43 years ago today In 1976: The true story and death fo Joachim Peiper.

  In 1976: The unidentified Avengers communist group.

 43 years ago today in 1976, the former Waffen-SS field officer and personal adjutant of Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Peiper, died from smoke inhalation after his home in France was firebombed by unidentified members of a French communist group known as The Avengers. 

A hard and utterly ruthless man, Peiper remains a controversial figure to the present day, his at times impressive conduct in combat more often than not totally eclipsed by the rivers of innocent blood he shed everywhere he went. 

Born in 1915 to a middle-class Silesian family, Peiper’s father was a soldier in the Imperial German army and had fought in various colonial campaigns in East Africa but had spent much of the Great War recuperating from malaria before returning home and joining the Freikorps in the fight against Polish nationalists. Peiper thus grew up with this precedent and example for him to follow.

 Not faring too well at school he joined the Scout Movement and quickly developed an interest in pursuing a military career like his father before him. 

Peiper was eighteen when the Nazis took over in 1933 and he almost automatically joined the Hitler Youth yet he still wished to follow a military career and had a keen interest in becoming a cavalry man.

  Acting on the advice of family friend, General Walther von Reichenau – later made infamous during Operation Barbarossa for his encouragement of killing Jewish civilians – he joined the SS as a means of becoming skilled in horse-riding. 

Instead of becoming a means to an end however the SS soon took over Peiper’s life as he rose through the ranks, catching the attention of Heinrich Himmler at the 1934 Nuremburg Rally who encouraged him to commit himself wholeheartedly to the SS. 

The following years saw him continue to rise through the ranks and by 1938 he had acquired an administrative position as Himmler’s adjutant. 

He would remain by Himmler’s side until 1941, accompanying him to Poland in 1939 where he was present for the execution of Polish intellectuals and assisting his esoteric master develop plans to control the people of Poland. 

He bore witness to the gassing of a resident of psychiatric facility in Poland later that year and then went on a tour of the concentration camps such as Buchenwald before doing a tour of SS police administrators. 

As the Battle for France was coming to an end in May 1940, Peiper finally got to see action after he obtained permission to serve in the field, leading a platoon in the capture of an artillery piece which earned him the Iron cross. 

After a month in the field he returned to his master’s side, accompanying him on his trip to meet Franco in Madrid and his tour of the concentration camps and the newly occupied territories during which he visited a Jewish ghetto.

 When Operation Barbarossa began in 1941 Peiper was the man who provided Himmler with the statistics on the number of people put to death by the Einsatzgruppen death squads.

 Later that summer however he finally parted ways with the head of the SS and entered the field, though he maintained correspondence with his old master for some time thereafter. 

In what was his first proper experience of war, Peiper was sent to the Ukraine and saw action in Mariupol and Rostov-on-Don where despite suffering high casualties due to his aggressive tactics he distinguished himself as a man of exceptional fighting spirit. 

Whatever his bravery however his conduct was dwarfed by the dark malice that went with the SS, his unit being responsible for killing prisoners of war and for helping Einsatzgruppen units.

 After spending much of 1942 in France where his unit was rested and refitted he continued to rise through the ranks and then returned to the front in 1943 for the Third Battle of Kharkov, where he led his men in a dashing break through Soviet lines and rescued an encircled infantry division from annihilation before fighting his way back to German lines through the flaming maelstrom of war. 

As they made their way back however they discovered in the village of Krasnaya Polyana that German troops had been massacred and mutilated by partisans. 

Peiper’s response to this was to burn the village down and slaughter its inhabitants for which he and his unit gained the nickname of the ‘Blowtorch Battalion’ as they burned hundreds of men, women, and children alive in a number settlements thereafter. 

This led to him receiving the illustrious decoration of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and Nazi propaganda swiftly seized the opportunity to make him a hero of the Reich, praising his tactical skills in the field as legendary and making him an icon of the Waffen-SS forever after. 

Not long afterwards he was transferred to Italy to deal with partisans where once again he did not refrain from using a scorched earth approach of annihilation, putting civilians to the sword and their homes to the torch, the most well known instance of which was the Boves massacre.

In the winter of that year he returned to the East and commanded a Panzer Regiment where his total ruthlessness and aggressive drive continued as a recurring feature, resulting in resentment amongst some of his men and dead bodies amongst his enemies, his unit purportedly killing over two thousand Soviet soldiers and taking just three prisoners. 

Once again innocent civilians were burned alive in their homes with the use of flamethrowers. For his actions that winter he received Oak Leaves for his Knight’s Cross. 

In 1944 he was sent to Normandy where he suffered from a nervous breakdown after his unit suffered heavy losses in its fight with the Americans. 

Armed with the new King Tiger tanks he partook in the Battle of the Bulge but was hampered by the new tanks’ mechanical defects and high fuel consumption. 

He fought on the Western Front for the rest of the war during which he committed yet more war crimes, most notoriously at Malmedy where he massacred American troops

 He managed to escape the retribution of the Soviets as the Reich was collapsing and surrendered to the Americans at the Enns River.

 Though he was put on trial at Nuremburg and sentenced to death in 1946 for the atrocities he had committed against the U.S army alone, this was soon commuted to life imprisonment and with the help of his old SS and Wehrmacht comrades campaigning on his behalf, not to mention the especially right-wing Senator Joseph McCarthy, he was released in 1956 after barely a decade in prison and acquired a job with Porsche and later Volkswagen. 

Though in public he kept a low-profile vis-á-vis his association with SS veterans, in secret he played a leading role in their organizations and tried to suppress any attention to his crueller deeds, instead emphasising the military aspects alone. 

When new light was shined on the Nazi past after the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, Peiper and his old comrades prepared defence strategies in the event that they were ever prosecuted for their crimes and at one stage the famed Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal himself, pursued charges against him though to no avail. 

Peiper spent the last years of his life living quietly in France as a contributor to a car magazine until his presence was uncovered by the French Communist Party. 

After receiving death threats Peiper sent his wife and children away to Germany and remained alone in his house armed with a rifle waiting for the attackers to make their move.

 Old as he was he fired a number of shots at them as they torched his house with Molotov Cocktails. He died whilst trying to salvage his and his wife’s valuables in his study.