointed adjutant to Heinrich Himmler in April 1938 and held this position until August 1941, save for a period during the Battle of France in which he was detached for combat service. After returning to frontline duty in late 1941 he moved on to command various infantry and panzer units within the Leibstandarte, by now expanded to a full division.

While on Himmler's staff, Peiper met and married his wife, Sigurd, with whom he had three children: Hinrich, Elke, and Silke. Himmler was particularly fond of Peiper and took a keen interest in his ascension towards command. By age 29, Peiper was a full colonel of the Waffen-SS, well respected and a holder of one of wartime Germany's highest decorations, the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords personally awarded to him by Adolf Hitler.

Peiper was a skilled combat leader and took part in several major battles of the war. On the Eastern Front, he fought in the battles for Kharkov and the Kursk offensive of 1943, earning particular distinction in the former. In 1944, he commanded Kampfgruppe Peiper of the Leibstandarte division (assigned to the Sixth SS Panzer Army under Sepp Dietrich) during the Battle of the Bulge. Peiper advanced to the town of La Gleize, Belgium, before running out of fuel and coming under heavy fire from American artillery and tanks. He was forced to abandon over a hundred vehicles in the town, including six Tiger II tanks, and made his way back to German lines with 800 men on foot.

During its move from Lanzerath, Belgium to La Gleize, the kampfgruppe had shot approximately 90 American POWs, most notably in the neighbourhood of Malmedy. Moreover, in the area of Stavelot, 131 Belgian civilians (including women and children) were killed by units under Peiper’s command[citation needed].

After the war

After the end of World War II, Peiper and other members of the Leibstandarde were tried for war crimes in the Malmedy massacre trial. During the course of the investigations, Peiper and his men were alleged torture both physically and psychologically, claiming to have being repeatedly beaten, and threatened with having their families handed over to the Russians.[citation needed]. However, evidence of physical torture, although alleged by German civilian doctors, was not confirmed in the examinations during the Senate investigation of 1949. Peiper volunteered to take all the blame if the court would set his men free; the court refused. Peiper as commanding officer was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, as were many of his men. He then requested that his men be executed by firing squad; this request was also denied. Favorable testimony concerning Peiper's treatment of American prisoners at La Gleize, offered by Lieutenant Colonel Hal McCowan was unable to alter the opinion of the court. McCowan, who, along with his command, had been captured by Peiper at La Gleize, was labeled an enemy collaborator by the court for testifying that wounded American soldiers in Peiper's custody had received equal priority with German wounded in receiving medical treatment, and that at all times during his occupation of the town, Peiper had behaved in a professional and honorable manner.

The sentences generated significant controversy in some German circles, including the church, leading the commander of the US Army in Germany to commute some of the death sentences to life imprisonment. In addition, the Germans' defense attorney, U.S. military attorney Lt. Col. Willis M. Everett, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court claiming that the defendants had been found guilty by means of "illegal and fraudulently procured confessions" and were subjects of a mock trial. His claims touched off a major scandal, eventually leading the Senate to become involved.

In its investigation of the trial, the Senate Committee on Armed Services came to the conclusion that improper pre-trial procedures (including a mock trial, but not torture as sometimes stated) had harmed the process and, although there was little or no doubt that some of the accused were indeed guilty of the massacre, the death sentences could not be applied.[1]

Ultimately the sentences of the Malmedy defendants were commuted to life imprisonment and then to time served. Peiper himself was released from prison on parole at the end of December 1956, after serving 11 and a half years.

Peiper was also accused of, but never prosecuted for, the Boves massacre in Italy on 8 September 1943. In 1968 the German Minister of Justice declared that there was no reason to prosecute Peiper, and the case was dismissed on 23 December 1968.

In 1972 Peiper went to live in Traves, Haute-Saône, France, and supported himself as a translator of English-language military books into German. He sent his wife to safety in Germany following explicit death threats, but remained in France. He was murdered on 14 July 1976 in a fire bomb attack on his house by an armed gang calling itself the "Avengers." The "Avengers" were never identified, but were suspected to be former Résistants or communists.

Assessment

Peiper remains a controversial figure. On the one hand, he was a competent soldier, and he was highly respected among his peers. His men were fiercely loyal to him, and he was considered by many to be a "charismatic leader."[citation needed] After the end of the war he continued to be held in high regard by his surviving comrades, many of whom talked of Der Peiper with admiration and respect.[2]

Indeed, from a purely military point of view Peiper was an example of a dedicated SS officer, who embraced Himmler's ideal that the mere appearance of his Waffen SS would strike fear into enemy hearts.[citation needed]While likely guilty of excesses, historians have noted the fact that the Eastern Front was a uniquely savage environment, where both sides routinely committed atrocities on each other. For example, in one incident outside Kharkov, 23 captured troops from Peiper's command were savagely tortured by a Soviet Siberian division, some soldiers being castrated and all having their eyes cut out with knives.[citation needed]. On the other hand, it is clear that Peiper's command itself, took very few prisoners in its operations around Kharkov in 1943.[3]

Nevertheless, Peiper garnered for himself and his men a unique reputation for callousness, even among the ranks of the Waffen-SS, an organization itself noted for its brutality. In the east his unit had gained the nickname "the Blowtorch Battalion", after burning several Russian villages and killing their inhabitants[3] (although Peiper claimed it was unrelated to these events, and that the blowtorch epithet came from its use as a tool to unfreeze vehicles in the Russian winter).[citation needed] Furthermore, his troops continued to commit such acts even after being transferred to the west, where such incidents were far less common. It was not the only Waffen-SS unit to do so; Peiper may also have been aware that captured Waffen-SS troops had previously been shot out of hand by British, Canadian and American soldiers.[citation needed] In any case, this would eventually culminate in incidents such as the Malmedy massacre and related crimes against Belgian civilians.

As Himmler's adjutant until late 1941, Peiper would also have been well-acquainted with the planning and staffwork behind Operation Barbarossa; in particular, he could not have been unaware of the anticipated operations the SS would undertake, for example the Einsatzgruppen.[citation needed] Indeed, in a conversation with a comrade, Otto Dinse, in 1943, Peiper acknowledged awareness of the mass executions. "Wenn wir den Krieg verlieren, wird es uns wegen dieser Dinge ganz schön dreckig gehen ("If we lose the war, we will be in a mess because of these things").[4]Peiper himself remained unrepentant about his Nazi past to the end of his life, saying,

"I was a Nazi and I remain one...The Germany of today is no longer a great nation, it has become a province of Europe."[5]

After the war, in particular, Peiper professed disinterest in politics, fancying himself a professional soldier, as evidenced by his continuing to "lose" his applications for membership in the NSDAP. Only through Himmler's specific request to the NSDAP was Peiper made a member. Indeed, interest in the finer points of National Socialism was not particularly high in the SS-Verfügungstruppe as a whole, and membership in the NSDAP was not a requirement for joining the SS-Verfügungstruppe (Special-Purpose Troops).[6]}} The Leibstandarte in particular remained very much the personal kingdom of its commander, Sepp Dietrich, his friendship with Hitler buttressing the general independence German regimental commanders enjoyed, thwarting much intrusion by Himmler. A letter from Himmler to Dietrich in March 1938 expressed the situation:

"Your officers are so gracious to honor me personally, but otherwise the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler is an undertaking for itself which does what it wants and which doesn't need to trouble itself about superior orders [and] which thinks about the SS Leadership only when some debt or other, which one of its gentlemen has incurred, has to be paid or when someone who has fallen in the mud has to be pulled out of the mess. Please do not forget that what you do as first commander of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler will naturally be taken as right by the next twenty commanders. I do not believe that you have adequately considered that this would be the beginning of the end of the SS in future years."[7]

One SS Education officer lamented,

"It is difficult to interest the simple SS man in historical questions."[8]

The Leibstandarte's Education officer would recall that the most common answer he received to the question, "Why did I become an SS man?" was "Because the black uniform, especially that of the Leibstandarte, looks the nicest." [9]

While SS apologists continue to attempt to whitewash Peiper's career, it is clear that he remained close to Himmler throughout the war and remained a true believer in the National Socialist regime.[10]

Quotations

  • "I recognize that after the battles of Normandy my unit was composed mainly of young, fanatical soldiers. A good deal of them had lost their parents, their sisters and brothers during the bombing. They had seen for themselves in Köln thousands of mangled corpses after a terror raid had passed. Their hatred for the enemy was such; I swear it and I could not always keep it under control."
  • "Imagine yourself acclaimed, a decorated national hero, an idol to millions of desperate people, then within six months, condemned to death by hanging."
  • "It's so long ago now. Even I don't know the truth. If I had ever known it, I have long forgotten it. All I know is that I took the blame as a good CO should have been and was punished accordingly." - Jochen Peiper on the Malmedy massacre, excerpted from A Traveler's Guide to the Battle for the German Frontier by Charles Whiting
  • "My men are the products of total war, grown up in the streets of scattered towns without any education. The only thing they knew was to handle weapons for the Reich. They were young people with a hot heart and the desire to win or die: right or wrong – my country. When seeing today the defendants in the dock, don't believe them to be the old Kampfgruppe Peiper. All of my old friends and comrades have gone before. The real outfit is waiting for me in Valhalla."
  • "History is always written by the victor, and the histories of the losing parties belong to the shrinking circle of those who were there."

Summary of SS career

Dates of rank

Notable decorations

References

  1. ^ Malmedy massacre Investigation – Report of the Subcommittee of Committee on armed services – United States Senate – Eighty-first Congress, first session, pursuant to S. res. 42, Investigation of action of army with respect to trial of persons responsible for the massacre of American soldiers, battle of the Bulge, near Malmedy, Belgium, December 1944, October 13 1949
  2. ^ Williamson, G: "Waffen SS handbook" p. 233
  3. ^ See photos in Platz der Leibstandarte: The SS-Panzer-Grenadier-Division "LSSAH" and the Battle of Kharkov January - March 1943, by George Nipe & Remy Spezzano, RZM Imports. ISBN 0-9657584-2-7
  4. ^ Westemeier, 2004; p. 49
  5. ^ Interview with a French writer Peiper spoke with in 1967, quoted in "The Devil's Adjutant" by Michael Reynolds, page 260.
  6. ^ from page 20, "Peiper, Commander Panzer Regiment Leibstandarte, by Patrick Agte.
  7. ^ taken from US National Archives Microfilm Publication, quoted in "Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, A Military History 1933-45" by James S. Weingartner, page 22.
  8. ^ US National Archives Microfilm Publications, quoted in "Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, A Military History 1933-45" by James S. Weingartner, page 29.
  9. ^ US National Archives Microfilm Publication, quoted in "Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, A Military History 1933-45" by James S. Weingartner, page 156.
  10. ^ Jens Westemeier, Joachim Peiper, a biography of Himmler’s SS Commander, 2007, Schiffer Military History
  • Agte, Patrick (2000). Jochen Peiper: Commander Panzerregiment Leibstandarte. J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing, Inc. ISBN 0-921991-46-0
  • Mitcham, Samuel W. (2006). Panzers in Winter: Hitler's Army and the Battle of the Bulge. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-275-97115-5
  • Reynolds, Michael (2004). The Devil’s Adjutant: Jochen Peiper, Panzer Leader, Casemate Publishers and Book Distributors; Pbk edition. ISBN 1-86227-156-9
  • Westemeier, Jens (2004). Jochen Peiper: zwischen Totenkopf und Ritterkreuz- Lebensweg eines Fuehrers der Waffens SS. Biblio Verlag, Bissendorf ISBN 3-7648-2318-6
  • Watt, Jim. "Jochen Peiper: Maligned Hero and Selected Campaign Series Notes." November 2001.
  • Williamson, Gordon (2003). Waffen-SS Handbook 1933-1945, Sutton Publishing Ltd. ISBN 0-7509-2927-8
  • Malmedy massacre Investigation – Report of the Subcommittee of Committee on armed services – United States Senate – Eighty-first Congress, first session, pursuant to S. res. 42, Investigation of action of army with respect to trial of persons responsible for the massacre of American soldiers, battle of the Bulge, near Malmedy, Belgium, December 1944, published 13 October 1949.
  • No Author. "Malmedy Massacre Trial."
  • "The Battle of the Bulge" (1965) at IMDb
  • "The Night of the Generals" (1967) at IMDb
  • No Author. "Jochen Peiper."

Template:KCwithOLandSW

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joachim_Peiper&oldid=261089271"