Close to the centre of power
In 1938, Joachim Peiper became an adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. He worked on Himmler’s personal staff, accompanied him on official journeys, and handled orders and communications. The position offered Peiper a privileged view of how the Nazi leadership organized its rule.
That view included direct encounters with violence. In September 1939, Peiper and Himmler witnessed the execution of Polish social leaders in Bydgoszcz. Later that year, they watched the gassing of patients at a psychiatric hospital near Poznań. Peiper described the scene to US interrogators after the war, recalling people first laughing and talking, then falling silent under the gas.
The machinery of persecution
As Himmler’s aide, Peiper also travelled to concentration camps and occupied territories. In 1941, he attended SS meetings where plans for mass killing and the removal of millions of people from Eastern Europe were discussed. During the invasion of the Soviet Union, he accompanied Himmler on inspections of units carrying out mass shootings. Peiper delivered reports that recorded the numbers of people killed by SS units.
These experiences matter because they contradict the postwar image Peiper promoted of himself as merely a soldier with no knowledge of Nazi crimes. He later denied or obscured his involvement in the Nazi Party and the extent of his awareness. Yet his work as an adjutant connected him directly to the senior leadership and its communications.
The contrast is stark: Peiper’s early career placed him not only near the battlefield, but inside the administrative world that planned and monitored mass murder. His later combat reputation cannot erase what that position exposed him to.
