On December 16th, many news outlets and individuals sought to highlight what could arguably be described as the most significant battle in U.S. Army history: The Battle of the Bulge. It was a massive Nazi counter-offensive that kicked off in the winter of 1944, the last desperate move the Third Reich had to make. Nazi forces smashed through allied lines and wrought havoc amongst the American Army. A desperate last stand was made by the 101st Airborne in Bastogne; elsewhere on the front lines American troops held on to their defensive positions at all costs; Gen. Patton maneuvered his tanks to hit at the Nazi's southern flank. It was a horrible, bloody affair, but one that the Army emerged from victorious due to a combination of tenacity and bold maneuvers on the battlefield.
The 18th Airborne Corps on Fort Bragg decided to kick off their remembrance of this epic battle by posting a picture of Waffen SS war criminal Joachim Peiper in a since deleted Facebook post. "The XVIII Airborne Corps will share stories about that brutal fight in the frigid Ardennes. These are the stories that were told by the men who fought in the historical battle," the Facebook post read alongside a colorized photo of Peiper.
Peiper had been a member of the Hitler youth before going on to serve in the SS, for a time a member of Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. Serving on the Eastern Front, his unit came to be known as the Blowtorch Battalion as it grew a reputation for waging total war including the burning of villages and wholesale slaughter of civilians. Later, in 1943 he used the same tactics in Italy in what became known as the Boves Massacre. During the Battle of the Bulge, Peiper's unit had captured some 120 American prisoners of war. They had the POWs stand out in a open field and then opened fire on them with machine guns. 84 bodies were recovered, some showing signs of execution at close range. Survivors of what became known as the Malmedy Massacre gave eye witness testimony.
After the war, Peiper was convicted of war crimes and imprisoned until his release in 1956. He lived in France in the 1970s where he was murdered, likely by French communists.
Why the 18th Airborne Corps chose to glorify a Nazi war criminal rather than American soldiers on the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge is a bit of a mystery. Subsequent comments made by the unit's Facebook page stated that, "sometimes in movies, the movie will create a sense of tension by introducing a bad guy," as this was the first post in a series that they planned the make. None the less, the decision to post a photo of Peiper was strongly criticized by the public and the offending post was removed from the 18th Airborne Corps Facebook page.