[1] As adjutant to Himmler, Peiper witnessed the SS implement the Holocaust with ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews in Eastern Europe; facts that he obfuscated and denied in the post-War period.

Throughout his post-war life, Peiper was very active in the social network of ex-SS men centred upon the right-wing organisation HIAG (Mutual Aid Association of Former Members of the Waffen-SS).

[19] In the April 1935 – March 1936 period, Peiper trained as a military officer in the SS-Junker School, from which institution the director, Paul Hausser, graduated ideologically complicit Nazi leaders for the Waffen-SS.

That demonstration of the mechanics of the Holocaust – of ethnic cleansing – was realised by the paramilitary Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz an ethnic-German, self-defence militia commanded by Ludolf von Alvensleben, the local SS and Police leader.

[26][27] In later conversation with the explorer Ernst Schäfer, Peiper rationalised the actions of the SS to hunt and kill the Polish intelligentsia by ascribing sole command responsibility to Hitler and his superior orders to Himmler.

[29] On 13 December 1939, in west-central Poland, at the village of Owińska, near Poznań, Himmler and Peiper witnessed the Aktion T4 poison-gas mass killing of mentally ill patients in a psychiatric hospital.

For audacious soldiering in his platoon's capture of a French artillery battery atop the hills of Wattenberg, south of Valenciennes, Peiper was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class, and promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain).

[35] On 7 September 1940, Himmler thanked the commanders of the LSSAH motorised regiment: "We had to have the toughness – this should be said and soon forgotten – to shoot thousands of leading Poles", and stressed the psychological problems suffered by Waffen-SS soldiers when they are "carrying out executions", "hauling away people", and "evicting crying and hysterical women" in order to clear the lands of Poland for German colonisation.

[37] In February 1941, Reichsführer-SS Himmler informed adjutant Peiper about the upcoming Operation Barbarossa (22 June – 5 December 1941), for the invasion, conquest, and German colonisation of the U.S.S.R: Red Army.

In Augustów, Poland, the Einsatzkommando Tilsit killed approximately 200 people; and in Grodno, Byelorussia, before Himmler and Peiper, Heydrich berated the leader of the local death squad for having shot only 96 Jews in a day.

To facilitate the depopulation of the lands of Russia, SS-General Sepp Dietrich, commander of the LSSAH, volunteered his Waffen-SS infantry to assist the Einsatzgruppe in the massacre of 1,800 people at the Gully of Petrushino.

Consequently, Nazi Germany responded on 8 September with Operation Achse, wherein Wehrmacht forces, including the LSSAH, invaded and occupied the north of Italy, in order to forcibly disarm the Italian army in situ.

[66] On 19 September 1943, in a firefight with the Waffen-SS occupiers, partisan guerrillas of the Italian Resistance Movement killed one soldier and captured two others in the vicinity of Boves, in the Piedmont region of north-west Italy.

[72] Peiper's over-aggressive style of leadership caused him to disregard tactical common sense in deploying the tanks and infantry forces of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment in battle against the Red Army.

In 1956, the judicial authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany opened a war-crime case to investigate the accusation that Peiper deliberately killed some of his own Waffen-SS soldiers as a point of unit discipline.

[78] As with the other Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht units in the area, Kampfgruppe Peiper fought defensively until Operation Cobra (25–31 July 1944) collapsed the German front when the U.S. Army destroyed every tank of the LSSAH and killed 25 per cent of their force of 19,618 soldiers.

[80] In the autumn of 1944, the Wehrmacht continually repelled Allied assaults to breach, penetrate, and cross the Siegfried Line, whilst Hitler sought the opportunity to seize the initiative on the Western Front.

[84] The 6th Panzer Army assigned Kampfgruppe Peiper to routes that included narrow and single-lane roads, which compelled the infantry, armoured vehicles, and tanks to travel as a convoy approximately 25 kilometres (16 mi) long.

[89] Along with other American prisoners of war captured earlier, they were ordered to stand in a meadow before the Germans opened fire on them with machine guns, killing 84 soldiers, and leaving their bodies in the snow.

[citation needed] On 19 December, in the area between Stavelot and Trois-Ponts, while the Germans were trying to regain control of the bridge over the Amblève River (crucial for allowing reinforcements and supplies to reach them), men from Kampfgruppe Peiper raped and killed a number of Belgian civilians.

In December 1945, the Army transferred him to the prison at Schwäbisch Hall, and there integrated Peiper to a group of approximately 1,000 Waffen-SS soldiers and officers of the LSSAH who also awaited judicial processing for their war crimes.

[107] In the 16 May – 16 July 1946 period, at the Dachau Concentration Camp, a military tribunal heard the Malmedy Massacre Trial of 74 defendants, which featured Waffen-SS Lt. Col. Joachim Peiper (Cmdr.

[109] Defence counsel Everett then called Lt. Col. Hal D. McCown, commander 2nd Battalion, 119th Infantry Regiment, to give testimony about his captivity – as a prisoner of war – of the Waffen-SS who captured him and his unit on 21 December 1944, in the vicinity of La Gleize, Belgium.

The prosecutor's cross-examinations compelled the SS men to behave like "a bunch of drowning rats ... turning on each other" to survive; thus did the Nazi PoW testimonies – of soldiers and officers – about the Malmedy war crimes provide the military tribunal with reasons to condemn to death several of the Waffen-SS defendants.

[121] His active social life in the Waffen-SS community included Peiper's public participation in the funerals of dead Nazis such as those of Kurt Meyer, Paul Hausser, and Dietrich.

[122] Collaborating with the HIAG, Peiper secretly worked for the political rehabilitation of Waffen-SS soldiers and officers, by suppressing their war-crime records and misrepresenting them as war veterans of the Wehrmacht.

Offended by that explicit, public identification as a war criminal, Peiper asked the Mutual Aid Association of Former Members of the Waffen-SS (HIAG) to legally defend him against that war-criminal label.

[130] In 1968, the German District Court in Stuttgart determined that Battle Group Peiper had set houses afire and that "a portion of the victims killed was from rioting that was committed by [the Waffen-SS soldiers]".

[141][142][143] The Washington Post and The New York Times newspapers quoted Facebook commentators who said that the DoD's positive military biography of the war criminal Joachim Peiper was a "vile and disturbing" exercise in historical negationism, which had the tone of "a 'fanboy-flavoured' piece" of right-wing propaganda.

[142][141] Moreover, the researchers of The Washington Post traced the source of Peiper's colourised photograph to the Twitter account of a pro-Nazi artist who publishes photographs of Nazis, with captions of supportive praise for Nazism and Hitler, and concluded that: It remains unclear how Pentagon and Army officials cleared an image, apparently created by an artist who celebrates Nazi propaganda online, to be published alongside a tribute to the American soldiers who fought and died to defeat a fascist regime 75 years ago.