Halle and his remaining 300 men were now desperately vulnerable, and with the onset of summer, the defences on Kaprolat and Hasselmann lost the snow that hid them from view, softened the blast impact from artillery shells and provided the Norwegians with their mobility. Inexplicably, during this time of utmost danger, Halle (now promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer) was sent back to Norway on a staff assignment, and over a hundred of his men were also given home leave. On Kaprolat, Steen had just 57 men to man the defences.
Axel Steen, the Norwegian SS-Ski Norge officer in command of Kaprolat Hill in Finnish Karelia, summer 1944. Surrounded and almost out of ammunition he shot himself rather than surrender. (Erik Wiborg)
The Norwegian Nordland and then SS-Ski Battalion Norge commander, Frode Halle.
Kaprolat Hill today. With hills few and far between, they were key features in the cat and mouse fighting in Finnish Karelia. (Erik Wiborg)
Norwegian SS-Ski jägers return to their bunkers on Kaprolat Hill after another patrol. (Erik Wiborg)
Norwegian SS-Ski jägers on parade, clearly some of these soldiers are little more than boys, and soon they would be pitched into battle against the Red Army. (Erik Wiborg)
Norwegian SS MG34 machine-gun crew in action on the Finnish Front; they are wearing snow-shoes. (Erik Wiborg)
The Norwegian SS-Ski jägers use a mortar on the Finnish Front. (Erik Wiborg)
Panorama of an SS-Ski jäger patrol on the Finnish Front. (Erik Wiborg)
On 22 June the news started to filter through to the battalion that a massive Red Army offensive had struck Army Group Centre far to the south. Reports were very sketchy, but it was clear that the Soviet Bagration offensive was on a massive scale. Whilst not of the same magnitude, it would soon be the Norwegians’ turn. In fact, Meretskov had concentrated two of his full-strength Rifle Divisions to hit the SS-Nord, now little more than a brigade, and punch through their ‘Road Position’ on the Kiestinki-Louhi Corridor. The Norwegians were right in the path of the intended attack.
Three days after Bagration began to tear Army Group Centre to pieces, the Soviets launched their own offensive in Karelia. Kaprolat was targeted first. A massive artillery barrage was followed by an entire regiment of assaulting infantry who swarmed up the hill’s pretty gentle slopes. Steen and his men fought back ferociously and inflicted horrific casualties on the Russians. One of the Soviet regiment’s battalions was reduced from 400 to just 36 men in the fighting. But the end was inevitable. Bunkers and trenches fell throughout the day and night, until finally the Soviets reached Steen’s command post and surrounded it early the following morning. Along with Steen, who was already wounded, was his fellow Norwegian, SS-Standartenoberjunker Birger-Ernst Jonsson. With ammunition running out, Steen and Jonsson shot themselves rather than surrender. Only one Norwegian commander was still alive, Jonsson’s Bad Tölz classmate SS-Standartenoberjunker Kaare Børsting. He gathered the few survivors together and led them in a desperate breakout attempt. Fighting all the way, Børsting managed to guide the remnants of his Company to Hasselmann Hill where they gratefully threw themselves into the arms of the 2nd Company. Their relief was short-lived though, as the Red Army offensive rolled on and hit them later that same day. Hasselmann saw the same pattern as at Kaprolat, with massed Russian artillery being followed up by determined infantry assault. As at Kaprolat, the Norwegian SS men put up a stout defence, but the odds were stacked against them. When Kaare Børsting was killed as his stick grenade detonated before he could throw it, the heart went out of the defence and the hill fell. A handful of Norwegians escaped the disaster and fled west, where they married up with a relief column from the SS-Nord’s SS-Mountain Regiment 11 Reinhard Heydrich sent to support them.
It was too late. The SS-Ski Battalion Norge had been virtually exterminated. Halle had rushed back from Norway but had been too late to save his unit from destruction. In less than three days of fighting the 2nd and 3rd Companies were wiped out, with an estimated 135 volunteers killed and more than 40 captured. Fifteen of these prisoners did somehow manage to overpower their guards and escape back to German lines but it was scant consolation. For their unluckier comrades, years in the gulags awaited them. It was not until 1955 that the last Kaprolat POWs were repatriated from the Soviet Union after 11 dreadful years in captivity.
A Norwegian SS-Ski trooper kitted out for the cold of Finnish Karelia. (Erik Wiborg)
Lonely sentry duty for SS-Ski troopers in the snowy wastes of Karelia. (Erik Wiborg)
Norwegian SS-Ski troopers on another long patrol across the silent forests of Finland. (Erik Wiborg)
SS-Ski grenadiers pose in Finnish Karelia; the middle trooper is armed with a Soviet submachine-gun. Many troopers used captured Russian weapons on account of their sturdiness, reliability and ready access to ammunition. (Erik Wiborg)
As for the dead, alongside Steen, Jonsson and Børsting, the 3rd Company lost its other two platoon commanders, Rolf Walstrøm and the SS-Wiking veteran Tor Torjussen. Second Company lost one of its platoon commanders, Sverre-Andersen Østerdal (who had been the President of the Norwegian Sporting Association), its most senior NCO, SS-Oberscharführer (‘Senior Squad Leader’) Ola Magnussen, and its overall commander, Holmesland Vik, who had been badly wounded. To put Kaprolat and Hasselmann in context, the DNL lost 158 legionnaires killed in more than 12 months service at the Front, and the SS-Ski Battalion Norge lost about the same in less than 72 hours.
Aftermath
The Norge had taken a hammering but its solid defence had helped the SS-Nord to stem the Soviet tide. The same was true along the line as Wehrmacht and Finnish units held out, taking the steam out of the Russian assaults. Fighting continued for most of the next month, but without a decisive breakthrough. Kahrs’s 1st Company was reunited with their surviving comrades and took a full part in the defensive battles. Halle and Kahrs were awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class for their bravery, as was Steen, although his award was posthumous. With the Front now quiet the SS-Ski Battalion set about building new defensive positions on the Sohjana River and reorganising, and one company was even sent to man an island in Lake Pundum from where it patrolled up to the neighbouring Lake Pja. Any enemy they spotted were dealt with by long-range artillery fire from the SS-Nord’s guns to the south.
The return of the troopers on leave gave the battalion a significant boost, as did the recovered wounded like Arnfinn Vik who came back as a company commander. A fresh tranche of 50 new recruits also fleshed out the ranks, as did the arrival of Berg’s 3rd SS-Police Company fresh from training at Sennheim. The battalion was now back up to a strength in excess of 400 men, and prepared to face further action against the Red Army. However on 4 September 1944 the situation changed dramatically.
The Norwegian 3rd SS-Police Company is inspected. (Erik Wiborg)
The Norwegian 3rd SS-Police Company take a break during training in 1944. Their generally unpopular commander, Aage-Henry Berg, is in the middle at the back wearing the peaked cap. (Erik Wiborg)
Finland capitulates
The utter destruction of Army Group Centre and the astonishing loss of 350,000 German soldiers in a few short weeks had convinced Marshal Mannerheim and the rest of the Finnish Government that Nazi Germany was beaten. Their only hope to avoid calamity was to negotiate an honourable surrender. The Red Army offensives against Karelia had been stopped but the attack out of Leningrad had not; the Soviets were now advancing north killing thousands of Finland’s best troops. Moscow’s peace terms were not unduly harsh, but they did demand that Finland turn her armed forces on her erstwhile ally and expel all German military personnel, by force if necessary, in a matter of weeks. The Germans had laid contingency plans for a Finnish surrender, even so, considering the vast distances involved there was no way they could comply. They had hardly any vehicles and little fuel in any case, the roads were few and generally pretty poor and the withdrawal route to Narvik was more than 1,000 kilometres long. The scene was set for tragedy.
Dietl had died in
an air crash back in June, so it was the Twentieth Mountain Army’s new commander, Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic, who led the retreat back to Norway. Rendulic would later go on to command the III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps and its component Norwegians. The SS-Nord was used as the Army’s rearguard, and the SS-Ski Battalion Norge as the SS-Nord’s rearguard. Thus they were some of the very last Wehrmacht men to cross over into their homeland some three months later after having to fight off attacks from their old allies. The irony was complete, the Norwegian SS men had volunteered to fight alongside their Finnish cousins and had ended up shooting at them. Bjarne Dramstad took part in the withdrawal as a member of the 3rd SS-Police Company:
At the beginning of September Finland capitulated, this led to mixed emotions in the Company, some were angry that they were not given the chance to fight the Russians and help the Finns, but I could really understand them, they were under enormous pressure and had to do what they could to save their country. But it was bitter, most of the Finns probably felt the same.
Well, we were given the order to walk back, thousands and thousands of soldiers retreated on the long, cold, hard march. I was given the job of being head of the Company’s field-kitchen, this was a good but demanding job, as we were constantly on the move so it was hard to keep the food warm.
In Rovaniemi an ammunition train was blown up and I was thrown onto the field-kitchen, but didn’t get any injuries. A lot of the NCOs and soldiers were constantly drunk in Rovaniemi, the four years of war had taken their toll, and by now we knew the war was lost. Finally we reached the Norwegian border at Skibotn. Luckily the Finns never attacked us, that would have been very hard for me, I had struggled so hard to fight for the Finns, so this was an ironic end to it all. First I was fooled by the Germans and sent to the Leningrad front and not to Finland as promised, and finally when I managed to get there the Finns gave up.
Bjarne Dramstad (helmeted soldier shaking hands) receives the Police Honour Medal (Politiets Hederstegn) from Jonas Lie himself in Oslo, spring 1943. (Knut Thoresen)
Back in Norway while the Norge was sent south to Oslo, Bjarne and his comrades were kept in Narvik and used as hunting teams (Jagdkommandos), to patrol the far northern border, guarding against Red Army incursions and local resistance:
Service in the Jagdkommandos in Norway meant hard, long ski patrols that lasted for days, often under harsh conditions. Our squad was stationed in a farm at Dividalen National Park patrolling the border area. The farmer, as I later found out, was connected to the Resistance, and he probably warned them when we went out on patrols. This gave me a great respect for him even though he belonged to the other side. I had the pleasure of meeting him [in 2007], he was then one hundred years old, but still remembered how he fooled us during the war. This gave us both a good laugh.
Vidkun Quisling inspects men of the Norwegian SS-Ski Battalion Norge. (Erik Wiborg)
Bjarne’s service finally ended early the following year when his Company was first sent south to Oslo and then subsequently disbanded. His old company commander, Oscar Rustand was trying to establish a 4th Company at the same time of course for one last throw of the dice but needless to say there were few takers.
As for the Norge down in Oslo, it was renamed the SS-Ski Battalion 506 (motorised), and ordered to prepare to combat a possible communist-inspired uprising and root out any internal resistance. That was a step too far for Frode Halle who refused to fire on fellow Norwegians, he relinquished command and the old SS-Police company commander and Iron Cross 1st Class holder, Reidar-Egil Hoel, took over. It was an inglorious end to a story full of heroism and tragedy. The specialist Norwegian SS ski troopers had joined to help Finland and ended up in Lappland fighting alongside Germans and some three hundred kilometres from the nearest Finnish unit. There, in a beautiful but forgotten wilderness, they had lost more than half their number in vicious fighting, and had then been ignominiously cast out by the very people they had signed up to fight for. Back home they were then expected to turn their guns on their own countrymen.
VI
1945: The End of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS –
the Wiking in Hungary and the Nordland in Berlin
Our mobility, which had always given us an advantage over the vast but slow Soviet formations, was now only a memory.
Guy Sajer, an Alsatian volunteer in the Grossdeustchland Division, (The Forgotten Soldier, Ballantine Books, 1971)
Nazi Germany in 1945
As 1945 began, Adolf Hitler’s empire was fast shrinking and the end was finally in sight. His last substantial reserves were being frittered away in the Ardennes, while in the East the Red Army continued its ominous build-up all along the Front. Finland and Rumania had abandoned Nazi Germany, Slovakia was in rebellion, most of the Balkans had been lost and Horthy’s Hungary was only being kept in the war by threats and kidnap – the SS commando leader Otto Skorzeny had actually taken Admiral Horthy’s son hostage in a daring raid. German industry was somehow miraculously supplying the Wehrmacht with an ever-increasing amount of modern equipment, but the critical fuel shortages Guy Sajer noticed in the Grossdeutschland meant that most of this high-grade kit just sat idle. The horse was now the Army’s main method of battlefield mobility, while its ranks were increasingly filled with half-trained conscripts who were no match for the military juggernauts facing them in the East and West.
The Kriegsmarine was still operating in the Baltic, but the U-Boat battle in the Atlantic was lost. High grade aviation fuel was in even shorter supply than gasoline, so when the Luftwaffe could get into the air it concentrated on trying to protect German cities and it was becoming a rarity over the frontlines.
Making for home
Against this tide it was the remnants of the old élites whom Hitler and OKW would turn to for some sort of a miracle, and they would be rushed from one sector to another in a vain attempt to keep on saving the day. The inevitable result was massive, recurring losses in the ranks of divisions like the Wiking and Nordland, and the Scandinavian Waffen-SS simply could not afford the casualties. In this sixth year of the war they only numbered just over a thousand men, with the majority still in the Nordland, a minority in the Wiking, and a handful strewn over other formations. The Allied advance across Western Europe created a last big influx of volunteers into the Waffen-SS among the likes of the Dutch, Flemish and French as those lands were liberated, but the same did not happen across occupied Scandinavia. Coupled with this, the familiar recruiting pools among Germany’s foreign workers and the home-grown Far-Right parties had dried up. There would be no new waves of ‘Vikings’ into the Scandinavian Waffen-SS. So the burden fell on the thinning ranks of veterans. The Finns, bar a tiny handful, had gone home and were now mourning their country’s 79,047 war dead and abiding by their peace agreement with Stalin. With the Norwegians of the SS-Police Companies and specialist Ski Battalion repatriated, it was Per Sörensen and his Danes who made up the lions share of the remaining volunteers with some 70 per cent of the total.
From left: the Swedish Untersturmführer Gunnar-Erik Eklöf (platoon commander in the Nordland’s famous Schwedenzug – 3./AA 11), the German SS-Sturmmann Muzzi Emmerich, and the Swedish Unterscharführer Markus Ledin. The three men brew up coffee with their half-track in the background during the Dünaburg fighting in Latvia, July 1944. Ledin would later be cut off behind Soviet lines before escaping home via Finland in a requisitioned fisherman’s boat. (Lennart Westberg)
Erik Wallin, helmeted on the right, with his friend and fellow Swede Karl-Olof Holm. Holm tried to desert home from the Nordland in October 1944 while serving in Courland. He was caught, tried and shot. (James Macleod)
There were still a few dozen Swedes serving, although desertion became more common now it was absolutely clear that the war was lost. Hans-Gösta Pehrsson was still the ranking Swedish officer in the Nordland, and he intended to stay until the end, but he would not stand in the way of his countrymen who wanted to call it a day, either before or after the devastating
fight at Trekni. Fighting in Estonia and Courland on the shores of the Baltic meant the Swedes could almost see home; and some went. Three volunteers, SS-Unterscharführer’s Sven Alm, Markus Ledin and Ingemar Somberg (the first two were veterans of the Winter War) got trapped behind the advancing Soviets when their armoured half-track broke down. Left stranded, they repaired the vehicle and decided to head to the coast. Arriving at the fishing village of Noarootsi, they killed the handful of Red Army troopers billeted there, grabbed a boat and headed for Finland. Arrested by the Finns, Alm and Ledin’s Winter War medals earned them all a quick release and they crossed over into Sweden and safety. Their erstwhile comrades Nils Berg, Elis Höglund and Knut Fagerström, followed the same path and took another boat with some Estonian refugees from a nearby port. They too made it home. Not all were so lucky though. Erik Wallin’s friend, the ex-Swedish Army sergeant Karl-Olof Holm, tried to desert but was caught, court-martialled and shot.
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