On this day in 1976, Nazi war criminal Joachim Peiper died after his house was deliberately set on fire in France. During the war, he had murdered over 1000 civilians. A vigilante group called “The Avengers” claimed responsibility for the attack.
On this day in 1976, Nazi war criminal Joachim Peiper died after his house was deliberately set on fire in France. During the war, he had murdered over 1000 civilians. A vigilante group called “The Avengers” claimed responsibility for the attack.
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[Joachim Peiper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Peiper)
An SS sergeant in Peiper’s ration supply company stated that Peiper said “In the village, the two petrol trucks were burnt and 25 Germans killed by partisans and Soviet soldiers. As a revenge, Peiper ordered the burning down of the whole village and the shooting of its inhabitants.”
In August 1944, when an SS commander, formerly of LSSAH, was captured south of Falaise in France and interrogated by the Allies, he stated that Peiper was “particularly eager to execute the order to burn villages”. Peiper wrote to Potthast in March 1943: “Our reputation precedes us as a wave of terror and is one of our best weapons. Even old Genghis Khan would gladly have hired us as assistants.”
The massacres in the Soviet Union were not Peiper’s only crimes. He was also responsible for the [Boves massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boves_massacre), in which 23 Italian civilians were murdered, and the [Malmedy massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre), in which 84 American POWs were murdered.
Although the 84 victims were the “main event” of the Malmedy massacres, Peiper’s men also murdered an additional 274 American POWs and 111 Belgian civilians.
After the war, Peiper and his men were arrested by the U.S. military for their roles in the Malmedy massacre. They were brought to an American military court established in the former Dachau concentration camp. A total of 73 SS soldiers and officers were tried.
The three officers who hold command responsibility for the Malmedy massacre:
Joachim Peiper
[Sepp Dietrich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp_Dietrich)
[Werner Poetschke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Poetschke) (Poetschke was not tried since he was already dead; he was killed in action on March 24, 1945)
[The trial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre_trial)
[An article about the trial](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/justice-after-1944-malmedy-massacre)
The trial was a resounding success. Every defendant was found guilty of war crimes. Forty-three of them, including Peiper, were sentenced to death. The others were given life terms (including Dietrich) or decades in prison with hard labor. They were transported to Landsberg Prison to await their execution or serve out their sentences.
What happened in the months and years following remains a source of interest and research. The proceedings themselves and the interrogations leading up to the trial became highly publicized, contested, and politicized.
The convicted SS men claimed that American interrogators used unlawful methods. They went as far as to claim that they had been tortured and that all of the statements given were coerced.
Publicity regarding the trial mounted and the Secretary of the Army responded by organizing a commission to investigate these allegations. The claims of abuse, supported by German veterans, the German populace, and religious organizations who desired the release of war criminals, also had American backers. One member of the commission in particular, Judge Edward Van Roden, propagated the allegations and questioned the validity of the trial. Following this commission, on March 20, 1948, 31 of the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, except Peiper and 11 others. Additionally, 13 of the initial 74 were freed, citing insufficient evidence.
The energy behind the abuse allegations was sustained and in 1949, Senate hearings were conducted to investigate. New Senator and rabid anti-Communist [Joseph McCarthy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy) had an intense interest in the case and obtained special permission to attend the hearings, seeing the Malmedy trial as a chance for the spotlight.
Many other anti-Communist politicians at the time were claiming that being lenient with Nazi war criminals was necessary. West Germany at the time was extremely friendly with Nazis, so leniency would appease them.
A central point of the investigations was the motivation of the interrogators, some of whom were Jews who had fled Europe and had become American soldiers. Defenders of those declared guilty at Dachau argued that the interrogators, especially the Prague-born PhD chief interrogator Lt. William Perl, whose wife had survived Ravensbruck, were out for revenge.
McCarthy, the hearing’s supposed observer, played a leading role, sympathizing with Peiper and the other SS men, aggressively questioning the US interrogators and other witnesses, going so far as to call for Lt. Perl to undergo a lie detector test.
In the end, the commission found these claims to be false and the allegations of abuse to be almost entirely fabricated. However, minor procedural errors were found, allowing a justification basis to further amend the sentences delivered on July 16, 1946.
By 1951, most of the men were released and the only remaining death sentences, those of Peiper and four others, were commuted. Peiper was instead ordered to serve 35 years in prison with hard labor.
The commutations were due to massive waves of Nazi sympathizers demanding clemency for the last 28 Nazi war criminals still on death row under American military law. The protests were spurred by fears that the remaining death sentences were about to be carried out.
Tens of thousands of West Germans, including many politicians, protested outside Landsberg Prison. It is worth noting that few, if any, of them were opposing capital punishment specifically. They were against punishing Nazis for mass murder.
The crowd insisted the men were innocent and demanded full pardons. They also assaulted Jewish counter-protesters who called on the U.S. to enforce all death sentences on the remaining condemned. Many of the West German politicians who insisted that executing people who had committed some of the worst crimes which humanity had ever witnessed was wrong suddenly wanted it back for common offenses shortly after. They called the condemned just as much victims as those who died in the Holocaust.
In the end, all but 7 convicts who were deemed Landsberg’s absolute “worst of the worst” were reprieved. Among the 7 men to not be reprieved was [Oswald Pohl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Pohl), the head administrator of the entire concentration camp system, four genocidal death squad commanders who had murdered tens of thousands of people, and two concentration camp officials who were deemed to be extremely cruel and undeserving of any form of leniency.
[My previous post about the 7 men who were not reprieved](https://www.reddit.com/r/MorbidReality/comments/v6z07z/on_this_day_oswald_pohl_the_head_administrator_of/)
The West German government continued to try to have these men, deemed the “Landsberg Seven”, reprieved as well, but failed. They were each hanged one by one on June 7, 1951.
Under a more recent policy of the U.S. government easing themselves on Nazi war criminals to appease West Germany, all remaining defendants in the Malmedy massacre were paroled in the 1950s. In 1954, Peiper’s sentence was further cut. He would now serve only 11.5 years instead of 35 years.
Both Sepp Dietrich and Joachim Peiper were released from Landsberg Prison in 1956. They had each served about 11 years in prison, including pre-trial custody.
Dietrich was returned to prison for 19 months after a West German court found him guilty of participating in the [Night of Long Knives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives), a political purge of Nazis, mainly SA men, many of whom were considered political rivals by Hitler. He was released once more in 1958. Dietrich died of a heart attack in West Germany on April 21, 1966, at the age of 73. Six thousand people, including many former SS men, attended his funeral.
After his release, Peiper settled down in France. The confirmation of his past and presence in France attracted journalists, to whom Peiper readily gave interviews. He claimed he was a victim of Communist harassment. In an interview, Peiper claimed he was innocent of the Boves massacre, for which he had never been tried, and had already paid for his crimes.
On Bastille Day on July 14, 1976, a group of French anti-Nazis attacked and torched Peiper’s house in Traves. Peiper, 61, died of smoke inhalation. His killers were never caught.
McCarthy, the Senator who had intervened on the behalf of Peiper and his men went on to perpetrate the infamous [Red Scare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) of the 1950s, ruining the reputations of many people in the United States by accusing them of being Communists or Communist sympathizers.
However, McCarthy eventually pushed his luck too far. He started accusing high ranking members of the U.S. military of being Communists with virtually no evidence.
On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy by a vote of 67–22, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion. He died on May 2, 1957, at the age of 48. McCarthy succumbed to health problems which were worsened by alcoholism due to his public humiliation.