Joachim Peiper (30 January 1915 – 14 July 1976) was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and war criminal convicted for the Malmedy massacre of U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs). During the Second World War in Europe, Peiper served as personal adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, and as a tank commander in the Waffen-SS. Peiper personified Nazi ideology as a purportedly ruthless glory-hound commander who was indifferent to the combat casualties of Battle Group Peiper, and who encouraged, expected, and tolerated war crimes by his Waffen-SS soldiers.

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. As a tank commander, Peiper served in the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) in the Eastern Front and in the Western Front, first as a battalion commander and then as a regimental commander. Peiper fought in the Third Battle of Kharkov and in the Battle of the Bulge, from which battles his eponymous battle group – Kampfgruppe Peiper – became notorious for committing war crimes against civilians and PoWs.

In the Malmedy Massacre Trial, the U.S. military tribunal established Peiper's command responsibility for the Malmedy massacre (1944) and sentenced him to death, which later was commuted to life in prison, then 35 years. In Italy, Peiper was accused of having committed the Boves massacre (1943); that investigation ended for lack of war-crime evidence that Peiper ordered the summary killing of Italian civilians.

Upon release from prison, Peiper worked for the Porsche and Volkswagen automobile companies and later moved to France, where he worked as a freelance translator. 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). In 1976, Peiper was murdered in France when anti-Nazis set his house afire after the publication of his identity as a Waffen-SS war criminal.

Early life

Family background
Born in Berlin on 30 January 1915, Joachim Peiper was the third son of a middle-class family from German Silesia. His father, Woldemar Peiper, had served as an officer in the Imperial German Army and fought in the 1904 campaign in German South West Africa.
He later contracted malaria and received a severe wound
which demobilised him from active duty in German Africa. In 1907 Woldemar resumed active duty in the Prussian army.
He rejoined the colours in the First World War
and was for a time deployed to Ottoman Turkey,
where he suffered chronic cardiac problems consequent to the previous malarial infection. Poor health then demobilised Woldemar from active duty in Asia Minor.

During the European interwar period, Woldemar joined a company of mercenary soldiers within the paramilitary Freikorps and actively participated in suppressing the Polish Silesian Uprisings (August 1919–July 1921) which aimed to annex German Silesia to the Second Polish Republic. In the Weimar Germany of the 1920s, the antisemitic canards of Nazi ideology – the Stab-in-the-back myth, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The International Jew, et cetera – had much appeal to the political conservatives and to the political reactionaries such as the Freikorps mercenary soldier Woldemar Peiper who were angry that Imperial Germany had lost the Great War.

Two of Woldemar's sons, Horst and Joachim, followed the same life-path of nationalist ideology and military service to Germany. In 1926, the eleven-year-old Joachim followed his middle brother, fourteen-year-old Horst Peiper, to become a boy scout; eventually, Joachim became interested in becoming a military officer.

Horst joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) and served in the SS-Totenkopfverbände as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp. Transferred to active duty as a Waffen-SS soldier, Horst fought in the Battle of France (1940) as part of the 3rd SS Panzer Division, and died in Poland in June 1941 in a never-fully-explained accident; rumour said that his fellow SS-men drove Horst to commit suicide because of his homosexuality.

Peiper's eldest brother, Hans-Hasso (b. 1910) was mentally ill, and his suicide attempt resulted in cerebral damage that reduced him to a persistent vegetative state. Interned to a hospital in 1931, Hans died of tuberculosis in 1942.

Pre-War career

Fascist politics
Joachim Peiper was eighteen years old when he joined the Hitler Youth in the company of Horst, his middle brother. In October 1933, Peiper volunteered for the Schutzstaffel (SS) and joined the Cavalry SS, where his first superior officer was Gustav Lombard, a zealous Nazi, and later a regimental commander in the SS Cavalry Brigade, who were notoriously efficient at the mass murder of Jews in the lands of the occupied Soviet Union, notably in punitive operations such as the Pripyat Marshes massacres (July–August 1941) in Byelorussia.

On 23 January 1934, he was promoted to SS-Mann (SS Identity Card Nr. 132.496), which made Peiper an "SS Man" before the Schutzstaffel was independent of the Sturmabteilung (SA) within the Nazi Party. Later that year, Peiper was promoted to SS-Sturmmann at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his reputation attracted the notice of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, for whom Peiper personified Aryanism, the master-race concept promoted by the Nazism taught at the SS officer school. Despite not being as tall, blond, and muscular as the Nordic recruits to the SS, Peiper compensated by being a handsome, personable, and self-confident SS officer.

The SS formally employed Peiper in January 1935, and later sent him to a military leadership course. As an SS leadership-student Peiper received favourable and approving reviews from the SS instructors, yet received only conditional approval from the military psychologists, who noted Peiper's egocentricity, negative attitude, and continual attempts to impress them with his personal connection to Reichsführer-SS Himmler. The military psychologists concluded that Peiper might become either a "difficult subordinate" or an "arrogant superior" in the course of his career in the SS.

SS man & Party member
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 politically correct Nazi leaders for the Waffen-SS. Besides military fieldcraft, the SS-Junker School taught the National Socialist (Nazi) worldview that centred upon anti-Semitism. The paedagogic qualifications and competence of the instructors at the SS-Junker School was questionable.

The Nazi Party issued Peiper his NSDAP Identity Card Nr. 5.508.134 on 1 March 1938, two years after he became an SS man. In the post-War period Peiper continually denied having been a member of the Nazi Party, because that fact contradicted his self-promoted image of a common man who was "merely a soldier" in the Second World War.

Staff officer
In June 1938, Peiper became an adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Himmler, which tour of duty Himmler considered necessary administrative training for a promotable SS leader. In that time, the officers working within the Personal Staff Reichsführer-SS were under the command of SS functionary Karl Wolff. As a staff officer, Peiper worked in the anteroom of the SS Main Office in Berlin and became a favourite adjutant of Himmler. Peiper returned the admiration and by 1939, Peiper always was the adjutant of the Reichsführer-SS at every official function.

Private life
In 1938, Peiper met and courted Sigurd Hinrichsen, a secretary who was a friend of Lina Heydrich (wife of Reinhard Heydrich) and a friend of Hedwig Potthast, secretary and mistress to Himmler. On 26 June 1939, Peiper married Sigurd in an SS ceremony; Himmler was the guest of honour. The Peipers lived in Berlin until its bombing in 1940; Sigurd Peiper then went to live in Rottach-Egern, Upper Bavaria, near Himmler's second residence. They had three children.

Adjutant to Himmler

Mechanics of the Holocaust
On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland launched the Second World War in Europe. Adjutant Peiper travelled in the personal train of Reichsführer-SS Himmler. Peiper occasionally was the liaison officer to Hitler, when the Führer travelled by train with Erwin Rommel, and when the Führer met with Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS generals near the front lines of the Eastern Front.

On 20 September, in the northern Polish city of Bydgoszcz, Himmler and Peiper witnessed the public executions of twenty Polish social leaders who might lead partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. 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. 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.

As a participant in the Nazi conquest of Poland for German Lebensraum, Peiper witnessed the administrative refinement of SS policies for more effective methods of killing during ethnic cleansing, designed to depopulate Polish lands for German colonists. 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. In post-war interrogations by U.S. Army JAG and military intelligence interrogators, Peiper was factual and emotionally detached in describing his eye-witness experience of mass murder:

The [gassing] action was done before a circle of invited guests. . . . The insane were led into a prepared casemate, the door of which had a Plexiglas window. After the door was closed, one could see how, in the beginning, the insane still laughed and talked to each other. But, soon they sat down on the straw, obviously under the influence of the gas. . . . Very soon, they no longer moved.

Throughout 1940, Himmler and Peiper made an inspection tour of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, including the Neuengamme concentration camp in the north, and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the north-east of the country. In Occupied Poland, Himmler met with Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader, and his subordinate, Odilo Globocnik, the SS bureaucrat responsible for deporting the Jews from the cities of Warsaw and Lublin and from the Polish territories already annexed as Lebensraum for Germany.

In April 1940, Himmler and Peiper continued their camp-inspection tour at the Buchenwald concentration camp and the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The SS and Police Leader Wilhelm Rediess and the SS official Otto Rasch strove to develop quicker methods for killing civilians in order to depopulate Poland for German colonisation. In May 1940, Globocnik demonstrated for Himmler and Peiper the efficacy of the Aktion T4 programme for the involuntary euthanasia of disabled and crippled people and also discussed Globocnik's work in the Lublin Reservation programme for the control and confinement of the Jewish populations of the Greater Germanic Reich.

Combat decorations

In May 1940, Himmler and Peiper followed the Waffen-SS throughout the Battle of France. On 18 May, Peiper became a platoon leader in a unit of the LSSAH motorised regiment. 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). On 19 June 1940, Peiper was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class for audacious soldiering. As further reward and remuneration, Peiper took back to Germany a French sports car for his personal use; Himmler ordered the car be included in the motor-pool inventory of his personal staff. On 21 June 1940, Peiper returned to his role of personal adjutant to Himmler.

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. After an official visit to Francoist Spain to meet Generalíssimo Francisco Franco in October 1940, Peiper was promoted to First Adjutant on 1 November 1940.

Invasion of Russia
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. Moreover, Himmler and his staff travelled to occupied Poland, occupied Norway, Nazi Austria, and occupied Greece to see the progress of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS operations there, including the depopulation of Poland for German colonisation.

About his visit to the Łódź ghetto, Peiper wrote that "it was a macabre image: we saw how the Jewish Ghetto police, who wore hats without rims, and were armed with wooden clubs, inconsiderately made room for us." The episode in the Łódź ghetto indicates Peiper's awareness of the criminality of the Nazi occupations, yet wrote anecdotes – about the Jewish Ghetto Police abusing the Jews – which were meant to lessen the degree of his complicity in the war crimes of the Waffen-SS and of the Wehrmacht.

In the 11–15 June 1941 period, adjutant Peiper participated in the SS conference wherein Himmler presented plans for killing of 30 million Slavs in eastern Europe, especially Russia; present were Kurt Wolff; Kurt Daluege (head of the Order Police), Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (SS and Police Leader in Byelorussia); and Reinhard Heydrich (head of the Reich Security Main Office). When Nazi Germany invaded the U.S.S.R., on 22 June 1941, Himmler used a headquarters-train to tour the conquered Russian lands; Himmler and Peiper inspected the work of the Einsatzkommando units who were depopulating the conquered lands. 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.

In July 1941, Himmler and Peiper were in Białystok to witness the progress of the depopulation of that city and of Poland by the Order Police battalions, and met with Bach-Zalewski to discuss the deployment of units of the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS ("Command Staff Reichsführer-SS"), which comprised 25,000 Waffen-SS soldiers tasked to execute racial and ideological war against the peoples of Russia. The Kommandostab units were under authority of the local Higher SS and Police Leaders, who identified the local populations of Jews and "undesirables" to be killed.

As the first and second adjutants, Peiper and Werner Grothmann were aware of and handled all of Himmler's orders and communications. Peiper delivered the Kommandostab's daily body-count reports to Himmler. The 30 July 1941 report from Gustav Lombard's SS cavalry indicated that they had shot 800 Jews; the 11 August 1941 report from Lombard indicated that they had shot 6,526 looters (Jews). Peiper likewise delivered to Himmler the daily Einsatzgruppen murder statistics that compared the numbers of people killed against the pre-war projections of the timetable for depopulating the U.S.S.R.

At the Eastern Front
Peiper's adjutancy to Himmler ended in summer of 1941, and Peiper was reassigned to the LSSAH motorised regiment in October 1941. Peiper rejoined the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) whilst they fought in the Eastern Front, in the vicinity of the Black Sea. As the replacement for an injured company commander, Peiper assumed command of the 11th Company and fought the Red Army at Mariupol and Rostov-on-Don. Noted for his fighting spirit and aggressive leadership in battle, tank commander Peiper's victories came at the cost of many German tanks and casualties among Waffen-SS infantry.

The division was followed by Einsatzgruppe D, who were responsible for killing the local Jews, other civilians, Commissars, Red Army soldiers, and partisans. 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. In May 1942, the LSSAH was sent to Vichy France for rest, recuperation, and refitting, and were subsequently reorganized into a Panzergrenadier division. Peiper was promoted to commander of the 3rd Battalion.

Blowtorch Battalion
Peiper's battalion left France in January 1943 for the Eastern Front, where the Nazi invaders had begun to lose the initiative, especially in the Battle of Stalingrad. During the Third Battle of Kharkov, the battalion became known for an audacious rescue of the encircled 320th Infantry Division. In a letter home, Peiper described hand-to-hand fighting with a Soviet ski battalion in an effort to lead the division, including its sick and wounded, to safety.

The rescue culminated with a fierce battle with the Soviet forces at the village of Krasnaya Polyana. Upon entering the village, Peiper's troops made a terrible discovery. All the men in his small rearguard medical detachment who had been left there had been killed and then mutilated. An SS sergeant in Peiper's ration supply company later stated that Peiper responded in kind: "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". (The testimony was obtained in November 1944 by the Western Allies.)

On 6 May 1943, Peiper was awarded the German Cross in Gold for his achievements in February 1943 around Kharkov, where his unit gained the nickname the "Blowtorch Battalion". Reportedly, the nickname derived from the torching and slaughter of two Soviet villages where their inhabitants were either shot or burned.

Ukrainian sources, including surviving witness Ivan Kiselev, who was 14 at the time of the massacre, described the killings at the villages of Yefremovka and Semyonovka on 17 February 1943. On 12 February troops of the LSSAH occupied the two villages, where retreating Soviet forces had wounded two SS officers. In retaliation, five days later, LSSAH troops killed 872 men, women and children. Some 240 of these were burned alive in the church of Yefremovka.

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."

Propaganda hero
On 9 March 1943, Peiper was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, the most prestigious military decoration of the Third Reich, for which Reichsführer-SS Himmler congratulated him in a live radio broadcast: "Heartfelt congratulations for the Knight's Cross, my dear Jochen! I am proud of you!" In that stage of the Second World War, Nazi propaganda portrayed tank commander Peiper as an exemplary military leader. The official SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps) reported that Peiper's actions in Kharkov demonstrated that he is a Waffen-SS tank commander who always is "the master of the situation, in all its phases", that Peiper's "quick decision-making" assured victory in the field through his "bold and unorthodox orders" and that he is "a born leader, one filled with the highest sense of responsibility for the life of every one of his men, but who [was] also able to be hard, if necessary" to complete the mission.

In the post-War period, such hyperbolic descriptions of the tactical prowess of the tank commander Peiper glamourised the Waffen-SS man into a war hero of Germany. In the SS hierarchy, Peiper was an SS man and military officer who received, obeyed, and executed orders with minimal discussion, and expected that his soldiers receive, obey, and execute his orders without question.

In July 1943, the LSSAH tank division participated in Operation Citadel in the area of Kursk, in which Kampfgruppe Peiper fought well against the Red Army. After Operation Citadel failed, the LSSAH tank division was redeployed from the Eastern Front in Russia to the north of Fascist Italy.

In Italy

German occupation of Italy
In August 1943, Kampfgruppe Peiper was stationed at the city of Cuneo, six kilometres north of the village of Boves, in the commune of Boves. Fascist Italy ceased being a belligerent power of the Rome-Berlin Axis on 3 September 1943 with the signing of the Armistice of Cassibile between the Kingdom of Italy and the Allied Powers. 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.

Massacre at Boves

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. In a later firefight with the partisans, a Waffen-SS infantry company failed to rescue their comrades from the partisans. After this, the armoured units of Kampfgruppe Peiper assumed strategic control of the streets and the roads into and out of the village of Boves, and Peiper then threatened to destroy the village if the partisans did not release their Waffen-SS prisoners.

In effort to avoid the Nazis' destruction of the Boves village, the local spokesmen of the Boves commune, the parish priest Giuseppe Bernardi and the businessman Alessandro Vasallo, successfully negotiated the partisans' release of their Waffen-SS prisoners and of the body of the SS soldier killed earlier. Despite the successfully negotiated release of the body and prisoners, Peiper ordered the soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper to summarily kill 24 men of the Boves village in retaliation for the resistance of the villagers. They also killed a woman when they looted and burned her house.

In the after action report to the LSSAH headquarters, Kampfgruppe Peiper described the Boves massacre as Peiper's heroic defence against anti-German attacks by Communist partisans in which Waffen-SS soldiers battled, defeated, and killed 17 bandits and partisans, and that "during the fights [with partisans] the villages of Boves and Costellar were burned down. [That] in nearly all [the] burning houses [stores of] ammunition exploded. Some bandits were shot."

Return to the Eastern Front
In November 1943, the LSSAH fought in battles at Zhytomyr, in Ukraine. In the course of battle, although he lacked experience in leading tanks Peiper replaced the regiment's dead commander and so assumed command of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment. In early December, Peiper was nominated for a medal for the successes of the 1st Regiment: the destruction of some Red Army artillery batteries and a division headquarters, having killed 2,280 Red Army soldiers, and delivering three Red Army Prisoners of War (PoWs) to military intelligence. The recommendation for awarding the medal to Peiper described the scorched-earth attacks of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment, wherein tank commander Peiper "attacked with all weapons and flame-throwers from his SPW" armoured fighting vehicle to defeat the Red Army defenders, and then "completely destroyed" the village of Pekartchina.

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. Peiper's battlefield victories cost more Waffen-SS casualties (soldiers killed and soldiers wounded) than would have been lost with textbook tactics to achieve the same victory. Attacking without the benefit of prior reconnaissance by scout units, Peiper's tank-and-infantry frontal assaults against entrenched Red Army units killed too many infantry and cost too much lost matériel for an essentially Pyrrhic victory; thus, after a month of Peiper's command, the 1st SS Panzer Regiment had only twelve working tanks.

In December 1943, because of his destructive leadership of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment in Russia, the division command of the LSSAH relieved Peiper of combat duty and transferred him to staff-officer duty at the division headquarters. Despite his uneven battlefield performance in Russia, his political value for Nazi propaganda was greater than his shortcomings as a military officer; thus, on 20 January 1944, Hitler presented the Oak Leaves heraldic device to Peiper for his medal of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.

At the Western Front

Battle of Normandy
In March 1944, the LSSAH was withdrawn from the Eastern Front and sent to be reformed in Nazi-occupied Belgium. New and replacement soldiers were integrated to their ranks; most were adolescent boys, unlike the Nazi ideologue, fanatical soldiers from the 1930s. The difficult training and the brutal hazing-and-initiation rituals to which the new soldiers were subjected resulted in five soldiers being executed for not meeting the standards of Kampfgruppe Peiper; SS-Obersturmbannführer Peiper then ordered the new soldiers to look at the corpses of the failed soldiers. 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. In 1966, Peiper claimed he knew nothing of it, and the lack of contradictory evidence and witnesses closed the case.

As the Allied invasion (Operation Overlord, 6 June 1944) began, the LSSAH were deployed to the coast of the English Channel to confront the expected Allied invasion at Pas de Calais in northern France; transport to the frontlines was limited, and the Allied air forces controlled the skies. From 18 July 1944, the Kampfgruppe Peiper regiment saw action, but Peiper rarely was at the frontlines, because of the uneven terrain and the requisite radio silence. 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.

After suffering a nervous breakdown, Peiper was relieved of command on 2 August 1944; and in the September–October period of 1944, Peiper was in hospital to treat his nervous collapse. Therefore, Peiper was not in command of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment during Operation Luttich (7–13 August 1944), the series of failed counter-attacks at Avranches.

Battle of the Bulge
In autumn of 1944, the Wehrmacht continually repelled Allied assaults to breach, penetrate, and cross the Siegfried Line, whilst Hitler sought opportunity to seize the initiative on the Western Front. The result was Nazi Germany's Ardennes Offensive, a desperate, strategic gambit whereby the German armies were intended to break through the U.S. lines in the Ardennes forest, cross the River Meuse, and then seize the city of Antwerp in order to break and divide the Allied front.

The 6th Panzer Army was to penetrate the American lines between Aachen and the Schnee Eifel, in order to seize the bridges over the Meuse, on both sides of the city of Liège. The 6th Panzer Army designated the LSSAH as the mobile-strike force, under the command of SS-Oberführer Wilhelm Mohnke. Four combined-arms battle groups composed the 6th Panzer Division; Peiper commanded Kampfgruppe Peiper, the best-equipped battle group, which included the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion equipped with seventy-ton Tiger II tanks. Kampfgruppe Peiper was to seize the bridges on the Meuse river between the cities of Liège and Huy. To address the shortage of fuel, headquarters provided Peiper with a map indicating the locations of U.S. Army fuel depots, where he was intended to seize the fuel stores from the few U.S. Army soldiers manning those fuel dumps.

Advance

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  long. Peiper complained that the roads assigned were suitable for bicycles, but not for tanks;  yet the chief of staff Fritz Krämer told Peiper: "I don't care how and what you do. Just make it to the Meuse. Even if you've only one tank left when you get there."

Peiper's vehicles reached the point of departure at midnight, which delayed the attack by Kampfgruppe Peiper by almost twenty-four hours. The plan was to advance through Losheimergraben, but the two infantry divisions tasked to open the route for Kampfgruppe Peiper had failed to do so on the first day of battle. In the morning of 17 December, Kampfgruppe Peiper captured Honsfeld and the U.S. Army's stores of fuel. Peiper continued west until the road became impassable, a short distance from the town of Ligneuville; that detour compelled Peiper's units towards the Baugnez crossroads, near the city of Malmedy, Belgium.

Malmedy and other atrocities

During Peiper's advance on 17 December 1944, his armoured units and half-tracks confronted a lightly armed convoy of about thirty American vehicles at the Baugnez crossroads near Malmedy. The troops, mainly elements of the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, were quickly overcome and captured. 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. The survivors were able to reach American lines later that day, and their story spread rapidly throughout the American front lines.

In Honsfeld, Peiper's men murdered several other American prisoners. Other murders of POWs and civilians were reported in Büllingen, Ligneuville and Stavelot, Cheneux, La Gleize, and Stoumont on 17, 18, 19 and 20 December. 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 killed a number of Belgian civilians. The battle group was eventually declared responsible for the deaths of 362 prisoners of war and 111 civilians.

Stall and retreat
Peiper crossed Ligneuville and reached the heights of Stavelot on the left bank of the Amblève River at nightfall of the second day of the operation. The battle group paused for the night, allowing the Americans to reorganize. After heavy fighting, Peiper's armour crossed the bridge on the Amblève. The spearhead continued on, without having fully secured Stavelot. By then, the surprise factor had been lost. The U.S. forces regrouped and blew up several bridges ahead of Peiper's advance, trapping the battle group in the deep valley of the Amblève, downstream from Trois-Ponts. The weather also improved, permitting the Allied air forces to operate. Airstrikes destroyed or heavily damaged numerous German vehicles. Peiper's command was in disarray: some units had lost their way among difficult terrain or in the dark, while company commanders preferred to stay with Peiper at the head of the column and thus were unable to provide guidance to their own units.

Peiper attacked Stoumont on 19 December and took the town amid heavy fighting. He was unable to protect his rear, which enabled American troops to cut him off from the only possible supply road for ammunition and fuel at Stavelot. Without supplies, and with no contact with other German units behind him, Peiper could advance no further. American attacks on Stoumont forced the remnants of the battle group to retreat to La Gleize. On 24 December, Peiper abandoned his vehicles and retreated with the remaining men. German wounded and American prisoners were also left behind. According to Peiper, 717 men returned to the German lines out of 3,000 at the beginning of the operation.

Despite the failure of Peiper's battle group and the loss of all tanks, Mohnke recommended Peiper for a further award. The events at the Baugnez crossroads were described in glowing terms: "Without regard for threats from the flanks and only inspired by the thought of a deep breakthrough, the Kampfgruppe proceeded ... to Ligneuville and destroyed at Baugnez an enemy supply column and after annihilation of the units blocking their advance, succeeded in causing the staff of the 49th Anti-Aircraft Brigade to flee." Rather than a stain on Peiper's honour, the killing of POWs was celebrated in official records. In January 1945, the Swords were added to his Knight's Cross. The great fame of Peiper as a Waffen-SS commander during the Battle of the Bulge was born.

War's end
In early 1945, in Hungary, Kampfgruppe Peiper fought in Operation Southwind (17–24 February 1945) and in Operation Spring Awakening (6–15 March 1945) in the battles of which, despite killing many enemy soldiers, Peiper's aggressive style of command cost many more wounded and dead Waffen-SS soldiers than were necessary to win the battle. On 1 May 1945, as the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler was forced into Austria, Peiper's men learned of the death of the Führer the previous day. On 8 May, the German high command ordered the units of the Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler to surrender to the U.S. Army that was across the River Enns. Flouting the high command's order to surrender, Col. Peiper trekked home to Germany, but American forces captured him on 22 May 1945.

In late June 1945, U.S. Army war-crime investigators began the forensic investigation of the Malmedy massacre that the Waffen-SS committed on 17 December 1944. The war crimes committed during the Battle of the Bulge were attributed to Battle Group Peiper, so the U.S. Army searched PoW camps for the Waffen-SS soldiers assigned to Peiper's command. Moreover, as the battle-group commander, Peiper headed the list of war criminals sought by the U.S. Army from among four million prisoners of war. On 21 August 1945, Waffen-SS Standartenführer Peiper was found and identified as the suspected author of the war-crime massacre of 84 U.S. soldiers in a farmer's field near the city of Malmédy, Belgium.

In July 1945, during his interrogations by JAG and military intelligence officers, Peiper revealed his commitment to Nazism; when the Army interrogators asked his opinion about the plight of the Poles and the Jews, Peiper agitatedly replied that: "All Jews are bad and all Poles are bad. We have just cleansed our society and moved these people into camps, and you let them loose!" Moreover, as a Waffen-SS officer, Peiper also lamented to the Army interrogators that the U.S. government was wrong in having refused to incorporate the Waffen-SS into the U.S. Army to "prepare to fight the Russians" in defence of Western civilisation.

War criminal

Interrogation
In Upper Bavaria, at the U.S. military jail in Freising, the judicial and military intelligence interrogators soon learned that, although Peiper and his Waffen-SS troops were hardened soldiers, they had not been trained to withstand interrogation as prisoners of war. Being psychologically unsophisticated men, some SS PoWs readily answered the questions asked of them by the interrogators; other SS PoWs claimed they only spoke to interrogators after having endured threats, beatings, and mock trials.

In the course of his interrogations, Peiper assumed command responsibility for the actions of his soldiers. 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. On 16 April 1946, the prison transferred 300 Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS POWs to the Dachau Concentration Camp, where a military tribunal would hear their war-crime cases.

At trial

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. 1st SS Panzer Regiment) who committed the war crimes; Sepp Dietrich (Cmdr. 6th SS Panzer Army); Fritz Krämer (Dietrich's chief of staff); and Hermann Prieß (Cmdr. I SS Panzer Corps). The U.S. Army's war-crime bill of charges was based upon the facts reported in the sworn statements given by the Party, Wehrmacht, and Waffen-SS PoWs in the Schwäbisch Hall prison.

To counter the evidence in the sworn statements of the Nazi defendants and the prosecution witnesses, the lead defence attorney, Lt. Col. Willis M. Everett, tried to show that the sworn statements had been obtained by inappropriate interrogation. 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. In his trial testimony, Lt. Col. McCown said that he had not witnessed Col. Peiper's Waffen-SS soldiers mistreating their American prisoners of war.

The prosecutor countered that, by the time Lt. Col. McCown and his soldiers had been captured on 21 December, battle group commander Peiper already was aware that the tactical situation of being out-numbered, out-gunned, and out-manoeuvred placed Kampfgruppe Peiper in danger of imminent capture by the U.S. Army. While on 17 December 1944, the units of the Battle Group Peiper at Malmédy, Belgium were advancing to their objectives, by 21 December 1944, continual firefights with the U.S. Army had divided and dispersed scattered Battle Group Peiper, and thus almost trapped Peiper's unit, and Peiper, at La Gleize. By that point Peiper's vehicles had little fuel and his soldiers had suffered 80 per cent casualty rates.

Defence counsel Everett called only Peiper to testify. In his testimony, Peiper communicated only calculation about the usefulness of his American prisoners of war, testifying that when the Peiper Battle Group fled afoot from the town of La Gleize, Col. Peiper made hostages of Lt. Col. McCown and some of his soldiers in order to protect his Waffen-SS soldiers from capture by the U.S. Army.

Despite the damning and incriminating facts that Peiper testified to the military tribunal, the other defendant SS-men, supported by their German lawyers, unwisely asked for the opportunity to testify. 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.

The military tribunal were unconvinced by Peiper's testimony that, as the commanding officer of the Battle Group Peiper, he, Col. Peiper, had no command responsibility for the summary execution of American PoWs by his Waffen-SS soldiers. When asked about having ordered his soldiers to summarily murder Belgian civilians, Peiper said that the dead people were partisan guerrillas — not civilians.

Two witnesses testified to having heard Peiper on two occasions order the summary execution of U.S. PoWs; yet, when the prosecutor asked whether or not he gave the orders for the summary executions, Peiper denied the veracity of the eyewitness testimony, claiming that the testimony had been coerced from men under mental duress and physical torture.

Death sentence
On 16 July 1946, the military tribunal for the Malmedy Massacre Trial convicted Joachim Peiper of the war crimes of which he was accused, and sentenced him to be hanged. In the judicial system of the U.S. Army, a sentence of death is automatically reviewed by the U.S. Army Review Board, and, in October 1947, death-sentence reviewers commuted some verdicts into long imprisonment for Nazi war criminals. In March 1948, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the U.S. military governor of Occupied Germany, reviewed 43 death sentences, and confirmed the legality of only 12 death sentences, including the death sentence of Waffen-SS Col. Peiper.

Release from prison
In 1951, about politicking for the political rehabilitation of Waffen-SS Colonel Joachim Peiper, ex-general Heinz Guderian said to a correspondent:

At the moment, I'm negotiating with General Handy [in Heidelberg], because [he] wants to hang the unfortunate Peiper. McCloy is powerless, because the Malmedy trial is being handled by Eucom, and is not subordinate to McCloy. As a result, I have decided to cable President Truman and ask him if he is familiar with this idiocy.

In 1948, the judicial reviewers of the trial verdicts of the military tribunal commuted the war-crime death sentences of some Waffen-SS defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial to life imprisonment. In 1951, Peiper's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1954, it was further commuted to 35 years imprisonment. He was released on parole on 22 December 1956. When Peiper was told he was being released by two U.S. soldiers, he was so shocked that he stared at them silently. The political lobbying of the network of SS men arranged and realised Peiper's early release from prison and his finding employment; the Mutual Aid Community of Former Members of the Waffen SS (HIAG) already had found employment for Frau Peiper near the Landsberg Prison wherein her husband resided. Thanks to the political influence of Albert Prinzing, an ex-functionary in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) security service, Peiper was employed at the Porsche automobile company.

Post-War life
On release from Landsberg Prison, Joachim Peiper acted discreetly and did not associate with known Nazis in public, especially with ex-Waffen-SS soldiers and the Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members (HIAG); privately, Peiper remained a true-believer Nazi and member of the secret community of Waffen-SS in the Federal Republic of Germany.

In 1959, Peiper attended the national meeting of the Association of Knight's Cross Recipients. He travelled with Walter Harzer, the HIAG historian, and reunited with Sepp Dietrich and Heinz Lammerding, who had also been formally identified as Nazi war criminals. 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. 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. Nevertheless, self-awareness of his legalistic chicanery allowed Peiper to tell a friend: "I, personally, think that every attempt at rehabilitation during our lifetime is unrealistic, but one can still collect material."

On 17 January 1957, the Porsche automobile company employed Peiper in Stuttgart. In the course of his employment, Italian trade union workers formally complained that Peiper was unacceptable as a co-worker because he remained a Nazi and because of the wartime Boves massacre committed by his command, the Kampfgruppe Peiper, in Italy. An owner of the car company, Ferry Porsche, personally intervened to promote Peiper into a management job, but the trade unions legally refused to work with Peiper; despite the friendship with Porsche, and because of lost sales of cars in the U.S. — for employing a Nazi war criminal — the Porsche automobile company dismissed Peiper from his employment.

On 30 December 1960, Peiper filed a lawsuit against the Porsche car company, wherein the attorney claimed that Joachim Peiper was not a Nazi war criminal, because the Allies had used the Malmedy massacre trial (1946) as propaganda to defame the German people; likewise the Nuremberg trials (20 November 1945 – 1 October 1946) and the Malmedy massacre trial were anti-German propaganda. Peiper's attorney cited documents by Freda Utley, a Holocaust denier academic, which said that the U.S. Army had tortured the Waffen-SS defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial.

The court ordered that Mr. Porsche void the employment contract and indemnify Peiper for the dismissal. Morever, that lost job allowed Der Freiwillige, the official newspaper of the HIAG, to misrepresent Peiper as having been "unfairly sentenced" for war crimes committed by other Nazis. The HIAG then found Peiper employment as a trainer of car salesmen at the Volkswagen automobile company.

War-crime trials
In the early 1960s, Cold War geopolitics in western Europe required transforming Germany from enemy (Nazi Germany) to ally (Federal Republic of Germany) for consequent integration into NATO. Consequent to the relative de-Nazification of German society, the economy of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) disallowed ex-Nazis to hide among the educated staff of a business company in post-War Germany; a Nazi diploma was unacceptable for employment. The Adolf Eichmann trial (1961) and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–1965) informed the world of the true, racist nature of Nazi Germany and their white supremacy politics of official antisemitism and the Final Solution in order to realise the Holocaust — the purpose of National Socialism.

Unlike in the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–1945) in Europe, when the Allies prosecuted war crimes under a limited remit (1945–1947), the Federal Republic of Germany continually extended the statute of limitations for the prosecution of war crimes in order to successfully hunt, capture, and prosecute the war criminals of the Nazi party, the 'Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS, and the Gestapo. In their testimonies at the war-crime trials in the FRG, the Nazi war criminals repeatedly named SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper as an active  participant in the massacres of civilians and PoWs at the Eastern front and at the Western front of the War; among the fellow Nazis who betrayed Peiper in court were Karl Wolff (senior adjutant to Himmler) and Werner Grothmann (Peiper's successor as adjutant to Himmler). At trial, the court heard Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (Bandenbekämpfung chief for occupied Europe) speak of Himmler's plans to "rid Russia of thirty million Slavic people" and Himmler's pronouncements, at Minsk, that he was "determined to eliminate the Jews".

In 1964, the village of Boves, Italy erected a monument commemorating the victims of the Boves Massacre committed by the Kampfgruppe Peiper on 13 September 1943. 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. Peiper's defence attorney said that Italian Communists had fabricated evidence to substantiate false Nazi war-crime accusations; Peiper again repeated that Battle Group Peiper had to destroy the village of Boves in the course of the Waffen-SS defence against Communist partisans.

On 23 June 1964, the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes formally accused Peiper of perpetrating the Boves Massacre in 1943. The formal accusation was based upon statements of two ex-partisans who recognized SS Lt. Col. Joachim Peiper from two published photographs in a picture-book about the Battle of the Bulge and from a photograph of SS-Obersturmbannführer Peiper observing the incineration of the village of Boves. 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]". Nevertheless, despite the battle group's collective culpability for the war-crime at Boves, there was no evidence of the individual command responsibility that SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, himself, had directly ordered the massacre of villagers at Boves, Italy.

Nazi idolatry
In the United States, Joachim Peiper is an idol of neo-Nazi Americans who romanticise the Waffen-SS as German war heroes, rather than as Nazi war criminals. In the post-War period of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the cultural context — xenophobic Russo-American Cold War and reactionary McCarthyism — allowed historical, factual, and personal misrepresentations of Peiper to coalesce into the cult of personality practised by certain right-wing organisations, such as the HIAG (Mutual Aid Association of Former Members of the Waffen-SS) who sought his early release from war-crime imprisonment in West Germany. In American popular culture, Lt. Col. Peiper's military bearing, good looks, commanding presence, and chestful of Nazi medals earned him many right-wing admirers in civilian society and in military society.

In the U.S. military, the idolatry of Peiper penetrated the official publications of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In 2019, the DoD Facebook account included a colourised military photograph of Peiper in Waffen-SS uniform into an audiovisual commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Army fighting Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge — which included the Malmedy Massacre (1944) committed by Kampfgruppe Peiper. Peiper's Waffen-SS photograph provoked "widespread backlash on social media" because the DoD publication appeared to celebrate a Nazi war criminal as a German war hero; the DoD apologised and deleted the photograph. Despite that political mis-step, the Pentagon used Peiper's Waffen-SS photograph to represent the German enemy fighting the U.S. Army airborne corps in the Battle of the Bulge. Moreover, the Facebook page of the Army's 10th Mountain Division also featured Peiper's colourised Waffen-SS military photograph to represent the German enemy they fought in the Second World War.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. 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. But the mis-step is just the latest in a month of embarrassing incidents for the U.S. Army, which has been recently slammed with multiple allegations of white supremacist activity.

Later life and death
In 1972, Joachim and Sigurd Peiper moved to Traves, Haute-Saône, in eastern France, where he owned a house. Under the pseudonym "Rainer Buschmann", Peiper worked as a self-employed English-to-German translator for the German publisher Stuttgarter MotorBuch Verlag, translating books of military history. Despite his biography and working pseudonymously, they lived under his true, German name, "Joachim Peiper", and soon attracted the notice of anti-fascists.

In 1974, a member of the French Resistance recognised Peiper and reported his presence in metropolitan France to the French Communist Party. In 1976, the historian of the French Communist Party searched the Gestapo files for the personnel file of SS-Oberststurmbannführer Joachim Peiper to determine his whereabouts. On 21 June 1976, anti-Nazi political activists distributed informational flyers to the Traves community informing them that Peiper was a Nazi war criminal residing among them. On 22 June 1976, an article in the L'Humanité newspaper confirmed that Peiper was living in the village.

The confirmation of Peiper's Nazi identity and presence in France attracted journalists to whom Peiper readily gave interviews, wherein he claimed that he was a victim of Communist harassment due to his role in the war. In an interview (J'ai payé'' "I Already Have Paid"), Peiper said he was an innocent man who had paid for his war crimes (referring to the Malmedy massacre) with twelve years of prison. He said he was innocent of the earlier Boves massacre war crime in Italy. He also said "In 1940, French people weren't brave, that's why I'm here". These insulting remarks angered the press and residents. It was reported that he and his wife left France and moved to West Germany due to ongoing death threats.

On Bastille Day 14 July 1976, French anti-Nazis attacked and torched Peiper's house in Traves. When the fire was extinguished, firefighters found the charred remains of a man holding a pistol and a .22 calibre rifle, as if defending himself. The arson investigators determined that person had died from smoke inhalation. The anti-Nazi political group The Avengers claimed responsibility for the arson that killed Peiper; nonetheless, because of the destruction caused by the arson some French police authorities remained unconvinced that Joachim Peiper was the person found.

References

Citations

Bibliography

1915 births
1976 deaths
Adjutants of Heinrich Himmler
Assassinated Nazis
Deaths by smoke inhalation
German mass murderers
German people murdered abroad
German prisoners sentenced to death
German prisoners of war in World War II held by the United States
Hitler Youth members
Military personnel from Berlin
People convicted in the Malmedy massacre trial
Military personnel from the Province of Brandenburg
People murdered in France
Prisoners sentenced to death by the United States military
Recipients of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords
SS-Standartenführer
Unsolved murders in France
Waffen-SS personnel

Joachim Peiper


William Hughes Mearns (1875–1965), better known as Hughes Mearns, was an American educator and poet.  A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, Mearns was a professor at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy from 1905 to 1920.  Mearns is remembered now as the author of the poem "Antigonish" (or "The Little Man Who Wasn't There"). However, his ideas about encouraging the natural creativity of children, particularly those age 3 through 8 were novel at the time.  It has been written about him that, "He typed notes of their conversations; he learned how to make them forget there was an adult around; never asked them questions and never showed surprise no matter what they did or said."

Mearns wrote two influential books: Creative Youth 1925, and Creative Power 1929. Essayist Gabriel Gudding credits those books with "[lighting] a fuse" under the teaching of creative writing, influencing a generation of scholars.

He also served for a time (starting in 1920) as head of the Lincoln School Teachers College at Columbia University.  He was also a proponent of John Dewey's work in progressive education.

Antigonish

Mearns is credited with the well-known rhyme, composed in 1899 as a song for a play he had written, called The Psyco-ed.  The play was performed in 1910, and the poem was first published as "Antigonish" in 1922.
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away
"Antigonish" (1899)

Mearns also wrote many parodies of this poem, entitled Later Antigonishes, such as "Alibi":
As I was falling down the stair
I met a bump that wasn't there;
It might have put me on the shelf
Except I wasn't there myself.

Other works
 I Ride in My Coach (illustrated by W.T. Schwarz) 1923
 Lions in the Way  1927
 Richard Richard (illustrated by Ralph L. Boyer) 1916
 Vinegar Saint (illustrated by Ralph L. Boyer) 1919
 Night Goblins (illustrated by Ralph L. Boyer) 1923

References

External links

Harvard University alumni
University of Pennsylvania alumni
American educators
20th-century American poets
1875 births
1965 deaths

William Hughes Mearns


Anders Blomqvist (born in 1949) is a Swedish professor of pain research at Linköping University.

Anders Blomqvist was born in Norrköping, Sweden. He obtained a doctorate degree in medical science in 1981 and was appointed associate professor of anatomy in 1983 at Uppsala University, Sweden. Between 1984 and 1986 he was a visiting research fellow at Florida State University, followed by two years as a research associate at Uppsala University and ten years as a senior lecturer at Linköping University.
In 1998 Anders Blomqvist was appointed professor of pain research at Linköping University.

Blomqvist's early research concentrated on the construction and function of the nerve paths for the sense of feeling. He revealed how the sensation of pain is mediated by specific nerve pathways, and not, as has been previously suggested, conditioned by stimulation of other sensory pathways. Blomqvist's later research is focused on how immune signals are transmitted to and processed by the brain. He has shown that the expression of prostaglandin E2 synthesizing enzymes are critical for the febrile response to peripheral inflammation.

External links
 Publications, Anders Blomqvist, Linköping University Electronic Press

References

Swedish medical researchers
Academic staff of Linköping University
1949 births
Living people
Academic staff of Uppsala University

Anders Blomqvist


Kalteva Torni ( The Leaning Tower), is a 2006 Finnish comedy film, directed by Timo Koivusalo. It was premiered in Finland on 20 October 2006.

The leading roles are played by Martti Suosalo, Seela Sella, Liisa Kuoppamäki, Siiri Suosalo, Esko Nikkari, Mats Långbacka, Laura Jurkka, Jemina Sillanpää and Risto Salmi.

It is the story of a benevolent man who does not know he has multiple personalities. His greatest fear is that he will not be able to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa before it falls. His adventures lead him into tricky situations and, eventually, he does see it.

External links

2006 films
2000s Finnish-language films
2006 comedy films
Films directed by Timo Koivusalo
Finnish comedy films

Kalteva torni


Damnation Alley is a 1977 post-apocalyptic film directed by Jack Smight, loosely based on the 1969 novel of the same name by Roger Zelazny. The original music score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, and the cinematography was by Harry Stradling Jr. Poorly received with critics and audience, it has since achieved a cult following.

Plot
First Lieutenant Jake Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent) shares ICBM silo duty at a US Air Force missile base in the Californian desert with senior officer Major Eugene "Sam" Denton (George Peppard).  While signing in for their work shift in the underground base, Denton notifies Tanner he is requesting that command reassign him, since he feels Tanner is not a suitable team member for their two-man crew.  While passing through base security checks, Denton and Tanner talk with Sergeant Tom Keegan (Paul Winfield).

While Denton and Tanner are running procedure drills, the US detects incoming nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union.  After confirmation that an actual attack is in-progress, Tanner and Denton launch part of the retaliatory strike. Although interceptor missiles destroy around 40% of the incoming Soviet missiles, the United States is hit hard, particularly major cities.

Two years later, the Earth has been tilted off its axis by the nuclear detonations of World War III; radiation has mutated giant scorpions, the planet is wracked by massive storms, and the sky is in a perpetual aurora borealis-like state. Tanner has resigned his commission and has been scouting nearby Barstow, California, while Keegan (who has also left the Air Force), has been painting as an artist in one of the base's out-buildings where they have been relegated to. Mutated giant scorpions menace the area, requiring Tanner and Keegan to continually shoot the creatures with high-powered rifles. After returning from Barstow with provisions, Tanner gives an airman a stack of Playboy magazines he located.  Later, the airman falls asleep in a bunk and drops a lit cigarette, starting a small fire, which causes an explosion.  The explosions kill most of its inhabitants including the base commander, General Landers (Murray Hamilton). Keegan and Tanner are unscathed, as are Denton and Lieutenant Tom Perry (Kip Niven), who were outside, on their way to the bunker.

Denton has been considering going to Albany, New York, to find the source of the lone radio transmission that has been aired weekly since the war. He and the remaining others set out in two Air Force Landmasters—giant, 12-wheeled armored personnel carriers fitted with rocket launchers, flame throwers and cannons, capable of climbing 60-degree inclines, and operating in water. They must cross Damnation Alley, considered "the path of least resistance" between intense radiation areas.

Along their journey, one of the Landmasters becomes disabled in a storm (which also kills Perry), and they encounter mutated "killer cockroaches" in the ruins of Salt Lake City that trap and eat Keegan alive. Denton and Tanner also pick up two survivors: a woman in Las Vegas, Janice (Dominique Sanda), and a teenage boy, Billy (Jackie Earle Haley), discovered in an abandoned house in the High Plains. They fight a band of gun-toting mountain men they encounter in the ruins of a gas station in the Midwest. Denton uses the Landmaster's rocket launchers to destroy the gas station and the madmen's buildings.

As they continue their journey, the Landmaster develops a problem with its drivetrain near Detroit. Denton comments that it was "designed to use spare truck parts", semi-trucks in particular. In Detroit they enter a large wrecking yard in search of the needed parts. A large, hemisphere-wide storm comes upon the group and they take shelter in their vehicle just as a megatsunami washes them away. After the storm passes, they are adrift in a large body of water and it appears that the Earth has returned to its normal axis as the sky is clear.

Using the Landmaster's amphibious capability, they reach land. As they are making repairs, they hear a radio broadcast of music and an attempt to reach survivors. After Denton makes radio contact, Tanner and Billy set out on Tanner's dirt bike to locate the source of the broadcast. In the final scene, they reach a surprisingly intact suburb of Albany, New York, where they are greeted by its inhabitants.

Cast
 Jan-Michael Vincent as 1st Lt. Jake Tanner
 George Peppard as Major Eugene "Sam" Denton
 Dominique Sanda as Janice
 Paul Winfield as Keegan
 Jackie Earle Haley as Billy
 Kip Niven as Lt. Tom Perry
 Mark L. Taylor as Haskins
 Robert Donner as Man / Guard
 Murray Hamilton (uncredited) as General Landers

Production
Roger Zelazny's original story of Damnation Alley  was changed considerably for the final shooting script of the film. Initially, Zelazny was quite pleased with the first draft by Lukas Heller, and expected it to be the shooting script. However, when the project was presented to several directors (including Robert Wise) and special effects teams (including Douglas Trumbull), it was considered nearly impossible to film due to the amount of effects work called for in the script. The studio then brought in Alan Sharp to write a revised version to minimize this issue, which left out many of the elements of the original script and Zelazny's book. Zelazny did not realize this until he saw the film in the theater.

With the revised script, and budgeted at US $7.2 million, Damnation Alley was helmed by veteran director Jack Smight, who had scored two consecutive box office hits in the previous two years (Airport 1975 and Midway). Filming began on June 21, 1976, east of the town of Borrego Springs, California, where a missile base set was constructed, as well as locations in Meteor Crater, Arizona, Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Mojave Desert in California. The lake scenes were filmed at Flathead Lake in Kalispell, Montana.  Filming wrapped on August 13, 1976.

Production was rife with problems — the devastated landscapes and giant mutated insects proved to be nearly impossible to create, despite the large budget. For example, a sequence involving giant  scorpions attacking a motorcycle was first attempted using full-scale scorpion props, but they did not work and the resulting footage was unacceptable. The solution was to use actual scorpions composited onto live action footage using the blue screen process in post-production. Another action sequence with giant cockroaches used a combination of live Madagascar hissing cockroaches and large numbers of rubber bugs which looked unconvincing onscreen, as the strings pulling mats covered in fake insects were plainly visible.  To complicate matters, according to director Jack Smight in his memoir, studio chief Alan Ladd, Jr. redirected about a quarter of Damnation Alley'''s total production budget as completion funds for George Lucas' lower-budgeted film, Star Wars. Smight was not made aware of the budget reduction on Damnation Alley until he neared its completion, which compromised most of the remaining special effects work, for which there was now very little money left.

The original director's cut of the film delivered to the studio by Jack Smight in late-1976 ran 2 hours and 15 minutes. Even though the special effects work was not completed at that time, the studio made minor changes to the cut, and awaited the completion of the special effects work prior to releasing it.  While the effects were underway, the completion funds were diverted to Star Wars, which was having budget and production issues, which eliminated several important effects scenes which had not yet been created, including the Minuteman III missile launch sequences, the base explosion, and importantly, the storm and tsunami in the last act.  Because these scenes were cut, Fox relied on stock footage from other films (and public domain footage of missile launches and nuclear explosions) for those particular shots.

Because of this, and the last-minute decision to add "radioactive skies" in special effects, Damnation Alley was in post-production well past the intended release date of December, 1976 due to the difficult process of superimposing optical effects on the sky in about 300 shots (which were not part of the original concept, and consequently, were not planned for during filming, resulting in poor execution of the effect).  This pushed the release date from December, 1976 to March, 1977, and then again to June, 1977.  It was during this delay that 20th Century Fox released their "other" science fiction film for 1977, Star Wars. The studio had planned to release only two science fiction films that year, with Damnation Alley intended to be the blockbuster.Star Wars became a hit of epic proportions, and forced Fox to further delay and re-address a struggling Damnation Alley, which was still languishing in post-production special effects work.  In a panic, the release date was delayed to December, 1977, only to be moved up to October when the studio realized it would go up against the release of an expected hit, Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. With the additional delay, Fox re-edited the entire film. Smight was already involved with another project during this time, so Fox took over the re-edit. The decision was made to cut down the length of the film to the bare-minimum running time of 90 minutes for a theatrical release, and large sections of the film were edited out by the studio. These cuts amounted to 44 minutes of footage, and included a major subplot of a love triangle between Tanner, Denton, and Janice. Many scenes early in the film at the missile base were excised as well - sequences which showed the breakdown of military order. Murray Hamilton was featured prominently in several scenes which were cut, as the now-despondent and alcoholic General in charge of the base (which rendered his character literally "mute" in the final film, with no lines of dialogue). Critically, a physical confrontation between Tanner and Denton after the death of Keegan by "killer cockroaches" was removed (in this scene, Tanner blames Denton for not saving his friend from death). In spite of these major edits, Fox focused more content on the "Landmaster" vehicle, and the special effects, in direct response to Star Wars. The film underwent several name changes during this period, from the original "Damnation Alley" to "Salvation Road," and then to "Survival Run" up until shortly before the release, when it was again renamed "Damnation Alley". The film was finally released in the United States on October 21, 1977 to fleeting success when it opened, but poor critical reviews and word of mouth tanked it at the box office.

Landmaster

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the film was the Landmaster vehicle, which features a hinged center section, and a unique rotating 12-wheel assembly. The "Landmaster" was custom-built for the film at a cost of $350,000 in 1976 by automotive customizer Dean Jeffries ($1.4 million in 2010 dollars).

The Landmaster was sold to a private owner in 2005 and was restored to its original condition as featured in the film. The Landmaster was then on the show car circuit for several years. In 2007 it was featured at the San Francisco Rod & Custom Show at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, California as part of a special exhibit with other notable movie and TV cars.  As of 2023, the Landmaster belongs to longtime friend of the vehicle's designer, Dean Jeffries, and fellow legendary car customizer himself, Gene Winfield. It is parked at his shop, and can be seen from the highway.

Sound 360
A few big-city premiere engagements of Damnation Alley were presented in Sound 360, a high-impact surround-sound process.

Jerry Goldsmith's score made good use of the wide stereo separation afforded by Sound 360, particularly in the opening theme, with fanfares emanating from each side of the theater in turn.

Reception
In what was a departure from typical motion picture studio practice at the time, Damnation Alley opened in September, 1977 in Japan, one month prior to its release in the United States and more than a year after it was filmed. It grossed $1,250,956 in its first 9 days from 64 theaters. After its US release, it quickly left the theaters because it did not make enough to stay in the chain theaters, duplexes or triplexes. Dismissal of the film was noted, overshadowed by prior apocalypse-themed films like Day the World Ended and On the Beach. In some theaters during 1977, the film was paired with another film, Ralph Bakshi's fantasy Wizards, which was financially successful.

In the UK, Damnation Alley was released in January 1979 as a double bill with Thunder and Lightning, another 20th Century Fox film from 1977.

Television version
The network TV premiere on NBC television on Sunday, June 12, 1983 featured alternate and additional scenes re-inserted (notably, footage of Murray Hamilton and George Peppard, where Denton asks for permission to leave the missile base, as well as additional scenes with Dominique Sanda and Peppard, where Denton tells Janice about his wife who died in the nuclear war).  The network premiere was a ratings success, finishing second in the Nielsen Ratings for the week.

Home mediaDamnation Alley'' was released on VHS, Betamax, and Video 2000 formats in the United Kingdom in 1983, and on VHS and Betamax in the United States in 1985. Shout! Factory released the film (on DVD and Blu-ray) on July 12, 2011 in the United States. This release features a new anamorphic widescreen transfer, and audio commentary with producer Paul Maslansky, as well as extras including featurettes detailing the challenges in making the film, and a detailed examination of the now-famous Landmaster vehicle with designer and builder Dean Jeffries. The original "Sound 360" audio mix is not featured on the DVD and Blu-ray, as the original elements were too damaged to salvage. The film was also released on DVD in the United Kingdom in 2011.

References

External links

1977 films
1970s science fiction films
1970s disaster films
American disaster films
American science fiction films
1970s English-language films
Films about nuclear war and weapons
Films about the United States Air Force
Films based on American novels
Films based on science fiction novels
Films based on thriller novels
Films set in California
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Films set in Detroit
Films set in the Las Vegas Valley
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American post-apocalyptic films
American road movies
1970s road movies
Films about World War III
20th Century Fox films
Films scored by Jerry Goldsmith
Films directed by Jack Smight
Films produced by Paul Maslansky
1970s American films
Films set in bunkers

Damnation Alley (film)


Cassius Fairchild (December 16, 1829-October 24, 1868) was a Wisconsin businessman, politician, and military officer.  he was born in Franklin Mills, Ohio (now Kent, Ohio). Fairchild was educated mostly in Ohio. His father was Jairus C. Fairchild, who was the first Treasurer of Wisconsin and the first Mayor of Madison, Wisconsin. His brother was Lucius Fairchild, Governor of Wisconsin. He moved to Wisconsin and managed his family's cranberry and lumber businesses. He also managed their rental properties. Fairchild was elected to the Madison, Wisconsin Common Council where he served as president. He also served in the Wisconsin State Assembly. At the time of the American Civil War, Fairchild enlisted in the Union Army becoming a colonel in the 16th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Fairchild was badly wounded in the Battle of Shiloh, and eventually died of his wounds.

References

Other websites
Political Graveyard: Fairchild

People from Ohio
People from Wisconsin
1829 births
1868 deaths
State legislators of the United States

Cassius Fairchild


The  was a small fortification attached to Osaka castle. It is famous for being impregnable and playing a key role in defending the castle in the winter of 1615. Later, it was forcefully destroyed despite being exempt from the reconciliation condition.

Background
Osaka castle was built on the Uemachi plateau enclosed by the Yodo River and the Yamato River. It was well fortified to the north but weakly guarded to the southern Tennōji plateau. Sanada Yukimura built the fortification in front of the outer moat, at the Kuruwa port, at the southeastern Hirano-guchi (平野口) gate and beside the Kuromon-guchi (黒門口) gate. Due to its position, Sanada Maru became an obstacle to the main Tokugawa force during the Siege of Osaka.

By 1615, after its destruction, the tower keep era had reached its peak and construction declined with the establishment of the Pax Tokugawa, which lasted until the Meiji period in the late 19th century.

History

In 1614, Osaka castle, the stronghold of the Toyotomi clan, represented the last obstacle to Japan's unification under the Tokugawa hegemony.
Toyotomi Hideyori appointed Sanada Yukimura as the garrison commander due to his experience opposing Ieyasu's army in his castle at Ueda during the Sekigahara campaign.  At that time the castle had two moats, which still exist, and Hideyori's engineers created an outer moat by cutting a channel between the canal that existed to the west and the Nekoma stream which flowed from south to north on the eastern side.

The following campaign and battle is often referred to as the last stand of the samurai before the Tokugawa shogunate reformed the ways of the samurai including prohibiting practices like headhunting.

The attack on Sanada Maru began on December 4. Yukimura and about 6-7,000 men defending Sanada Maru against Tokugawa forces of approximately 10-30,000 men. The Tokugawa forces were repeatedly repelled, and Sanada's troops launched a number of counterattacks, even breaking through the siege lines.

By December 18, all the outlying forts and waterways had fallen but the Sanada Maru proved impregnable. As a stockade had been built, Ieyasu began to starve out the huge castle. However, supplies were sufficient to feed everyone for several years. Ieyasu then resorted to artillery bombardment. Sakers fired from the north, no less than 300 culverins blasted from the south, and more culverins firing from the north and the east were able to do considerable damage.

While long-range culverins kept up a bombardment, miners began digging in an attempt to weaken the walls. As there were still uncommitted clans who might be tempted to attack the Tokugawa from the rear, time was on the side of Hideyori. Ieyasu used the steadily improving bombardment to pressure for peace negotiation.  Hideyori accepted a peace formula whereby the Tokugawa army would withdraw and Osaka castle would remain in Hideyori's hand under the provision of no further "rebellion" against the Tokugawa Shōgun. Many Tokugawa troops did not leave but instead worked to fill in the outer moat. Hideyori protested but by the time, a week later, Ieyasu agreed that these had indeed not been included in the peace agreement the outer moat had ceased to exist, and his men were turning to the second moat.

Location
The place where Sanada Maru was located is north of the Sanadayama Park. It was originally a little hill which was recessed in the center. Today it is a small underdeveloped plot of land in an urbanized area. A partial moat and bridge are present. Just south of it is Sanada High School.

Structure
Sanada Maru was an earthwork barbican with a simple two-storey wooden wall on top with firing platforms augmented with other simple means of defense like palisades. A dry moat offered additional defence. Cannons were placed along the walls, together with firebomb-projecting mangonels. Defended by the Sanada samurai clan it may be classified as a yagura, although only in the spirit rather than technical accuracy. As essentially a temporary structure it was not copied elsewhere.

Film, television, and theatrical adaptations
Sanada Maru has appeared in part or in full for different media including stage, screen and radio. These adaptations include:
 A 2016 Japanese drama, Sanada Maru for NHK, starring Masato Sakai.

See also
 Maidashi Maru, south-west fortification

References

Further reading
 群像シリーズ・激闘大坂の陣 最大最後の戦国合戦, Gunzo history series: Osaka no jin, the last fierce battle of the Samurai,

External links

Buildings and structures in Osaka
Special Historic Sites
Osaka Castle
Sanada clan
Castles in Osaka Prefecture

Sanada Maru


Republicanism in the Bahamas is a political movement for the replacement of the monarchy of the Bahamas and a monarch as head of state with a president. The idea has been floated since at least 2002, with renewed discussions since Barbados' became a republic in 2021. Calls for the Bahamas to become a republic have also been made following the death of Elizabeth II. There were protests during the visit of Prince William and his wife, Catherine, calling for an elected head of state.

Background
The Bahamas was colonised by the British and gained independence from Britain in July 1973. The Bahamas is a constitutional, parliamentary democracy and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. Queen Elizabeth II was the Head of State represented in The Bahamas an appointed Governor General and the government is led by the prime minister.

It is reported that Barbados becoming a republic in 2021 encouraged republican movements elsewhere in the Caribbean, including the Bahamas. Arley Gill, Grenada's ambassador to the Caribbean Community suggested in 2022 that a momentum for republicanism had developed across the Caribbean.

History

Commissions
In 2002, the government of the Bahamas appointed a Constitutional Review Commission, which asked for public opinion, including keeping the Bahamian monarch as head of state. Its preliminary report concluded there were "mixed feelings" on the matter and "the abolition of the English monarch [sic] as head of state of the Bahamas is part of the evolutionary process toward a truly peoples' government [sic]". A commission in 2012 recommended maintaining the status quo, but, postulated that a republic would be the "inevitable terminus of constitutional evolution". The following year, a commission recommended the government begin a process of public education to prepare citizens for a republican form of government in the future. No government has yet followed that advice.

Discussion and proposals
In January 2020, Minister of Education Jeffrey Lloyd said that the Bahamas should have a discussion on becoming a republic.

In September 2020, former Attorney General Sean McWeeney, Q.C. said that the Bahamas becoming a republic is an inevitable part of the political evolution of the country and would likely need to be driven by the Bahamian government.

In December 2021, the Office of the Prime Minister Press Secretary Clint Watson said that a transition to republic was not currently on the agenda of the Davis administration. In the same month the former Director of Culture Dr. Nicolette Bethel suggested that a federal republic would be the best system of government for the Bahamas. Also in December 2021, Sarah Dickson, British high commissioner to the Bahamas said that the future of the head of state of the Bahamas was up to the Bahamian people and that the UK and the Royal Family would continue to be friends of the country, working closely on a variety of matters, regardless.

In March 2022, Renward Wells suggested that the Bahamas was ready to become a republic with former Progressive Liberal Party (MP) Leslie Miller suggesting it would not happen in his lifetime. On a royal tour to the region, Prince William said that the royal family would "support with pride and respect your decisions about your future".

In September 2022, following the death of Elizabeth II, Prime minister of the Bahamas, Philip Davis said that he requires the support of the public of the Bahamas before proceeding with the process, "The only challenge with us moving to a republic is that I can't, as much as I would wish to do it, I cannot do it without your consent". He added, "I will have a referendum and the Bahamian people will have to say to me, 'yes'."

Model
The Coalition of Independents has suggested the Bahamas use a similar model to the United States of America; though, the organization believes becoming a republic will mean independence for the Bahamas, which the country attained in 1973.

Polling
A Lord Ashcroft poll conducted in 2023 found that 51 per cent of respondents preferred becoming a republic, with 27 percent favouring continuance of the monarchy and 22 per cent undecided or unwilling to choose.

See also

 Monarchy of the Bahamas
 Republicanism in Antigua and Barbuda
 Republicanism in Barbados
 Republicanism in Jamaica
 Republicanism in Australia
 Republicanism in Canada
 Republicanism in the United Kingdom

References

Republicanism by country
Republicanism in the Commonwealth realms
Politics of the Bahamas

Republicanism in the Bahamas