Definitive biography of a Hitler henchman

Hitler’s Warrior: The Life and Wars of Colonel Jochen Peiper by Danny S. Parker, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; ISBN 978-0-306-82154-7 ©2014, $29.99, p. 303, plus maps, pictures, notes and index

By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.

WINCHESTER, California–The youngest colonel in Hitler’s army, Jochen Peiper, had a distinguished World War II military career, first as an aide, beginning in 1938, to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, architect of the “Final Solution,” and then as his personal adjutant, between November 1940 and August 1941. Later, as a tank commander in the 1st SS-Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s personal bodyguard division, he fought the Russians in the East and against the allied powers in the West. As the war drew to a close, Peiper’s regiment became involved in the Malmédy Massacre of American soldiers.

Historian Danny Parker, after twenty years of researching and reviewing tens of thousands of pages of original documents about one of the Third Reich’s most decorated soldiers, he wrote Hitler’s Warrior, in which Peiper’s biography is presented chronologically in five parts: (1) Ascent in the Nazi bureaucracy under Himmler, (2) Military campaigns during the war, (3) Trial for war crimes against American soldiers, (4) Life in Landsberg Prison and the years immediately after his release, and (5) His residence in Tavérs, France.

Peiper, a tall handsome lad with blond hair, a living example of an Aryan poster boy, dropped out of high school and at the suggestion of Himmler, whom he met while participating in Hitler Youth, applied to SS officers’ school in December 1934, to which he was accepted, culminating in an induction ceremony, led by Adolph Hitler, the following November. Later, he met Hitler for the first time face-to-face. Parker records that Hitler, passing a group of officers in which Peiper stood turned and looked directly at Peiper with a faint smile. “‘The look changed my life,’ Peiper said of his first encounter, ‘He looked at me and I was ready to die for him.’”

As Himmler’s personal assistant, Peiper participated in meetings, heard conversations, and saw orders creating the atrocities that would come to be called the Holocaust. For example, Peiper was with Hitler and Himmler in Munich on the night of November 9, 1938, when they learned of the destruction of Jewish lives and property taking place throughout Germany, known as Kristallnacht. He heard Himmler give the order that “the demonstrations are not to be hindered by the police.” Peiper, traveling aboard Hitler’s train shortly after Germany’s tanks conquered Poland, in September 1939, acted as the liaison from Himmler to coordinate “the murder teams of the Einsatzgruppen.”

In March 1940, he visited Buchenwald and in January 1941, he and Himmler toured Ravensbrück, an all female concentration camp located about fifty-five miles north of Berlin. Later that month, the two of them spent a day at Dachau. In June, as Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s attack on Russia, unfolded, Peiper understood that Himmler blessed the plan to exterminate the Jews without leaving a trace, demanding a “ruthless and energetic execution” of the orders. So, what did Peiper know? Parker writes, “If not a participant, Peiper was at the news center of the killing storm.” Himmler and Parker were so close that colleagues referred to Peiper as “Himmler’s memory.”

Peiper asked Himmler for a transfer to the front lines in August, 1941, to which Himmler reluctantly agreed, sending him initially to in the Eastern Front, where Peiper’s bravery and cunning saved German soldier’s lives on many occasions. In the West he fought the Canadians on D-Day and took a leading role against the Americans in Hitler’s last stand—the Great Ardennes Offensive. On several occasions he displayed extraordinary heroism and exceptional military leadership on the battlefield, resulting in a number of medals, including the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, among the highest awards granted by Nazi Germany to its soldiers, which Hitler personally presented to him at his home—Wolf’s Lair.

Parker, describing the chaos of battle, records that Peiper, leading his Panzer regiment, racing through the Ardennes forest to smash American lines, at what historians would call the Battle of the Bulge, arrived at the Baugnez crossroads, near Malmédy, Belgium about noon on December 14, 1944, where they intercepted a convoy of Americans. Being surrounded and out gunned, the Americans surrendered. They were taken to a field and placed with other Americans, about 120 men in total. For reasons unknown, even now, the soldiers fired on their prisoners, killing all of them. In short order, Peiper became “the most hated guy in America—GI enemy No.1”.

Peiper made no effort to hide his identity after the war. When the American military finally figuring out that they had him ensconced in a detention camp, they arrested and charged him with murder. His interrogation, which took place during the late summer and into the fall of 1945, determined that he still clung to the Nazi philosophy. One interrogator reported Peiper telling him that he could come to America and help hang Jews.

Parker describes the trial in fascinating detail, which lasted three months in Dachau, ending in July 1946. Peiper, his fellow officers, and their subordinates were all found guilty. Peiper and forty-two others were sentenced to death by hanging; the others received life imprisonment or a lighter sentence. At the trial’s conclusion, sitting alone in his cell, Peiper wrote to the prosecutor telling him, “You can never bend the neck and pride of an old Prussian front-line officer!” To his lead defense attorney he wrote, “I am going to die as one of the last soldiers of this terrible war, but not as a criminal! I have a good conscience.”

The sentences of these and other condemned prisoners were reduced or commuted one by one over the next few years. In January 1951, the military reduced Peiper’s sentence to life imprisonment. Parker explains, “Publicly Truman and top officials thoroughly condemned Hitler, the killing of Jews, and the SS involvement. Privately, however, senior US government operatives prepared to drop the prosecution of the horrid acts of the German Endlösung—The Final Solution—all to preserve West German support for the Cold War.”  Peiper finally received a parole in December 1956. None of the soldiers convicted in the Malmédy Massacre were ever executed.

He first found work with Porsche Motors, then with Volkswagen, and finally with an auto magazine. With the capture and death of Adolph Eichmann, German courts found new energy to prosecute war crimes, and by 1960, Peiper’s name kept popping up in courtroom testimony associated with the death of Jews and Italian partisans. Even Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter brought charges against Peiper, whom he called the Second Eichmann. Peiper consistently denied all knowledge about the Final Solution and the Death Squads. Lack of evidence hindered prosecution, but the legal assaults took their toll on Peiper.

Peiper became disenchanted with the “new Germany” and the life style of its middle class, subsequently buying properly in Través, France, where he built a modest two-story house in an idyll setting by the Saône River. Paradise lasted just four years before the local French Communists discovered his presence. Parker provides a vivid description that on the night of Bastille Day, 1976 unknown assailants burned Peiper’s house to the ground. He managed to save, before being burned to death, legal documents, antique photos, some clothing, and an old copy of Mein Kampf signed by Adolf Hitler.

The charred body consisted of “withered stumps of arms or legs; the majority of it was the burned-out crucible of a shrunken torso barely sixty centimeters [two feet] long…. The fire, they estimated, had reached foundry temperatures: over 1,400 degrees Centigrade [2,500 degrees Fahrenheit].” Conspiracy theories were immediately put forward: Peiper staged his own death, placing some transient in the house, gutting it, and fleeing the country; Wiesenthal was among them. Yet, the truth can be stranger than fiction. In an odd twist of fate, Peiper died in his house, which for one night became a crematorium-like setting, similar to the ones he witnessed as he toured the various German death camps.

The police identified suspects and persons of interest, but no one was ever tried for the crime. The French government did not declare Peiper officially dead until April, 1977, but to this day, the police of Dijon, France still consider this an open case.

In addition to crafting a masterful biography of Jochen Peiper, Parker provides much detail about the personal lives of the people at or close to the highest levels of the Nazi bureaucracy, some famous; others relatively unknown to the general public, including Himmler’s secretary and mistress, Hedwig Potthast, with whom he had two children, and who received many gifts from him, including “a table and stool supported by legs of human thigh bones.”  Oswald Pohl, dubiously known as “Banker of the Holocaust,” who after his arrest in May 1946 “readily admitted the existence of the Vernichttungslkanger—the elimination camps—saying, ‘everyone down to the lowest clerk knows what went on in the concentration camps.’”

Danny Parker painstakingly portrays Jochen Peiper’s complex personality: Loving father and husband, loyal friend, trusted leader, but also a racist and Nazi-thinking patriot to the end, a professional soldier whose bureaucratic indoctrination and recklessness on the battlefield allowed him to coldly lump combatant and non-combatant deaths into the categories of winning the war and annihilating the Jewish race. In Hitler’s Warrior, Parker meticulously covers Peiper’s life and in doing so has produced the definitive work the subject.

Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars;  Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. You may send a comment to fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com or post it on this website, per the instructions below.

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