SS und Polizei: Myths and Lies of Hitler's SS and Police

by J. Lee Ready

  On 2 August Hausser ordered Dietrich to form a fire brigade [rescue force] and tidy up the situation. Dietrich sent Sturmbannfuehrer Erich Olboeter to Vire with a company of panzergrenadiers, thirteen Panthers and six Wespe self-propelled guns [all of the SS HJ] and six armored cars from the SS LAH. Upon arrival Olboeter fended off British armor, which fortunately never pressed their advantage.

  On 5 August Sandig tried to get his men out of Tilly in order to be replaced by the army’s 89th Infantry Division, but he had to do it without the Canadians noticing. He failed and the Canadian 2nd Armored Brigade and 2nd Infantry Division responded immediately and attacked Tilly and La Hogue. Yet the SS repelled them.

  Meanwhile surprising orders reached Dietrich. He was to form a strong armored force ready for a counter offensive! Naturally he replied that he had nothing to spare, and as predicted he was overruled. He reluctantly compromised, agreeing to let go of the SS LAH. The division was told that its new assembly area was to the south, miles to the rear.

  Olboeter’s men had to pull back on 6 August when the Americans took Vire.

  Thus by now Dietrich was defending the line La Hogue to the Orne River with two army divisions: the 89th and 271st. He held the 12th SS HJ Panzer Division in reserve.

  Meantime south of Normandy Hitler was already amassing his armored counter offensive, while at the same moment the US Third Army under General George S. Patton was charging westwards into Brittany and southwards through Mortain. US First Army was following him and protecting Patton’s eastern flank.

  Hausser had lost his left flank completely, and he knew his right flank troops east of the Orne were holding on only by the skin of their teeth. Yet Hitler reassured him that the armored counter offensive he was planning, which would be led by General von Kluge, would pierce through at Mortain, charge westwards to Avranches and cut off Patton’s army. It was a good plan, but it assumed there were several panzer divisions available with which to launch it. Hausser wondered: ‘Where would they come from and when?’

  Finally Hausser could take the suspense no longer, urging that von Kluge attack at once, ready or not, otherwise the Americans would be too strong in the Mortain-Avranches sector. Von Kluge agreed.

  Therefore, in the middle of the night 6th - 7th August von Kluge attacked, but this counter offensive on which so much depended was a rusty, sluggish affair. Baum’s 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division began its part of the counter offensive by encircling the sleeping city of Mortain. The army’s 2nd Panzer Division advanced around Juvigny and St. Barthelmy. The reconnaissance battalion of the 1st SS LAH Panzer Division attacked an element of the US 9th Infantry Division at Le Mesnil-Tove and pushed the Yanks out before dawn.

  At daylight the American 30th Infantry Division (reinforced) woke up to find Germans all around them. The GIs fought back with hand held weapons, artillery and a few tank destroyers. The Germans were in fact astonished by the ferocity of their resistance.

  At 0800 hours the SS LAH reconnaissance battalion, having covered six miles, ran into elements of the US 30th Infantry Division at Le Mesnil-Adelee.

  In the early light the 2nd Panzer Division, having surrounded St Barthelmy, began attacking the village itself through a dense fog ably supported by about half of the SS LAH’s tanks plus Dinse’s panzergrenadier battalion. By noon they had taken the village, but then the fog lifted, and within minutes the Germans were under air attack. That afternoon the Americans counterattacked Le Mesnil-Tove using a combat command from the US 3rd Armored Division, some infantry of their 9th Division and a tank battalion. The 2nd Panzer and SS LAH Panzer Divisions soon began falling back. As the tank strength of a US armored division was no greater than that of a British armored brigade they were often temporarily beefed up with extra armor.

  Hausser never did have much faith in this counter offensive, and now less than twenty-four hours into it he knew it was already over. He demanded permission for his entire Seventh Army to retreat. Von Kluge was making similar noises about his own forces.

  That night the St. Barthelmy sector was reinforced by both sides. The Americans brought in part of their 4th Infantry Division, and the Germans brought up the remainder of the SS LAH [minus a small battlegroup under Schiller helping the army’s 84th Infantry Division back in Normandy].

  While von Kluge was managing his counter offensive, back in Normandy in the early hours of the 7th the British 59th Infantry Division broke across the Orne in the rear of the German 271st Infantry Division, and Dietrich had to call upon one of his reserve formations, namely Wuensche’s battlegroup of all arms from the SS HJ. With thirty-four Panthers and Mark IVs, some mobile flak guns, about ten Tigers, a few batteries of self-propelled artillery and two battalions of Mohnke’s panzergrenadiers, Wuensche was confident as he rolled forward. The flak guns were quite necessary. Indeed before long the convoy was attacked by several medium bombers. At 1830 hours on the 7th Wuensche collided with the British 34th Tank Brigade and 59th Infantry Division. His people inflicted fearful losses on the British tanks and foot soldiers, but Allied artillery support and air power was most effective. Untersturmfuehrer Kurt Bogensperger’s tank was blown apart and he was mortally wounded. A stalemate quickly developed.

  South of Normandy on the foggy morning of 8 August Rudolf Sandig sent some panzergrenadiers into Bellefontaine and Juvigny, but they quickly withdrew under fire, and for the rest of the day four German panzer divisions [1st SS LAH, 116th, 2nd and 2nd SS Das Reich] held their positions against fierce counter attacks by American infantry, artillery and tanks, while under constant raids by the mixed nationality Allied air force.

  Meanwhile in Normandy in the dark early hours of the 8th Dietrich‘s headquarters was blasted by a devastating air raid, following which his front line was assaulted by tank/infantry teams from the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division and 2nd Armored Brigade and British 79th Armored Division, 33rd Tank Brigade and 51st Infantry Division. Moreover the Allies advanced behind a rolling artillery barrage.

  Ironically the smoke from burning vehicles, flaming houses and smoldering trees and the dust from explosions coupled with the pre-dawn darkness made everyone on both sides blind as bats. The German infantry fell back three miles under orders, abandoning Tilly.

  Wuensche was ordered to fall back, and he safely did so, having lost nine Panthers and 122 men in 24 hours. Meyer ordered him to use his battlegroup to hold Potigny while he himself with the rest of the SS HJ would counterattack. In broad daylight while Meyer was organizing this maneuver a large formation of Allied four-engine bombers flew right overhead and began dropping bombs. Indeed the bombs straddled the front line so that they inflicted as much damage on the Allies as they did on the Germans. One of the casualties was the commander of the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division.

  As the empty bombers flew away Meyer sent half of the SS HJ into battle. He was fortunate to have been reinforced by the 101st SS Heavy Panzer Detachment of Tigers now led by the redoubtable Wittman. About 1430 hours this half of the division was involved in a head on collision with the enemy advance of fresh and fully equipped armored units [Canadian 4th Armored Division, Polish 1st Armored Division and British 8th Armored Brigade], yet unbelievably at odds against them of ten to one Meyer’s men and machines drove back all of this fresh armor, and furthermore they did it with comparatively few losses, though Meyer was shocked to learn that Wittman did not return. In fact the whole Waffen SS was stunned by the loss of Wittman, the ex-army soldier, who had been with them in every campaign starting with the Battle of Flowers in Austria, coming up through the ranks to become one of the highest decorated soldiers in the Third Reich. He had just turned thirty years old.

  In the Mortain sector 9 August was a repeat of the previous day for von Kluge’s panzer forces, yet Hitler was demanding a resumption of the counter offensive. So far von Kluge had only advanced a third of the way to Avranches.

  On the 9th in Normandy Wuensche got into the act again by sending a small tank force to destroy an impudent Canadian inf
antry advance in the center of his line. Later Canadian tanks showed up and Wuensche whipped them too, aided by Canadian fighters that strafed their own men. In fact this day in this part of the line the Canadians suffered forty-seven tanks destroyed and about 300 infantry casualties, whereas Wuensche’s personnel losses were light and not one of his tanks was irreparably damaged.

  The Poles of the Polish 1st Armored Division quickly recovered from the shock of their first fight, and they attacked again, and this time they began pushing back Meyer’s forces. Meyer soon lost Cauvicourt, and later that night the SS evacuated St. Sylvain and St. Martin. This put the Poles twelve miles north of the Falaise-Vire road, over which Hausser intended to retreat. If this road and the one parallel to it at Argentan were taken by the Poles and Canadians, then Hausser’s entire Seventh Army would be surrounded!

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  By 1 August two major Soviet drives were crossing Poland, one of the 2nd and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts ostensibly aiming at Warsaw, while the other of the 1st Byelorussian Front was pointed at Cracow. Himmler formed the IV SS Panzer Corps and gave its first commander Gruppenfuehrer Gille responsibility for ensuring the Soviets did not cross the Vistula River. Gille would have the 3rd SS Totenkopf and 5th SS Wiking Panzer Divisions [and the excellent Brigadefuehrer Kurt Brasack to command his artillery]. Yet these divisions were losing experienced warriors daily. Hauptsturmfuehrer Waldemar Riefkogel, a Totenkopf tank leader and hero of Kursk, would have been invaluable now, but he had been killed in the retreat. The Wiking troops were sickened that Guenther Sitter one of their heroic leaders was killed in an accident, of all things.

  In fact the Soviets halted at the Vistula, but this was not owing to Gille’s efforts, but rather because they had outrun their supply lines. But a stable line did not mean a peaceful one. Casualties mounted. Sturmbannfuehrer Rudolf Saeumenicht was a renowned tank commander, had earned four medals serving with the SS Totenkopf and had been wounded, and now served with the SS Wiking, but here the twenty-eight year old finally pushed his luck too far. He was killed. In the Totenkopf Division Sturmbannfuehrer Arzelino Masarie was mortally wounded. He had been well decorated for his reconnaissance abilities.

  Himmler also formed the XII SS Corps and gave it to his chief recruiter, Obergruppenfuehrer Curt von Gottberg, but this lackey soon realized he was out of his depth and he applied for ‘sick leave’. In fact this corps never really did entice any SS units to join it and by autumn the army had taken it over.

  The SS Charlemagne Sturmbrigade was ordered to defend Sanok at all costs. These Frenchmen did so and suffered 137 killed and 669 wounded in two weeks - 50% casualties. Then they were withdrawn to Danzig for a rest.

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  For five years following the German conquest of Poland life was hell for the Christian people of Warsaw. Most were assigned to forced labor, some in Warsaw or other parts of Poland and some in Germany. Many had been arrested on suspicion of anti-Nazi behavior and sent to a concentration camp. Others were sent to a slave labor camp for the possession of a ham or a chicken when unauthorized. A few had been lined up against a wall and shot in revenge for someone else’s crime. Of course it had been worse for the Jews: they had been slowly exterminated until their ghetto was empty. By 1944 not even rats roamed the ghetto streets.

  Yet to rise up and fight back was a serious act that required great courage, thus few Poles joined the anti-Nazi guerilla forces. For five years the Polish police, German police, Kripo, SD and Gestapo had fought a clandestine war against these will o’ the wisp urban guerillas. It was a frustrating conflict for both sides. The vast majority of incidents were not publicized by the Nazis, but some had to be admitted, e.g. when Polish guerillas assassinated the SSPF for Warsaw, Brigadefuehrer Franz Kutschera in February 1944.

  But by the end of July 1944 this was all about to change. The largest of the resistance movements, the AK [Home Army], which was a loose confederation of political activists, was quietly assembling 40,000 members [4,000 of them female]. A few at a time, they slipped into Warsaw. The second largest group, the NSZ, spent as much time killing Jews and Communists as they did knocking off Germans, and lately they had flocked to eastern Poland to fight the Red Army. The third largest resistance group was the Communists, with probably 2,000 guerillas in Warsaw. They were neighborly with the AK, but fought the NSZ on sight.

  The 2nd Byelorussian Front had now reached Praga, the town opposite Warsaw on the east bank of the Vistula. Only one more river crossing and the Soviets would be in Warsaw. The German Ninth Army of General Niklaus von Vormann was under orders to prevent this from happening. In the immediate vicinity he had Gille’s IV SS Panzer Corps [of the SS Totenkopf and SS Wiking] and the army’s 45th Grenadier and 19th Panzer Divisions and the Luftwaffe’s Herman Goering Panzer Division.

  The city of Warsaw was controlled by Nazi administrators, who relied heavily on Polish civil servants and on the police. The police headquarters in the aptly named Police Street controlled over a thousand Polish and German policemen. These men were assigned standard police duties such as traffic, patrolling and investigations. Actually some of these ‘Germans’ were Polish Volksdeutsch and ‘margarine Germans’. Another thirty Polish cops worked at the Police Presidium, and 220 were based at Ul Wieska. In addition the city had policemen ready for large-scale operations: 200 Ukrainian hiwas at Ul Wieska; and sixty German gendarmerie at Dworkowa. There were also police sentries: 120 Poles at the waterworks, 100 Poles at the electric power station and sixty Poles at the cold storage depot. The city could also activate 250 Polish police reservists and 400 Volksdeutsch members of the SA in an emergency.

  The city was also the capital of a district, and the district KdO had 300 Polish officials, detectives and civilian employees. Furthermore he controlled units of police ready to be trucked into the countryside when needed: 800 Polish and German police divided into three field battalions, plus another 220 in an independent formation; as well as 250 German Gendarmerie, 150 Cossack hiwas and 80 Ukrainian hiwas. In an emergency the KdO could call upon 150 Polish police reservists and 200 Volksdeutsch SA.

  There were other police in the city, such as prison guards, air raid warden police, fire department police, post office police, rail station police and train guards. Almost all were Poles.

  The city also had a KdS, who controlled the Gestapo, Kripo and SD, a total of 150 Germans and several hundred Poles. For large-scale dirty work the KdS controlled a company of Ukrainian schumas, a 500-man battalion of German police and 900 Germans of the 22nd SS Police Regiment.

  The KdS and KdO were under the overall control of the SSPF, Oberfuehrer Paul Geibel. He was a retired naval officer. Geibel had 30 SS administrators at his headquarters at Aleje Roz and 700 Ukrainian schumas to protect them.

  Apart from the front line forces that had fallen back into Warsaw, the German armed forces had other personnel in the city, namely 500 Waffen SS recruits and instructors in military schools, 1,300 Luftwaffe men performing administrative duties or working as ground crews at the airport or manning flak guns, and several thousand army personnel in various units including engineers, supply, administration and medical. The 174th Reserve Division despite its name was in fact a holding barracks for recruits on their way to schools or front line units and for veterans returning from hospital. The city also saw many German women in uniform by now, and not just as office personnel. The fire service had begun to accept women, and the Luftwaffe’s flak units had started to take in girls as young as fifteen. All armed forces personnel that were permanently stationed in the district came under the command of an Austrian, Luftwaffe General Rainer Stahel.

  There were also significant numbers of paramilitary personnel such as the OT, which had hundreds of members in the vicinity erecting military fortifications, the OT-Schutzkommando that guarded thousands of slave workers, the TeNo with hundreds of members responsible for emergency maintenance work, an NSKK detachment providing vehicle transportation to whomever required it, an RAD formation of a
few hundred seventeen-year old German youths undergoing compulsory government manual labor, and the Werkschutz that guarded slave workers and protected factories. All of these were armed for self-protection, whether German, Volksdeutsch, Ukrainian or Poles. The German state railway had also armed its German employees here.

  Of the civilian population of Warsaw about 920,000 were Poles, circa 16,000 were Germans who had come in since 1939, and perhaps 20,000 were Volksdeutsch, either newcomers who had come in from the provinces or local Poles who had become ‘margarine Germans’. The number of foreign volunteer workers is harder to judge, perhaps a few thousand, including about 5,000 Ukrainians. There were also thousands of foreign forced labor and slave labor.

  Recently several army units had retreated to the city. The 17th Division reflected the reality of the German Army by summer 1944, for it had lost its German infantry battalions on the battlefield, and its ‘teeth’ were now the 786th Turkestani Battalion, 2/791st Turkestani Regiment, 580th Russian Cavalry Detachment [about 250 men], 252nd (German) Guard Battalion and 1/818th Azerbaijani Regiment. The rear echelon of the division was a mixture of Germans, Volksdeutsch and hiwis. Attached to the division were seven army engineer battalions and six companies of German and Volksdeutsch police from the 25th SS Police Regiment.

  There were therefore at least 25,000 Axis armed personnel in the city ready immediately to face the 42,000 guerillas in the city.

  Despite all of these security chiefs each with his own prestige at stake, General von Vormann as the commander of the Ninth Army had every right to commandeer the entire body of security forces inside Warsaw, owing to a long standing arrangement between Himmler and the army that the latter held sway over all land up to thirty miles from the front line.

  The hotheads within the AK argued for an all out insurrection to grab Warsaw for the Poles rather than trade Hitler for Stalin. It was a hopeless gesture, because the AK leadership did not believe they could defeat the Germans on their own, and if they invited Stalin’s forces to help them - well, the very thought was terrifying, inviting one devil in to drive another out. Only the Communist guerillas wanted the Soviets to take Warsaw. But the hotheads argued that they could ask the Polish Army to help them. By this they meant the army of General Berling, which had been created by Stalin from Poles he had captured during his invasion of 1939 and from young Poles he had conscripted between September 1939 and June 1941. Stalin had been so desperate for troops in 1941 he not only created this new Polish Army, but allowed those Poles who did not wish to serve under his leadership to form their own army under General Anders, which walked all the way to British territory. By 1944 Anders’ army was fighting the Germans in Italy.