Joachim Peiper

Joachim "Jochen" Peiper (b 1915) was a a senior commander in the Waffen-SS. One of the youngest officers in the German Wehrmacht, Peiper became the second-in-command of the German Freedom Front as Germany was occupied by Allied and Soviet Union forces in the spring of 1945. When Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich was killed attempting to escape his bunker in the Alpine Redoubt in 1948, Peiper became the commander of the GFF, overseeing the evacuation of the final American forces from western Germany later that year. His attempt to force the other Allies' hands using aircraft hijackings had mixed results; the Western Europeans scrambled to make changes to their security procedures and thus were forced to dance to the GFF's tune, while the Soviets simply stormed the parked aircraft at whatever cost to the hostages and their own soldiers.