Hitler's Vikings

by Jonathan Trigg

Berlin’s last defenders were a true reflection of the sad, hopeless and bizarre place the Third Reich had become by that late spring. The ranks were filled with children, grandfathers and foreigners. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Hitler Youth boys stood alongside old men in their fifties from the Volkssturm, the German equivalent of Britain’s Home Guard. The Nordland’s Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were joined by a battalion of Latvians from the 15th SS, and a battlegroup of French SS men from the 33rd Charlemagne. Trying to exercise command of this pathetic garrison was the artillery general, Helmuth Weidling. Dividing the city into sectors, he split the Nordland up and used its various parts to stiffen his rag-bag of defenders. On 23 April, Wallin and the rest of the Recce Battalion were based in Neukölln in the south-east of the city, Per Sörensen’s Danmark held a bridgehead at East Cross, with the last of the Nordland’s assault engineers in Treptow Park and Plänterwald. The Norge defended the three main bridges over the River Spree in Schöneweide, while the Anti-Aircraft Battalion was in Adlershof using their few remaining guns in a ground role. All of the Nordland’s artillery were concentrated in Britz to provide fire support anywhere in the city. For once, ammunition was plentiful as the grenadiers found stockpiles pretty much all over the place. This was now street-fighting. All war is savage, but there is something about combat in the rubble of peoples’ houses and lives, amidst so many signs of otherwise normal life, that somehow makes urban battle the worst there is. The choking smoke and dust, the flames and claustrophobia of a city-scape are all horrible, and made far worse by the immense noise. Noise may not seem to be anything other than a nuisance, but in urban fighting it is a massive factor. Explosions and shots are amplified by the constricted nature of the buildings, all communication soon comes down to endless shouting and even your own weapons are truly deafening. The effect is disorientating and exhausting. The brain struggles to make sense of its surroundings and often just blanks them out instead, making men sluggish and despondent. Overall, men burn out quicker and need to be rotated out of combat after no more than a couple of days. Prolonged exposure to street fighting, with no time out of the line to gather oneself, will turn a unit into so much human rubble in a matter of days. This is exactly what awaited the Nordland, whereas there was an opposite feeling amongst the Soviets – no-one wanted to die now with victory so close – as Wallin observed:

  There was no limit to their tank forces. The infantry we saw less and less of though. Time after time we realised that the forces ranged against us were exclusively tanks, assault guns and entire battalions of Stalin Organs. There wasn’t an infantry soldier amongst them. The motorisation of the Red Army had reached its peak, and the infantry were mostly transported in American trucks following in the tracks of the tanks.

  Berlin was surrounded and dying. Neukölln was lost, despite a French counter-attack, Gatow airfield was destroyed and Tempelhof airfield threatened, with Soviet tanks on the edges of its runways. The attempt to hold this last link to the outside world led to a bitter-sweet moment for Erik Wallin:

  We were suddenly pulled out of the battle and sent urgently southwards down to Tempelhof and Mariendorf where the Soviets had managed to make a dangerous breakthrough. The half-tracks were driven at a raging speed southwards along Frankfurter Allee, Skalitzer Strasse, Gitschiner Strasse and Belle-Alliance Strasse.

  The Company arrived at a petrol depot among the airfield’s administrative buildings to refuel, and among the comrades I met there was Ragnar Johansson. During the hard fighting of the last few weeks we hadn’t seen each other even once. He was amazed to see me. ‘You’re still alive?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Yes of course I am.’ I replied. ‘But the boys said you got it at Küstrin.’ Ragnar couldn’t believe his eyes, then he smiled broadly and declared, ‘Come on, let’s celebrate.’ He pulled me over to his half-track and pulled a bottle from the back. ‘Danziger Goldwasser, great stuff, it’s the company commanders but I borrowed some, he can’t take too much anyway.’ Ragnar said beaming. We each took a big gulp from the bottle and then quietly enjoyed a cigarette. He was a fine man and soldier, and ever since most of the Swedes in the Waffen-SS had been gathered in our unit he had been the connecting link. First as a motorcycle dispatch rider, then as GP’s half-track driver, and in this role he had been a link to all of us, bringing us news and letters from home.

  That was the last time I saw Ragge Johansson.

  The fight at Tempelhof was over before it really began and the place was abandoned. The fighting was confused, there was no real frontline, and it was incredibly difficult to keep any sort of control among the wrecked and burning buildings. Unable to get a clear picture of what was going on around him, Sörensen shinned up a telegraph pole, clinging on precariously with one hand, while holding his field-binoculars with the other. It was too good a target to pass up, and a Soviet sniper put a bullet right into him. He was dead before he hit the ground. His men buried him the next day in Plötsensee Cemetery, in a makeshift coffin made from old ammo crates. The Norge’s Richard Spörle was killed at pretty much the same time, leaving both the Danmark and Norge Regiments leaderless. With all three remaining battalions mustering barely a thousand men all together, Ziegler amalgamated them under the command of the Danmark’s Rudolf Ternedde. Gathering up the exhausted grenadiers, Ternedde led them to the city’s inner defence ring, the so-called ‘Sector C’. There they established a makeshift defensive line along the over ground S-Bahn tram line from Treptow Park and through to the Sonnen Allee.

  Ziegler out – Krukenberg in

  The entire Nordland now numbered no more than 1,500 men, and as far as Joachim Ziegler was concerned his surviving Scandinavians, Germans and volksdeutsche had done enough, and he was determined to try and spare them more bloodshed. The tall SS general spoke to Weidling about how to best bring the fighting to a close, but the taciturn Wehrmacht man was having none of it and relieved Ziegler of his command on the spot. His replacement was an old acquaintance from service in the Baltic states – the SS-Charlemagne’s Dr Gustav Krukenberg. The militarily undistinguished 57-year-old would now command both the Nordland and his own French SS men. The German Nordland veteran, SS-Unterscharführer Burgkart, was a witness to the abrupt handover:

  On the morning of April 25 1945, we – SS-Sturmbannführer Saalbach and SS-Sturmbannführer Vollmar and I – were standing talking in front of the stairway entrance to the advanced command post of the division in a building of the lung hospital at Hasenheide. Suddenly we were spoken to from behind, ‘Where is the Nordland command post?’ I turned and said, ‘Down there in the cellar.’ As I said that I saw the silver-grey coat insignia and knew it was a Brigadeführer. He went past me followed by a couple of SS men with machine-pistols under their arms; they didn’t say a word.

  When I looked round I saw a few trucks carrying SS men had driven up, the men got out and formed a cordon cutting off the whole street. Everything was stopped. A short time later Brigadeführer Ziegler, his orderly and his driver, Hauptscharführer Emmert, came up the stairs, Ziegler walked straight up to me and said; ‘Burgkart take your kit and any private belongings out of the wagon.’ I asked, ‘Why Brigadeführer?’, and he replied; ‘Take your things out, I have to go now.’ Only then did we learn that the other Brigadeführer was Dr Krukenberg of the SS-Charlemagne and the men with him were French.

  Emmert meanwhile had gotten into the wagon and started it. I took out my kit, overcoat and assault rifle, and Ziegler and his orderly went to get in. Before he did Ziegler turned to us, saluted and said; ‘Gentlemen, all the best.’ Vollmar turned to me and asked what was going on, I wanted to go into the command post but was stopped by one of the Frenchmen saying; ‘No, back, no, back.’ At this moment two or three armoured personnel carriers full of wounded SS men drove up. The crews were searching for a hospital for our gasping, groaning and shrieking comrades. The Frenchmen shouted at them to stop but the drivers ignored them and drove on. Suddenly one of the Frenchmen fired at the first SPW with his assault rifle. The SPW’s
gunner reacted instantly and fired his MG34 into the French SS men. I saw three or four French SS men rolling around on the ground yelling and thought it was time to get out of there as fast as possible.

  ‘Boys, it’s all over’

  Most of Berlin was now in Soviet hands, and it was burning. The weather was warm for the time of year, and the skies were clear. With no Luftwaffe, and much of the city’s air-defences knocked out, the Red air force had carte blanche to strafe and bomb anything in sight. If they could not level it from the air then the Soviets hit it with artillery or tanks. As the defenders’ heavy weapons became fewer and fewer, the Russians boldly wheeled their big guns down the middle of Berlin’s streets, smashing everything at point-blank range. The Nordland and the Charlemagne in particular still exacted a heavy toll from their attackers, but come 29 April their resistance was giving out. By that time the Norge was in the Spittelmarkt, and the Danmark around Koch Strasse U-Bahn underground train station. The engineers, anti-aircraft crews and the last five King Tigers of the Hermann von Salza were in the Tiergarten. Most of the Nordland’s Recce Battalion were fighting alongside Henri Fenet’s Frenchmen in Potsdamer Platz, with Pehrsson and the last of his Swedes and their six half-tracks defending the Reich Chancellery.

  Then on 30 April, deep in an underground bunker, after a short wedding ceremony, a middle-aged Austrian crunched on a cyanide capsule and blew his own brains out with a small calibre pistol before the poison could take effect. Next to him his wife of less than an hour committed suicide too. Adolf Hitler was finally dead. Having caused millions of deaths the dictator lacked the courage to stand with his men and go down fighting. As his body was hurriedly burnt in a shallow trench outside the Chancellery bunker, the news started to leak out – it was over.

  Krukenberg’s men, both Nordland and Charlemagne, were pulled back to the huge Air Ministry building on Leipziger Strasse, though the Norge was still at the Spittelmarkt. A lone King Tiger stood sentry in the street outside as everyone tried to work out what to do next. Pehrsson, though, was in no doubt. He gathered his men together and told them the war was over, that their oaths were absolved and they should try and escape the city.

  Breakout

  Thousands of Berlin’s defenders simply sat down and waited to be rounded up by the Red Army. Others drank themselves into a stupor on rivers of alcohol that seemed to appear from nowhere. A few, like Waffen-Obersturmführer Nielands and his Latvian SS recce company, stayed in their positions and prepared to die – there would be no POW Camp for those Stalin regarded as traitors. Several thousand though were determined to try and break out of the city to safety. Their officers took them to the Weidendammer Bridge over the Spree at Freidrichstrasse. There they waited for nightfall to try and cross the bridge and head west out of Berlin.

  In the waiting throng, private soldiers rubbed shoulders with generals like Ziegler and Krukenberg, and high-ranking Nazi Party officials, even Hitler’s deputy Martin Bormann was there. A few of the Nordland’s last armoured personnel carriers and panzers managed to reach the bridge by draining fuel from the rest, which were then disabled and abandoned. As night fell, the mass of would-be escapees prepared to make the dash over the couple of hundred metres of open bridge and road. The Soviets were waiting.

  Just after midnight on 1 May, a group of men stormed forward onto the bridge, only to be cut down by shell and machine-gun fire. The next wave were undeterred and after marshalling the armour, they charged. After that it was more or less a free-for-all, as chaos reigned. The Soviets were determined to stop anyone from getting away and they poured steel and high explosive into the hordes of Army and SS men. It is impossible to calculate how many men died at Weidendammer Bridge, except to say it was carnage. No panzers made it beyond the far side, and neither did any half-tracks. Erik Wallin’s friend, Ragnar ‘Ragge’ Johansson, was driving one of the latter when it got hit on Friedrichstrasse. Johansson dived out, only to be caught and killed in a shell blast a few yards away. He was perhaps the very last member of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS to die in combat in World War Two. Some Nordland men did make it across the bridge though, and they swiftly dispersed and struck west. Among the lucky ones were two of the Norge’s Norwegian panzer grenadiers, Lage Søgaard and Kasper Sivesind from the 12th Company, and the Danish officer, SS-Obersturmführer Birkedahl-Hansen, who led a group of fellow Danes from the Danmark out through Spandau. Birkedahl-Hansen was suffering from jaundice at the time and several of his men were wounded, but somehow they managed to keep going north until they reached the Baltic Sea port of Warneminde. There the SS men half-begged and half-bullied a local fisherman to take them to Denmark. By mid-May they were home. As for Ziegler and Krukenberg, the two SS generals got over the Weidendammer and then split up. Just short of the Gesundbrunner U-Bahn station in the Humboldthain district, Joachim Ziegler was hit by a ricochet and killed instantly. Krukenberg managed to lay low in the ruins for a couple of days before being discovered and captured by a Red Army patrol.

  Among the ruins, the columns of weary prisoners, and the sudden eerie silence, Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, the victor of Stalingrad and now the conqueror of Berlin as commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, wrote in his diary on 2 May: ‘Everything was quiet in Berlin.’

  As for the Swedish Waffen-SS contingent, only Hans-Gösta Pehrsson and Erik Wallin made it out of the city alive. Wallin had been wounded in the left leg by a shell blast on 27 April, and tried to find shelter in the crumbling city:

  I remembered that one of my Swedish comrades, Untersturmführer Gunnar-Erik Eklöf, an officer from our battalion, recently had a command in Berlin as the city became the frontline. Perhaps he was to be found in his apartment at Getraudenstrasse. I went in that direction towards Wilmersdorf. Every street crossing had a tank barricade, it was difficult to get through. When I finally reached my destination, it was clear the house was empty. On again.

  Wallin was lucky, and found shelter and medical care in an overflowing first-aid centre in a school in Nikolsburger Platz. He was still there when the city surrendered. Abandoning his uniform, he moved around Berlin for the next few weeks hiding out with other Swedes, mostly civilian workers, trying to find a way home. In a stroke of pure luck, he then met up with Eklöf, who was also in touch with Pehrsson. Pehrsson told Wallin about the death of his friend Ragnar Johansson on Freidrichstrasse during the break-out, and the two of them then resolved to escape the city as soon as practicable. On 2 June, with Wallin’s wounds healed, the pair of ex-grenadiers started out north on foot. En route they heard of an official crossing-point for displaced foreigners trying to get home, over the Elbe River at Wittenberge. Trekking to the site, alternately dodging and bluffing their way through the Red Army, the two Swedes posed as Italian refugees and smuggled themselves onto a ferry.

  The Swedish Waffen-SS officer, Gunnar-Erik Eklöf, who served in the Nordland’s famous Schwedenzug, then the SS-Hauptamt in Berlin, before ending up with Otto Skorzeny’s commandos in the special forces unit, Jagdverband Nordwest. (James Macleod)

  The feeling of having at long last got out of the range of fire from the Red Army was overwhelming. We reached the other bank and were greeted by laughing British soldiers, with the words, ‘Welcome back to civilisation!’

  The end of the SS-Wiking

  Away to the southeast, and following the failure of Spring Awakening, the Wiking had been steadily pushed out of Hungary and into Austria. Along with the rest of Dietrich’s men, the Wiking was caught up in the defence of Vienna and the fighting around Stühlweissenburg. In the chaos and confusion the division splintered, with much of the Westland separated from its compatriots. Some fell into the vengeful hands of the Red Army near the River Mur, but Karl Ullrich led the majority to the American lines at Radstad, where they laid down their arms and went into captivity. After four years of constant combat, all of it in the East, and having fought in Barbarossa, the Caucasus, Cherkassy, Kovel, the Vistula and Hungary – the 5th SS-Panzer Division Wiking was no more. Tens of
thousands of men had been through its ranks, with so very many of them killed or wounded in the process, but the division had established a military reputation that equalled that of the very best Waffen-SS formations, and it was not stained by tales of wanton atrocities as were so many others. Overall the Wiking had won an extraordinary 55 Knight’s Crosses, of all the Waffen-SS divisions only the Das Reich (69) and the Leibstandarte (58) Divisions earned more.

  Years after the end of the war, Erik Brörup emigrated to Canada and ended up serving in the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps. He is standing in front of his armoured car. (James Macleod)

  Erik and Grethe Brörup at home in Canada. Erik suffered strokes towards the end of his life which left him severely incapacitated. His mind was still sharp though, until he passed away peacefully on 7 January 2010. (Erik Brörup)

  The Wiking had always been majority-manned by Germans, despite its name and the intent of its founders, but until the advent of the SS-Nordland it had proudly carried the banner of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS and several thousand Danes, Norwegians, Finns and Swedes had worn the Wiking cuff-title. The establishment of the Nordland had effectively brought an end to the Wiking’s Nordic heritage, although even then a few Scandinavians continued to be found in its ranks – when Erik Brörup surrendered to the Americans on 8 May, just south of Fürstenfeld, he was not the only Scandinavian. Having surrendered, the men were well treated and sent to a detention camp in Upper Bavaria at the beginning of June. A hasty ‘de-nazification’ process was declared complete by September, and from then on men were released in batches and sent home. For those Germans from the now-lost eastern Länder (roughly translated as ‘regions’) there was no home to go to, and they started again among their comrades from western and central Germany. Things were not so easy for the foreign volunteers, who went home to face their vengeful countrymen.