Peiper’s Last Gamble: Hitler’s Panzer Spearhead in the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944

SS-Obersturmbannführer Jochen Peiper's leadership in the failed Ardennes Offensive, highlighting victories, defeats, and war crimes.

By the autumn of 1944, Hitler’s plans for the conquest of Europe were in disarray. The Führer’s much-vaunted Third Reich, facing an Allied onslaught from the east and west, was slowly collapsing.

Desperate to seize the initiative on the Western Front, Hitler, seeing himself as a beleaguered modern-day Frederick the Great, looked for some bold counterattack that could change his fortunes. Hitler’s wish had at least one clear result, for as even as early as 19 August 1944, he had instructed Alfred Jodl to consider a bold counter-stroke in the west in November. Hitler’s generals therefore set about drawing up plans for an offensive in the area of the Ardennes Forest. It was to be an attack that would enable German forces to cross the Meuse and, decisively breaking through the Allied front-line, advance on Antwerp.

Given the limitations he and his forces faced, Hitler knew he would need panzer leaders capable of a delivering a Blitzkrieg advance, perhaps one that took advantage of night-time hours. One of the German officers who was tasked with delivering this audacious victory was the battle-hardened veteran SS-Obersturmbannführer Jochen Peiper.

A Waffen SS officer and one of the most celebrated heroes of Hitler’s armies, Peiper, and the SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte as a whole, were already on his mind. A long-time adjutant of Heinrich Himmler, and completely dedicated to the Nazi cause, Peiper had fought in every major campaign of the Second World War. However, having been wounded in Normandy following the D-Day landings, Peiper, also ailing from a combination of battle fatigue and hepatitis, had been evacuated to a field hospital and then back Germany in August 1944.