Hitler's Vikings

by Jonathan Trigg

  VII

  Homecoming – Retribution and Legacy

  Behold the cruel Danish, Norwegian and Swedish races, who in the words of the holy Gregory ‘did not know except how to grind their teeth like barbarians, but who can now already intone a Halleluja to the praise of God.’ Behold that race of pirates who used to raid the coasts of Gaul and Germany but who are now satisfied with their own lands. Their ferocity has gone.

  Adam of Bremen on the Vikings from his History of the Bishops of Hamburg

  When the Third Reich officially surrendered in the West, Norway and Denmark were still occupied by substantial German forces. There was no resistance, and all Wehrmacht personnel laid down their weapons and marched silently into captivity. Amongst them were thousands of Scandinavians, either in uniform or not, who had served alongside the occupiers and who were now joined by survivors from the Wiking and Nordland as they returned home. Whilst the Germans were allowed to leave in peace, ‘retribution’ was the watchword for those deemed by their own countrymen to have collaborated. In the East the process was simple and brutal. All those who had sided with the Germans, in whatever capacity, were rounded up and either shot or dispatched to the infamous gulag slave labour camps. There they were worked, starved and beaten to death. In France, Belgium and the Netherlands, a judicial process followed hot on the heels of an ‘unofficial’ reckoning and settling of scores that left several thousand dead. Scandinavia was distinct in not suffering a wave of revenge killings, but even so Denmark and Norway were convulsed in the aftermath of occupation.

  The Dutch volunteer Jan Munk at a reunion with his comrades from the Wiking in 1996. (Jan Munk)

  Denmark

  The Danish Government had a legal conundrum. The original Frikorps Danmark had been officially sanctioned, and Danes had received limited but still significant encouragement from their own State to serve with the Germans. The Frikorps’ very first commander, Christian-Peder Kryssing himself, had only taken up the role after being asked to do so by Copenhagen. The Danish solution was a law rushed through at the end of May 1945 which revoked the original decision to allow volunteering, and retrospectively criminalised it. Danish officers who had served in the Wehrmacht were banned from re-admittance into their own armed forces, and in November the first trials of Danish SS men began. Altogether 15,724 Danes were arrested for some sort of collaboration, with 1,229 acquitted and the rest convicted; 3,641 received prison terms of more than four years each, of which 2,936 also lost all their civil rights on a permanent basis. The death penalty, abolished years earlier, was reinstituted with 112 sentences handed down and some 46 carried out. Among those executed were two of the earliest and best-known Danish Waffen-SS volunteers; Knud Börge Marthinsen and Tage Petersen. Marthinsen was convicted of murdering a fellow Waffen-SS officer whom he suspected of having an affair with his wife. He was shot by firing squad on 25 June 1949, but was rehabilitated by a shamefaced Danish Parliament several decades later. Kryssing’s family suffered terribly. His wife was crippled in an Allied air-raid while serving as a Red Cross nurse, and two of his sons were killed in action serving with the Waffen-SS. He himself, to his absolute horror and disgust, was disowned by King Christian X, tried and sentenced to five years behind bars. Appalled at his treatment he moved to Haldersleben in North Schleswig after his release, dying on 7 July 1976. As for Frits Clausen, he died of a heart attack in prison while awaiting trial. The Knight’s Cross winner, Sören Kam, moved to Germany after the war and received citizenship in 1956. On 21 September 2006, 85 years old, he was detained in Kempten, Bavaria in accordance with a European arrest warrant issued by Denmark. Wanted in connection with the murder of newspaper editor Carl-Henrik Clemmensen in Copenhagen, he denied the charge and Germany refused to extradite him. Nevertheless, as late as November 2009 he was named as a wanted war criminal in a list published by The Times in the UK. Kam’s fellow Knight’s Cross winners, Johannes Hellmers and Egon Christophersen, survived the war as well and went into quiet retirement in Denmark. Christophersen lived in the small town of Køge and worked in Ørum Hansen’s machine factory for over thirty years before dying in January 1988, while Hellmers lived another 11 years, finally passing away in late 1999. The Honour Roll Clasp winner Alfred Jonstrup, permanently scarred after losing half his jaw in Courland, died in 1983 aged 67.

  Brörup was released from an internment camp in Germany, went back to Denmark but quickly decided to make a new life abroad. Emigrating to Canada, he ended up serving in the Canadian Royal Armoured Corps and then became a qualified bush pilot and forest ranger before retiring. He died in January 2010 after suffering a number of strokes. Paul Hveger, by 1945 an Unterscharführer still serving in Copenhagen, was drafted into the Wiking’s Replacement Battalion (Ersatz Bataillon) and sent to Ellwangen prior to transfer to the Front. It turned out he and his new company commander had a history, and not a good one, and as a result Hveger was sent home. That decision almost certainly saved his life. The Replacement Battalion was wiped out in the last months of the war, and almost every Danish volunteer was killed. After the war ended he was arrested and given a 12-year prison sentence, and was released in 1949. Three of his friends did not fare as well; one committed suicide, the other two (both officers) were sentenced to death. Sturmmann Vagner Kristensen served with the Danmark Regiment until the end of the war and survived. Back home he too was tried and sent to prison, and on release was drafted into the Danish Army. He ended up serving two tours in the 1959-60 UN-mission (UNEF) and was awarded the UN medal. One night he had a few drinks and started singing forbidden Frikorps songs. This didn’t go down well with his superiors and he was discharged and sent home.

  The first ever Danish Waffen-SS Knight’s Cross winner, Unterscharführer Egon Christophersen. Christophersen won his Knight’s Cross for leading a successful counter-attack during the savage Narva battles in the summer of 1944.

  The teenage Danish Frikorps and Danmark Regiment volunteer, Vagner Kristensen, at home in Germany. (Vagner Kristensen)

  The Danish Knight’s Cross winner Sören Kam at his home in Germany. (James Macleod)

  Finally, a postscript on Iceland: it had lost its independence to Norway way back in 1262, and since then had ‘swapped’ rulers so that by the outbreak of the Second World War it was part of Denmark. Occupied by the Allies as an essential North Atlantic base, the island and its people were so remote that the Scandinavian Waffen-SS passed it by. Even so, two Icelanders were known to have served in its ranks; Björn Björnsen went to Bad Tölz, did not graduate but became an SS war reporter instead in the Kurt Eggers Regiment, while Grettir ‘Egidir’ Odiussen served as a panzer grenadier with the Wiking. He was captured by the Russians and sent to the gulags. He never returned.

  Norway

  For Norway, the German occupation had lasted five long years, and in the form of Vidkun Quisling the people had a focus for their anger. Quisling himself had refused to flee; even when Albert Speer offered him his personal plane and pilot, the Norwegian Minister-President turned him down (the Walloon SS leader Léon Degrelle used it instead to escape to Spain). In the early hours of 9 May he asked Bjørn Østring, as the head of his personal bodyguard at Gimle, to telephone Oslo’s Central Police Station and inform them he was on his way there to surrender himself. On arrival he was arrested and quietly led away. Just as in Denmark, Norway had also reinstated the death penalty especially to deal with its collaborators. Convinced of his own rectitude, Quisling defended himself during his three-week trial. Found guilty of treason on 3 September, he was tied to a post in the grounds of the Arkerhus in Oslo and shot by firing squad. Three- and-a-half years earlier he had been appointed as the country’s Minister-President in the very same building. He was one of 25 Norwegians executed for treason and collaboration.

  Again in common with its neighbour Denmark, the new Norwegian Parliament passed a Penal Code Amendment on 1 June 1945 which criminalised volunteering. The trials began immediately. But unlike in Denmark, apart from Quisling the ‘hy
dra’ largely decapitated itself – Jonas Lie (so long Quisling’s opponent) died at Skallum on 11 May; suicide was suspected but unconfirmed. The Hird leader, Henrik Rogstad, did kill himself, as did Josef Terboven and Himmler’s representative in Norway, Wilhelm Rediess. In a bizarre pact both men got drunk in a bunker at Skaugum, then Rediess shot himself, before Terboven blew them both up with a mine. Lie’s old comrade from their days as Leibstandarte war correspondents, the Justice Minister Sverre Riisnaes, was judged to be mentally ill and committed to an asylum, while the SS-Ski and Police commanders, Frode Halle and Reidar-Egil Hoel, were both imprisoned. Hoel passed away in 1971, Halle at the beginning of 1995. In total a staggering 90,000 Norwegians were investigated for collaboration (out of a population of just three million), with more than half being tried and convicted. Some 28,000 were deprived of their civil rights or fined, and a further 18,000 were sent to prison. Six hundred of those were sentenced to more than six years each. For a comparison, given respective population sizes, this would have meant some 300,000 Britons imprisoned for collaboration. Ornulf Bjornstadt, the SS-Germania veteran, was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to five years hard labour. Fredrik Jensen, as an officer and the most highly-decorated Norwegian SS man, was lucky to receive just three months in jail and the loss of his citizen’s rights for 10 years. Even so, on release he moved to Sweden and worked as a foreman in fabrication machinery. Still registered by Interpol as a ‘war criminal’, he was arrested and deported from the USA during a holiday in 1994. Later he lived in Malaga in southern Spain, but was under investigation accused of assisting Mauthausen Concentration Camp’s ‘Dr Death’, Aribert Heim, to escape, a charge he vigorously denied. Olaf Lindvig, as an officer and GSSN leader, was handed down 12 years. He died in 2007. Bjarne Dramstad first had his front teeth kicked out by former Resistance men during his interrogation, before being given five-and-a-half-years hard labour.

  Bjørn Østring, as a prominent Norwegian Waffen-SS volunteer and close friend of Quisling, was definitely in the firing line:

  Like all my comrades I was tried and convicted. A retroactive law declared the mere membership of the NS as criminal, as was volunteering for front-service with the Germans. I was given a seven-year sentence (NS membership plus front-service plus ‘political activity’) and served two years of it. I also lost my civil rights, later restored, but I never considered leaving Norway, although I did help some comrades and others make their way to Argentina.

  Even 65 years on Bjørn Østring is still an admirer of Quisling – note the photo of Vidkun Quisling on the wall over his shoulder. (Chris Hale)

  When the trials finished, Norway did its best to move on, but bitterness still persisted. Bjarne Dramstad did several jobs after finishing his prison term, mainly in the construction industry, and by the mid-1970s he found himself working on an oil rig out in the North Sea. He never hid his past, and in the confined space of the rig he became the victim of sustained harassment from leftwing union members. Eventually he was forced to quit. As for Østring and Lindvig they gained a certain notoriety for their trenchant views later in life. Østring, married towards the end of the war, stayed in Oslo and founded the Institute for the History of the Norwegian Occupation (the INO, of which Dramstad became a member), dedicated to preserving the memory of the volunteers and their experiences. There was no formal national veterans group, as with the Flemings for example, but many ex-Waffen-SS men continued to meet up as the years went by for conversation, a coffee and sometimes something stronger.

  Sweden and Finland

  Sweden, alone of all the Nordic lands, saw no battles or occupation. It remained strictly neutral, and so had no collaborators or any interest in retribution against the few surviving Waffen-SS volunteers. Only those men who had first deserted the Swedish armed forces before enlisting abroad, or had committed some other minor infringement, were put in front of the courts. Erik Wallin was one of the latter; his crime was to have supposedly ‘stolen his Swedish Army uniform’. He was tried and sentenced to several months behind bars. Whilst inside he was repeatedly beaten by other inmates, owing to his service, as the guards looked on. On release, he recounted the story of the last year of his time in the Nordland to his fellow countrymen and former Waffen-SS war reporter, Thorolf Hillblad. The resulting book is an extremely rare firsthand testament from a Scandinavian volunteer. Wallin continued to meet up with Hillblad and other veterans on a regular basis until he suffered a heart attack at a reunion in Berlin and died.

  Hillblad’s fellow correspondent and prominent Swedish SS man, Hans-Caspar Krüger, could not settle back in Sweden after the war and like many others found his way to Argentina after the war. The two most decorated Swedish Waffen-SS men, Hans-Gösta Pehrsson and Sven-Erik Olsson, were not arrested and lived out their days in peace. Pehrsson became a salesman in Stockholm and passed away in 1974 aged 64, and Olsson 11 years later in 1985.

  The Finns were very different; well, what else would they be? Having effectively fought three wars in six years, they at least ended up on the winning side and managed to avoid becoming a Soviet satellite. Waffen-SS service was in no way considered a crime, indeed it was often a career advantage. Of the 1,200 or so men who survived their service, 282 went on to become officers in the Finnish Army, several of them of high rank. One, Sulo Suorttanen, an ex-Bad Tölz graduate and SS-Untersturmführer, even became the Defence Minister in a subsequent national government.

  ‘Daddy, what did you do in the war?’

  The Waffen-SS remains one of the most controversial military bodies to have ever existed. On the one hand its military achievements deserve to stand as examples of martial excellence, but there is no getting away from the fact that as an organisation it was intimately connected with the vileness of Nazism. The verdict of the Nuremburg Tribunal on the Waffen-SS summarises the criminal aspect:

  The SS was utilised for purposes which were criminal under the Charter involving the persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of the occupied territories, the administration of the slave labour program and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners-of-war … The Tribunal declares to be criminal … those persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS as enumerated in the preceding paragraph (members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen-SS, members of the SS Totenkopf Verbände …).

  Erik Wallin at a reunion of his Nordland comrades in Germany after the war. He died from a heart attack at one of these reunions. (James Macleod)

  Thus membership of the Waffen-SS was condemned as a crime in itself, yet this seems ill-judged given the complexity of events and circumstances. Waffen-SS soldiers committed the atrocities at Le Paradis, Oradour and Malmédy, amongst others, and of that there is no doubt whatsoever. Even as late as 2009 a 28-year-old Viennese student, Andreas Forster, stumbled across the alleged massacre of 58 Hungarian Jewish slave labourers just before the war ended. The 90-year-old Wiking veteran, Adolf Storms, has been charged with murder and is now awaiting trial.

  Does that mean all of those who wore the same uniform should be condemned? In essence should we condemn the Scandinavian Waffen-SS? The volunteers’ own views are revealing. Bjarne Dramstad:

  We felt sorry for Russian civilians, and gave them food and other small things when we could spare them. Some Russian women had to clear roads of snow, they were brutalised by the Germans if they didn’t work fast enough and I felt sick when I saw this happening. On our way to the Front, on our first day in Russia, we found a dead Russian woman shot in the head, probably by the German gendarmerie for breaking the curfew of something.

  I didn’t see any atrocities myself, but soon after arriving at the Front I was on guard duty at an ammo dump in Duderhof West with some old German policemen from the 16th Polizei-Regiment I think. They openly bragged of how they had been getting rid of Jews in Poland. For example how they had dragged married couples out of their beds at night and shot them. We were shoc
ked and felt sick, this was terrible. I never had any negative feelings towards Jews, the only ones I ever met went round the villages back home selling clothes and we gave them food whenever we could. Long after the war I went to Auschwitz, it was terrible, but it opened my eyes. I believed in Hitler during the war, I was wrong – he was a madman.

  I believe that everyone is responsible for what they have done, and if anyone committed atrocities they should answer for it. There is a difference between a soldier and a murderer in uniform; I look upon myself as a soldier.

  Bjørn Østring said much the same:

  In the internment camp I was trained as a professional painter and later on at the earliest possible opportunity I gained my Master’s Certificate, founding a company of my own with several employees. My trade expertise then provided me with good jobs in leading companies, one founded by Alf Bjercke the WWII Spitfire pilot. I am and always have been proud of my commitment to the cause that I fought for, and I have never concealed it from anybody. I was genuinely relieved that WWII had come to an end, but I wasn’t glad we lost as I was scared of Stalin taking over Europe. I never witnessed any atrocity of any kind, and nothing of the kind has ever been alleged to have taken place in our sector, but as time went on and much came to light of which we knew nothing, I was enraged that it soiled our honour.