Hitler's Brandenburgers

by Lawrence Paterson

  Shukhevych, the Ukrainian head of the Nachtigall Battalion, helped to organise local militia groups who, with the encouragement and connivance of incoming SD Einsatzgruppen, unleashed a horrifying wave of anti-Jewish pogroms throughout the city, the Jewish community being falsely accused of collaborating with the Bolshevik NKVD killers. The Nachtigall Battalion and other Wehrmacht units did not, as a whole, take part in the violence, though individual members almost certainly did and altogether an estimated 4,000 Jewish civilians were killed during the first of Lviv’s pogroms. Within days the Nachtigall Battalion left the city, marching in the direction of Vinnytsia on 7 July alongside the Brandenburger’s 1st Battalion, led by Hauptmann Hartmann. Both units were soon in ferocious action and suffered heavy casualties in fighting against fanatical troops of the Red Army’s Komosol Regiment.

  Heinz had been outraged by what he witnessed in Lviv, though found himself unable to intervene to any significant degree. On 1 July, he sent a clear report on the capture of the city to his superiors, mentioning the behaviour of local residents as well as German police units:

  The Ukrainian population, partly even the poorer Polish population, dating from the Austrian period, took the troops as liberators and the massacres committed by the Reds fuelled their rage to the utmost. Violence began on 30 June and 1 July against the Jews which adopted the worst character of a full pogrom. The police were controlling events and the most brutal and repugnant behaviour took place against the defenceless … The population considers the Bolsheviks criminally guilty due to their massacres, but now does not understand the torture and shooting of indiscriminately condemned Jews, including women and children. This makes a particularly discordant impression on the Ukrainian Companies. They cannot distinguish between the power of the Wehrmacht and the police and, as they see examples in the actions of German soldiers, are generally wavering in their assessment of Germany. It is the same force which yesterday ruthlessly shot down Jewish looters, but rejects cold-hearted cruelties.

  The report, plus his support for the Ukrainian independence movement, soon cost Heinz his position in the regiment. On 19 July, he received the clasp for his EK II, six days later the clasp for his EK I and the Infantry Assault Badge in silver before he was ordered back to Brandenburg’s Generalfeldzeugmeister barracks by Canaris, not least of all to keep him away from potential repercussions for his actions from more devout National Socialists. There he received a new assignment: command of the Abwehr School near Meseritz (the Regenwurmlager) for the training of V-Leute and foreign troops. After his departure, the Brandenburg Regiment’s 1st Company which had functioned as a holding unit for V-Leute was renamed ‘V-Abteilung’ and transferred during November 1941 to Meseritz. Subsequently, Oberleutnant Babuke’s 17th Company, still in the process of forming, was redesignated and moved to Brandenburg an der Havel to become the new 1st Company. Heinz for his part remained at the Regenwurmlager for a year but would later return to the regiment during November 1942.

  The Nachtigall and Roland Battalions were subsequently dissolved during October 1941. Bandera’s premature declaration of Ukrainian independence had not been warmly received by his German overlords as Hitler’s vision of the Ukraine was as a vassal state to the Greater German Reich, not an autonomous region. Bandera was arrested on 15 September 1941 and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp until 1944.10 Both dissolved battalions were regrouped at Neuhammer and merged to create the auxiliary police unit Schutzmannschaft Bataillon 201. Attached to the SD and Einsatzgruppen, this unit spent time then engaged in fighting partisans and murdering Jewish civilians in Belarus.

  Though Nachtigall was no more, both Herzner and Oberländer remained active with Ukrainian forces, the latter reporting to OKW during 1942 that the key to mastering the Ukraine was by ‘winning over the masses and pitilessly exterminating partisans as deadly to the people’. 11 He was later named head of the mixed German and Caucasian Sonderverbänd Bergmann, which was actively involved in brutal anti-partisan warfare. However, in May 1943 he was dismissed from the Wehrmacht on Hitler’s orders after distributing a political paper that called for the mass recruitment of Eastern volunteers by the Wehrmacht, a policy to which Hitler was opposed. Oberländer returned to Prague, a year later joining the staff of Andrey Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army.12

  Heinz’s was not the only Abwehr voice to call for, at the very least, greater restraint in dealing with what had euphemistically been described in the Third Reich as the ‘Jewish problem’ as Nazi perceptions of racial superiority were resulting in catastrophic outrages leading to what is now known as the Holocaust. Of course, there was also a pragmatic reason for restraint. The Wehrmacht had been hailed in many Soviet regions as liberators from Stalin’s brutal regime and while the opportunity existed to mobilise entire populations in concert with Germany’s war aims, the behaviour of occupation troops and subsequent political policy against all non-German populations, not just Jews, would rapidly undo any accrued goodwill, Furthermore, Hitler had issued specific instructions that Red Army Commissars were to be immediately shot upon capture. Soviet prisoners were poorly treated at best and, once the facts of these executions became common knowledge, Red Army resistance perceptibly stiffened as there was clearly no benefit in surrendering to such a pitiless enemy. Lahousen later related this fact to American interrogators after the war:

  The treatment of Russian prisoners and commands regarding this, with which alone the German Wehrmacht befouled itself forever, were the object of several written and oral protests of Amt Ausland/Abwehr, all of which had Canaris’ signature or were issued in his name … So, to give one example of many, in the ‘sorting-out’ of Bolshevist infected Russian prisoners, Crimean tartars or Azerbaijan men from the Caucasus were liquidated by the ‘Sonderkommandos’ of the SD solely because as Mohammedans they were circumcised and therefore were regarded as Jews by the race-fanatics of the SS and SD. Precisely from these peoples of the Soviet Union, however, had Abwehr Abteilung I and II especially gained valuable volunteer helpers (agents and combat units) … With the statement that this war was not a military dispute of two states or armies, but an ideological conflict of two concepts of life and that the political objectives of National Socialism were to be given preference over all military or other considerations, these and similar protests (especially from the front) were rejected by some generals who were all too subordinate to Hitler. Canaris had protested and warned here too. It was in vain.13

  There was indeed little appetite in OKW for criticism of what had become policy on the Eastern Front. General Hermann Reinecke – head of OKW’s General Office of the Armed Forces (Allgemeines Wehrmachtamt) and the office for the NSFO (Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffiziere) responsible for political propaganda in the Wehrmacht – issued regulations for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war on 8 September 1941, which read in part:

  The Bolshevist soldier has therefore lost all claim to treatment as an honourable opponent, in accordance with the Geneva Convention … The order for ruthless and energetic action must be given at the slightest indication of insubordination, especially in the case of Bolshevist fanatics. Insubordination, active or passive resistance, must be broken immediately by force of arms (bayonets, butts and firearms) … Anyone carrying out the order who does not use his weapons, or does so with insufficient energy, is punishable … Prisoners of war attempting escape are to be fired on without previous challenge. No warning shot must ever be fired … The use of arms against prisoners of war is, as a rule, legal.14

  The war in the East was being characterised as an ideological and racial struggle for survival and would be punctuated by massacres perpetrated by both sides. In the interim, the Red Army’s stubbornness in defence was already perceptibly increasing.

  By 17 July Hauptmann Dr Wolf-Justin Hartmann’s 2nd Company had reached the small village of Lyudavka that lay on the main road to the city of Vinnytsia which was less than 30km to the east. They had already advanced 400km as the crow flies fro
m their jumping-off point on the Polish–Soviet frontier, forging ahead as the spearhead for 4th Gebirgs Division. Resistance before the Ukrainian city had noticeably stiffened and light artillery fire and aircraft attacks disrupted the German advance as Hartmann summoned his five company officers for a situation briefing.

  Under cover of darkness the company advanced in a two-pronged attack to dislodge Soviet troops, amongst whose number were fanatical Komsomol members. Hartmann was attempting to break their defensive bulwark that had been established along a tree-lined road only 1.5km away. Support for the Brandenburger assault troops came from three Sturmgeschütz, the German plan to envelop the enemy positions with simultaneous approaches from north and south. During the early morning of 18 July, the attack was launched into heavy small arms and mortar fire. Following heavy fighting, the Soviets were finally forced to retreat, leaving over one hundred dead and wounded men behind them. However, for the 2nd Company the result was catastrophic; over fifty men wounded, including Hartmann, who was taken to the rear midway through the assault and twenty-eight killed, including four of the five officers subordinate to Hartmann; only Leutnant Oskar Schatz remained alive and unscathed.15

  The dead were buried in a ceremony during the following day attended by the commander of the 4th Gebirgs Division. His unit also had lost men, amongst them the commander of 13th Gebirgsjäger Regiment, Oberstleutnant Franz-August Sorko, killed by a stray bullet during fighting immediately to the north. The Brandenburgers’ decimated 2nd Company continued to be used in further bitter fighting, though their strength was pitiful and morale had slumped to a new low. Canaris himself visited the survivors of the company on 30 July with regimental commander Oberst Haehling von Lanzenauer, restoring some selfconfidence in his men, though they had also reached the point of material exhaustion. On 4 August, they were finally ordered out of the line, moving to Lviv where they were reunited with their recovering commander Dr Hartmann. From there they returned in stages to Germany, via Przemyśl, then Kraków and finally reaching the barracks in Brandenburg an der Havel on 17 August 1941, whereupon they began the task of rebuilding their shattered unit.

  CHAPTER 6

  War in the Desert

  ‘Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.’

  Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel

  While the Wehrmacht were preparing for the ambitious invasion of the Soviet Union, the Brandenburgers had already become involved in several smaller deployments to both North Africa and the Middle East. German intelligence work in North Africa had been the domain of the French-based Abwehrstellen at St Germain and Bordeaux, augmented by Abwehr officers attached to the German Armistice Commission in the Vichy-controlled cities of Algiers, Oran, Tunis and Casablanca. Indeed, it was to the latter that Hippel had been transferred after his departure from the Brandenburg Regiment. However, as intelligence reports from these sources necessarily passed through the hands of Wehrmacht officers of the Armistice Commission before dissemination, they were frequently judged ‘alarmist and exaggerated’ when they predicted potential Allied activity and correspondingly dismissed out of hand, leading to major intelligence failures throughout the German North African campaign. Perhaps the most notable example of this was the disregarding of intelligence that showed preparations to be underway for the Anglo-American landings in the Casablanca area and subsequent failure to anticipate Operation ‘Torch’ in 1942. The Abwehr also suffered from a shortage of officers capable of understanding and dealing with Arabs. To counter this deficiency, several French North African prisoners of war were recruited by the Abwehr as agents but their selection and training was so poor that they immediately deserted upon arrival back in their homelands.

  During early 1941, the Abwehr established Aussenstelle ‘Wido’ in Tripoli. British forces had checked the Italian advances after their declaration of war in June 1940 and then pushed Italian troops as far west as El Agheila, threatening the existence of an Axis presence in North Africa. However, the diversion of British forces to Greece resulted in a German opportunity to reinforce the flagging Italians in Libya. In concert with the arrival of combat troops, the new Abwehr post was created to supply intelligence in support of General Erwin Rommel’s fledgling Afrika Korps. The 41-year-old commander of the ‘Wido’ station was Rittmeister Witilo von Griesheim, a former cavalry officer before his attachment to the Italian Army as part of an exchange programme between the Axis partners. Subsequently he was moved to the General Staff although his ‘abnormal sexual disposition’ forced his resignation in 1937. Griesheim volunteered once more for active military service in 1940 and was swiftly recruited by Canaris into the Abwehr. Working with the Italian intelligence service, Griesheim supplied a steady stream of valuable information simultaneously to both Berlin and Rome and his opposites in Allied intelligence characterised him as ‘an able and dangerous man’.1 He made effective use of Arab agents and Tuareg tribesmen, one of whom acted as his permanent interpreter. The ‘Wido’ station relocated at least twice, moving from Tripoli to Nalut and then eventually Zuara near the Algerian border where they shared an office with the Italian intelligence service in a house only 200m from the Mediterranean Sea.

  Supervising Griesheim and the entire operation was Major Franz Seubert (codenamed ‘Angelo’) of Abwehr I, while assisting him on the ground were Wachtmeister Hans von Steffans and Unteroffizier Holzbrecher, both members of the Brandenburg Regiment and both assigned to a small radio station at Nalut, 200km south-west of Tripoli. Steffans had previously served in the French Foreign Legion for seven years beginning in 1923 and it is thought that he did not particularly get along with his superior Griesheim, finally being transferred back to the regiment during 1942. The posting of both men to Libya illustrates the fact that the Brandenburg Regiment was frequently used as a convenient pool of trained men from which all three branches of the Abwehr could draw drivers, interpreters, wireless operators and, on several occasions, actual field agents. For example, Unteroffizier Beilharz, born in Jaffa, Palestine, was posted to Tripoli as an Arabic interpreter. He had previously been part of the Brandenburger 2nd Company before transfer to North Africa in September 1941 and assignment to the small ‘Hoesch Group’ camped near Tripoli, later attached to a Panzergruppe headquarters. This minor unit was tasked with scouting beyond the German–Italian lines for periods of up to three or four days at a time, contacting Arabs and gathering as much information about the enemy as possible before returning. Beilharz was later part of Count László Almásy’s Operation ‘Salam’ in 1942, which we will look at shortly. Often, civilian Abwehr personnel were also transferred to the regimental strength for training and to obtain nominal military rank before posting overseas, generally attached to the V-Leute Company that had been amalgamated with Major Heinz’s 1st Battalion.

  The Middle East

  It was not only North Africa that attracted Abwehr and Brandenburg attention, but also turbulence in the Middle East. At the beginning of April 1941, a pro-Axis coup d’éat had taken place in Iraq, overthrowing the government that had maintained a pro-British stance since the country had been granted partial independence nine years previously. Four nationalist generals mounted the successful coup which installed the former Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as leader of the country. Gaylani had resigned dismissed from the post earlier that year under pressure from Great Britain due to his overt alignment with the German and Italian governments. The coup had been assisted and encouraged by the German Consul, Fritz Grobba and three Abwehr II men; Hauptmann Wilhelm Kohlhaas and Palestinian-Swabians Unteroffizier Brass and Unteroffizier Krautzberger of the Brandenburg Regiment. Hitler issued a secret directive on 23 May 1941 – Weisung Nr. 30 – regarding the future prosecution of war in the Middle East. In the text, he described the ‘Arab liberation movement’ against the United Kingdom and potential German involvement therein.

  In this context, an uprising in Iraq is particularly important. It strengthens forces hostile to the British beyond Iraq’s borders, di
srupts English communications and ties down English troops and English ships at the expense of other war reserves. I have therefore resolved to push forward developments in the Middle East by supporting Iraq … I order the sending of a military mission, assistance from the Luftwaffe, arms deliveries for the support of Iraq … The Military Mission (codename: Sonderstab F) is to be commanded by General der Flieger Felmy.

  Their tasks are

  a)to advise and support the Iraqi armed forces,

  b) to make military connections with England hostile forces outside Iraq as far as possible,

  c)to gain experience and documents for the German Armed Forces in this area.

  … The members of the military mission shall initially be regarded as volunteers (per the Legion Condor). They wear tropical uniform with Iraqi insignia. The latter also to be used by German aircraft.

  Just under one month later, on 21 June, the eve of ‘Barbarossa’, Felmy’s responsibilities were defined:

  Sonderverbänd F is the Central Field Office for all questions regarding the Arab world, which concern the Wehrmacht. [Felmy] is included in all plans and measures taken in the Arab world.