Joachim Peiper held the rank of Obersturmbannführer in Nazi Germany’s fanatical Schutzstaffel, more commonly referred to as the SS. He spent the first two years of the war as an adjutant to the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, and leading member of the Nazi Party, Heinrich Himmler, where he would have witnessed at first hand the construction and implementation of numerous SS policies, many of which would have been in relation to ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust. In October 1941, having yearned for a chance at combat, he changed roles and became a commander in the Waffen-SS, although he still remained in regular contact with Himmler. As a member of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte, he saw service in the Soviet Union, Italy and Belgium. On 19 September 1943, he and his men were responsible for the murder of twenty-four Italian civilians at the village of Boves. On 17 December 1944, men under his command were responsible for what became known as the Malmedy massacre, involving the murder of eighty-four unarmed American prisoners of war. Following this, between 17 and 20 December, Peiper and his men were involved in the murder of a number of other American soldiers, as well as Belgian civilians. Peiper was never charged with the atrocities at Boves, but in 1946 he faced an American military tribunal for the Malmedy masssacre. Although found guilty and sentenced to death, his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment but he was eventually released in 1956. In 1972, Peiper moved to the French village of Troves in north east France. On 14 July 1976, his home was attacked and set on fire. Overcome by smoke, he died in the flames.

During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven Remy revisits the massacre—and the decade-long controversy that followed—to set the record straight. After the war, the U.S. Army tracked down 74 of the SS men involved in the massacre and other atrocities and put them on trial at Dachau. All the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Over the following decade, however, a network of Germans and sympathetic Americans succeeded in discrediting the trial. They claimed that interrogators—some of them Jewish émigrés—had coerced false confessions and that heat of battle conditions, rather than superiors’ orders, had led to the shooting. They insisted that vengeance, not justice, was the prosecution’s true objective. The controversy generated by these accusations, leveled just as the United States was anxious to placate its West German ally, resulted in the release of all the convicted men by 1957. The Malmedy Massacre shows that the torture accusations were untrue, and the massacre was no accident but was typical of the Waffen SS’s brutal fighting style. Remy reveals in unprecedented depth how German and American amnesty advocates warped our understanding of one of the war’s most infamous crimes through a systematic campaign of fabrications and distortions.

In this new historical investigation, German historian Jens Weste-meier portrays the rise and fall of an SS war criminal, and demolishes persistent myths of a Nazi icon. The picture revealed here is at odds with the popular Peiper mythology created by wartime and contemporary National Socialist propaganda, novels, motion pictures, and right-wing Peiper biographies. Using primary sources and personal interviews, a compelling image of the SS colonel emerges. The result is a highly readable and scholarly account with the first complete picture of Joachim Peiper. Now, a previously little understood Waffen-SS icon comes to life in a book that is at once an important contribution for our understanding of World War II history, as well as the place of the Waffen-SS in Hitler's Third Reich."

‘A bad reputation has its commitments.’ So wrote home Jochen Peiper from the fighting front in the East in 1943, characterizing his battle-hardened command during the Second World War. Peiper’s War is a new serious work of military history by the renowned author Danny S. Parker which presents a unique view off the Second World War as seen from a prominent participant on the dark side of history. The story follows the wartime career of Waffen SS Colonel Jochen Peiper, a handsome Aryan prodigy who was considered a hero in the Third Reich. Peiper had been Heinrich Himmler’s personal adjutant in the early years of the war, and, having procured a field command in Hitler’s namesake fighting force, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, he become famous for a flamboyant and brutal style of warfare on the Eastern Front. There, in his sphere, few prisoners were taken, and motives of racial genocide were never far from unspoken orders. Transferred to the west, Peiper’s battlegroup incinerated a tiny town in Northern Italy and killed the village mayor and priest. Being well-connected to Himmler and other generals of the period, Peiper finds a place in the narrative as a storied witness to the inner workings of the Nazi elite along with other prominent SS officers such as Kurt Meyer. In this meticulously researched work, we witness the apex and then death spiral of Nazi military intentions as Peiper fights for Germany across every front in the conflict. Peiper’s War provides a telling inside look at Hitler’s war and then how the dark secrets of his security-minded command were improbably unearthed at the end of the conflict by an obscure top-secret surveillance facility in the United States.

The story of the most infamous massacre of American soldiers in World War Two. An ideal book for people interested in the works of Alex Kershaw, Ben Macintyre and Jonathan Freedland. 'Drive on recklessly, give no quarter and to take no prisoners', these are the words that SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper gave to his men on the eve of this notorious event. In December 1944 the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes was in full swing, spearheaded by the armor of the Kampfgruppe Peiper. When they met a U.S. Army convoy of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion they swiftly surprised the Americans and immobilized the convoy. Realizing that they were out-numbered and out-gunned the soldiers of the 285th Field Artillery surrendered to the Waffen-SS, little did they know that they would be mown down by Nazi machine guns in cold blood shortly afterwards. Charles Whiting reconstructs Kamfgruppe Peiper's drive into the Ardennes during the Battle of Bulge and the subsequent slaughter of eight-four American soldiers in remarkable detail. Through in-depth research and interviews with many who were alive on this fateful day, including Jochen Peiper himself, Whiting uncovers the traumatic sequence of events and its aftermath. 'a good tactical study ... Various interesting personalities appear.' Military Affairs Massacre at Malmedy: The Story of Jochen Peiper's Battle Group Ardennes, December, 1944 should be essential reading for all who wish to learn more about one of the most heart-breaking events of the Second World War.

Handsome, intelligent, impetuous, and dedicated to the Nazi cause, SS Colonel Jochen Peiper (1915–1976) was one of the most controversial figures of World War II. After volunteering for the Waffen-SS at an early age, Peiper quickly rose to prominence as Heinrich Himmler's ever-present personal adjutant in the early years of the war. Sent later to the fighting front with the fearsome 1st SS Panzer Division, Peiper became a legend for his flamboyant and brutal style of warfare. As one of Hitler's favorites, he was chosen to spearhead the Ardennes Offensive, later known as the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, Peiper became the central subject in the bitterly disputed Malmédy war crimes trial. Convicted but later released, he moved to eastern France. There, he and his past were discovered, and he died in a fiery gun battle by killers unknown even today. In Hitler's Warrior, historian Danny Parker describes Peiper both on and off the battlefield and explores his complex personality. The rich narrative is supported by years of research that has uncovered previously unpublished archival material and is enhanced with information drawn from extensive interviews with Peiper's contemporaries, including German veterans. This major new historical work is both a definitive biography of Hitler's most enigmatic warrior and a unique study of the morally inverted world of the Third Reich.

SS Obersturmbannführer Jochen Peiper was one of Germany ‘s most colorful military leaders of World War II with an audacious reputation. The name Peiper will always be linked to the Malmédy Massacre, the death of Belgian civilians and more than seventy American soldiers, but there is still a myth around Peiper. Why was a twenty-nine year old Waffen-SS officer chosen to lead the German spearhead unit during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944? Peiper was a special leader within the one of the most elite Waffen-SS divisions, the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler. Peiper was charismatic and extreme loyal to his unit. His men trusted him as a leader, even under the most extreme conditions. In Germany he was a well-known war hero. It was a logical decision that Peiper became the commander of the spearhead unit, but there were other factors leading to this decision: tactical considerations, a we-know-what-to-expect-principle, and Peiper was lucky that he was still alive and serving in the Waffen-SS.