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By the end of the war, the Waffen-SS had organized 38 divisions comprising about 800,000 soldiers; 25% were killed in battle. They were never integrated into the Wehrmacht, and grew to become a "de facto" fourth branch of the German military. However, they were never any real threat to replace the army, given their much smaller percentage of size in the armed forces (under 10%) and the fact they never had independence of operational command. They had a reputation for fanatical loyalty, bravery, brutality, mistreatment and killing of prisoners and civilians, and war crimes.<ref>Wegner (1990); McNab (2009)</ref> In December 1944 on the Western Front during the "Battle of the Bulge" elements of the Leibstandarte Division shot between 86 and 100 Americans prisoners near Malmedy.<ref>Colonel Joachim Peiper lamented to the US Army interrogators that the U.S. government was wrong in having refused to incorporate the Waffen-SS into the U.S. Army to fight the Russians in defense of [[Western civilization]]. On 16 July 1946, the American military court at Dachau sentenced 46 members of the Waffen SS, including Joachim Peiper, to death by hangingfor the Malmédy Massacre. Another 23 received life in prison and the remaining men received sentences between 10 and 20 years. However, the convicted SS men claimed that American interrogators used torture and that all the statements given were forced. A commission was organized to investigate these allegations and some members of the commission questioned the validity of the whole trial. In 1948, the judicial reviewers of the trial verdicts of the military tribunal commuted the war-crime death sentences of some Waffen-SS defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial to life imprisonment. In 1951, Peiper's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1954, it was further commuted to 35 years imprisonment and eventually he was released on parole on 22 December 1956. Upon release from prison Peiper found a job at Porsche automobile company but Italian trade union workers formally complained that Peiper was unacceptable as a co-worker because he remained a Nazi and because of the wartime Boves massacre in Italy committed by his command. The owner of the car company, Ferdinand Porsche, personally intervened to promote Peiper into a management job, but the trade unions again legally refused to work with Peiper. Despite the friendship with Porsche, and because of lost sales of cars in the U.S. — for employing a Nazi war criminal — the Porsche automobile company dismissed Peiper from his employment. In 1972 Joachim and his wife Sigurd moved to Traves, in eastern France. Peiper worked as a self-employed English-to-German translator of military history books. Peiper lived under his real name. In June 1976 anti-Nazi political activists distributed informational flyers to the Traves community informing them that Peiper was a Nazi war criminal. The confirmation of Peiper’s Nazi identity and presence in France attracted journalists to whom Peiper gave interviews, wherein he claimed that he was a victim of Communist harassment due to his role in the war. On 14 July 1976, when a group of French anti-Nazis set his house on fire, Joachim Peiper, then 61 years old, was burnt alive. </ref>