"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" Joachim Peiper - 1967 On the night of July 13 into July 14, 1976, a house in the small French village of Traves burned almost completely to the ground. By morning, investigators had found a badly burned body inside, and one name immediately turned the fire into an international story: Joachim Peiper. For years, Peiper had lived there far from the battlefields that had made him infamous. To neighbors he was a German resident in rural Haute-Saône, but to historians, veterans, and families marked by the war, his name carried the weight of the Waffen-SS, the Battle of the Bulge, and the killing of American prisoners near Malmedy. The distance between those two realities is what makes the final chapter of Peiper’s life so unsettling. A man associated with some of Nazi Germany’s most notorious wartime crimes had reached middle age, worked in civilian industry, and eventually settled among people living peaceful postwar lives. Yet the past had never disappeared. Joachim Peiper had risen rapidly inside the SS system and served close to Heinrich Himmler before becoming a prominent Waffen-SS commander. By late 1944, he was commanding Kampfgruppe Peiper during Germany’s desperate Ardennes offensive, better known in the English-speaking world as the Battle of the Bulge. On December 17, 1944, American prisoners captured near Baugnez, outside Malmedy in Belgium, were gathered in a field. Waffen-SS troops from Peiper’s formation opened fire on them, and the episode became known as the Malmedy massacre. That legal controversy would follow the case for years, but it did not erase what happened at Baugnez. American prisoners had been killed after capture, and the massacre became one of the most infamous crimes committed against U.S. troops in Western Europe. Peiper’s military record was also connected with other allegations and investigations relating to violence against civilians. One of the best known concerned the Italian village of Boves, where killings and destruction occurred during a German operation in September 1943. The postwar legal history surrounding Peiper was therefore not simple. He had been convicted in the Malmedy case, his death sentence was later commuted, and the changing political climate of the early Cold War gradually transformed the fate of many German war-crimes prisoners. By 1956, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, all of the defendants convicted in the Malmedy proceedings had been released. Peiper returned to civilian life in West Germany. This is one of the parts of his story that can feel most difficult to comprehend from the present. A man who had once stood in a courtroom facing execution was again living as a free civilian little more than a decade after the end of the war. The shift reflected more than one individual case. By the 1950s, the strategic priorities of the Western powers had changed dramatically as confrontation with the Soviet Union began to dominate politics in Europe. Questions of punishment, rehabilitation, anti-communism, German rearmament, and integration of West Germany into the Western alliance increasingly overlapped. For many survivors and veterans, those political changes could feel deeply at odds with the scale of what had happened only a few years earlier. Peiper worked in the West German automobile industry after his release. (Porsche) But his name continued to attract attention, and the possibility of living an entirely anonymous postwar life became increasingly difficult. Eventually, he moved to France. The location itself carried an uncomfortable historical irony. France had endured occupation, deportation, political exile.show more
