Hitler's Vikings

by Jonathan Trigg

  Resistance on the Home Front

  It wasn’t just Pehrsson’s Swedes who knew the war was lost, back in the Scandinavian homelands everyone else knew too. In Denmark and Norway the occupation, and resistance to it, was becoming increasingly violent as the two sides fought it out in the streets. On 8 February, Quisling’s Chief of Police and commander of the paramilitary Hird, the ruthless and detested Sturmbannführer Karl Alfred Marthinsen, was assassinated outside his Oslo home. Acting on orders from the Norwegian government-in-exile in London, the Milorg resistance movement used a gun team to spray his official car with bullets, Marthinsen died instantly. In the aftermath, 29 anti-occupation Norwegians, including the leading lawyer Jon Vislie and the prominent Milorg supporter Kaare Sundby, were rounded up and shot in retaliation by the Nazi authorities. The whole of Norway went into shock at this unprecedented act of brutality. Across the Baltic things were just as bad in Denmark. The authorities tried to maintain order through repression, and the reaction was predictable. Two months after Marthinsen was killed it was the turn of his Danish counterpart, the leader of the Hipo Corps, Erik Viktor Petersen, to be gunned down in the street by his fellow countrymen.

  The SS-Wiking in Hungary

  While the Resistance cut down the Far Right on the home front, the Red Army was completing the task against their Waffen-SS counterparts on the battlefront. November and December had seen Hungary invaded and Budapest surrounded. Some 95,000 German and Hungarian troops ended up trapped in the city, with the core of the defence based on the cavalrymen of the 8th SS-Cavalry Division Florian Geyer and the 22nd SS-Volunteer Cavalry Division Maria Theresia. Hitler was obsessed with holding the capital and the Hungarian oilfields, which were the Third Reich’s last major supplier of fuel. No matter that his entire ‘Fortress’ and ‘hold to the last man’ strategies had proved themselves to be utter failures and that the oilfields in question could not even provide Army Group South’s needs let alone anyone else’s. As ever, Hitler refused to accept reality and the Ostheer was ordered to expend its last strength in vain attempts to relieve Budapest and defeat the Soviets on the Magyar plains in a series of operations codenamed Konrad (there were to be three in the end). Involved from the start was the Wiking, which was dispatched south from Poland along with the Totenkopf, and sent straight into the attack from its transport trains on New Year’s Day.

  Advancing from Komarno, the Germans main base in western Hungary, the two panzer divisions surprised the 4th Guards Army and threw it back some 20 miles. But the Russians swiftly got over their initial shock and poured fresh forces into the struggle. The offensive slowed and casualties mounted. Unwilling to concede defeat, Hitler pulled Gille’s Corps back and moved them near Szekesfehervar to try again. With Hans Dorr’s Germania in the lead, the Wiking attacked again. Scandinavian grenadiers fell to mines, artillery fire and even electrified wires as their ranks were further thinned. But somehow they carried on, the Wiking’s King Tigers (an armoured monster that weighed 68 tonnes and sported the superlative 88mm gun as its main armament), creating carnage among the Soviet tank ranks as the division advanced to within a mere 12 miles of the centre of Budapest. The garrison, desperately battling for their survival among the smoking ruins of the once-beautiful city, could hear the rumble of the guns as the Wiking edged forward – surely they would be saved. Then disaster struck.

  Dorr called a briefing for his officers in a barn in the just-captured village of Sarosd. A lone Soviet anti-tank gun and its crew had been overlooked by the assaulting troops and had kept their heads down. Sensing an opportunity, the gun commander saw the SS officers gathering in the barn near the square and ordered his gunner to hit it. With the trademark retort that gave the Soviet 76mm gun its nickname among the Germans of the ratschbum, the high velocity shell shot across and slammed into the building’s roof showering the assembled commanders with red-hot shrapnel. At a stroke the Germania was beheaded. Dorr, a Knight’s Cross winner and Cherkassy survivor, was wounded for the sixteenth time in his brief career and would later die of his injuries. Several other men were killed instantly, and almost everyone else was wounded by the razor sharp steel fragments. The stuffing was knocked out of the Germania by the losses and the offensive ground to a shuddering halt as the Soviets threw ever-more reinforcements into a counter-attack. Within days, not only had the Germans been stopped but the Wiking itself had been surrounded.

  The former Norge and Danmark 1st Battalions were heavily involved in the fighting, particularly around the town of Pettend. Fritz Vogt, now Erik Brörup’s battalion commander, personally destroyed six Soviet tanks with hand-held panzerfäuste during the fighting that claimed the lives of several Scandinavian volunteers, including the ex-DNL veteran Fritjof Røssnaes (his elder brother Knut was also in the division) and the surgeon Dr Tor Storm, allegedly burned alive with his wounded charges after trying to surrender. The two battalions did manage to break out from Pettend and rejoin the rest of the division, but the price was astronomically high. The Danmark was effectively annihilated and was never resurrected, while the Norge could muster just 36 officers and men by mid-February. The Westland’s commander, SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Hack spoke of the ferocity of the combat:

  The Soviets attacked us frontally during the day, supported by artillery and Stalin’s Organs [German nickname for the multi-barrelled Katyusha rocket launchers]. The battle raged in and around the little town of Seregelyes, and somehow we captured a complete Stalin Organ with tractor and ammunition. Our artillerymen and infantry gunners, under SS-Hauptsturmführer Peter Wollseifer, turned the multiple launcher around and soon the Soviets were getting a taste of their own medicine.

  The Red Army’s Vistula-Oder offensive

  Peter Wollseifer’s success with the Katyusha was nowhere near enough to turn the tide, and Konrad 2 was abandoned. With it went a large part of the division’s Nordic past as most of the Wiking’s remaining Scandinavian grenadiers were either killed or wounded in the twin offensives. By now, the focus of the war on the Eastern Front, no longer the Russian Front of course, had shifted north. On the morning of 12 January the Soviets burst out of their bridgeheads on the Vistula River and struck west towards Berlin – the STAVKA plan was to end the war in just 45 days. Guderian, as Hitler’s Chief-of-Staff, had warned his leader of the danger on the Vistula, but Hitler had long retreated into a military fantasy world. The dictator even called the Soviet build-up ‘the biggest bluff since Genghis Khan’. His amateurish failure to recognise the obvious would cost the Wehrmacht and the Scandinavian Waffen-SS dear.

  Spring Awakening in Hungary

  So as the Red Army tore the Wehrmacht to pieces in eastern Germany, the Wiking was held fast in Hungary unable to influence the decisive battle being fought hundreds of miles away to the north. ‘Grossfaz’, a derogatory shortening of Goebbels’ sycophantic public description of Hitler (‘der grösste führer von alle Zeit’ – ‘the greatest leader of all time’), then proceeded to compound his original error massively by sending Sepp Dietrich’s entire Sixth SS Panzer Army to join the Wiking to try and inflict the ever-elusive decisive defeat on the Soviets in Hungary.

  Operation Spring Awakening (Unternehmen Frühlingserwachen) was launched on 18 February by Nazi Germany’s strongest remaining field force. The offensive began seven days after the doomed Budapest garrison of 30,000 survivors desperately tried to escape the burning city. Forced to leave well over 10,000 wounded men to the tender mercies of the Red Army, the remaining Germans and Hungarians set off west along the Italian Boulevard and through the city’s drains and sewers. The Russians were waiting and cut down the escapees in droves. Pretty soon their few panzers and other vehicles were knocked out and everyone was on foot. It became a giant hunt, with packs of Soviets ripping the German/Hungarian columns to shreds. In the end only some 700 reached the German lines, the rest were either taken captive or perished like the SS-Polizei battlegroup commander, SS-Oberführer Helmut Dörner. Joachim Rumohr and August Zehender, respectively comm
anders of the Florian Geyer and Maria Theresia SS Cavalry Divisions, committed suicide during the break-out rather than face capture. Budapest is sometimes described by historians as the ‘Stalingrad of the Waffen-SS’, which is an overstatement, even so it was a momentous battle that wiped out the Waffen-SS cavalry arm, sealed Hungary’s fate and hammered another nail in the Ostheer’s coffin.

  With Budapest finally lost, there was little point left to Spring Awakening, but on it went anyway. Dietrich now had the I, II and IV SS Panzer Corps under his command, but it was to no avail – fuel and ammunition were in short supply, the ground was marshy and water-logged, and the roads and bridges unable to bear the weight of the massive German panzers. Just as with every Wehrmacht offensive of the past 12 months and more, the initial breakthrough could not be exploited. Exhausted, the cream of the Waffen-SS was forced back to its start line and pushed onto the defensive. Remarkably though, there were still a small handful of Scandinavians fighting in the Wiking, one of whom was the Frikorps Danmark veteran Erik Brörup. Having served for some months in SS Parachute Battalion 500 based in Hungary, he had then been forced to watch as his old unit, the Florian Geyer, had been exterminated in the capital. Joining the Wiking’s Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion, where one of the company commanders was his fellow Dane Robert Hansen, he was pretty clear that there was still plenty of fight left in the Scandinavian Waffen-SS that springtime:

  My most memorable encounter took place on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1945, near Szekesfehervar in Hungary. I was Adjutant, with the rank of SS-Obersturmführer, to SS-Sturmbannführer Fritz Vogt, holder of the Knight’s Cross. Actually I had heard of Fritz Vogt’s exploits in the West in 1940 during a lecture by my old tactics instructor from the Danish Cavalry when he was telling us about the Waffen-SS. Anyway the Russians had started their offensive the day before, which was also Fritz Vogt’s 27th birthday. Our unit was SS-Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 5 [SS-Panzer Aufklärungs Abteilung 5].

  I had established a command post in a small house and set up communications with a switchboard and radio while shells fell around us. SS-Obergruppenführer Gille telephoned to congratulate Vogt on his birthday and to tell him he had just been awarded the Oakleaves to his Knight’s Cross. His face lit up and he said: ‘This calls for a drink!’ We hoisted a few, then the Supply officers showed up bearing some bottles of beer, and all the other officers found time to show up for a quick drink. All the while the war was going on around us.

  One company commander was having some trouble with the enemy, so I suggested to Vogt that I go out and try to straighten things out. Vogt laughed and said: ‘What’s the matter with you, do you feel like a hero today?’ I answered that he had just got himself a new medal and should let others have a chance to win one. He replied: ‘Okay but watch what you are doing!’ By that time of course we had all had a good drink and were in excellent spirits!

  I got an SdKfz 250/9 [an armoured personnel carrier with mounted 20mm cannons] and went into battle. We were firing high-explosive shells and it seemed easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. Then the Russians brought up an anti-tank rifle and shot up my vehicle, forcing us to bail out. We ended up in hand-to-hand combat with them. I had a panzerfaust anti-tank rocket but it wouldn’t fire. I therefore used it like a club and cracked one Russian’s head with it. I was in trouble though. However Fritz Vogt then appeared with a few more armoured personnel carriers and got me out. He told me to take a couple of hours off, and later he and I went off alone on a reconnaissance behind the enemy lines. I got the Iron Cross First Class for all this. That Fritz Vogt was some character!

  The SS-Nordland in Courland

  While New Year’s Day 1945 found the Wiking’s Scandinavians getting off their trains and going into battle in Hungary, the Nordland’s volunteers were in the frozen north of Courland waiting for the next Red Army assault. Having fought off the Soviets during the First and Second Battles of Courland the previous October and the Third in November, both sides were gearing up for a further trial of strength. Guderian was still pressing Hitler hard to evacuate the peninsula and re-deploy the Army Group (now renamed as Army Group Courland – Heeresgruppe Kurland) in its entirety to Prussia, to defend the eastern Reich, but he would not hear of it. His argument, as before Christmas, was that the soldier’s presence kept the Red Fleet from dominating the Baltic, safeguarded Swedish iron ore imports and drew major Soviet forces away from the main front. While these reasons were arguably cogent, the end result was that the majority of two entire German Armies would be unavailable to the Ostheer when it needed them most.

  Nazi Germany had now been retreating in the East for close on two years. For the men in the line it is hard to imagine how they kept up their morale as the ranks were continually depleted and the miles swept by endlessly. Incredible as it now seems, some still believed in ultimate victory, one such was the Swedish SS-Unterscharführer Erik ‘Jerka’ Wallin serving in the Nordland’s Schwedenzug that new year:

  We knew that a significant part of the most vital German industries had gone below ground and were therefore invulnerable from the air. We knew that even better weapons would soon be mass-produced, and that the German forces in the West, just a few days before, had started a successful offensive in Belgium and Luxembourg. Soon the terrible pressure of numerically superior forces would have to ease. We just needed some months of breathing space. Then we would hit back with annihilating power, especially here in Courland … With our toughness and persistence against the furious assaults of the Red Army, we could offer a breathing space to the reserves, who were now being organised and freshly equipped in Germany.

  It is difficult to comprehend how anyone could believe this was really the case, but Wallin had been fighting the Red Army since the Winter War and final defeat was probably too awful a prospect for the NCO to contemplate. Leaving Bunkas in the east of the Pocket on 4 January, the Nordland moved south-west some 40 kilometres to the town of Preekuln, just to the east of the main port town of Liepaja. Its neighbours were the 30th Infantry Division on its left and the 11th on its right, with the experienced 14th Panzer Division covering the whole sector as the mobile armoured reserve. Wallin for one was grateful to leave Bunkas, as he described in his book ‘Twilight of the Gods’ A Swedish Waffen-SS Volunteer’s experiences with the 11th SS-Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, Eastern Front 1944-45:

  … we were relieved and could leave Bunkas, a real death trap. It lay in the open without any connections to the rear except during the dark of night. We were lucky to get out of there before Ivan had finished with his build-up for the great assault we knew was coming. Instead our successors had to face the storm a few days later and according to what I heard hardly anyone from the relief came out of there alive.

  The Fourth Battle of Courland

  Unsurprisingly that far north, January 1945 in Courland was damnably cold. The snow was not metres thick, but it was there, and the nights were clear so everything froze overnight. The Ostheer had finally learnt its lessons from the eastern winters, and the kit and equipment Erik Wallin and his comrades were issued with was a world away from the dire ‘jackboot and overcoat’ days of 1941. The grenadiers were issued with reversible white/camouflage padded uniforms, weapons were greased with anti-freeze, and heavy weapons had special lubricants to keep them working never mind the thermometer reading. But despite all of this welcome technical advancement every infantryman still froze – the weather is the weather and no soldier can beat it. Even the Scandinavians, no strangers to northern winters, felt the cold. But the Scandinavian Waffen-SS had precious little time to worry about the temperature after their move west, as the Red Army launched yet another offensive against Army Group Courland. This time it was aimed at the southwestern end of the Pocket, and designed to take Liepaja and deprive the Germans of the port. The main blow fell first on the 30th Infantry Division, and then the Nordland itself on 23 January. After resting behind the lines for a day or so, Wallin’s company were back in the line when th
e blow struck, as usual it was preceded by an enormous artillery barrage:

  During the bombardment we received orders that our mortars had to go into action. The only thing we could do was to take a deep breath and run out into that hell. The area around us had completely changed character … ploughed away by Ivan’s artillery and a new landscape created. One of the mortars had obviously taken a direct hit down the barrel, because the remains hung like an opened banana skin over the mounting. The other mortars had survived, as had the stock of shells, about 150 of them.

  What then followed was, for me, one of the most frantic episodes of the war. I guess it would have been too much to hope that the enemy should cease firing at our mortar position, so that we, in peace and quiet, could carry out our own action! However their fire didn’t show any sign of slackening at all. Every other minute you had to throw yourself down some hole to avoid being torn to pieces by a howling shell. During this we had to keep on firing according to the corrections that the field-telephone blared to us direct from the artillery observer who was somewhere out in front of us.