Who was General Eisenhower’s interpreter when he visited Ohrdruf?

Ohrdruf was a forced labor camp which was a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. It was the first Nazi camp of any kind to be discovered by American troops while prisoners were still in the camp.  Previously, in September 1944, Americans had discovered the abandoned Natzweiler camp in Alsace, which is now in France, but it was in the Greater German Reich at that time.

General Eisenhower visited the Ohrdruf camp on April 12, 1945.  Who could forget that date?  It was the day that President Roosevelt died.  Eisenhower was accompanied by General Omar Bradley and General George S. Patton. Their interpreter was a German-American named Captain Alois Liethan.

In a new book by Michael Hirsch, entitled “The Liberators: American’s Witnesses to the Holodcaust,” Private Don Timmer claims that he interpreted for General Eisenhower until the arrival of Captain Liethan, who was late because he was on a different plane.  

Was German war hero Joachim Peiper a Nazi?

In doing some research on Joachim Peiper and the Malmedy Massacre trial, I came across the Harry Turtledove Wiki on http://www.wikia.com.  Harry Turtledove is a novelist who writes alternative history novels like The Man With the Iron Heart in which the fictional Joachim Peiper takes over a fictional German resistance group after the fictional Reinhard Heydrich is killed in 1947 while trying to escape his fictional Alpine Redoubt.

Joachim Peiper in his SS uniform

On this page of my own website, I wrote that Col. Jochen Peiper was not a member of the Nazi party.  Someone sent me an e-mail, challenging me on that statement, and cited Harry Turtledove’s claim as proof that Peiper was a Nazi.  Harry Turtledove’s claim that Joachim Peiper’s Affiliations included the Nazi Party could be part of his Alternative History.  I am not an Alternative History buff; just give me the real history and the facts.