Hitler's Brandenburgers

by Lawrence Paterson

  Demetrio was later captured during the German retreat from France in September 1944 and stood trial after the end of the war for the massacre at Valréas, representing himself as defence counsel against the French prosecution. Found guilty, he was sentenced to death, though this was commuted and he was eventually released at the end of 1953 whereupon he returned to West Germany to be reunited with his wife and daughter.

  In 1951, a French military tribunal attempted to assign guilt for the massacre to at least one of the various officers present that day. Through Niel’s testimony it was established that Demetrio was not in the square when the shooting started. He was involved in interrogating prisoners in the hotel and by the time he emerged there were already ten people lying bleeding in the dust. Likewise, Unger was elsewhere when the executions began. His subsequent request for transfer from the division was seen by some to indicate that he perhaps felt a subordinate had undermined his authority by issuing such grave orders. Suspicion fell on Hauptmann Wilhelm Hentsch, the leader of Avignon’s GFP, though he maintained that he was not present that day in Valréas. Oberleutnant Gerhard Blank of the 9th Panzeraufklärungsabteilung later testified that he saw a civilian Peugeot car with two officers – a Hauptmann and Leutnant – arrive at Valréas with a bullet hole in the windscreen. Later the two were seen to be discussing with Unger the fact that an attack had wounded their driver outside the town and reminding him that: ‘the Führer had ordered all bandits shot’. His testimony, quoted here, would seem to be damning for Demetrio:

  During a battle with Maquisards in Valréas, Leutnant S., a group leader in my unit, captured about twenty resistance fighters. These were handed over to us by Leutnant S. I directed them to the command of Major Unger, the head of the operation in Valréas.

  A few days later, Major Unger reported that the executions were done without his knowledge. We then asked through the ranks and to all the officers who had carried out the execution or given orders to begin them.

  Finally, a Hauptmann, whose name I do not know and who probably belonged to the SD and a Leutnant Dimitreff or Dimitroff. Both can be considered as authors or at least as instigators. These presumptions were based on the fact that I heard them later discussing prisoners that had not been shot, saying that they had shot them and then squandered a small amount of gasoline from their transport to Avignon.20

  Blank’s statement appears to clearly assign guilt to Demetrio and perhaps even Träger, though suspicion continued to focus on Hauptmann Hentsch of the GFP. Demetrio’s defending accounts muddied the water somewhat, though he perhaps confirmed that the vehicles both he and Träger used could match Blank’s description.

  I do not know the ex-lieutenant Gerhard Blank, whose statements about Valréas you have informed me.

  I can only repeat that Hauptmann Hentsch was not present.

  I do not see at all at what time a discussion might have arisen between me and Hauptmann Träger on the one hand and Major Unger on the other. In fact, by the time I reported to Hauptmann Träger, there had already been seven or eight shots. This proves that the decision to shoot the prisoners had already been taken. Hauptmann Träger used a sedan Peugeot 402. I drove a khaki-coloured Peugeot 403 with red lining.21

  The events at Valréas may have been the largest regional example of Brandenburg involvement in punitive measures against French civilians, but it was not isolated. As the fighting in Normandy intensified so too did German attempts to quell uprisings in the south. Oberfähnrich Schwinn’s 1st Section of four Germans and a dozen Frenchmen appears to have been relentless in pursuit of this objective. The small group were stationed in the Spendid-hôtel in Cavaillon, between Marseilles and Avignon. From there they mounted several covert operations, using disguises that ranged from that of a British paratrooper – as they attempted to infiltrate Maquis escape routes – and French civilians in a bid to find local resistance groups and their headquarters. In effect their missions now appeared to have more in common with SD operations than those traditionally associated with the Brandenburgers and, of course, Schwinn would go on to later join the SS. Is it possible that he was serving two masters during his tenure with the Brandenburgers? Regardless, the division had come to be considered guerrilla warfare specialists and were therefore now being assigned to a hotbed of Partisan activity. They quickly discovered that there was no more challenging – and brutal – theatre in which to wage such a war than the Balkans.

  CHAPTER 10

  Partisan Warfare in the Balkans

  ‘Those Chetniks up there who are now firing on us will have joined us within a year.’

  Josip Broz Tito

  Yugoslavia was a heterogeneous state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes of whom German occupation troops harboured an inherent distrust. The most numerous demographic was Serbian, occupying what had been the former Kingdom of Serbia and the provinces of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Dalmatia and split between the Muslim and the Orthodox faith. It had been Serbian protest that had unseated the country’s royal household following Yugoslavia’s accord with Hitler in 1941 and precipitated the German invasion. From amongst the Orthodox Serbian population rose the Chetniks who, under the leadership of royalist former-Colonel Draza Mihailović, resisted both German and Italian occupation forces though initially only moderately. The next-largest ethnic group were the Croats who inhabited the north-west of Yugoslavia (now Croatia). Generally, more ‘westernised’ than Serbs, they tended towards Catholicism as a religion. The final ethnic group were the Slovenes who inhabited northern Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) that bordered Italy and were of similar characteristics to Croatians.

  Following the occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941, most garrison duty had been the responsibility of the Italians. This arrangement not only honoured Italian commitments to the Tripartite Pact, but also released German forces for ‘Barbarossa’. In addition to Albania, which they had held since 1939, Italian forces assumed control of most of Greece, excepting Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete and a scattering of Aegean islands while western Thrace had been occupied and annexed by Bulgarian forces. The Italians soon began to dismember Yugoslavia, incorporating western Slovenia into Italy while annexing Dalmatia and Montenegro. Part of south-western Serbia was separated and added to ‘Greater Albania’, over which Italian troops exercised little real control, penned up in scattered urban strongholds and avoiding confrontation with aggressive Gheg and Tosk tribesmen. The newly proclaimed Kingdom of Croatia was divided into German and Italian zones of interest along the axis Višegrad–Sarajevo–Banja Luka; Germans permitted troops east of this line and Italians to the west. Parts of Slovenia were incorporated into ‘Greater Germany’ while Bulgarians annexed Yugoslav Macedonia and occupied south-eastern Serbia, with Hungarians annexing the Batchka and Baranya and a small portion of eastern Slovenia

  In August 1943, most Brandenburg units that had been deployed on the Eastern Front had been withdrawn to Germany and Austria, refitted, reinforced and issued with tropical equipment. They were shortly to be transferred to Yugoslavia and northern Greece where partisan activity had steadily increased concurrent with German fears of a planned British amphibious landing to recapture what had been lost to the Allies in 1941. Following the fall of Tunisia in May, Abwehr reports appeared to indicate the strong possibility of an Allied attack in the Balkans rather than the more obvious route through Italy. It was known that Churchill harboured a long-lasting fixation on the region, scene of his dramatic First World War failure in the Dardanelles that wasted thousands of Allied lives. He continued to harbour desires to invade southern Europe not through the French Mediterranean coast but via the Adriatic Sea, landing near Trieste and directly threatening Austria, while also advancing from the Aegean islands. The imminent Italian collapse appeared to intensify his desire, but at no point would his American or Soviet ‘Allies’ countenance the idea.

  Nonetheless, Hitler had become convinced of a plan to invade through Sardinia and Greece. This was in no small part due to the brilliant Operation ‘Minc
emeat’ that supplied fake intelligence papers planted on the supposed body of an Allied intelligence officer washed ashore in Spain. Passed to Canaris, who in turn handed them to OKW, the deception succeeded in diverting significant German forces to the Balkans before the actual invasion of Sicily began.

  Major Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz had been recalled from the Regenwurmlager on 20 November 1942 and appointed as commander of Verband 804, which subsequently became 4th Regiment ‘Brandenburg’ from the beginning of 1943. On 1 March, he was promoted to Oberstleutnant and the following month led his regiment to the Balkans. Despite his previous association with the anti-Hitler conspirators, Pfuhlstein, as the division’s new commander, harboured grave misgivings about Heinz, whom he viewed as a ‘political figure’ in a unit that required sharp military minds. Indeed, Heinz reported to Oster at Tirpitzufer that his regiment was ‘ready and on call’ for the conspirators by March 1943.1 Initially inclined to relieve Heinz of his command as soon as he assumed control of the division, in deference to Canaris’ wishes, Pfuhlstein left him at his post … for the time being.

  He was virtually incapable of commanding a company, let alone a regiment.

  Heinz knew next to nothing … about modern warfare in general. Similarly, he had no experience or knowledge of how to train and instruct a reconstituted unit.2

  For his part, Heinz also distrusted Pfuhlstein, regarding him as highly ambitious to the point of later betraying the division to Jodl and Warlimont at OKH and actively intriguing against Canaris and the circle of conspirators centred on Oster. Heinz levelled the accusation that Pfuhlstein appeared to give preference to devout Nazis as his aides and by appointing Wilhelm Walther as the commander of the division’s 1st Regiment he had given control of the leading element to a ‘full-time Nazi functionary’. Canaris, however, described Pfuhlstein on 1 November 1943 as ‘tireless in increasing the efficiency of his division’, his motivation for such appointments purely military. In Walther, whatever his political or ideological motivations may have been, he had an outstanding Brandenburg officer.3

  Despite Pfuhlstein’s distrust of his regimental commander, Heinz and his headquarters staff travelled to Belgrade during mid-April, preceding the combat units of his command. Koenen’s 3rd Battalion would later arrive in Sarajevo, directly subordinated to Heinz. On 28 April, Hauptmann Dr Hartmann arrived with 2nd Battalion by rail at Raška in Serbia, before travelling 50km west to Sjenica where they were placed under the operational control of the 1st Gebirgs Division.

  During June, Hauptmann Wilhelm Hollmann, who had been recalled from his military semi-retirement and promoted to take command of Heinz’s 1st Battalion, moved with his men to the Peloponnese in Greece. They travelled alongside the 104th Jäger Division to Athens before moving west over the Corinth Canal. The battalion had been reinforced to the level of a motorised unit with modern weapons and a heavy company that boasted heavy machine guns and mortars, 20mm Flak guns, 75mm anti-tank guns and a 105mm artillery battery.

  Hollmann’s was not the sole Brandenburg unit in Greece. Oberstleutnant Franz Pfeiffer had taken command of 2nd Regiment in southern Russia in June 1943 following the death of its previous commander Wolfgang von Kobelynski through illness. Bavarian Pfeiffer was an experienced Gebirgsjäger who had won the Knight’s Cross on 13 June 1941 while commander of 15th Company, 100th Gebirgsjägerregiment and was later seriously wounded in the Soviet Union and placed into Wehrmacht reserve pool. Fit for action once again, he brought his new regiment to Ptolemaida in western Macedonia, Greece. There he was concerned with the security of the industrialised region’s coalmines and power stations. Huge quantities of lignite (known as ‘brown coal’ as it was composed of compacted peat) had been extracted since Greece had been occupied, the area at the centre of Greek industrial resurrection and the primary source of the nation’s energy.

  The Greek resistance movement was, like that in Yugoslavia, divided along political lines. While some groups professed loyalty to the royal government-inexile, others were more staunchly communist. The two main factions in Greece were the royalist EDES (Greek Democratic National League), led by Colonel Zervas, a retired Greek Army officer and the numerically superior communist ELAS (Greek People’s Liberation Army, the armed wing of the EAM, or National Liberation Front) commanded by Colonel Sarafis who had been dismissed from military service in 1935 for his political activities.

  This, and similar conditions throughout the Balkans, created an extra dimension to the difficulties faced by the German occupiers from 1943 onwards, one of virtual civil war between local parties. In Greece during 1943 the ELAS attacked and eliminated most non-communist guerrilla groups, also putting great pressure on civilians who were not committed to the communist cause to adhere to their ideology, their threats frequently matched with violence. Walter Lucas, a war correspondent for the Daily Express, arrived in Greece in September 1944 following the German withdrawal and made some surprising discoveries that he revealed in an article published on 11 October:

  Three generalisations can be made with some accuracy about the clear majority of Greeks:

  1. They are deeply and irrationally pro-British; 2. They hate the Germans; 3. They do not want any political interference in their country, either from friend or foe. That is the common denominator, but outside those simple facts the rest is a sizzling cauldron: Greek slaughtering Greek; so-called quislings as patriotic as partisans; and between the two the mass of the poverty-stricken population silently and fearfully praying for a murrain on both … So-called ‘quisling troops’ – such as the Security Battalion which surrendered to us so readily at Patras last Sunday – were formed partly from a desire to maintain order and give protection in the countryside … [They] are composed of many decent people who hate Germans but are frightened by the communist bogey. Many of the members are conscripted and have no other choice; others are there because it is their only means of eating. There are, too, just ordinary thugs. Of the two warring parties, the so-called quislings are probably more pro-British than many partisans. In fact, on both sides there are patriots, unscrupulous leaders and just ordinary people who have no other choice.4

  It was a complex maelstrom in which the Brandenburgers found themselves embroiled. German forces began raising collaborationist Security Battalions from April 1943, though, as Lucas noted above, these were hardly pro-Axis. The minority EDES were predominantly in the Epirus mountains of north-western Greece, while the ELAS dominated the remainder of the country through conquest. Prior to 1943 both groups had achieved some successes against Italian occupation troops, but the arrival of seasoned German soldiers caused a sudden reversal of fortune.

  Pfeiffer’s troops had arrived by rail, delays having been caused by multiple sabotage attacks disrupting the line that straggled through steep-sided mountain passes in Yugoslavia. After finally reaching Skopje the Brandenburgers detrained and were transported in half-tracks over the mountains to Axios. Before long the regiment was in action against Greek partisans as Oberleutnant Konrad Steidl, commander of 1st Battalion, recalled in his diary:

  After a day-long reconnaissance, I found that strong groups of bandits were sheltering around Kleisoura. I reported to Oberstleutnant Heinz and was ordered to take a motorised detachment into the southern Kleisoura gorges. From the regiment, I had been sent the large half-track with ‘Vierlings’ Flak weapon. With a motorcycle sidecar combination, I led the spearhead of a machine-gun group. We drove carefully as the bandits had mined the road. Approaching the village entrance, about a metre from some bushes I was fired at. The bullets whistled past my forehead. I jumped from the motorcycle, opened fire with my machine-pistol on two fleeing bandits and laid them both out. The village is full of bandits and at the same time they opened fire on my column from the heights above. We left our vehicles and charged the village.In a short time, the ‘Bandit’s nest’ [Bandennest] is burning and we can see our last remaining opponents. The four-barrelled gun [Vierling] shoots with unbelievable force at only short distance fr
om the enemy. Only a few manage to save themselves inside mountain caves, from where we still received heavy fire. Advancing is only possible with heavy losses and so I decide that any success achieved would not be worthwhile. Gröber was hit in the head by a low shot from the Flak weapon. We return to headquarters, our throats are completely dry, the heat is unbearable.5

  The pattern of removing villagers from their homes and replacing them with guerrillas was a tried and tested ambush technique against the Italian occupiers. However, despite Steidl’s initial reluctance to suffer the losses required to take this village, the tactics were frequently unsuccessful against highly motivated and experienced German troops. The Brandenburgers were used on ‘pacification’ missions to quell growing agitation from Greek guerrillas, known locally as Andartes. Kleisoura was later taken by Hauptmann Renner’s 3rd Battalion and Steidl moved with his men south, in the vanguard of 1st Battalion.

  I have several places nearby to pacify and launch daily operations with my detachment. A few days later, a company of Greek volunteers, who understand only sadism and plundering, but have no idea how to work as soldiers, arrive as support.

  I am launching a night attack against a few villages south of Aliakamonas.It was painstaking work wading with the company through the loamy river [Aliakamonas Potamos]. Rain showers set in. In the morning, we laboured on the other side of the river and in the morning, we were soaking wet in the open air, crossing exposed fields to get through several villages. Oesterwitz comes in from the west with his [2nd] Battalion. We meet. There are a lot of hellos as old acquaintances meet again. We had not seen each other since Baden. Leutnant Fred Wurst, a Palestinian man, Lenz Angeringer and old mates celebrate their reunion with us. The 2nd Battalion has suffered heavy losses from mines. A great thunderstorm sets in and hailstones come rattling down. Heinz transports my company back with his vehicles. A new mission is about to be launched: the attack on Neapoli and an advance to the south of Neapoli!6