Nobody was found guilty of his murder.One of the foremost German characters in the Battle of the Bulge was Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Joachim Peiper, the notorious Waffen-SS commander of the strongest armored Kampfgruppe (KG) of the 1st SS Panzer Division, Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH). On the night of 13–14 July 1976, his house was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and he died with a rifle and pistol in hand while shooting at the attackers. In 1974, a French communist identified him, and he became the subject of death threats when the French Communist Party publicized his war crimes in L'Humanite, a left-wing publication. However, his status as a war criminal led to him being denied visas, and he became a translator in the town of Traves, France in 1972. Peiper would be released in December 1956 after serving just over eleven years in prison, and he worked as a car salesman after the war. However, the German church's objections led to Peiper's sentence being commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1954 it was commuted to 35 years. On 16 July 1946, Peiper was sentenced to death by hanging for his role in several war crimes during World War II.
On, his unit surrendered to the Americans on the Enns River in Austria, and he was captured on 22 May. He would later fight in the Battle of the Bulge (during which he may have perpetrated the Malmedy massacre), and he was later transferred to Hungary, where he took part in Operation Spring Awakening. In July 1944, he suffered a nervous breakdown during Operation Cobra, during which the Allied Powers broke through at Avranches and mauled his division. From November 1943 to March 1944, he returned to the eastern front, but he was later transferred to Belgium, where he had five German soldiers publicly executed for stealing chicken and ham from local villagers. Later in 1943, he was moved to Italy, and his men killed up to 195 Italian civilians in the village of Boves on 8 September. When he discovered the burned bodies of 25 German soldiers who had been killed by Soviet partisans, he had the village of Krasnaya Polyana burned down and its villagers massacred, and he was known to be eager to execute the order to burn down villages. In 1943, he led a battalion of the 2nd Panzergrenadier Division at the Third Battle of Kharkov, where he distinguished himself. Peiper would first enter a combat unit attached to Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in 1941, and his company suffered heavy losses at Mariupol during the war with the Soviet Union due to Peiper's aggressive tactics. He visited concentration camps and other installations with Himmler, and he travelled across occupied Europe. In 1939, he was promoted to Lieutenant ( Obersturfuehrer), and he married one of Heinrich Himmler's secretaries, becoming a part of the SS leader's entourage. Peiper rose through the ranks and eventually became an officer, training other SS soldiers under Paul Hausser. The younger Peiper did not have good enough grades to enter college, so he joined the Hitler Youth with his brother Horst in 1933 and later the SS. Joachim Peiper was born on 30 January 1915 in Berlin, German Empire to a middle-class family from Silesia Peiper's father Waldemar Peiper had fought in East Africa until 1915, and he served in the far-right Freikorps during the Interwar period. Peiper was involved in several war crimes in the Soviet Union and Western Europe, and he was said to have been eager to burn down and massacre whole villages. Joachim Peiper (30 January 1915 – 14 July 1976) was a German SS colonel (with the rank of Standartenfuehrer) during World War II.