by J. Lee Ready
The Allgemeine SS also wanted a piece of the action so they set up twelve reservist fuss standarten [infantry regiments] recruited from Sudetenlanders and Czech Volksdeutsch.
Karl Frank the Sudeten politician now became one of the directors of the Czech Protectorate. To cover his back he became a reservist in the Allgemeine SS.
The actual ruler of the Czechs would be Hitler’s foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath, who handed over his position of foreign minister to Joachim von Ribbentrop. Von Neurath was a remnant of the pre-Hitler German government and was a reservist SS officer. He soon brought in Polizei Generalmajor Juergen von Kamptz to command all uniformed Orpo police in the Protectorate [both German and Czech]. Kamptz had been badly wounded in the Great War, and had then served in the police during the civil war and since then. Himmler had finally induced Kamptz to join the SS reserves.
Everywhere in the Protectorate the Volksdeutsch were given the best jobs at the expense of Czechs and Jews. The SS RuSHA commanded by Oberfuehrer von Gottberg facilitated the arrival of farmers from throughout the Reich to take over Czech farms, displacing about 100,000 rural Czechs and Jews. Gottberg was not beyond taking a bribe now and then, and he made sure that he lined his pockets.
A few days after Hitler’s ‘conquest’ of the Czechs, he bullied the Lithuanians into handing over the Memelland district. It was after all a Volksdeutsch neighborhood. Naturally Heydrich’s Sipo and SD rushed in here too under the guiding hand of Brigadefuehrer Jacob Sporrenberg, as did the Allgemeine SS creating the 105th Fuss Standarte [Infantry Regiment]. The Memellanders [Volksdeutsch], such as sixteen year old Werner Wolff, cheered the arrival of German troops, not realizing that freedom under the Nazis was more terrifying than oppression under the Lithuanians. Herbert Boettcher, a lawyer and son of a well-known local politician, was recruited by Himmler into the Allgemeine SS, and owing to his family connections he soon became director of Orpo in the region.
Himmler refused to accept Czechs into the SS, because they were Slavs and thus not Aryan, but he did open his doors to the Volksdeutsch living in the region. In fact the SS now expanded rapidly with Volksdeutsch volunteers coming from Memelland, the Sudetenland, the Czech Protectorate and Slovakia. As the latter was an independent nation now under the control of Josef Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest, Himmler had to ask permission for his recruiters to ply their trade here. Tiso agreed.
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There is no doubt that the Germans did not believe the British would really fight for Poland. Poland was not as peace-loving and innocent as the British government portrayed her to the British people. Poland was in fact a militant dictatorship. In 1815 the Prussians, Austrians and Russians had divided up Poland among themselves. But in November 1918 the Poles had unified as an independent Poland. But within weeks the Poles had begun aggressive war on their neighbors: Lithuania, Byelorussia, Ukrainia and Germany. This backfired in 1920 when her expansion put her in direct military conflict with the fledgling Soviet Union. The Poles barely won that. As a result her government remained unpopular with everyone, and in the early 1920s an internationally monitored free election allowed almost a million Poles to vote to have their villages taken over by the Germans rather than be retained by the warmongering Polish government! Naturally this was a great embarrassment to the Polish leaders. But still they were happy for by 1923 they had carved an empire for themselves containing millions of Volksdeutsch, Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians. They also gained Danzig by a ruse. This German city was ostensibly run by the League of Nations, but the Poles ran the city using troops thinly disguised as postal employees!
The Poles were highly racist, especially towards Jews and Gypsies. Many a Jew left Poland in the 1920s for Germany to seek freedom. In 1938 the Poles had revoked the citizenship of all Jews who had emigrated, and when the Nazis deported Polish-born Jews back to Poland before the cutoff date, the Polish immigration service had refused them entry, and instead placed them in a ‘no-man’s land’ near the border for several months. These unfortunates had to eke out a living in tent camps and small huts, begging for food from charities.
In March 1939 the Polish Army had invaded Czecho-Slovakia to steal the Teschen district.
The Germans were positive that the British would not go to war to defend such a government. And they were not naïve to think so, for almost immediately after the British parliament had guaranteed Polish sovereignty they thought better of it and tried to wriggle out of it, suggesting to the Poles that they should ask the Soviets instead to protect them from Hitler, to which the dictatorial Polish commander in chief Marshal Edward Rydz answered: ‘With the Germans we may lose our freedom, but with the Russians we should lose our soul.”
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Himmler needed a larger SS, because he suspected that Hitler would soon order an invasion of Poland, and the Poles would not be pushovers. Those SS men called into the armed forces during the war scare of the summer of 1938 had been released by year’s end and had taken up their old SS jobs again. But if war came they would be recalled again. Only those Volksdeutsch SS from outside the Third Reich, such as Slovakia, could not be called up by the German armed forces, as they were not German citizens.
However, by 1939 Himmler was ready to take on the generals and their armed forces reservist system, because he had a new plan. Specifically: any SS member called up to do military service was to ask to serve in the SS Verfuegungstruppe, which was his right. Hopefully, the reservist boards would honor this agreement. Once inside the SS Verfuegungstruppe, the SS soldier would be given a phony medical discharge. Thereupon, free from his military obligation, he would return to his civilian job in the SS, e.g. Scharfuehrer in the SD. Himmler also approved phony doctor’s reports declaring that many of his SS members were too physically incapacitated to serve in the armed forces.
Ironically Himmler on occasion was actually taking a few select men from the army. In June 1939 Major Peter Hansen transferred from the army to the SS Verfuegungstruppe. This South American born German was a Great War veteran, who had rejoined the army in 1935 as an artillery expert.
The reservist system also endangered Himmler’s police. By 1939 Himmler controlled 130,000 ordinary policemen in his Orpo, but he would lose most of those aged 19-45 if there was a war and a call up of reservists, so he recommended to Hitler that all policemen currently aged 30-38 should not be called up. Hitler agreed. This would still leave a shortfall, so Himmler created the Police Reserve, which would be open to volunteers aged 19-45 that were medically unfit for military service, but nonetheless physically fit enough to be a cop, and also open to men aged 46-55, too old for military service. In fact he ordered all retired policemen up to the age of 70 to join the Police Reserve. This included men that were members of the criminal prison service.
Yet once done the numbers still did not add up. So he approached Hitler again and managed to get him to agree that any civilian currently aged 30-38 could volunteer for the Police Reserve in lieu of military service. The result was that the Police Reserve soon had a strength of 91,500. Himmler divided the Police Reserve into Barracks Units that could be called to full-time service in an emergency. He also drew up plans to organize them into battalions and regiments if required.
One thing was certain. Anyone who joined the police after the Nazi takeover knew he would be enforcing Nazi laws. Policemen throughout the world in the 1930s were harsher in their treatment of criminal suspects and witnesses than those of a half century later. Those who joined the police within a police state knew what they were getting into.
Despite these plans the armed forces still grabbed men. Hans Plesch, a senior policeman aged thirty-four, was called into the army.
Himmler as yet did not control the national fire fighting service [Feuerwehr], but he intended to. However, it too was suffering from the military conscription of its personnel. Therefore its recruitment age was stretched from eighteen to sixty, and retired firemen up to the age of eighty were conscripted as part-timers.
As for the role of the SS Verfuegungstruppe in any future battle, Himmler wanted a real army, not just a few SS light infantry units. So he invited Hitler to visit Standartenfuehrer Felix Steiner’s SS Deutschland Standarte. Hitler did and was impressed with the live fire exercise and he agreed that the SS Verfuegungstruppe could expand to divisional size and moreover he concurred that the Army should provide the necessary equipment. Naturally the army generals were furious.
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The armed forces did not conscript women, and the police and fire service employed few women and then only in limited ‘office jobs’. Thus Himmler knew he could recruit females into the SS without hindrance. These days so many German females were caught breaking Nazi laws, that it was no longer possible to incarcerate them all in Lichtenburg concentration camp or in the small female sections of other camps, so Eicke built a new large camp just for women at Ravensbruck fifty miles north of Berlin. This camp’s administrative staff of SS KZL and SS Wv would eventually establish more than thirty sub-camps for slave labor, both female and male.
At the Ravensbruck main camp Eicke founded a school for female recruits to the SS KZL and SS Wv. Ultimately more than 3,500 women would train here to become SS Aufseherinen, i.e. female overseers. They would be outranked by every male SS member, but they would have power of life or death over their prisoners. If they did not have a cruel streak when they began training, they usually came out that way, and undoubtedly some were psychopathic killers. Some Aufseherinen would go on to make a name for themselves as vicious and deadly taskmistresses, such as Jenny Barkmann, Juana Bormann, Hermine Boettcher, Sydonia Bayer, Elizabeth Becker, Therese Brandl, Erna Beilhardt, Dorothea Binz, Greta Bosel, Margot Dreschler, Hermine Braunsteiner, Ruth Closius, Else Ehrich, Ruth Hildner, Herta Ehlert, Gertrude Feist, Ida Forster, Ilse Forster, Irma Grese, Hildegard Hahnel, Irene Haschke, Anna Hempel, Charlotte Klein, Joanna Kurd, Wanda Klaff, Hildegard Lachert, Johanna Langefeldt, Hildegard Lippmann, Hilde Lisiewitz, Gertrud Rheinholt, Erna Rosenthal, Gertrude Sauer, Elizabeth Marschall, Charlotte Mayer, Margaret Mewes, Carmen Morey, Ewa Paradies, Vera Salvequart, Gertrud Schreiter, Emmi Schotig, Ilse Steinbusch, Else Weber, Freida Walter, Gerda Steinhoff, Rosy Suess and Emma Zimmer.
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Chapter Seven
A REAL WAR
Those German troops and SS personnel that had participated in the invasions of Austria, Sudetenland, Czecho-Slovakia and Memelland had all received campaign medals for these. However, real combat veterans [whether from the Great War, the German Civil War, the Polish War or the Spanish Civil War] knew that this was all show business, for there had been no fighting in these ‘campaigns’. However, no one had any illusions that Poland would collapse like these other states. Poland had one of the largest armies in the world and its politicians were dictators who had no qualms about sending their soldiers into harm’s way.
Suddenly in the last week of August 1939 when the fear of war was at its height Hitler and Stalin brought the world to a standstill, by announcing that they were signing a non-aggression pact. This outbreak of peace between the Nazis and Communists astonished everyone. As recently as five months earlier the German Condor Legion in Spain had been in combat against Soviet forces. There is no doubt that the Nazis felt betrayed by Hitler, yet such was their faith in him by this date that they excused it by saying that perhaps he had an ulterior motive.
Actually he had two. One was his secret agreement with Stalin that they should divide Poland between them. The second was unknown even to Stalin, namely that Hitler wanted a border with the Soviet Union, so that he could move troops up to it in secret and invade Stalin’s empire at a time of his own choosing. Surely if Stalin wanted peace with Germany as he always claimed, he would have preferred to retain a Polish buffer state between the German and Soviet armies, so that he would have warning of a German attack against him, unless of course he planned to attack Germany himself some day. Hitler and Stalin were like two knights in a joust, clearing away all obstacles so that they could charge at each other.
In late August 1939 Heydrich gave Untersturmfuehrer Alfred Naujocks of the SD a secret mission, which would establish a cassus belli for the invasion of Poland. Naujocks had several reasons for liking this mission. First of all as an SS man it was an honor to be entrusted with so great an event, secondly as a Nazi he disliked the Poles who were currently oppressing many ‘Volksdeutsch Germans’, and thirdly as a Lithuanian Volksdeutsch he hated the Poles because they were currently oppressing thousands of his fellow countrymen in southern Lithuania [occupied by the Poles for twenty years]. Naujocks was an odd choice though, for he was not known for his intellectual achievements. As per orders he and his SD team occupied a German radio station near the Polish border, interrupted the announcer and made a statement in German and Polish pretending to be Polish soldiers who were attacking Germany. In the vicinity they dumped the dead bodies of several concentration camp inmates dressed in Polish army uniform. Several similar incidents took place elsewhere along the border. Then the press was invited to see the evidence of the Polish ‘invasion’. It was amateur theatrics at its worst and fooled no one. Heydrich had come up with this charade with the help of Standartenfuehrer Otto Rasch, a supposedly well-educated professor. No matter: the German armed forces invaded Poland on 1 September and the war was on.
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Juergen ‘Jochen’ Peiper was by now an Obersturmfuehrer of the SS LAH and naturally he wished to be with his unit at this momentous occasion, but he had been temporarily assigned to Himmler’s headquarters as an adjutant to liaise with the SS Verfuegungstruppe headquarters. This assignment was not a complete waste for Peiper, for he met, courted and married one of Himmler’s secretaries.
This morning, 1 September 1939, Peiper and Himmler boarded Himmler’s personal train, which was a mobile headquarters, and waited for the news that it was safe to cross the Polish border. Himmler had at last gained permission from the army generals for his SS Verfuegungstruppe to go into action, though the generals refused to allow this unit to fight as one complete body. Instead the SS soldiers were divided up into smaller units and would serve piecemeal.
One of the many army units in the forefront of the invasion was Generalmajor Werner Kempf’s 4th Panzer Brigade, which consisted of an headquarters and the 7th Panzer Regiment drawn from the army, and the following formations drawn from the SS Verfuegungstruppe: a motorized reconnaissance sturmbann [battalion], a signals unit, a towed artillery standarte [regiment] and the SS Deutschland Motorized Infantry Standarte [regiment].
With his ‘boys’ taken away from him, Hausser had no command authority in the invasion, so he attached himself to Kempf as an ‘observer’. One of Kempf’s’ artillery commanders was Obersturmbannfuehrer Herbert Gille.
Elsewhere the SS Germania Standarte of motorized infantry under Oberfuehrer Karl Maria Demelhuber was assigned to VIII Corps. Like Hitler Demelhuber had soldiered in the Bavarian Army during the Great War, and he had joined the Nazis in the early days. But he had become disillusioned and had not been a party member for years.
The SS LAH Standarte and an SS pioneer sturmbann [engineer battalion] served independently under the orders of XIII Corps.
The SS Der Fuehrer Standarte remained in Austria and would have to sit this one out.
Standartenfuehrer Sepp Dietrich knew that the very existence of the SS Verfuegungstruppe, and especially his own SS LAH, was in peril, for though the army generals did not mind an SS LAH that spent its time marching on an asphalt parade ground, and indeed they insulted Dietrich’s soldiers by calling them ‘asphalt soldiers’, but they had strenuously objected to an SS LAH that was a rival to an army regiment. Moreover, the army generals did not treat Dietrich as a fellow officer with an SS rank equivalent to army oberst [colonel], but instead saw him as nothing more than a jumped-up unteroffizier [sergeant] from the Great War.
However, Dietrich was one of the few Germans who had commanded a tank in the Great War, and as he was no fool he h
ad kept up on armored tactics. He had some veteran warriors with him, such as Willi Bittrich, but he was highly impressed by his youthful green officers, including Karl Kreutz, Albert Frey, Max Hansen, Kurt Meyer, Hubert Meyer, Wilhelm Mohnke, Rudolf Lehmann, Martin Gross, Martin Kohlroser, Gustav Knittel, Rudolf Sandig, Hugo Ullerich and Theodore ‘Teddi’ Wisch. In fact Wisch had been an enlisted man for three years and was now a battalion commander, and still only thirty-two. Dietrich was also pleased with his enlisted men, such as Rottenfuehrer Michael Wittman, who had left the army to become an armored car driver in the SS LAH. In fact most of Dietrich’s officers had entered the SS as enlisted men and had served as a ‘rottenfuehrer’ or ‘scharfuehrer’ before going to officer’s candidate school. There were no ‘airs’ in this outfit and few aristocrats with the ‘von’ in front of their names. Indeed one of the reasons the army generals hated the SS Verfuegungstruppe was that the SS officer corps was for the most part made up of common folk, sons of milkmen and mechanics. Of course there were some commoners [i.e. non-aristocrats] within the German Army officer corps too, men such as Erwin Rommel, but they had to play the game, acknowledging the class system or they would never rise in rank. In fact most generals despised Rommel, because of his humble origins. Within the SS Verfuegungstruppe the officers called each other by first names, and some officers actually allowed their enlisted men to call them by a first or last name. E.g. within the SS Deutschland Fritz Witt was ‘Fritz’ to just about everybody. Unlike the British and US armed forces, where an increase in responsibility usually brought a promotion, in the German forces one’s rank was not a reflection of one’s job. This was especially true in the SS.
There was another reason why the army generals were loathe to accept SS officers as equals. Prior to 1919 the ‘German’ Army was in fact divided into several state armies, the largest being the Prussian Army. And in 1919 when these armies were amalgamated into the Reichswehr, i.e. the new German Army, most of its generals were drawn from Prussia, whereas the SS drew its officers from all over Germany and even outside Germany. Only a minority were Prussians. Despite Hitler’s talk of the New Order and the Third Reich, good old-fashioned regionalism was still rife among the Germans. As recently as twenty-three years before Hitler’s birth Prussia had warred against Bavaria, a fellow German state. In 1939 England as a unified nation was a thousand years old, the USA was 163 years old, but Germany as a unified nation was only 68 years old! Rommel had spent the Great War in the Wurttemberg Army not the Prussian Army, and had only transferred to the new German Army in 1919 - yet another reason he was disliked by the ‘Prussian’ generals. No one needed to remind the generals that Hitler was an Austrian and had served in the Bavarian Army during the Great War. Behind his back the generals called him ‘that Bohemian Corporal’, a reference to a rumor that he was part Bohemian [i.e. Czech].