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

by J. Lee Ready

  Dietrich put a battlegroup of the 37th SS Luetzow Cavalry Division into Wiener Neustadt to aid the SS LAH. It was commanded by Obersturmfuehrer Karl Keitel, the son of General Keitel the chief of staff of the armed forces.

  However, by nightfall on the 3rd the SS LAH began withdrawing from Wiener Neustadt, and Dietrich ordered elements of the SS Das Reich to rush to the north of Vienna to prevent the enemy from outflanking the city’s defenses. Further to the north around Fuerstenfeld the 3rd SS Totenkopf Panzer, 5th SS Wiking Panzer and most of the 37th SS Luetzow Cavalry Divisions dug in.

  In the Austrian town of Graz Sturmbannfuehrer Willi Schweitzer was ordered to raise a battlegroup based upon the 11th SS Training and Replacement and 18th SS Training and Replacement Battalions [of the 11th SS Nordland and 18th SS Horst Wessel Panzergrenadier Divisions] - in other words mostly fifteen- and sixteen-year old recruits.

  On the 4th the Soviets surrounded Vienna, but then they suddenly appeared to stop. Had they outrun their supplies again, the Germans wondered? Hitler chose to take advantage of this situation and ordered a counter attack. The unit that drew this dubious quality mission was the IV SS Panzer Corps, which now had under orders the 3rd SS Totenkopf Panzer Division, 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division and 14th SS Galizien Grenadier Division, plus the 1st SS Hungarian Ski Battalion and two battalions from the 11th SS Nordland Panzergrenadier Division - one of Danes and one of Norwegians. To reinforce the counter attack some bright spark in the higher headquarters of German Second Army sent 2,500 Luftwaffe ground crewmen without rifles to the SS Galizien. The divisional staff replied that they did not have sufficient extra weapons for these men. Whereupon Second Army suggested that 2,500 Ukrainians should hand over their own weapons and let the airplane mechanics do the fighting while the Ukrainians became ‘labor troops’. The SS officers were astonished at this blatant racism. To disarm a Waffen SS soldier, even a Ukrainian, in order to arm an aircraft mechanic or a clerk typist was not only lunacy, but also a tremendous insult to the Waffen SS and to the Ukrainians.

  Somehow or other the German Second Army found enough rifles for the airmen, who had most likely not really wanted weapons anyway.

  However, the Ukrainians did receive a good morale-building shot in the arm. Hitler agreed that the division could join the Ukrainian Liberation Army.

  The SS Wiking lost a great tank commander, Sturmbannfuehrer Fritz Vogt.

  On the 7th Obersturmbannfuehrer Hans Dorr, a regimental commander of the SS Wiking, celebrated his thirty third birthday. Thrice wounded in this war and the most decorated man in the division he was surprised he had lived this long.

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  Himmler was still trying to turn policemen into combat soldiers in order to retain control over them. He had lost most of his ‘cops’ to military conscription or to the Volksturm 2nd Levy. In early April he placed the 8th SS Police Regiment and new 50th SS Police Regiment into the new 1st SS Police Jaeger Brigade, and ordered them to stem the Soviet advance in Austria.

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  On 1 April the US 2nd Armored Division of US Ninth Army met the US 3rd Armored Division of US First Army at Lippstadt, thus trapping Army Group B and other forces inside the Ruhr industrial zone. Naturally many assumed Hitler would order the trapped troops to break out. Instead he urged them to fight to the bitter end on the north, eastern and southern flanks to defend the factories, while XII SS Corps manned the Ruhr Pocket’s western flank along the Rhine between Duisburg and Siegburg.

  This same day Obersturmbannfuehrer Stern’s SS Panzer Brigade Westfalen was forced to abandon Paderborn, but he had managed to fall back eastwards and thus was not trapped inside the Ruhr Pocket. His men were still full of fight and he retreated towards Eleventh Army, hoping to join them in their counteroffensive. Yet he must have been dismayed when he reached their positions to find this army digging in with no thought of counter attacking. They were just 170 miles from Berlin.

  But to the north of the Ruhr Pocket the Canadian First Army was pouring northwest into the Netherlands and the British were aiming for Berlin, while to the east of the Ruhr the US Ninth Army was aiming for Magdeburg, and to the south of the Ruhr the US First, Third and Seventh Armies and French First Army were flooding into Southern Germany.

  In most towns there was no resistance, but in a few the Allies met tough opposition from small bands of die-hards. Teenage SS recruits showed spirit if little training in several local fights such as at Hameln and Detmold.

  On 3 April SS Panzer Brigade Westfalen and the Eleventh Army gave the US 11th Armored Division a hot reception, but then the Americans suddenly stopped along the line Muehlhausen-Gotha-Suhl. The Germans were at a loss as to why the Americans had halted. Three days later another surprise came: the Americans diverted eighteen divisions from their sweep across Germany to return to crush the Ruhr Pocket. Moreover the British were streaming northwards now towards Bremen and Hamburg. The Canadians were still attacking into the Netherlands, pushing back among others the 34th SS Landstorm Grenadier Division. It looked like no one was advancing on Berlin. Even the Soviets who had been an afternoon’s drive from Hitler’s capital for over two months, as yet showed no signs of advancing. It was puzzling.

  Hitler was not surprised, though, because his astronomer had told him he was going to win the war! The Fuehrer was increasingly living in fantasy land, and he called General Walter Wenck to Berlin and gave him command of the Twelfth Army. But the fly in the buttermilk was that there was no Twelfth Army. Wenck like most professional soldiers had dreamed of commanding an army some day, but never thought he would have to create it himself.

  By 7 April SS Battlegroup Dirnagel had retreated to Wildentierbach, and here the unit turned and began a commendable effort to hold back steady American attacks by tank/infantry teams. There has been a suggestion that here some SS men were executed by the Americans after giving up. After a three day battle the SS battlegroup pulled out and began another retreat.

  SS Battlegroup Nord was also in full retreat from Wiesbaden, and not without cause: the Americans, still believing the Nord was at full-size, had hit them with five divisions.

  Brigadefuehrer Max Simon’s XIII SS Corps was ordered to hold a line Wuerzburg-Bamberg facing north, but within a day he was falling back towards Nuremberg. At Brettheim local Nazi politicians had armed Hitler Youth boys as young as twelve, but adults in the town including some soldiers had urged the boys to desert before the Americans arrived. The soldiers were willing to fight, but not willing to see children die. Max Simon learned of the situation and sent SS military police to the village. They arrested three men for this ‘treachery’ and hanged them. Simon had proven his courage time and again, but unfortunately he had also proven his cruelty.

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  At Flossenburg concentration camp it was business as usual, though today the executioners were in for a treat. They were ordered to hang Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother in law Hans von Donyanyi, an Abwehr agent; and also Admiral Canaris. Days later Bonhoeffer’s brother and another brother in law were executed.

  This same week there were many other executions per Hitler’s orders, including Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, who was executed at Ploetzensee Gestapo prison, and Johann Elser, who was hanged at Dachau. Canaris and most of these men had plotted to kill Hitler, but von Kleist-Schmenzin had merely slandered Hitler.

  Standartenfuehrer Hermann Florstedt felt the wrath of Himmler. For the crime of embezzling SS funds he was put up against a wall by the guards at Buchenwald and shot. Days later SS guards executed Standartenfuehrer Karl Koch, who had also been caught stealing money by KRIPO detective Obersturmfuehrer Konrad Morgen. Koch’s wife Ilse had already been jailed for theft.

  The guards at Nordhausen concentration camp fled when they heard gunfire. Within hours thousands of living skeletons watched quietly with bewilderment as American GIs wandered silently through the camp, the prisoners too weak to speak, the GIs too shocked to speak.

  At Gardelegen near Magdeburg a
column of exhausted prisoners and their SS KZL guards stopped to rest. The guards had been marching these pathetic wretches for months to avoid being forced to fight in battle, but now they learned the Americans were near. They opened fire and shot most of their prisoners [some escaped] and then they put on civilian clothes and melted into the general population.

  Hitler demanded Eleventh Army launch its counterattack against US Ninth Army. The war weary troops, including SS Panzer Brigade Westfalen, obeyed the order, but they failed to prevent US 2nd Armored Division from reaching the Elbe River, just fifty miles from Berlin. The news outraged Hitler and in anger he demanded Wenck’s Twelfth Army counterattack at once. No one at his headquarters had the courage to mention that Wenck had no army as yet.

  On 11 April at Nuremberg Oberfuehrer Georg Bochmann consulted with the local HSSPF Obergruppenfuehrer Benno Martin how to best use the 17th SS GvB Panzergrenadier Division and the town’s Volksturm 2nd Levy [including the 3rd SS Infantry Regiment of the Allgemeine SS] in order to defend this city that Hitler considered the capital of Nazism. The discussion continued even as the Americans began to arrive.

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  The administration of new units was becoming impossible, as Hitler and Himmler created them out of thin air or out of used-up formations. Brigadefuehrer Ziegler was in the odd position of commanding the 11th SS Nordland Panzergrenadier Division and III SS Panzer Corps at the same time. The Nordland was minus two battalions, which had been sent to Austria. Pipkorn’s 35th SS Polizei Grenadier Division had been recently reinforced by two army battalions. The XI SS Corps was another one of these catch-all formations. It consisted of the Volksturm 2nd Levy from the town of Kuestrin reinforced by four army divisions: the Kurmark Panzergrenadier, 25th Panzergrenadier, 169th Infantry and 712th Infantry. The sole reason for its SS designation was that it was commanded by Brigadefuehrer Matthias Kleinheisterkamp and a small SS staff. One of his officers, Sturmbannfuehrer Willi Baumann, earned the Knight’s Cross commanding a provisional battle group within the corps.

  Degrelle’s SS Corps West still had the 27th SS Langemarck and 28th SS Wallonie Grenadier Divisions.

  Though Hitler still controlled a hefty empire by anyone’s standards including Denmark and Norway, many ordinary soldiers on both sides somehow felt that if Berlin fell the war would end. This was wishful thinking more than anything, but British, American and Soviet tanks had ‘Berlin or bust’ slogans written on them.

  Perhaps Hitler thought so too, and that is why he chose to hold out in Berlin rather than flee to his Alpine Redoubt. He had asked Otto Skorzeny to leave his SS Provisional Division Schwedt to command the guerilla forces in the Alps, his Alpine Redoubt, in order that the war could continue for years to come, but Skorzeny learned when he reached the Alps that the guerillas and their supplies were figments of Hitler’s imagination.

  As for the condition of Germany after he was gone, Hitler did not give a damn. Indeed on 19 March 1945 he had secretly ordered the complete destruction of Germany in a scorched earth policy. He wanted nothing to remain to give comfort to the Allies - no factories, no farms, no crops, no mines, no roads, no rail lines - nothing. Fortunately for the German nation, some clear thinking people, most prominently Albert Speer, made sure that these orders were never implemented.

  Of course Hitler assumed the Nazi stalwarts would all go down in flames with him to the tune of Wagner’s ‘Goetterdaemerung’ - Damnation of the Gods. He was grossly mistaken. Only Bormann and Goebbels agreed. The remainder including Himmler made excuses. In fact Ribbentrop was secretly trying to negotiate a surrender. Goering had also approached the Allies for this purpose. Himmler suspected this and wanted to nip these efforts in the bud, for he was negotiating with the Allies himself. If anybody was going to survive the collapse of the Third Reich Himmler intended it to be himself. He did not know that his own chief of staff Oberstgruppenfuehrer Karl Wolff was also in talks with Allied intelligence. The rats were deserting the sinking ship.

  And again we have here another lie. Himmler would have shot anyone suggesting surrender, but he was no more eager to die for Hitler than he would have been to die for a Communist trade union boss.

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  Naturally everybody in Berlin knew the Soviets were coming, and most people wanted to escape the coming battle, but there were too many armed men roaming the streets looking for exactly this sort of panic, namely the ‘heroes’ of the Gestapo, SD and Kripo, who had fled from every town for the last year; the Allgemeine SS [old men and partially crippled veterans]; those SA stormtroopers that had managed to hold down an essential job such as munitions factory machinist; a few old policemen including some in the seventies; fifteen-year-old boys of the Streifendienst; and the army’s military police. They stopped everyone who was trying to leave the city, and those who could not give a good reason why they were leaving, man or woman, were hanged from the nearest lamppost with a ‘traitor’ sign hung around their neck.

  Throughout the city males of all nationalities between the ages of fifteen and three months and sixty were grabbed and thrown into the Volksturm 2nd Levy. This included members of the Allgemeine SS too, because these SS men were civilians unlike the Waffen SS. The Berlin garrison of Allgemeine SS contained the 8th Signals Company, 8th Pioneer Company, 7th Cavalry Regiment and the following infantry regiments: 6th Felsen, 15th, 42nd Scholz von Rarancze, 44th, 75th Widukind and 80th. These men would fight in their own units. but under Volksturm command. The local SA Wehrmannschaft would also fight under the control of the Volksturm.

  In one sense the Battle for Berlin had already begun, five years earlier to be exact. Almost every night during that time the city had been bombed by the Western Allies, and over the last two years there had been daylight raids too. There was rubble everywhere. In one raid alone on 18 March 1945 fully 1,950 American planes attacked the city, and only 22 were shot down. By April American and Soviet fighter planes were scouring the city looking for something to strafe. Often it was a line of housewives queuing for food. Luftwaffe planes were a mere rumor.

  However, there was no reason why this city could not put up one hell of a fight against the Soviets. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Berlin’s men folk were already in uniform serving elsewhere, the city of Berlin contained probably three million souls at this date, swollen with refugees of many nationalities and foreign workers galore, both volunteers and conscripted. The Volksturm 2nd Levy of men with essential jobs aged fifteen and three months to sixty numbered no fewer than 300,000 souls. The city was also packed with about 100,000 rear-echelon troops from all the branches including Waffen SS. Furthermore the local Hitler Youth leaders had illegally armed boys as young as twelve. One of the Nazi Party’s chief educators of children was August Heissmeyer, an Allgemeine SS obergruppenfuehrer and past concentration camp inspector. He now prepared these naïve kids for combat as part of his SS Battlegroup Heissmeyer. Of course he did not actually intend to accompany them into battle. He planned to surrender.

  The city also contained large formations of SD, Gestapo and Kripo commanded by Gruppenfuehrer Max Schneller as Berlin HSSPF. In addition the city had a myriad of flak guns manned by Luftwaffe personnel, foreign volunteers and local boys aged fifteen and girls as young as eighteen [and some much younger]. These guns were well sited in narrow streets, large areas of bombed out rubble, along riverbanks and in wooded parks and would make it difficult for Soviet armor. Immense multi-story air raid shelters had been built in Berlin, some holding thousands of civilians, and strong as castles they could be integrated into the defense plan. All told the city had on paper at least a half million defenders.

  Budapest had held out for three months with far fewer troops. Vienna was still holding. Breslau was still holding out and some German garrisons in France that had been cut off the previous August were still holding out! Thus Hitler was in good spirits. He was especially elated when he learned on 12 April that the American President had died suddenly. They had both come to power at
the same time.

  However, General Hellmuth Reymann saw things differently. Appointed commander of the Berlin defenses he found that he would only be allowed to commandeer 34,000 of the many rear-echelon troops as their respective branches were transferring the remainder elsewhere. This was bad enough, but then he learned that some of the Volksturm 2nd Levy had already been mobilized and sent elsewhere and of those who were left only 60,000 had reported in, of which 12,000 were policemen currently on duty.

  There was more bad news. Gruppenfuehrer Max Schneller had been given responsibility for the creation of the city’s defenses by Goebbels, but he had done nothing to prepare the city’s barricades and anti-tank ditches, because the party officials had thought it defeatist to prepare. Still worse news reached Reymann - he was ordered to sit idly by as most of the flak guns were transferred to the front line on the Oder. Hitler had just given absolute priority to General Theodore Busse’s Ninth Army on the Oder east of Berlin, with secondary priority to General Hasso von Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army to Busse’s north and to the Fourth Panzer Army to Busse’s south. Berlin’s defenses were not a priority! Reymann knew he was in over his head, for he did not have the clout to defy the Fuehrer.

  Ideally at this stage the Germans needed some of their top strategians, but Guderian, von Manstein, von Runstedt, Hausser, Steiner and von Kleist were no longer available. They had talked back to Hitler, so he had sent them far away! They were the lucky ones.

  While Hitler’s armies in Germany were desperate for manpower and equipment, Hitler still kept a quarter of a million men holding the Kurland Pocket against severe Soviet onslaughts. These included those remnants of the 300th Police Special Purpose Division and the VI SS Corps of the 19th SS Lettische Division, 106th SS Lettische Panzergrenadier Regiment and 24th Infantry Division. Incredibly Hitler also insisted that 400,000 fully trained and armed troops sit idle in Norway and that another 150,000 wait peacefully in Denmark. He ordered countless smaller garrisons to hold out rather than try to reach the main armies.