by J. Lee Ready
In desperation Himmler united four German police battalions into the new 8th SS Police Regiment and sent it to the Hungarian front.
Hitler wanted to hold on to Budapest for two reasons: one, that it was a famous city from the Austrian Empire days, and two, that it was the capital of Hungary, one of only three European partners Hitler had left; the others being Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic and Pavelich’s Croatia.
Despite having to dodge Soviet artillery shells crashing on the streets of Budapest, Adolf Eichmann was busy here rounding up Jews to be transported away for ‘special treatment’. The Swedish embassy at the insistence of one of its diplomats, Raoul Wallenberg, had issued Swedish identities, passports and visas to 35,000 of the city’s Jews. As Sweden was ostensibly neutral Eichmann could not touch them. Nor could he touch the Spanish embassy, Portuguese embassy, Swiss embassy or the International Red Cross, which were also ‘hiding’ Jews. Eichmann seethed with rage, but not even Himmler could get Hitler’s permission to ignore these neutral nations - Hitler needed trade with these nations too much.
Yet the remainder of Budapest’s Jews was fair game. The Hungarian police were already forcing them to dig fortifications and anti-tank ditches, while Arrow Cross militiamen were periodically grabbing a few thousand Jewish women and children and marching them westwards across the frozen Transylvanian Alps. Taking a hint from the German SS KZL, they were using these Jews in effect as human shields protecting them from Hungarian/German military conscription. All bullies are cowards at heart and the remaining Arrow Cross militiamen were no exception. Those who had been willing to die for the cause had already long since joined the Hungarian or German armed forces. German troops on their way to the Hungarian front witnessed these Arrow Cross columns and complained about the brutal scenes. Even at this late date there were German troops who were ignorant of the campaign of genocide against Jews.
Millions of Hungarian civilians were on the move too, fleeing the Soviet advance, and this meant that thousands of Hungarian men, hitherto holding down a reserved occupation, were now unemployed as they had fled their home towns and were thus available for conscription. Perhaps having lost faith in their government many joined the SS. Some serving Hungarian soldiers also voluntarily transferred. The generals of the Hungarian Army were too impotent to complain about this. As a result Himmler began forming more SS divisions of Hungarians, using Volksdeutsch wherever possible as officers and NCOs. The 25th SS Hunyadi Grenadier Division was already performing very well at the front.
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The Polish front was still stable with German troops in the rubble of Warsaw holding the Vistula River line. However, day by day the Axis forces were being whittled down. Fighting as infantry the 11th SS Police and 23rd SS Police Regiments were annihilated.
The 15th SS Lettische Grenadier Division moved to Western Poland across the sea from Kurland to retrain and rebuild. It is possible that Himmler worried that if left in Latvia these soldiers would desert to the Nationalist partisans. Once in Poland the division was given little time to recuperate, for the Polish partisans were a serious problem. The SS Caucasus Corps was battling them, as were Germans, hiwis and osttruppen of the German Army, plus Polish and German police, and Polish and Ukrainian schumas, and the SS East Turkic Waffenverband [minus the 1st SS Tatar Mountain Brigade]. The SS Lettische was now ordered to join them.
In readiness for a new Soviet offensive into western Poland, Obersturmbannfuehrer Karl Streibel evacuated the Trawniki School, and formed his instructors and the latest class of SS KZL hiwi trainees into a battalion. But he had no intention of fighting. He used his men to force Polish civilians to dig anti-tank ditches and build fortifications.
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In Slovakia there were still some scattered partisans on the loose, so the 14th SS Galizien Grenadier Division was not only ordered to keep Wildner’s battlegroup here, but to reinforce him with another battlegroup under Sturmbannfuehrer Wittenmeyer.
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Inside Germany the towns were filling up with refugees who had fled the Soviet advance or the Anglo-American advance, and the German Red Cross and the SS VOMI, now commanded by Obergruppenfuehrer Werner Lorenz, were trying their best to cope, offering temporary housing, food and medical supplies. Apparently no serious ethnic discrimination occurred when it came to helping the needy, though these refugees were not just Germans and Volksdeutsch, but were also Flemish, Walloons, French, Luxemburgers, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Hungarians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Russians. There were of course no Jewish refugees entering Germany on their own.
Most of the refugees were given employment in war-related industries, but the German armed forces conscripted all Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian able-bodied men from the age of fifteen and a half upwards. Many were used as flak gunners. By the end of the year 22.1% of Germany’s agrarian workers and 24.9% of her industrial workers were foreigners, either volunteers or forced labor. These percentages do not include slave labor.
It was human nature that caused the refugees to gravitate towards the cities, for only large communities could provide the emergency necessities. However, this did not mean they had reached safety, for by now all of Germany’s cities had become battlegrounds in the sense that the Allied air forces were grinding them to dust. Some entire neighborhoods had been obliterated with hundreds of thousands made homeless. One tenth of all civilians in Germany killed by Allied bombs were foreign workers.
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In Italy behind the lines the remnants of the SS Italien Sturmbrigade were recuperating from many combats. Italian partisans were a major menace, and combating them were the 16th SS Reichsfuehrer Panzergrenadier Division, the 24th SS Karstjaeger Mountain Division, the Trient Security Corps, the Trieste Civic Guard, SS Police Regiment Brixen, SS Police Regiment Defregger, SS Police Regiment Alpenvorland, 15th SS Police Regiment, 1/20th SS Police Regiment and SS Police Regiment Bozen. And these were just Himmler’s people. Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Wolff also controlled German Army anti-partisan units including many osttruppen. All these units possessed Italian hiwis and kawis. In addition Mussolini had almost a half-million security personnel of his own fighting the partisans or manning the front line.
Mussolini’s Black Brigades proved to be ruthless, so much so that their fascist fanaticism had attracted the attention of Himmler, and he had stolen some of them to make the SS Karstjaeger Division. He was pleased with the result when these Italian SS swept the Piedmont for partisans, and in November 1944 he stole yet more Black Brigades to create the 29th SS Italien Grenadier Division. These Italians accepted the dubious honor with grace. Standartenfuehrer Constantin Heldman was assigned to ease these Italians into the SS.
In addition to the personnel of these two Italian SS divisions, SS Battalion Debica and SS Italien Sturmbrigade, an additional 80,000 Italians had voluntarily joined the SS by November 1944 either as members, kawis or hiwis. They performed a myriad of jobs: such as Allgemeine SS sentries; agents, translators and interrogators for the Gestapo, SD and Kripo; sentries for the SS Border Police; administrators and interpreters for the SS WVHA; and guards of the SS KZL.
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Chapter Forty
DECEMBER 1944
By 1 December 1944 the Waffen SS was a powerful entity with twice as many divisions as the British Army. They were divided into twelve corps headquarters, thirty-five division-sized formations and a host of smaller units. I SS Panzer and II SS Panzer Corps were regrouping behind the Schnee Eifel. III SS Panzergrenadier Corps and VI SS Corps were trapped in Kurland. IV SS Panzer Corps was holding the Vistula in Poland. V SS Mountain Corps was a mere shadow of its former self holding positions in Bosnia. IX SS Mountain Corps was almost surrounded in Budapest. X SS Corps was being formed in North Germany as was the XI SS Corps. XII SS Corps was really an Army formation and was in reserve on the Western Front. XIII SS and XIV SS Corps were preparing for battle in eastern Lorraine. XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps was holding the Dra
va River in Croatia.
However, it must be remembered that the Waffen SS had no real rear echelon, and had to rely upon the German Army.
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When orders came from Himmler to destroy Plaszow labor camp and kill all the inmates, Oskar Schindler a German factory owner managed to talk the SS KZL into allowing him to evacuate 1,200 Jewish men, women and children from the camp to his hometown of Brunnlitz in the Sudetenland. He even convinced them to provide him with a train and sufficient guards to accompany them and create a new labor camp there. These guards were happy to go with him in defiance of Himmler’s order, otherwise without someone to guard they would have been eligible for conscription into the Waffen SS.
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In Slovakia by December most of the surviving guerillas were scattered throughout the freezing snowy mountains, huddled together for warmth in small groups. As a result Sturmbannfuehrer Wittenmeyer and his men were allowed to rejoin their parent unit, the 14th SS Galizien Grenadier Division, but Wildner and his men were ordered to continue to sweep the mountains. The SS Galizien was also ordered to send a battlegroup under Sturmbannfuehrer Dern to man the stationary front in Hungary.
By now in western Hungary Himmler’s training officers were beginning to produce two more Hungarian divisions, the 26th SS Ungarische [Hungarian] Grenadier Division and the 33rd SS Ungarische Cavalry Division. Oberfuehrer Berthold Maack was influential in their instruction. It is possible that these units eventually contained a high number of Hungarian Volksdeutsch, but their original designation showed that it was intended that they be ethnically all-Hungarian [both Magyar and Szekler].
Budapest was almost encircled by 1 December, and knowing how much the city meant to Hitler, Himmler suggested an SS officer to command its defenses. Hitler agreed and appointed Obergruppenfuehrer Karl von Pfeffer-Wildenbruch. The Hungarian element of the city’s defenses consisted of three weak beat up infantry divisions, a devastated armored division, a mob of recruits, rear-echelon forces, the Arrow Cross Militia and the city police for a total of 37,000 men. The German portion of the defenses consisted of the IX SS Mountain Corps of the 8th SS Florian Geyer Cavalry and 22nd SS Maria Theresa Cavalry Divisions, plus some men from the 18th SS Horst Wessel Panzergrenadier Division. Additional German outfits present were the new 1st SS Police and 6th SS Police Regiments, 104th SS Police Battalion, a part of the army’s 13th Panzer Division, army rear-echelon troops, Luftwaffe flak gunners and a multitude of hiwis, for a total of about 33,000 ‘Germans’. In addition to the complete garrison of 70,000, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch would also directly command the IX SS Mountain Corps, because its commander Gruppenfuehrer Karl Sauberzweig had resigned from the SS and had returned to the army!
On the flanks of the city other Hungarians and Germans were fighting desperately. One reinforcement for the Hungarian front was Himmler’s pal, Oskar Dirlewanger, who had done so well in Warsaw and Slovakia, or so Himmler believed, that Himmler allowed him to dig up more crooks, petty thieves, murderers, rapists, tramps and gullible innocents of all nationalities to expand his brigade into the 36th SS Grenadier Division, which Dirlewanger with predictable modesty named the ‘Dirlewanger’. He had never been too particular about the ethnicity of his recruits and now that he had the approval to induct thousands he was certainly not choosy. He definitely took in full Gypsies and almost assuredly he would have accepted Mischlings and perhaps even full Jews. The division was given little useful training.
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Following Reinefarth’s outstanding service in the Warsaw insurrection, Himmler rewarded him with the command of the XVIII SS Corps, a promotion that must have caressed Reinefarth’s ego, for the best the German Army had done was to make him a feldwebel in charge of a score of men, but Reinefarth’s glee quickly turned to bewilderment when he found out that there was no such corps and that he was expected to create the formation out of thin air!
This month the Azerbaijani battalions of the SS East Turkic Waffenverband were unified as the SS Azerbaijani Waffenverband, which became part of the SS Caucasus Corps. The pride of these soldiers knowing that they had earned respect from the Germans was offset by the realization that they would never see Azerbaijan again.
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Sepp Dietrich had performed his duties in Normandy as commander of the I SS Panzer Corps and then Fifth Panzer Army with aplomb, so it was no surprise that Hitler gave him another army command, Sixth Panzer Army. Moreover, he was allowed to appoint many Waffen SS officers to his staff. He asked for Brigadefuehrer Fritz Kraemer as his chief of staff. When Dietrich was shown his new command, he could hardly believe it, for it was a more powerful force than any German soldier thought possible by late 1944: I SS Panzer Corps of the 1st SS LAH and 12th SS HJ Panzer Divisions; II SS Panzer Corps of the 2nd SS Das Reich and 9th SS Hohenstaufen Panzer Divisions; and the army’s LXVII Corps of the 12th, 272nd, 277th and 326th Volksgrenadier Divisions and the Luftwaffe’s 3rd Parachute Division. Additionally, under Dietrich’s direct command were Luftwaffe flak batteries, several army Nebelwerfer regiments, the 560th SS Jagdpanzer Detachment and the 501st SS Heavy Panzer Detachment [ex-101st].
However, upon further inspection Dietrich saw this was not as formidable as it sounded. The four Waffen SS panzer divisions had lost many of their experienced people and their manpower had been topped up with recruits as young as fifteen, some of whom had not even been born when Dietrich joined the SS. Others were Luftwaffe ground crew and Kriegsmarine sailors forcibly transferred to the Waffen SS. Moreover, some of these SS were not Germans, but Volksdeutsch who had retreated along with their parents from the Soviet advance. Some were Volksdeutsch from Belgium, who would soon be fighting inside their own hometowns.
The divisions were also low in armor. SS Das Reich contained fifty-eight Panthers, twenty-eight Mark IVs and twenty-eight StuGs. SS LAH possessed forty-two Panthers and thirty-seven Mark IVs. SS Hohenstaufen stood at fifty-eight Panthers, thirty-two Mark IVs and twenty-eight StuGs. SS HJ had thirty-seven Panthers, forty-one Mark IVs and twenty-two Jagdpanzer. Even this count was inaccurate, because some of the above Panthers had yet to arrive from the factory. The 3rd Parachute Division was a combination of young firebrands filled with Nazi spirit and older Luftwaffe ground crew no longer needed by Goering’s shrinking air force. Few of them were actual paratroopers. The volksgrenadier divisions each possessed six [or sometimes seven] light infantry battalions with some artillery and a few vehicles, and they were manned by feisty sixteen-year olds, middle-aged farmers and factory workers and grandfathers as old as sixty. Many of the older men had only just entered military service, some for the first time, and they had no love for Hitler and no ambition to die for him.
However, the biggest flaw as far as Dietrich and his staff could see was the over ambitious mission, that Hitler gave them. The Fuehrer wanted a winter offensive into Belgium and Luxemburg and he demanded no less than the city of Antwerp. This river port had recently fallen to the Allies, and they had only just begun to benefit from it. Indeed Hitler was firing hundreds of long range V-1 unmanned flying bombs at the city to try to interfere with port operations. German possession of Antwerp would first and foremost deny the Allies the use of this extremely valuable port, and secondly it would separate the Americans south of the city from the Canadians and British to its north, and that in turn would cut off the Anglo-Canadians from their supply lines, which might lead to another British seaborne evacuation as happened the last time they were trapped in Belgium [May 1940].
With profound reservations Dietrich accepted the mission, and he chose as his spearhead the SS LAH, and the tip of the spear would be Peiper’s battlegroup. This was a significant honor for Standartenfuehrer Peiper. Himmler was no doubt pleased too. He knew Peiper well. Hitler assigned the Fifth Panzer Army [Dietrich’s old command] and the Seventh Army to cover Dietrich’s southern flank during the offensive. All of the leading units would have guides who had grown up in the battle area: Luxemburgers, Belgians and Volksdeutsch.
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Himmler created a special unit for the offensive and gave its command to Otto Skorzeny. This 150th SS Trojan Horse Panzer Brigade came in three segments. One was the bulk of the unit, namely a conventional panzer/panzergrenadier force. The second segment was a task force using captured American tanks and trucks and German vehicles in US markings. The third segment was a reconnaissance force of 150 men wearing US uniforms and mounted in American jeeps with US markings. The purpose of this third segment was to use subterfuge to break through the American lines - a ruse de guerre. To enable their mission to succeed Skorzeny put out the word that he needed to talk to all Americans currently serving in the German armed forces and also to Germans who had lived in the USA for a considerable time. There were plenty of Germans who spoke some English, but they had thick accents. And those that spoke English fluently invariably spoke ‘British English’. Skorzeny needed men who spoke ‘American English’ flawlessly. For this reason he could not use the SS British Free Corps. He needed men who could converse with the Jazz-dancing, gum-chewing GIs. His first choice was the American Free Corps, a company-sized formation of Americans captured in battle and ‘turned’ by their captors. However, there were also thousands of Americans and ex-residents of the USA in the German armed forces. The actual Americans were mostly ‘Volksdeutsch’, and they knew that if caught by the Americans they would be executed as traitors. So, few of them volunteered for Skorzeny’s team. The remainder wanted to keep a low profile, but they did agree to instruct German volunteers in American slang. Most of these Americans had joined the German armed forces long before America’s entry into the war.
Himmler also asked Skorzeny’s advice about the Werewolf organization. At Hitler’s behest Himmler had set up this formation under Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Gutenberger, a long time policeman and ex-SA officer, and Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Pruetzman, who had controlled policemen in the Ukraine for three years. The formation’s purpose was to send assassins behind Allied lines to kill German community leaders who were collaborating with the enemy. Several Belgian Volksdeutsch were also on the hit list. [The Americans captured some Werewolf soldiers, and executed them, including one sixteen year-old.]