Once again, I am merely pointing out an apparent contradiction between Mr Westemeier's account and Peiper's own statements in a 1967 newspaper interview, reported by Reynolds in his book. It is nothing personal. I am merely posing a question.
I wonder if Timo Worst and Jens Westemeier - who is sending me furious PMs about "cruxifying" [sic] his book but declining to comment publicly - and others of a similar intellectually repressive mindset are capable of understanding that critical questions about a biographical book hostile to its Waffen-SS subject do not necessarily suggest a pro or neo-Nazi-inclined critic? Nor do they amount to a crucifixion of the book or its author...unless they strike accurately at one of the cornerstones of the narrative, of course.
Readers are invited to believe that Peiper lied about or attempted to conceal his NSDAP membership to avoid jail time. If true, this would suggest a moral weakness and instrinsic dishonesty on Peiper's part, a weakness of character. As Erik points out, why would someone who had already spent time on Death Row - on trumped-up charges based on confessions extracted by torture - and done hard time in jail for his wartime service try to conceal his NSDAP membership when he was so unequivocal about his Nazism in a newspaper interview over twenty years after the end of the war?
Peiper could have been a National Socialist in spirit without wishing to join a party widely seen as run by fat, corrupt "Golden Pheasants" by many young men, particularly the generation who passed through the SS-Junkerschule at Tölz and Braunschweig in the late 1930s. That Himmler had to make an issue of party membership in relation to LSSAH and SS-VT officers is quite illuminating in itself. One detects an inability on the part of authors like Westemeier to grasp the nuances, to read between the lines, so to speak. Peiper could either have been unaware of his administrative induction into the NSDAP alongside other LSSAH and SS-VT officers in 1938 and 1939 or he could have simply decided to refuse to recognise the legitimacy of his membership. There were plenty of Nazis who never joined the party back then, just as there are plenty of Nazis today who prefer not to be members of any movements or parties. Peiper might have opted to be economical with the truth over his NSDAP membership but if so, it cannot have been from any desire on his part to downplay or deny his Nazi beliefs, as the 1967 newspaper interview proves. Westemeier's thesis, therefore, makes no sense, unless one chooses to interpret it as an attempt to make Peiper look bad to modern readers.
Had the final draft been properly checked by suitably qualified editors, this part of it might have been changed. Having been on the receiving end of Westemeier's ire, I can only surmise that such editors would have been accused of being pro-Nazi revisionists in furious, abuse-laden missives from an author who, lest we forget, registered on Amazon.com as 'a reader' to post glowing reviews of his own book. This was the subject of a thread here on Feldgrau a while back:
http://www.feldgrau.net/phpBB2/viewtopi ... westemeier. Some of you will recognise "HSSPF" as the pseudonym used by quite a wellknown author of serious reference works related to the Waffen-SS. Of course, Mr Westemeier lambasts such individuals as "SS groupies" in his emotional PMs to me. He appears to suggest that I am an "SS groupie" too, for daring to question his narrative.
I suppose I will be accused of employing "below the belt" tactics for bringing Mr Westemeier's rather amateur attempts at self-promotion up but the salient point for me is the intensity of the aggressive reaction to the points I raised in relation to his obvious attempt to misrepresent Peiper's attitude to his Nazi beliefs. In raising these points, I have hardly "cruxifed" Mr Westemeier's book. If he can defend his narrative on these points, then why not simply do so, instead of sending me unpleasant PMs and having his friends post the usual nonsensical insinuations of pro-Nazi sympathies on the part of anyone not toeing their line?
PK
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