by J. Lee Ready
Dietrich was keenly aware of these social hills his men had to climb, and he demanded firm resolve and audacity, because they had to make a name for themselves in the coming battle or the SS Verfuegungstruppe might have no future. Yet he would always temper his orders with a cautionary command: “Bring my boys back.”
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Theodore Eicke had hoped that his SS Totenkopfverbaende would be accepted by the rest of the ‘fighting’ SS [i.e. the SS Verfuegungstruppe] and would be given a combat mission. But Hausser refused to allow this. However, Himmler did accept three of Eicke’s standarten for the coming campaign – 2nd SS Brandenburg Totenkopf, 3rd SS Thueringien Totenkopf and 4th SS Ostmark Totenkopf. But he only assigned them occupation duty.
Though Eicke’s SS Totenkopfverbaende were not part of the SS Verfuegungstruppe, and thus legally were still civilians, he had mobilized them, which meant they could no longer perform their normal job as outer perimeter camp guards. To man the empty guard towers Himmler called up reservist members of the Allgemeine SS and assigned them to this job, which even the army had to admit was an essential civilian occupation. Initially most of these SS men were happy about this call up by Himmler, because it prevented them from being called up by the army. After all, they had volunteered to be reservists in the SS because they liked the status, the fancy uniform and the benefits it brought, to enable them to inflate their importance in their hometowns. Had they wanted to charge onto a battlefield, they would have joined the regular army. Himmler’s call up kept them off the battlefield, but it also took them away from home. However, once they were inducted into the SS KZL and saw what was expected of them, namely to keep convicted gangsters, murderers and rapists and Communist saboteurs inside the wire and shoot them if they tried to cross it, they realized they had been given a job as important as that of fighting at the front. Eicke made sure these men learned his philosophy of ‘the enemy behind the wire’. As Eicke would be off playing ‘soldier’ from now on, his deputy, fifty year old Sturmbannfuehrer Richard Gluecks, became de facto Inspector of Concentration Camps.
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Funnily enough, the first SS personnel to see action in this new war were not members of the SS Verfuegungstruppe. Theoretically the city of Danzig was ruled directly by the League of Nations and other international bodies, but in fact it was controlled by the Poles, though its people were Germans. Himmler had tasked Eicke with creating the SS Danzig Heimwehr [Home Force], and Eicke had convinced about 500 Danzig residents to come to Germany to join it. Eicke topped them off with an equal number of SS Totenkopfverbaende and gave command of the force to Sturmbannfuehrer Hans Goetze. This fellow had earned his spurs, having been a soldier in the Great War, but he probably owed his current promotion to the fact that his father, Friedemann Goetze, was an SS brigadefuehrer, one of the oldest men in the service.
Now, on 1 September 1939, the first day of the war, SS Danzig Heimwehr was given the opportunity to liberate its hometown. Its members crossed the German/Danzig border and aimed straight for the post office, which besides postal workers also housed Polish troops. The gun battle was fierce and the SS men took no prisoners. Following their speedy victory they crossed the Danzig/Polish border and attacked along the coast.
Meanwhile, the Polish Army soon began a complete retreat into various pockets, one of them hoping to turn Warsaw into a fortress. Felix Steiner had not been provided with sufficient fuel for his trucks by the army, despite the fact that he was supposed to keep up with Kempf’s tanks. Therefore most of his SS Deutschland soldiers ended up walking across the East Prussia-Polish border along dusty dirt roads like ordinary infantry.
At Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) in angry response to the invasion Polish troops massacred innocent Volksdeutsch. There were smaller massacres elsewhere. These were a godsend for Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda machine that could now honestly claim to the Volksdeutsch in Poland that they needed to be liberated. The propaganda worked and many a Volksdeutsch aided the invading German troops. Many Volksdeutsch soldiers of the Polish Army eagerly defected.
Finally near Lielau [Mlawa] Steiner and his SS Deutschland were given a combat mission, but everything the army promised him failed to materialize, so the SS attack failed. The army generals blamed the SS rather than their own errors. Perhaps they had even set him up to fail.
The Germans were still learning modern warfare at this stage of the war, but already they had implemented several brilliant innovations, such as the idea of using cab ranks of Stuka dive-bombers on call, so that they could be used to bomb Polish defenses as and where the German ground troops discovered them. Another innovation was the tactic of sending motorized formations around the bombed Polish positions in order to drive into the Polish supply lines, leaving any Polish die-hards to be crushed by the walking German infantry. This Blitzkrieg [lightning war] as the Germans called it had been invented by General Heinz Guderian, who acknowledged a deep indebtedness to the books and articles of an Englishman, Basil H. Liddell-Hart. As a result the Poles were frozen into a flux: a state of indecision.
The next mission that Kempf afforded to Steiner’s SS Deutschland was to attack alongside the 4th Panzer Brigade’s SS reconnaissance unit led by Standartenfuehrer Matthias Kleinheisterkamp in order to chase the Poles towards the Narew River. Kleinheisterkamp was a forty-six year old decorated veteran of the Great War and a professional soldier, who had joined the SS in 1934. This SS attacked succeeded and soon had the Poles on the run. Nonetheless, the Polish forts around Rozan held out, so Steiner and Kleinheisterkamp were ordered to settle down to a bloody siege, while the army continued to advance and gain the lion’s share of publicity.
If the soldiers of the SS Deutschland were angry with the army for being left behind, those of the SS Germania were absolutely livid, because the army would not allow this standarte to fight as a unit, and instead ordered its people shunted about to various localities. One of its companies was counter attacked by an entire battalion of Poles, but these SS repelled the attack and took over five hundred prisoners, before a second wave of Poles forced them back.
Only after the Poles at Rozan had retreated could Steiner’s and Kleinheisterkamp’s troops advance again, and they received a rebuff when a Polish unit counterattacked them south of Lomza.
Meanwhile the SS LAH was riding in trucks behind army tanks and had a perilous but swift advance. Only at Pabianice in southwestern Poland were they detrucked to make an infantry assault. They won the rough fight, but only with the aid of army troops. The SS LAH was then counterattacked by Poles trying to break out of an encirclement. For two days the SS troops shot down charging Polish infantry.
By the tenth day of the war the SS Deutschland was across the Bug River, advancing into central Poland through town after town: Kaloszym, Siedlce and Zelechow.
On 12 September a sturmbann [battalion] of the SS Germania reached the San River, crossed it that night and chased off the Polish defenders, enabling the German Army’s 8th Infantry Division to have a free crossing.
The SS LAH was now rushed to the Bzura River to help trap another Polish force.
Meanwhile Kleinheisterkamp’s men reached the Vistula River east of Warsaw on the 16th.
On the 17th, as part of a secret deal with Hitler, Stalin sent the Soviet Union’s Red Army into eastern Poland to crush Polish defenses there.
A few days later Kempf gave Steiner another siege mission, one that the SS troops did not relish - to surround the two forts at Modlin and Zacrozym. For a week Steiner’s men waged siege warfare, and then on the 29th they leapt from their trenches and stormed Zacrozym, whereupon Modlin surrendered. Generalmajor Kempf praised the performance of the SS troops under his command.
Within days the remaining troops of the Polish Army either surrendered or escaped to neutral Romania.
The world was astonished at the speed of the German advance. The Germans were equally astonished. The Poles had fought well at small unit level, but their generalship was woefully inadequate, and when
they counterattacked German tanks with horse cavalry: well the outcome was never in doubt. And of course the Soviet Union’s invasion sounded the death knell for the Poles. German and Soviet soldiers met and shook hands.
The big picture showed that it was one of the most impressive victories in history. The Polish Army of three million men had been utterly defeated in seven hundred hours. Any further Polish resistance was suicidal. But the speed of the campaign belied the fact that it had been no cakewalk for the Germans. Their losses were 16,000 killed and 32,000 wounded, of which the SS LAH’s share was 400 killed and wounded, about 15% of the unit.
Several soldiers of the SS Verfuegungstruppe were decorated for heroism in this campaign, including Max Hansen, Walter Harzer, Peter Hansen, Fritz Vogt, Wolfgang Joerchel, Rudolf Lehmann, Karl Kreutz, Albert Frey, Otto Baum and Kurt Meyer. Indeed some were awarded two decorations, such as Willi Bittrich, Wilhelm Mohnke and Teddi Wisch of the SS LAH, Johannes Muehlenkamp of the SS Germania and Fritz Witt and Karl Gesele of the SS Deutschland. Others like twenty-two year old platoon commander Walter Schmidt were praised for their conduct. Karl Kreutz, now an artillery battery commander, was particularly happy, because his hometown of Bromberg had been liberated from the Poles after twenty years of occupation.
In fact as a military enterprise the victory was marred with just one single flaw: in response to the invasion of Poland the French and British had declared war on Germany!
With the two largest empires in the world at war with Germany, the press soon began referring to this conflict as World War Two, thereby relegating the Great War to the name ‘World War One’.
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The combat might be over for the troops in Poland, but the killing had only just begun. In September 1939 POW - prisoner of war - camps were set up all over Germany to house captured Polish soldiers. The Germans decided that their army should guard army prisoners, the Luftwaffe should guard captured airmen and the Kriegsmarine should guard captured enemy sailors. However, so many POWs had been taken that for administrative purposes some POW camps were placed under the kommandants of Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.
Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland like a Christmas turkey. Eastern Poland populated by 5.3 million Poles, 4.5 million Ukrainians, 1.1 million Byelorussians, 1.1 million Jews, 200,000 Lithuanians and 134,000 Volksdeutsch was annexed by the Soviet Union. Western Poland with 9.2 million Poles, 620,000 Volksdeutsch, 580,000 Jews, 100,000 Kashubians and 71,000 Czechs was annexed by Germany and given the name of Wartheland. Central Poland was taken by Hitler and would henceforth be known by the Germans as the General Government with its capital at Cracow, and it would be run by the Nazi party. This region contained 9.8 million Poles, 1.2 million Jews, 357,000 Ukrainians and 60,000 Volksdeutsch.
The Soviet NKVD took eastern Poland in its iron grasp, and over the next two years would arrest almost one person in twelve for a real or imagined anti-Communist act and send them to concentration camps in the Soviet Union. Conditions were so bad in this Soviet-occupied zone that many people, Jews included, fled into the Nazi zone.
Hitler planned to have an iron grip on the Poles, and to this end he and Himmler had planned a major police presence, but the British and French declaration of war had made the police presence all the more necessary, for the German Army now had to rush westwards and man the Franco-German border. There would be few German troops left in Poland.
The Orpo sent ordinary German policemen to help secure the Wartheland and the General Government, accompanied by seventeen battalions of the German Police Reserve, which was now activated to full-time service, and together they worked alongside the local Polish police and the German Army. Polizei Oberstleutnant Hermann Franz was the Orpo liaison officer with Eighth Army [Franz had been a Saxon Army soldier in World War One]. Owing to language differences the Polish police was manned by Volksdeutsch in Volksdeutsch towns, by Poles in ethnic Polish towns, by Byelorussians in Byelorussian towns and by Ukrainians in ethnic Ukrainian districts. From now on all these police would take direct orders from Himmler himself passed on by his representative SS Gruppenfuehrer Guenther Pancke. Thus again we see a blending of police and SS. Himmler thought Pancke would make a good ‘cop’, because he had been a farmer in South America!
Soon the Volksdeutsch members of the Polish police in the Wartheland were transferred to the German police – Orpo.
Rudolf Wiesner, a Volksdeutsch member of the Polish government had been arrested by the Polish police, but was now liberated by the Germans. He showed his gratitude by joining the SS.
Within the two German zones [Wartheland and the General Government] Heydrich established six SS einsatzgruppen, using personnel temporarily drawn from various SS departments: SD, Kripo, Gestapo and Allgemeine SS. Some of these fellows had served in similar formations in Austria, Sudetenland and Czechia. Standartenfuehrer Bruno Streckenbach’s SS Einsatzgruppe I placed four SS einsatzkommando in the southern General Government around Cracow under Sturmbannfuehrers Ludwig Hahn, Karl Bruenner, M. Mueller and Alfred Hasselberg. Standartenfuehrer Emanuel Schaefer’s SS Einsatzgruppe II put two SS einsatzkommando into the Lublin area under Obersturmbannfuehrer Otto Sens and Standartenfuehrer Karl-Heinz Rux. Sens was ex-navy and ex-Freikorps. Schaefer was lawyer. Obersturmbannfuehrer Hans Fischer’s SS Einsatzgruppe III had two SS einsatzkommando under Sturmbannfuehrers Wilhelm Scharpwinkel and Fritz Lipphardt for the Radom district. Fischer was a long-time Gestapo official, and like Lipphardt and Scharpwinkel he was a lawyer. Brigadefuehrer Lothar Beutel’s SS Einsatzgruppe IV had two SS einsatzkommando to control the Warsaw district under Sturmbannfuehrers Helmut Bischoff and Walter Hammer. Brigadefuehrer Ernst Damzog’s SS Einsatzgruppe V had three SS einsatzkommando under Sturmbannfuehrers Walter Albath, Robert Schefe and Heinz Graefe to serve the region between Warsaw and East Prussia. Damzog, a veteran of World War One, was an Alsatian who had left home rather than live under the French. Oberfuehrer Erich Naumann’s SS Einsatzgruppe VI covered the Posen [Poznan] area with two SS einsatzkommando of Sturmbannfuehrers Franz Sommer and Gerhard Flesch.
In addition Obergruppenfuehrer Udo von Woyrsch and Oberfuehrer Otto Rasch together set up their own SS einsatzgruppe in the Wartheland, with field command under Sturmbannfuehrer Rudolf Troeger, using members of the SD, Kripo, Gestapo and police. Woyrsch was Himmler’s kind of man: World War One hero, Border Police veteran of the Polish War and participant in the Night of the Long Knives. One of Troeger’s officers was Obersturmbannfuehrer Otto Hellwig, currently taking a sabbatical from his job as head of the Sipo and SD leadership school. Troeger’s men roamed the Volksdeutsch districts, where initially they were cheered as liberators, but within days the locals watched with bewilderment as Troeger’s troops arrested Volksdeutsch trade union leaders, Communists, all non-Nazi political bosses and select individuals on their hit list. Those who went quietly were often beaten all the same, but those who showed any kind of resistance were shot on the spot in public view. Some of Troeger’s men began erecting a concentration camp at Stutthof [Sztutowo], which would eventually have forty satellite camps. In the Bromberg area, where innocent Volksdeutsch had been massacred by Poles, a mob made up of some of Troeger’s SS troopers, some SS Totenkopfverbaende soldiers and some cops of the 6th Police [Berlin] Battalion shot 800 Polish people, chosen more or less at random.
Himmler was always on the lookout for ways to expand his power, so it came as no surprise when he formed a Volksdeutsch militia in the Wartheland and called it the Selbstschutz [Self Guard]. It reported to the local police, who reported to Orpo, which of course reported to Himmler. One of the officers assigned to help train the Selbstschutz was Oberfuehrer Josef Stroop.
The Allgemeine SS also arrived and began recruiting Volksdeutsch to establish two cavalry and fourteen infantry standarten.
As for actual government Wartheland would be run by Gauleiter Arthur Greiser a local Volksdeutsch. Danzig would be controlled by Albert Forster, who was a rabid anti-Semite. The Gen
eral Government would be controlled by Otto Gustav the Baron of Waechter. Himmler was pleased for all three were SS reservists.
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In the middle of all this Himmler chose to restructure his policing administration. Obergruppenfuehrer Heydrich was given command of the new SS RSHA - Reichssicherheitshauptamt [Reich Security Head Office]. This headquarters was divided into departments called offices [Amt in German]: Amt I was the personnel [human resources] office of all SD, Gestapo and Kripo, and would be run by Brigadefuehrer Werner Best; Amt II handled the administrative duties of the SD, Gestapo and Kripo; Amt III was SD within the Reich headed by Gruppenfuehrer Otto Ohlendorf; Amt IV was Gestapo controlled by Gruppenfuehrer Heinrich Mueller; Amt V was the Kripo with Obergruppenfuehrer Artur Nebe at the helm; Amt VI was SD outside of the Reich; Amt VII performed ideological research against enemies.