Joachim Peiper

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Joachim Peiper as SS-Sturmbannführer, 1943

Joachim “Jochen” Peiper (born January 30, 1915 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf ; † July 14, 1976 in Traves , France ) was Himmler's adjutant and a highly decorated leader of the Waffen SS at the end of the war . As regimental commander, he was held responsible for war crimes committed by his unit in Italy and Belgium and accordingly sentenced to death in the Malmedy trial in 1946. His death sentence was subsequently commuted to a prison sentence, from which he was released in 1956.

Life

Peiper came from an educated middle class family. His father, born in Silesia , served as a captain in World War I in what was then German South West Africa and in Turkey . After attending the Goethe secondary school , Peiper decided at the age of 17 to pursue a career in the National Socialist party organization. In the spring of 1933 he joined the Hitler Youth ; in October 1933 he became a member of the SS (membership number 132,496).

In 1934 Peiper was accepted into the SS Junker School in Braunschweig as an SS leader candidate . Appointed platoon leader and SS-Untersturmführer on April 20, 1936, he committed himself to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH), one of the first larger military units of the SS and thus one of the core units of the later Waffen-SS . On March 1, 1938, he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 5.508.134). In 1938 Peiper was accepted into Himmler's personal staff and in 1939 promoted to first adjutant .

Peiper standing behind Himmler to the left (1940 in Spain at the reception by Francisco Franco )

From 1939 Peiper was deployed in the LSSAH and was company commander during the attack on Poland in autumn 1939 . In the war against the Soviet Union he was first deployed on the Eastern Front and in September 1943 in Piedmont . Here Peiper's unit was involved in the Boves war crime (see below). During the Battle of the Bulge he commanded a combat group consisting of Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger II . Here, too, his unit was involved in war crimes, namely the Malmedy massacre . Peiper was “fully responsible for the massacre”, since he had given his subordinates the directive that prisoners of war should not be an obstacle to the advance and so sanctioned their shooting.

In the western campaign he earned the Iron Cross of both classes; on March 9, 1943 he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross . On January 27, 1944, he received the Knight's Cross Oak Leaves for commanding SS Panzer Regiment 1. On January 11, 1945, he received the swords for oak leaves.

Boves Massacre

In September 1943 Peiper was stationed as commander of a battalion of the LSSAH in Piedmont in northern Italy. With the armistice of Cassibile on September 3, 1943, the alliance between Germany and Italy was broken; the armistice was announced on September 8th. Thereupon the Commander in Chief South, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring , initiated the Axis case in his area of ​​command , in which the Germans disarmed all Italian units. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was entrusted with carrying out the operation in northern Italy .

On the morning of September 19, Italian partisans captured two German NCOs who tried to confiscate material from an Italian military depot in Boves near Cuneo . A first attempt at liberation failed and a German soldier died. Peiper appeared at the head of a company in Boves around noon. German and Italian witnesses have given very different accounts of the progress of the events.

Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Peiper (in Greece)

According to Italian investigations, Peiper's unit took a position that should serve both to ward off a feared partisan attack and to prevent the inhabitants from fleeing. Peiper then instructed the pastor of Boves, Don Bernadi, and the industrialist Vassallo to persuade the partisans to release the two prisoners. The two mediators negotiated successfully. The massacre began before the prisoners returned. The two negotiators were locked into the church, which was set on fire; they perished in the flames. 21 civilians were shot, another died less than a month later. The victims were predominantly the elderly, the sick and the physically handicapped. Then the whole place was set on fire. The fire destroyed 350 houses; on September 20, Peiper forbade the Cuneo fire department to work.

According to Peiper's information in a preliminary judicial investigation at the Stuttgart Regional Court , the houses in Boves caught fire as a result of fighting. Contrary to this, a report from the II. SS Panzer Corps under Paul Hausser to Army Group B stated : “The supply bases for bandits Boves and Castellar were burned down.” Peiper and the other two accused also stated that the two captured German soldiers were violent been released. According to information from five members of Peiper's unit who were questioned as witnesses, the prisoners returned with the help of the negotiators.

There was no trial against Peiper, in the decision to terminate the preliminary investigation in 1968 it said:

“The fact that on September 19, 1943 [erroneously on September 23] in Boves and the surrounding area the persons named in the order for the opening of the preliminary investigation died a violent death cannot be questioned. [...] Based on the results of the investigation, it can also be assumed that at least some of those killed are victims of riots committed by members of the Peiper Battalion. "

The court also considered it proven that Peiper's unit had set houses on fire and were shot at men fleeing. The three accused, including Peiper, were released from prosecution as it was not possible to establish that they had ordered the shooting of civilians and the burning of houses.

A possible background to the massacre is the deterrence of Italian soldiers in order to prevent them from joining the resistance after their country left the war: According to reports from the LSSAH on September 17, the soldiers' resistance to their disarmament in the Cuneo-Boves area continued. On September 20, the division said that - apart from small groups - the troops had laid down their weapons.

According to military historian Jens Westemeier , the court decision of 1968 was based on the then still inadequate scientific documentation and processing of the actions of Waffen SS units against places where they suspected the support of partisans. Peiper had set an example with the Boves massacre: “Boves was on fire when Peiper left with most of his men; not by artillery fire, but by arson. The Boves massacre was typical of the actions of Peiper's associations and can be placed [...] in line with the crimes in the Soviet Union and Belgium. "

Malmedy massacre

Joachim Peiper at the Malmedy Trial in 1946
Joachim Peiper and interpreter at the Malmedy trial in 1946

In December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge , Peiper was the commander of the LSSAH's 1st tank regiment, known as “Kampfgruppe Peiper”. For the success of the Ardennes offensive, the capture of bridges over the Meuse was a necessary prerequisite, for which Peipers Kampfgruppe, an association of about 2,000 men, was responsible. They were supposed to force a rapid breakthrough through the American positions and advance to the Meuse at Liege. On December 17, 1944, around 1:30 p.m., an advance unit of the armored force captured more than 100 US soldiers at a street crossing in Baugnez near Malmedy. She disarmed the soldiers and forced them to line up in a field south and west of the intersection. Shortly afterwards, the advance unit shot at the defenseless prisoners in a two to three minute continuous fire with a machine gun and pistols. Then some men from this unit entered the field and tried to kill the remaining wounded prisoners who were still living on the ground. Some of these had been able to run away and were therefore scattered over the terrain. The whole thing took about 10 to 15 minutes. Then the unit drove on. Now the main part of the combat group Peiper shot while passing this place for about an hour from its vehicles at the apparently partly still moving soldiers. Survivors then lay in the field for a few hours and tried to hide. It took some survivors about four days to get through to American troops and share what had happened. 82 American soldiers were killed in the shooting, 54 soldiers survived. This process became known as the Malmedy massacre . During this time there was another massacre of the Belgian civilian population at Trois-Ponts and Stavelot under Peiper's responsibility .

Shortly before the end of the war - the exact date is unknown - Peiper is said to have been promoted to Standartenführer of the Waffen SS. The transport must be regarded as inadmissible and not legally effective; written documents about such a process are nowhere available. It is possible that the promotion of SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Sepp Dietrich , who was known for such escapades, was arbitrarily pronounced.

Capture, Trial and Sentencing

After the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht, Peiper tried from May 9, 1945 from the Steyr area west of the Enns, located in American-occupied territory, to cross the still unoccupied Alps on foot in order to reach his family in Rottach. On May 22nd, shortly before reaching his destination near Schliersee, he was picked up by a patrol of the 42nd US Infantry Division. After staying in prison camps in Schliersee, Rottach-Egern and Feuchtwangen, Peiper was taken to the Nuremberg-Langwasser internment camp, where he was identified on August 20 as a potentially involved party in the Malmedy massacre. On August 22nd, he was transferred to the Interrogation Camp of the 3rd US Army in Freising. After relocation to the US Army Group Interrogation Center Oberursel in September 1945, to Zuffenhausen near Stuttgart in October 1945 and to Schwäbisch Hall in December 1945, Peiper was brought to the court of Dachau on April 16, 1946, where the trial on May 16, 1946 because of the Malmedy massacre. In July 1946, Peiper was sentenced to death as a war criminal in the Malmedy trial along with 42 other soldiers. The Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces in Europe, Thomas T. Handy , pardoned Peiper to life imprisonment on January 31, 1951. In its reasoning, Handy responded to requests for clemency for Peiper:

“His followers paint the image of a powerful leader who inspired his people and was the soul of his troops. Many of the petitions submitted on his behalf are based solely on the declaration that such an outstanding officer and soldier could not have been guilty of such crimes. […] I too am convinced that Peiper was the inspiring spirit in the preparation of terrorism and in the killing of prisoners of war by this force. It is precisely these arguments, which point to Peiper's leadership qualities, that will convince any indifferent observer that the killing of prisoners of war in so many different places in his area of ​​operations would not have been possible without his knowledge and without his consent, and even without the driving force of his personality. "

During his imprisonment in Landsberg, Peiper headed the in-house prison school from 1954, where inmates taught a wide variety of fields of knowledge and inmates were able to prepare for school-leaving certificates and take courses in various university subjects.

After release from prison

After early release from the Landsberg War Crimes Prison in 1956, Peiper worked for Porsche from 1957 , but was later released under pressure from the works council. Temporary employment at VW also led to protests from the workforce. Most recently, he worked as HR manager at the Stuttgart Motorbuch Verlag before moving to France in the 1960s . There he worked as a lecturer and - under the pseudonym Richard Buschmann - as a translator of military books for Motorbuch Verlag.

death

When Peiper's presence in 1976 became known to the French press, the communist daily l'Humanité demanded that Peiper be deported to Germany. In June 1976 he received a death threat and sent his family back to Germany. He himself stayed in Traves . On the night of July 13-14 , 1976, there was an exchange of fire in which Peiper apparently fired several shots. His house was set on fire. A charred corpse, presumably Peipers, was found in the ruins. The act was never cleared up, the " Action Committee Resistance - Deportation " has committed itself . He was buried in Schondorf .

reception

Peiper's lawful conviction as a war criminal was questioned in the press in 1976 by Spiegel and Die Zeit, among others .

The historian Volker Rieß stated in 2001 that "more or less apologetic representations" predominate on Peiper and the Malmedy trial , which criticized the American conduct of the investigation in particular. These representations included Rieß's publications by Ralf Tiemann, Patrick Agte, Michael Reynolds, Gerd J. Gust Cuppens and an early publication by Jens Westemeier . Extremely right-wing representations assume falsifications of history .

The extreme right-wing National-Zeitung portrayed Peiper in July 2000 in its series "Great German Soldiers - Immortal Heroes". According to the National-Zeitung, Peiper's reputation was "legendary"; he is one of the "most striking figures within the Waffen-SS". Units led by Peiper would have performed “breathtaking deeds of arms”. At the same time, the National-Zeitung described the convictions in the Malmedy trial as “the cradle for a subsequent and ongoing criminalization of the Waffen SS”. In the series, only soldiers loyal to the Nazi regime were honored, sometimes using the linguistic formulas of the Wehrmacht and Nazi propaganda . The political scientist Fabian Virchow classifies the series in “the imagination of the extreme right of the men who are oriented towards the deed and who shape the course of events / history in the interest of the 'national' or ' folkish ' collective”. The characterizations referred “at the same time to a conceptualization of masculinity , the profile of which - very unified - would be marked by characteristics such as 'hardness', 'willingness to sacrifice', 'courage to death', 'bravery', 'tenacity', 'cutting' or 'standing qualities' ".

In his dissertation published in early 2014 (University of Potsdam, 2009) on Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period, the military historian Jens Westemeier fundamentally revised the accounts of his own apologetic Peiper monograph published in 1996 and now characterizes Peiper's leadership style as military - Technically unskilled, unsuitable for leading larger associations and characterized by self-importance instead of a sense of reality. The tactical leadership of a regiment had overwhelmed him, he had shown horrific losses of the units under him as inevitable. Peiper was actually a thoroughly ideologically fanatical "racial warrior Himmler" who had borne major responsibility for war crimes and "as an egocentric superior went over the corpses of his men and especially those of his enemies". Westemeier points out that at the time of National Socialism , in contrast to other "war heroes", there was no myth of Peiper. This was only created in the post-war period as an action by the “war crimes lobby” (Westemeier), namely the HIAG and the Order of the Knight's Cross .

literature

  • John M. Bauserman: The Malmédy Massacre. White Mane, Shippensburg PA 1995, ISBN 0-942597-77-X .
  • Bernhard Kiekenap : SS Junker School. SA and SS in Braunschweig. Appelhans, Braunschweig 2008, ISBN 978-3-937664-94-1 .
  • Erich Kuby : Treason in German. How the Third Reich ruined Italy. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1982, ISBN 3-455-08754-X .
  • Roger Martin: L'affaire Peiper. Dagorno, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-910019-07-1 .
  • Peter M. Quadflieg , René Rohrkamp (Ed.): The "Malmedy Massacre". Perpetrators, victims, research perspectives. A workbook (= Aachen studies on economic and social history. Vol. 6). Shaker, Aachen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8322-9241-6 .
  • Michael Schadewitz: Between the knight's cross and the gallows. Skorzeny's secret company Greif in Hitler's Ardennes offensive 1944/45. Helios, Aachen 2007, ISBN 978-3-938208-48-9 .
  • Gerhard Schreiber : German war crimes in Italy. Perpetrator, victim, prosecution (= Beck'sche series. 1168). Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-39268-7 .
  • James J. Weingartner: Crossroads of Death. The Story of the Malmedy Massacre and Trial. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1979, ISBN 0-520-03623-9 .
  • Jens Westemeier : Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period (= War in History. Vol. 71). Published with the support of the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77241-1 (= revised version of the dissertation at the University of Potsdam 2009).

Web links

Commons : Joachim Peiper  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Georges Arnaud and Roger Kahane, L'Affaire Peiper, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1979 ISBN 2253022411 and ISBN 978-2253022411
  2. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period (= War in History, Volume 71) Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77241-1 , p. 856 f.
  3. ↑ List of seniority of the NSDAP Schutzstaffel. As of December 1, 1936, p. 239, No. 7632. (JPG; 1.40 MB) In: http://www.dws-xip.pl/reich/biografie/1936/1936A.html . Retrieved November 5, 2019 .
  4. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period , Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, pp. 95 ff.
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, Hermann Weiß (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism. 5th edition, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-423-34408-3 , p. 955.
  6. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in war and post-war times, Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, pp. 332–345, here p. 344 f.
  7. ^ On the Boves massacre see Gerhard Schreiber: German war crimes in Italy - perpetrators, victims, prosecution. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-39268-7 , pp. 129-135.
  8. ↑ Summary in Schreiber, War Crimes , p. 131 f.
  9. ↑ Erich Kuby: Treason in German. How the Third Reich ruined Italy. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1982, ISBN 3-455-08754-X , p. 480.
  10. ^ Message quoted in Schreiber, War Crimes , p. 129 f.
  11. ^ Order of the Stuttgart Regional Court of 1968, quoted in Schreiber, Kriegsverbrechen , p. 134.
  12. ↑ Schreiber, War Crimes , p. 132 f.
  13. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in war and post-war times , Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, pp. 257–267, quotation p. 267.
  14. ^ John M. Bausermann: The Malmédy Massacre. Shippensburg 1995, page iX f.
  15. ^ John M. Bausermann: The Malmédy Massacre. Shippensburg 1995, page 94
  16. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors: Joachim Peiper and the Waffen SS in war and post-war times . Ferdinand Schöningh, 2014, p. 366 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  17. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors: Joachim Peiper and the Waffen SS in war and post-war times . Ferdinand Schöningh, 2014, p. 364 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  18. ↑ The complete explanation of cell phones in: Robert Sigel: In the interest of justice. The Dachau war crimes trials 1945–1948. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-593-34641-9 , p. 179 ff.
  19. ↑ On the Landsberg prison school under Peiper's direction, cf. Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and post-war period , Paderborn 2014, p. 415ff.
  20. ↑ Karl-Heinz Janßen : Death caught up with him. Why a Colonel in the Waffen SS couldn't shake off his past. In: Die Zeit 31/1976 (23 July 1976).
  21. ^ Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann, Dieter Zinke: The generals of the Waffen SS and the police. The military careers of the generals, as well as the doctors, veterinarians, intendants, judges and ministerial officials with the rank of general. Volume 3: Lammerding - Plesch, Biblio, Osnabrück 2008, ISBN 3-7648-2375-5 , p. 179.
  22. ↑ a b c Bad luck for him . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1976 ( online ).
  23. ^ Brunner, Bernhard: The France Complex. The National Socialist Crimes in France and the Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany. ISBN 978-3-596-16896-5 , Frankfurt 2007, p. 325.
  24. ↑ Stephanie Millonig and Jutta Bäzner: After the SS massacre: descendants of the victims pray at the grave of the perpetrator. Retrieved January 29, 2020 .
  25. ↑ "Death caught up with him", Karl-Heinz Janßen, Die Zeit, July 23, 1976 [1]
  26. ↑ Volker Rieß: Malmédy - crime, justice and post-war politics. In: Wolfram Wette , Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): War crimes in the 20th century as a problem of historiography. Primus, Darmstadt 2001, ISBN 3-89678-417-X , p. 256.
  27. ↑ Ralf Tiemann: The Malmedy Trial. A struggle for justice. Schütz in Nation-Europa-Verlag , Coburg 1993, ISBN 3-87725-127-7 .
  28. ↑ Patrick Agte: Jochen Peiper. Commander, Panzer Regiment, Leibstandarte. Vowinckel , Berg am Starnberger See 1998, ISBN 3-921655-89-7 .
  29. ↑ Michael Reynolds: The devil's adjutant. Jochen Peiper, tank leader. Spellmount, Staplehurst 1995, ISBN 1-873376-41-3 .
  30. ↑ Gerd J. Gust Cuppens: What really happened. Malmedy - December 17, 1944. The Peiper combat group in the Ardennes. Grenz-Echo , Eupen 1989, ISBN 3-923099-62-2 .
  31. ↑ Jens Westemeier: Joachim Peiper (1915-1976) SS standard leader. A biography. Biblio, Osnabrück 1996, ISBN 3-7648-2499-9 .
  32. ↑ Fabian Virchow: Against civilism. International relations and the military in the political conceptions of the extreme right. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-15007-9 , p. 396. Virchow refers to: Without authors: Invented German crimes. "Confessions" under torture. In: National newspaper . No. 3, January 13, 1995, p. 2, and: Franz Uhle-Wettler : Court of the victors. In: German military magazine . No. 2, 1996, pp. 33-41.
  33. ^ National newspaper. No. 28, July 7, 2000, p. 12. Quoted in: Virchow, Zivilismus , p. 395 f.
  34. ↑ Virchow, Zivilismus , p. 347.
  35. ↑ Virchow, Zivilismus , p. 394.
  36. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, p. 641 f.
  37. ↑ Westemeier, Himmlers Krieger , p. 619ff.
personal data
SURNAME Peiper, Joachim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Peiper, Jochen; Buschmann, Richard (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German war criminal, Obersturmbannführer of the Waffen SS
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: July 14, 1976 or July 15, 1976
Place of death Traves (France)