Joachim Peiper, Malmedy, the SS, and war atrocities

[ForrestGump]

Began this as a bit of a muse on the case of Joachim Peiper but...well, one thing led to another and it got pretty long...



The SS consisted of several branches. The Waffen SS (translates as "armed" SS) were largely élite fighting units. Along with outfits like the Army's Grossdeutschland Division, mountain troops, and the Luftwaffe's Fallschirmjager paratrooper units and Herman Goring Division, they were probably the best troops fielded by the Germans and among the most effective soldiers ever seen on any of the world's battlefields. They were, at least before manpower and materiel shortages, the best equipped and best trained and if you read accounts of war on the Eastern Front you'll have to be impressed by accounts of handfuls of SS panzergrenadiers holding off overwhelming waves of Soviet soldiers. The great generals of the German war effort -- Guderian, Rommel and others that rank up with Sun Tzu and a few others as sages worthy of study in war colleges worldwide -- were Army (Wehrmacht), but the ranks of the Waffen-SS were filled with great field commanders, most of whom learned the hard way in the hell of the Eastern Front.

As the war went on, more and more SS divisions (some, like the British and American divisions small and of dubious value beyond the propaganda) formed and a great many were composed primarily of foreigners, mainly from the Balkan states and the Ukraine (anti-Soviet feelings ran strong there). For the most part, these divisions were not considered among the élite and they also committed a lot of atrocities. Talking of atrocities on the Eastern Front is almost meaningless, because both sides showed no quarter, but the kind I'm talking about came mostly from antipartisan operations and the activities of the einsatzgruppen. The einsatzgruppen were basically death squads, and were relatively small, mobile units that exterminated civilians in occupied Soviet republics (prototype groups were tested in 1939, in Poland, but the systematic deployment of einsatzkommandos began with the 1941 invasion of Russia), typically with the willing assistance of local militia and civilians. The worst became infamous and their commanders were --frighteningly -- nowhere near as nuts as you'd expect. Local militias and partisans in Lithuania and the Ukraine were all too eager to help the einsatzgruppen with their killing of Jews, as were Polish civilains.

The Wehrmacht, generally considered above such things, not only committed at least a few war crimes but were charged with aiding the einsatzgruppen -- not necessarily with the task of killing civilians, but they did provide support and were basically accomplices. I'm sure that the relationship was repugnant to any Wehrmacht officer who knew of the death squads' acitivites but, again, it comes down to that whole "just following orders" thing that is both the basis of any military's integrity and the downfall of many who followed them past some point, a point perhaps sometimes only seen clearly after the fact and away from the arena of war.

These einsatzgruppen killers and the concentration camp guards (not a part of the Waffen-SS and not likely to pass muster for entry into the older, élite units, though the 3rd SS Panzer Division 'Totenkopf' originally formed from camp guards) and the SD (Homeland Security, basically) and Gestapo are what's given the SS an image of pure evil. It's undeniable that the SS administered the Final Solution, and that Waffen-SS troops, even of the most élite Germanic units, took part in war crimes against military personnel and civilians. At Nuremberg the SS was condemned as a criminal organization. There's some validity to that -- again, I reference the activities of Gestapo, SD, death squads and the like ("following orders" or not) -- but I don't feel it's fair to spread collective guilt over men who were nothing more sinister than combat soldiers, and very, very good ones at that. The Waffen-SS were also a fairly egalitarian group, intentionally eschewing the strict hierarchical military order that was characteristic of the Prussian-based Wehrmacht. My point, though, is that the SS have been largely painted with a broad brush (not just by reg'lar folks but legally, at Nuremberg) and that it's not that simple. It also does a disservice to soldiers who fought with honor and...well, war crimes are omnipresent in war and if the Nuremberg trials had actually been just there would have been significant numbers of Allied personnel on trial, too. The victors get to make the rules.

The premier Germanic Waffen-SS units tended to suffer exceptionally heavy losses, fighting like maniacs until the bitter end. It was not unusual for these divisions to be totally decimated and then rebuilt. The 3rd SS Division "Totenkopf" had strength of approximately 19700 and lost 60000 men during the war (that division suffered over 80% losses in an 18-month initial deployment in Russia). The 12th SS Division "Hitlerjugend" suffered 60% losses in one month and, of 20500 men, only 500 survived the Normandy campaign.

"...whatever else they were, they were remarkable soldiers -- the like of which we may never see again". -- Major General Michael Reynolds on the 1st SS Leibstandarte and 12th SS Hitlerjugend divisions.

"Perhaps, though the most significant thing which singled out the men of these divisions was their obvious pride in being soldiers. It is strange that in postwar years the former Allies have spent so much time criticizing each others performances in WW2 but adoring that of the enemy -- particularly the Waffen-SS. At the end of the day it has to be said that the soldiers of the 1st SS Panzer Corps excelled in what is still, in some circles, called the Art of War." -- Major General Michael Reynolds

Anyway, there were over 40 divisions in the SS and not all of them were out there committing war crimes or randomly executing civilians. More than half were comprised of non-German volunteers and it's among some of these divisions that the atrocities against civilains tended to be worst and most common. Some of the SS mountain divisions -- again, primarily those with many foreign nationals -- were almost as bad as the einsatzgruppen at times. Part of the problem was that they were enaged in antipartisan operations and, as Vietnam and Iraq have shown well Americans, hunting down guerillas is not only dangerous but is rife with the possibility (PROBABILITY) of killing innocent civilians.

Units of the most élite Waffen-SS units were certainly responsible for or involved in war crimes against civilians, most often in reprisal for partisan activity but also as part of the Final Solution -- the latter was likely not common, but some of the divisions supplied men to einsatzgruppen and in 1941 a detachment from the 2nd SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" (the same division that later destroyed the town of Orador-sur-Glane) helped einsatzengruppen murder Jews near Minsk. Certainly, some of the activities of foreign-volunteer Balkan units of the Waffen-SS are extreme examples of civilian atrocities (the violence of which is the exact same Serb-Croatian, Muslim-Catholic kind of dynamics going on today, along with a warranted animosity between Ukrainians and the Soviets who killed a massive proportion of the Ukraine's civilian population).


Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine

Then einsatzgruppen weren't the only ones committing wholesale murder out there. The Dirlewanger Brigade, late in the war designated an SS division but nowhere near divisional strength, was formed by a disgraced and jailed academic, Dr Oskar Dirlewanger (most of the einsatzgruppen commanders also had PhDs). The unit consisted of criminals, defected or imprisoned Soviets and communists, concentration camp guards, concentration camp inmates (!), and disgraced and demoted SS and army personnel. They were the proverbial motley crew and were far worse than the imaginers of The Dirty Dozen could ever have conceived. Dirlewanger regularly killed his own men, sometimes apparently on a whim, and his men committed terrible crimes on partisans and on civilians suspected of association with partisans. They were the scum of the Earth. Ditto the Kaminiski Brigade, who were possibly even worse -- they certainly had fewer redeeming qualities, in that at least Dirlewanger's men did sometimes distinguish themselves in combat. Kaminski was Russian, of Polish-German extraction, and his men were from Byelorussia. Their behavior in the 1944 Warsaw uprising was so bad -- they cared more about raping and looting than anything else -- that the Wehrmacht demanded their removal and an embarrassed SS disbanded the group and killed Kaminski. Dirlewanger died under torture by Polish officers while in French custody at war's end.


Oskar Dirlewanger: brave, intelligent, sociopathic, psychopathic freaky death's-head-looking mofo.

Here's a pretty chilling collection of some of WW2's atrocities, from all theaters of operation. The scale of murders in Eastern Europe is staggering and it's apparent that all sides (Germans, Soviets, Tito's partisans, Polish/Croatian/Serbian/Czech etc civilians) committed unspeakable acts in that region:

WWII atrocities


Joachim Peiper.

The 1st SS Panzer Division ""Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler" was the élite of the élite, formed originally around the SS unit assigned as Hitler's bodyguard squad. Lieutenant Colonel (later Colonel) Joachim Peiper was one of the stars of the division and his battlegroup was picked to lead the Ardennes Offensive ("Battle of the Bulge"). Peiper was an incredible young field commander, a genius with panzer warfare who did some amazing things on the Eastern Front. Peiper was not a member of the Nazi Party but had been in the Hitler Youth. Peiper was a veteran of the greatest tank battle in history, at Kursk in July, 1943. He won a knight's cross with oak leaves and swords, a very high honor. Was he a hero? Militarily, yeah, he was brilliant. But it's kind of hard for me to use that word in connection with anyone who fought for a regime as evil as Hitler's and who was in a military branch as politicized as the SS. Not logical, I know, but they WERE -- collectively -- very much the Bad Guys. Individually, though, there were heros and villians just as anywhere else, and SS ranks included both and everything in between. The whole concept of heroism has been rendered almost meaningless, anyway, in this age of athletes being considered 'heroes' and everyone who dons an American military uniform getting the 'hero' label -- nice sentiment, but one that devalues the very idea of heroism.

There's a great deal of debate and contention over what happened at Malmedy on December 17, 1944, but the most likely explanation is that elements of Peiper's group took it upon themselves to open fire on 113 unarmed American POWs (72 or so died). Despite suggestion of any possible factors that might make this action justifiable to even the slightest degree, it looks like the most parsimonious explanation is that some soldiers basically just murdered prisoners. The Leibstandarte division was fresh off the Eastern Front, where this kind of thing was widespread on both sides, so the parameters for this kind of action were certainly in place. Then again, evidence from both Germans and Americans suggests that the killings began and may have been largely committed in response to an attempted escape by the captured Americans (killing escaping prisoners was allowed under the rules of war). We will never know, exactly.

Factoid of the day: among the American soldiers who escaped the massacre scene was actor Charles Durning. Durning was a ranger who landed at Omaha on D-Day and was awarded three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star.

These kinds of war crimes were rare on the Western Front. That fact makes Malmedy a bigger deal than it might be, in purely quantitative terms, when compared with the excesses of the Eastern Front and the systematic extermination of civilians. It was also the biggest such crime committed against US troops, that fact also being significant in the publicity and outrage accorded the event.

Confusing the issue is that Hitler had basically made a take-no-prisoners edict for the Ardennes Offensive but there are records of Peiper and others continued to take prisoners as usual and send them to the rear. So it's probably not really relevant, but what if it WAS an instance of "just following orders"? That 'Nuremberg defense' didn't hold water but, really, where do you draw the line? This question is particularly relevant given some of the stories that have come out of US involvement in Iraq...the Abu Ghraib crimes for one. A soldier is SUPPOSED to follow orders -- that's what it's all about -- so where and when exactly is that no longer true? It's maybe easy for us to provide an answer, as armchair critics after the fact, but things get less clear in wartime and baselines and perceptions shift in the heat of combat, especially in combat with no quarter (not how these Germans' opponents fought in the Ardennes but how their opponents had been fighting for so long in Russia and during the exhausting withdrawal back to Germany). Again, if these particular SS were following orders they were probably those of a junior officer and the result was a war crime with no excuses.

Bad Germans.

Peiper's unit had broken through US lines along a single road and their highly mobile panzer and panzergrendaier column had no facility for prisoners. Perhaps the massacre was a pragmatic response to this, the kind of thing sometimes done by today's special-ops units who cannot and do not take prisoners. In the end, his unit never reached their objective and by the time the Battle of the Bulge was over only 800 of his 5000 men, retreating on foot, remained alive.

That same day, and in the days following, orders came down from successively high levels in the US military that no German SS or paratroopers (paratroopers? the Fallschirmjager were among the most respected of the war's fighting men, accorded high regard even by their opponents) were to be take prisoner but that any such German soldier should be shot on sight. This order, of course, contravened the accords of the Geneva Convention -- it was itself a war crime. Not only that, it's all too reminiscent of the attitudes and orders of today's American leadership. The order was followed at least in a few cases, as when about 60 German POWs were shot by their American guards (without any later consequence) in Chegnogne on New Year's Day, 1945.

But here's the part that kind of irks me.

In 1946 (at Dachau -- the venue was carefully selected), Peiper and 70 of his soldiers were brought to trial on war crimes charges for the Malmedy massacre, and most were sentenced to death.

SS General Josef 'Sepp' Dietrich was also implicated, even though he wasn't even in the neighborhood, by virtue of his being commander of the Sixth Panzer Army. I guess the buck stops there (no, really, it passes from there to Himmler and, ultimately, to Hitler) and high-ranking commanders are ultimately responsible for wat happens in their commands but, still, that just seems wrong. If they're going to follow that logic, then it'd seem to me that -- short of an order to execute being issued by someone at that level -- the logical one to blame would be Hitler and perhaps some of his immediate advisors. And, again, there are very timely parallels here to the situation in Iraq and the culpability of Bush, Rumsfeld, et al.


Sepp Dietrich.

Dietrich was a Patton-like personality, larger than life and loved by his men and (unfortunately for him, in terms of postwar repercussions) by Hitler. He personally protested, to Hitler, executions of unarmed civilians and also fought against Hitler's taking away officers' decision-making powers in the wake of the almost-successful July, 1944 bomb plot. Although he was loyal to Hitler, when his decimated SS troops failed to hold back Russians in Austria at war's end, he refused Hitler's order to turn in his and his men's tunic cuff bands (imprinted with the SS divisional designation)...rumor has it that he then did return them, in a chamberpot. Dietrich hated Himmler, his superior, and referred to him as "the Reichsheini."

The trial was a kangaroo court with provisions VERY similar to those allowed under the Patriot Act these days, including that the burden was for innocence to be proven (by American defense lawyers, no less) and that a 2/3 majority vote was sufficient for conviction. The similarity goes further: in addition to being subjected to coerced confessions and torture (they even, as a prequel to what's happening today, put black hoods over the prisoners' heads before beating them), the SS soldiers were recategorized from POWs to civilian internees, no longer under the protection of the Geneva Convention. Sound familiar? Ain't nothing new under the sun, after all.

US troops had executed prisoners on several documented occasions before the Battle of the Bulge, a fact admitted by no less than Patton. Even Saving Private Ryan shows an American shooting a surrendered German, an incident not uncommon in Normandy where American commanders also issued take-no-prisoners orders. In fact, when Dachau was liberated American soldiers committed three separate such acts, killing captured Waffen-SS soldiers in one incident, SS concentration camp guards in another (okay, it's hard to have sympathy for anyone involved with those camps but, still, it's a war crime and, besides, many or most of the guards were Waffen-SS or Hungarians in German uniform who were just brought in to replace the real camp guards, who'd deserted two days in advance of the US liberation), and in a third a unit of the German Home Guard (old men and young boys). To be honest, if I were one of the first people to enter Dachau as a liberator, and been in combat for a while, I would very likely have taken it upon myself to blow away all the SS and, indeed, all the German soldiers I could find. Maybe. Regardless, that doesn't make it right. And that theoretical exercise points out quite clearly that war crimes are an inevitable consequence of war. But, again, that doesn't make them right. War, itself, is not right.

Defense attorneys were not allowed to mention war crimes committed by US troops and, when the accused mentioned them, such comments were struck from the record. Indeed, 23554 Americans were taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge (a great many by the SS units that played so significant a role in the attack) without incident, a fact that derailed the prosecution's case that (a by now totally insane) Hitler's order to take no prisoners meant that Dietrich, Peiper, and -- it would seem to me, logically -- ALL German officers were guilty as part of a massive conspiracy. These and other aspects of the trial increasingly bothered the main defense attorney, Lt Col Everett. Everett got to see beyond the double lightning bolts and death's head of the Waffen SS -- symbols unfortunately shared with concentration camp units and undoubtedly confused in the collective mind of American authorities -- and got to like Peiper who, by all accounts, was very affable and charismatic. Indeed, it was Everett who eventually fought to at least delay the immediate executions of the accused -- including taking it to the US Supreme Court and even to the International Court at the Hague (where he charged that the US had violated international law) -- and the result was that none of the executions were ever carried out. Everett expended vast sums of his own money and suffered poor health as a result of his effort to free the accused soldiers. It's notable that among witnesses for the defense was an American officer who spent a night talking with Peiper while his prisoner later in the attack.

At the trial, Peiper actually volunteered to take the blame if his men were let off the hook and, years later, he recounted how he accepted the blame, even though he had no idea what had happened, because he was the commanding officer. He was far ahead of the site of the massacre and most likely did not give the order to shoot the prisoners. Was it still his fault? The Allies seemed to think so. When the verdict was read he also requested that executions be carried out by firing squad, rather than hanging, but that was also denied. In the end, nobody was executed because the trials became the object of intense controversy and the methods (including torture) and mechanism through which the soldiers were found guilty were sharply criticized in the US, the new West Germany, the Hague, and elsewhere. The men were released in the '50s -- Peiper was the last released, in December of 1956.

Peiper, 30 at the time of the Malmedy massacre, spent his prime languishing in jail with a death sentence hanging over him. Sure, they didn't kill him, but he still spent 11 years in prison with the threat of execution hanging over him. And look at poor old Hess, who flew himself to England. For me, the validity of the Nuremberg trials will forever be called into question by the guilty verdicts of Hess and, most especially, Admiral Doenitz.

In 1972, after 16 years of having trouble holding decent jobs, Peiper finally moved to France. On Bastille Day, 1976, he died when his house was firebombed, probably by French communists. He'd been warned of trouble but refused to leave his home, though he sent his wife out of the country.

I find Peiper's story sad, when it comes down to it. He was a great soldier and military leader fighting on the side of a very bad cause. He may have BEEN a war criminal (a tag that becomes almost meaningless when you start to read about how widespread killing of prisoners and reprisals were), as a result of actions elsewhere, but he was tried as one only for Malmedy and it seems a stretch. And, again, he was an excellent soldier fighting -- with whatever degree of ideological fervor -- for a lost cause, and a negative cause. It's essentially a similar situation to the heroes of the Confederacy with further parallels in that Nazi apologists and revisionist historians, along with neo-Nazis and anti-semites (the misconduct at the Dachau trials was strongly linked to Jewish personnel, including prosecutorial officers of non-US origin), cite this and simialr fiascos in support of their warped agendas. Peiper was unquestionably a war hero -- if the Germans had won (now there's a scary thought) he'd have basically been their version of Audie Murphy -- but war is brutal and nobody gets out unscathed. And, again, he was on the wrong side in a war where it was, for a change, plainly apparent who the bad guys were.

The revisionists and Nazi apologists point to Allied atrocities. Their agenda is wrong, but the facts are all too often right. The Soviets committed unbeleivable atrocities on large and small scales, as did Japanese soldiers and civilians in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. And the Western Allies were not innocent, either. It's hard to get at the truth of US/British war crimes because, as the winners, they enjoyed the ability to classify or destroy evidence. Further, those of us brought up in a nation that fought against Hitler and the Japanese in WW2 are long conditioned to the idea that we really were on the side of right and the others were evil scum. I think it's highly likely that atrocities committed by non-Soviet Allies paled into significance beside those of Axis powers -- not just the Germans and their Final Solution but also the Japanese and their genocide in China and southeast Asia -- but our nations were not entirely blameless as is evident even from official sources. Even without the small-unit crimes on report, there's always Dresden.

For that matter, the huge "Rhine Meadows" internment camps at WW2's end -- some call them Eisenhower's death camps -- were nothing more than Allied concentration camps. There is no inherent moral superiority that makes a nation immune -- US death squads in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, and the reports back from Iraq, make that clear. A contributing problem in determining the extent of Allied war crimes is that revisionist f***wits, by which I mean the kind who deny the reality of the Holocaust, use evidence of Allied crimes as some kind of comparative weapon, as if involvement of British or American (or Canadian, Australian, etc) troops somehow absolves the Nazi-era Germans not only from responsibility for atrocities of the Malmedy kind but of the systematic destruction of entire groups of peoples: Jews, Gypsies, clergy, mentally handicapped, and so on. That's stupid. All evidence of Allied war crimes does is bolster two ideas: (a) war is hell and (b) wartime (peacetime, for that matter) atrocities are universal, and it's just a matter of degree and extent of societal approval or ignorance that determines to what degree the urge is expressed. Two wrongs don't ever make a right. Allied war crimes do not negate those of the Germans, Japanese, and other Axis powers...though the fact that only the losers paid the price for them says a lot, as does the cynical spiriting away of some of the most heinous war criminals by American and Soviet authorities after the war because those people were of use to the impending cold-war effort.

As for the Holocaust revisionists...well, the reports of the einsatzgruppen, verified by those concerned, indicate 1.5 million shot, most of them Jewish. And those concentration camps weren't baking cookies...even the most warped revisionist can't deny that some number of Jewish people died in those camps. So what if the final sum isn't actually six million? Is two million somehow acceptable? I understand the need and desire to get things accurate, but I have a feeling that other factors motivate the people who deny the 'alleged' Holocaust ever happened. Sickos.

Let's not forget all of this is now in the context of the US arguably being a Bad Guy...we're not led by true Nazis or as overtly evil in agenda and execution, but the qualifications are firmly in place and we have access to technology and military supremacy that the Germans could only dream of.





The Malmédy Massacre Trial

Massacre at Malmédy

Unconventional Allies: Colonel Willis Everett And SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Joachim Peiper

Is the Abuse of POW's Under American Control Unprecedented?

Whitewashing allied atrocities of World War II

An Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen

The Einsatzgruppen (including reports from the squads and accounts from survivors and perpetrators)

Einsatzgruppen

Eyewitness Account of Einsatz Executions

SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger

[pnorman]

1. Even before I finished reading this,

I was strongly moved by the top photo. It traces directly back to this collection of related images: http://www.uoregon.edu/~dluebke/Holocaust410-510/
I'll be spending a few hours going through all the other sources. This is NOT "ancient history"!

pnorman

[ForrestGump]

2. I looked at all the links I referenced in this post

Spent most of the day doing it. I had so much to do, on this first day off from work, but I just couldn't stop reading about all of these terrible things that people do to other people.

From reading about Malmedy and the trial I went to the site that lists (a very incomplete list) atrocities of WW2 in European and Pacific theaters and then on to the exploits of the einsatzgruppen -- it made me very, very sad and as close to tears as I'm likely to get when I'm so furious at the human species.

You're right. It's so long ago but it's also happening today. The same war that was fought in the Balkans and western USSR in the '40s, as often as not against civilian populations, has been continued to the present in Chechnya, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, and in too many other parts of the world. And now Iraq and Afghanistan has Americans and their opponents seemingly trying to outdo each other with dubious tactics. It's apocalypse, now, as ever.

[ForrestGump]

3. P.S.: note to anyone with especially sensitive personalities

I should have mentioned that some of the linked material (some pictures, but mostly text) contains the stuff of nightmares...most of the reports, even though toned down by brevity and editorial judgement, are chilling.

In fact, if you really delve into these resources, you'll find the einsatzgruppen situation reports collected on one of the sites to be perhaps one of the most skin-crawling indictments of human behavior, and lethal bureaucracy, ever revealed to the public...so matter-of-fact in describing the numbers and categories executed and the property taken from them at the killing sites. They were doing a job, undoubtedly most of them dispassionately by necessity if not by nature, and it's horrifying.

[Tallison]

4. Started reading then decided

to print it out and take it to bed soon. Always interested in the social psychology of organized violence (and war crimes as an extension of it). Thanks.

[ForrestGump]

6. I hope it is of some use

The scary thing is that I don't believe that there's anything in the souls of Germans (or of the other nationals who took advantage of German military superiority and ideological f***ed-upedness to settle old scores) that makes their depredations uniquely theirs...look beyond the past century and it's apparent that such genocidal behavior has been widespread, just as it has been in our century (Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, etc, etc, etc). And war crimes of the Malmedy and even My Lai type seem frightenly common.

Not exactly bedtime reading, dude!

[Tallison]

5. Sheesh! 9 pages already...

I can see this took you all day

[ForrestGump]

8. Sorry about that

:-)

It was a long war...

[KG]

7. they are restarting the military tribuals at gitmo.

gulags, secret trials, torture - this country has become what it used to claims it despised.

[ForrestGump]

9. Kind of ironic

Especially given how much shouting and breastbeating the US used to do when human rights were violated in such ways in banana republics and the like.

Among republics, we're now the Big Banana.

Kind of fitting that the nominal head is so simian, then.