by J. Lee Ready
Unfortunately Hitler did not provide enough ‘punch’, assigning control of the initial push of North Wind to Brigadefuehrer Max Simon’s XIII SS Corps, commanding the 17th SS GvB Panzergrenadier Division and the army’s 19th Infantry and 347th Volksgrenadier Divisions. At least Simon did have good artillery support. The SS GvB had been rebuilt yet again, this time taking in a considerable number of Russian Volksdeutsch. Some of the latter were mere boys that had fled the Soviet advance along with their parents.
Simon’s neighbor in this offensive would be the XIV SS Corps, but it was even weaker than Simon’s corps, possessing only one volksgrenadier division and a unit of Himmler’s personal SS escort. However, the weakest element in this corps was its commander, no less a personage than Obergruppenfuehrer von dem Bach Zelewski. A good organizer, he was nonetheless completely out of his depth in a front line command.
In reserve would be Gruppenfuehrer Brenner’s 6th SS Nord Mountain Division, which had reached Germany following an amazing escape from Finland and Norway. However, its casualties had been horrific, so that it no longer resembled a division. Therefore, it would now be referred to as SS Battlegroup Nord. Fortunately some excellent commanders had survived, including Gottlob Renz and Guenther Degen who had earned the Knight's Cross for their skill in Finland. The SS Nord also gained Standartenfuehrer Hellmuth Raithel, the mountain warfare expert.
The Norwegians of the SS Nord had remained in Norway and had been reconstituted as the 506th SS Panzergrenadier Battalion.
Operation North Wind began on New Year’s Day. Indeed the year 1945 was but five minutes old when Standartenfuehrer Hans Linger’s 17th SS GvB Panzergrenadier Division charged forward into the snowy night in the Saarguemines-Rimling area, many of its men yelling ‘Happy New Year’ in English. They slammed into the foxholes of the US 44th and 100th Infantry Divisions, but the Americans were not taken by surprise. In fact the struggle was violent and bloody, and to be truthful the poorly trained SS Volksdeutsch recruits were outclassed by the veteran GIs. Only in the Reyersvillers district did the Germans push back the Americans.
During this fight SS Battlegroup Schreiber crept through a hole in the line. This formation was part of SS Battlegroup Nord. Its 750 men were veterans of Finland, and were thus experienced in infiltrating a front line in the dark in snow.
After two days of attacks, the Germans reinforced their offensive with the remainder of SS Battlegroup Nord, which was directed to assault the US 45th Infantry Division at Wingen. The action at Wingen was fluid, and both sides lost men as prisoners and then counterattacked and liberated them. In this see-saw action Sturmbannfuehrer Gottlob Renz finally met his end.
A day later the German Army shocked the SS by dismissing several staff officers from the SS GvB and replacing them with army officers. To be sure Standartenfuehrer Linger protested.
These staff changes were to no avail and once the Americans had reinforced their line with the US 63rd Infantry Division and the French 2nd Armored Division, the German generals concluded there was no further chance of a breakthrough in Operation North Wind. On the 10th day of battle Linger was taken prisoner.
Ironically the Germans had hurt the Americans more than they realized, and on the 11th elements of SS Battlegroup Nord and some German Army units cut off and surrounded elements of three battalions of the US 45th Infantry Division at Reipertswiller. Three days later the generals ordered the SS GvB to withdraw to Germany for retraining. SS Battlegroup Schreiber was ordered to fight its way out, but only a third of the men made it.
Despite the reluctance of the army generals to continue the fight, the ordinary soldiers of SS Battlegroup Nord fought on heroically, so much so that by the 17th day of battle they had annihilated the trapped Americans, killing 200 and capturing almost 500. German army soldiers had aided the SS.
Von Treuenfeld’s 10th SS Frundsberg Panzer Division was transferred to the Hagenau Forest in order to reinforce the sudden success of Operation North Wind, and on the 17th he began his attack at Herlisheim. However, the SS found the Americans already on the run here. The Frundsberg then slowly closed up to the new US position on the Moder River.
On the 24th the SS Frundsberg crossed the near freezing Moder in rubber boats under fire between Hagenau and Kaltenhouse. They gained a bridgehead, but could not expand it. Erwin Bachmann, a twenty-three year old battalion adjutant, was awarded the Knight’s Cross for his courage and performance during this offensive.
SS Battlegroup Nord was now withdrawn to recuperate, and the SS GvB was sent to the rear to undergo retraining by the German Army.
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On 3 January the 1st SS Cossack Cavalry Division and the 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain Division assaulted the Sava River front in Croatia. However, despite being up against Bulgarian troops, rather than Soviets, they advanced only a few thousand yards in two days and then dug in. The Prinz Eugen soon gained a new commander, Oberfuehrer August Schmidhuber.
In mid-January the Bulgarians launched a major riposte along the Sava River against the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps, the 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain Division and units of the German Army and Croatian Army. This affair was little noticed by Hitler’s headquarters, nor was it given attention by Stalin’s headquarters, and it was ignored by the world’s press, yet it was a terrible bloodletting. The Axis units held their lines and inflicted no fewer than 27,000 casualties on the Bulgarians!
Meanwhile Himmler was still shuffling around the map with unit markers, and he ordered twelve of the Croatian schuma battalions to be concentrated into one formation, which he named the Gendarmerie Division.
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Having turned his back on the ‘Bulge’ and North Wind, Hitler now planned a major offensive to break through and rescue the city of Budapest. He did not give orders for the garrison to try to escape. He wanted to regain the city. The main reason was that as the capital of Hungary he felt it essential to recapture that city in order to keep the Hungarians fighting on his side. If they went the way of his other Axis partners, then only Pavelic’s Croatia and Mussolini’s Italy would be left. Japan was in no position to help Hitler. Therefore, he transferred many units to Hungary.
Considering the strain on the German armed forces at this time, Hitler’s Hungarian offensive was a major accomplishment. He chose to use three corps: Gille’s IV SS Panzer Corps, of the 3rd SS Totenkopf Panzer and 5th SS Wiking Panzer Divisions and the army’s 6th Panzer Division; the army’s LVII Panzer Corps of the 211th Volksgrenadier and 96th Infantry Divisions; and the army’s II Panzer Corps of the 1st Panzer and 23rd Panzer Divisions and 4th Cavalry (horse) Brigade. He protected the flank of the offensive with Baum’s 16th SS Reichsfuehrer Panzergrenadier Division, the army’s 8th Panzer and 13th Panzer Divisions, and the Hungarian Third Army. Most of the 1st SS Hungarian Ski Battalion was also assigned a defensive mission here, as were SS Battlegroup Ney and SS Battlegroup Hanke. Gille’s operations chief was a brilliant young staff officer Fritz Rentrop, only twenty-seven.
On the first day of the offensive, 4 January, Obersturmbannfuehrer Erwin Meierdress, the commander of a tank battalion of the SS Totenkopf, was killed in action. His men were astonished, believing him to be invulnerable. This ‘old hare’ had survived countless battles including the Demiansk Pocket and had won several medals for bravery including oak leaves to his Knight's Cross. He had recently celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday.
The offensive continued sluggishly, and on the third day the Soviets counterattacked and stopped every Axis unit. The Germans and Hungarians were determined to break through, so they chose another route and attacked again. They made some gains. SS Battlegroup Ney was part of the force that retook Szekesfehervar, but it cost Ney a quarter of his men.
Meantime inside Budapest Pfeffer-Wildenbruch was withdrawing his forces west of the Danube into the Buda half of the city. Air raids and artillery fire were turning the city into a charnel house of madness. Everywhere civilians got in the way, and corpses littered the streets. The city�
��s water pipes had long since been shattered by shellfire, but fortunately the city had several wells. In the ghettoes Jews were falling victim to Soviet shells, just as much as everyone else, and in addition they were subjected to brutal murders by insane racists. Teams of Arrow Cross men and women, blind with anger that they had been trapped in the doomed city, took out their frustrations on the Jews, beating and shooting them often while in a drunken stupor. Two of these murder squads were led by Roman Catholic priests, Father Vilmos Lucska and Father Andras Kun. Another team was led by a woman, Mrs. Vilmos Salzer, who enjoyed torturing girls to death.
Himmler was a poor excuse for a military commander, but he was good at ordering massacres. He realized Budapest would soon fall, even if Hitler still held out hope, and that would mean the liberation of the two Jewish ghettoes in the city, the unprotected one of victims earmarked for ‘special treatment’ and the protected one, which had so far been saved by the Swedes and Swiss. Only about 15,000 Jews had died in the city in the previous month. Therefore, Himmler ordered Pfeffer-Wildenbruch to exterminate both ghettoes.
As if this commander did not have enough to worry about - bullets were flying about his head on occasion - he now had to organize an ‘aktion’. He gave orders for the 1st SS Police and 6th SS Police Regiments and 200 Hungarian policemen to surround the perimeter of the unprotected Jewish ghetto, and then he passed on the orders to two killing teams, one made up of Gestapo and SD, and the other made up of Arrow Cross men led by a grateful Father Lucska. But he did not give the go-ahead just yet.
Raoul Wallenberg was secretly alerted to Himmler’s order by a senior SS officer, and the Swedish diplomat ran to talk to every senior German he could reach. He knew that asking them to disobey such an order from Himmler was signing their own death warrant.
Pfeffer-Wildenbruch might have considered himself still a policeman rather than a soldier, or maybe both. One thing is sure: he knew he was not a murderer. The other SS officers on his staff felt the same. He and his staff never implemented Himmler’s extermination order! In fact Army Generalmajor Gerhard Schmidhuber went so far as to send German troops to the ghettoes to protect Jews from Arrow Cross raiding parties.
Within days the ‘front line’ reached the ghettoes, and the Germans and Hungarians fell back into a pocket of about two square miles. The Jews were liberated by the Soviets.
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In January 1945 the Waffen SS NCO School at Lauenburg was ordered to hand over its cadets to provide NCOs for the army’s new Pomeranian Division.
This month the 27th SS Langemarck Grenadier Division went into battle against the Soviets at Zachan in Eastern Germany.
Meanwhile in the Kurland Pocket of Latvia Obergruppenfuehrer Walther Krueger was in command of VI SS Corps, now consisting of the 19th SS Lettische Division, 106th SS Lettische Panzergrenadier Regiment, the army’s 93rd Infantry Division and the Luftwaffe’s 21st Field Division. Latvians Obersturmbannfuehrer Nikolajs Galdins, Untersturmfuehrer Miervaldis Adamsons and Hauptscharfuehrer Zanis Ansons were each awarded the Knight's Cross.
Obergruppenfuehrer Keppler the commander of III SS Panzer Corps, which was also trapped in the Kurland Pocket, had little by way of encouraging news for his men, until one day in January when he was able to inform the 11th SS Nordland Panzergrenadier Division that it was shipping out to Germany. Morale had been bad recently because the men wanted to fight on the main battle line in Germany, not die defending a sliver of Latvia just to please Hitler. The fighting here had been tough. Obersturmbannfuehrer Fritz Knoechlein had certainly earned his Knight's Cross.
However, shipping out was an ordeal in itself for the Baltic Sea was now a deathtrap owing to Soviet aircraft and submarines. Fortunately for the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Volksdeutsch of the Nordland, the German Kriegsmarine was able to escort the troopships safely to Pomerania on the German coast. Once ashore, the division was ordered to build a defensive position at Stettin. They were told the Soviets might attack at any moment.
Stettin was a German city at the head of a bay known as the Oderhaff, and within its confines were several Allgemeine SS formations including the 5th Cavalry Regiment, 6th Pioneer Company and 9th Infantry Regiment. No doubt the SS Nordland troops were glad to hear of this garrison, until they found out that these units were of a much smaller size than their titles suggested, because most of their troops, reservists all, had been conscripted into the armed forces. Those who remained were either unfit for military service, such as those discharged from the Waffen SS with wounds, or were older than sixty years, or had an essential civilian occupation such as dock worker. The Waffen SS found these ‘soldiers’ to be of little help. Indeed they were a liability. Stettin also had its own Volksturm 2nd Levy of men aged 16 to 60 who had essential civilian jobs. They would not mobilize until the enemy attacked the city. Most of them were armed with a rifle and a handful of bullets or a single shot Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket.
Meanwhile back in Kurland Keppler was soon able to announce to the 4th SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Brigade and 54th SS Panzerjaeger Detachment that they and the headquarters of III SS Panzer Corps would also be shipping out to Germany. Two lowly soldiers of the Nederland had achieved fame and the Knight's Cross for their bravery: Rottenfuehrer Stefan Strapatin and Sturmmann Walter Jenschke. However, the Nederland was not as fortunate as those units that had earlier sailed to Germany: one of the troopships, the ‘Moira’, was sunk, drowning hundreds of Nederland soldiers.
The Nederland was also sent to Pomerania, and now Himmler decided to expand this unit into the 23rd SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Division, by bringing additional personnel from the Netherlands: i.e. Dutchmen who had volunteered already for some kind of service, whether SS, NSKK, OT or whatever. They were now conscripted into the Waffen SS.
This month while SS troops sailed from East Prussia and Kurland to Pomerania, Oberfuehrer Leon Degrelle was promoted to command a new formation, SS Corps West. He would have to use some of his own divisional staff officers, as no others were available, and his combat forces would consist of his own 28th SS Wallonie Grenadier Division plus the 27th SS Langemarck Grenadier Division, and whatever Volksturm and miscellaneous army units he could grab. He would also have the 101st and 102nd SS Spanish Companies. Thus Degrelle became the most promoted soldier in the war on either side, from private recruit to corps commander in three and a half years! He was the poster boy for foreign volunteers, and as such Himmler had to protect him. Recently it had come to the attention of several individuals that Degrelle’s wife back in Belgium was ‘seeing’ a Luftwaffe officer. This was a potential scandal that could have harmed Degrelle at the very moment that Himmler needed him the most, i.e. when Degrelle was the only person capable of holding the Walloon SS soldiers together. Fortunately for Himmler the Luftwaffe officer suddenly shot himself - several times!
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On 12 January the Soviets launched their long awaited Polish offensive with five army groups: 1st and 4th Ukrainian and 1st, 2nd and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts. Soviet tanks leapt forward from the Vistula River as if propelled by giant elastic rubber bands. The German front line collapsed completely. One of the first units to run away was Streibel’s battalion of SS KZL hiwis, which surely came as no surprise to the Waffen SS and army troops in the area.
As Soviet pressure mounted, one of the many units in the rear that was forced to retreat was the 26th SS Ungarische Grenadier Division, which was undergoing training in the Wartheland, and these Hungarians had to withdraw fast, but that was hard to do when under constant strafing and bombing by Soviet fighter planes while stuck in a massive traffic jam. The carnage was heartbreaking, but of even greater sadness for the divisional commander, Oberfuehrer Zoltan Pitsky, was that he had to leave behind sacrificial rearguards. To be assigned to one was a death sentence. Within days he too was dead. Oberfuehrer Berthold Maack took charge of the division. When the division finally reached safety the staff officers realized they had lost over 2,000 killed, wounded and missing i
n the retreat.
On 22 January the 2nd Byelorussian Front reached the Oder River just north of Kuestrin less than fifty miles from Berlin! The Berliners were used to hearing explosions, for they had been bombed mercilessly daily for four and a half years, but when they realized the distant rumbling was the sound of Soviet guns they shuddered with fear. When Hitler was told the origin of the noise he at first refused to believe it.
On the 26th Soviet troops swerved northwards and reached Elbing on the Baltic Sea, cutting off the entire German Third Panzer Army and Fourth Army. German casualties in Poland had already reached 110,000 this month.
In response Hitler came to the conclusion that his army generals would not fight so he created Army Group Vistula and gave the command to ‘my loyal Heinrich’, i.e. Himmler. Even the Waffen SS ‘generals’ were astonished at this order, let alone the army generals. Himmler was a good administrator and morale builder in a small room, but on the battlefield he was an unknown quantity. Whatever happened to his other major army command, the Oberkommando Oberrhein, many asked? In fact Hausser was running that army group for him.
The irony was not lost that Army Group Vistula was named after a river that the Germans no longer owned and was commanded by a man who could never become a soldier. The only shining light was that Himmler chose the veteran Brigadefuehrer Heinz Lammerding as his chief of staff.
Throughout the German towns of Pomerania teams of SD and Gestapo under orders from Obergruppenfuehrer Emil Mazuw patrolled the streets seeking out military stragglers. Aiding them were fifteen-year-old boys, members of the black-coated Streifendienst. They judged if the soldier was simply lost or a deserter. The former were pointed towards the front line. The latter were executed on the spot in public, often by hanging them from lampposts with a sign ‘Deserter’ around their neck.