Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  The Waffen SS grew out of the Schutzstaffel (security force) created in 1925 to protect Nazi Party meetings and senior cadres. From its beginnings the SS was a party instrument rather than a paramilitary force of the kind otherwise familiar in Weimar Germany. Its loyalty was personal, to Hitler himself, and inspired his creation after the seizure of power in 1933 of the regiment-sized Leibstandarte (bodyguard). Its title suggests its function: to secure the regime against a coup. Created at the same time was a second armed element: the Totenkopf (Death’s Head) units guarding the concentration camps. A year later a number of gun-carrying local leg-breakers called Political Emergency Readiness Formations were combined into three regiments of Verfügungstruppen (special service troops) equipped, like the Leibstandarte, as motorized infantry.

  This was scarcely a promising matrix for expansion—especially given Hitler’s simultaneous emphasis on the “Two Pillars Theory” hailing the Wehrmacht as the Third Reich’s sole “bearer of arms.” SS chief Heinrich Himmler combined the zeal of an ideologue and the soul of a bureaucrat. His response, echoed by Hitler, usually spoke of the SS as National Socialism’s ideological soldiers: a party force, limited in size and focused in purpose, which was nevertheless honored to serve alongside the army in the field.

  The explanation was fairly transparent, especially when volunteer enlistment in any of the SS armed branches became an alternate form of military service. But there were not that many of them relative to a rapidly expanding army. Compromise seemed reasonable in the context of all the other compromises the soldiers were making with the New Order. Besides, four extra motorized regiments might prove a useful addition to a mobile force at best none too large for its projected mission.

  Nothing, moreover, indicated that the effectiveness of the armed SS would transcend its numbers. Himmler’s vision aspired to a new human type, able to serve as a model and an instrument for revitalizing the Nordic race. It was a vision readily marketable among the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service in the early years, when the Reich was still an empire of dreams, when the General SS attracted doctors, attorneys, and businessmen—and when the black uniform was still fresh and new. The Leibstandarte in particular looked elegant. Its close-order drill was unmatched even by Grossdeutschland. Its men were handsome: not a pair of glasses in the ranks, at least on parade.

  But could these “asphalt soldiers” fight? The SS officer corps at this stage was a mixed bag of ideologues seeking to serve the Reich, opportunists seeking quick promotion, and second-tier transfers the army was not eager to retain. There were some exceptions. Paul Hausser was a retired army major general who justified his advancement in the SS by professional competence as a trainer and commander. Felix Steiner transferred in as a major because he admired SS ideas of training. But most of the men who rose from commanding companies and battalions to leading divisions and corps by 1945 did it in what came to be understood as the SS way: headlong energy and ruthless, never-say-die aggressiveness. SS doctrine emphasized speed and ferocity. SS training stressed physical toughness and incorporated risk to an extent surpassing the army.

  From the beginning Himmler was determined to develop an officer corps fundamentally different from its army counterpart. Once the cadres of transfers were in place, Waffen SS officer candidates were required to spend time in the ranks—two years initially, less as the war progressed. Only after that enlisted service were they eligible for the Junkerschulen, the special officer training schools, the best known—or most notorious—being Bad Tölz. The curriculum, ironically, included extensive instruction in table etiquette and similar bourgeois social graces. This reflected the fact that a higher proportion of SS officers were from lower social strata than their army counterparts. It reflected as well Himmler’s determination that his personal armed force would stand out in every particular.

  Hausser, Steiner, and their senior-officer counterparts also stressed breaking down the hierarchic rank stuctures still considered characteristic of the army. Officers and noncommissioned officers were encouraged to get to know their men, to participate in team games. In the field, rations and facilities were essentially the same—at least at company and battalion levels. “Pulling rank” off-duty was strongly discouraged. In principle, any Waffen SS man could request of another, from corporal to general, to “speak with you as a comrade,” and that request would be honored.

  The army’s collective reservations regarding SS military effectiveness nevertheless seemed justified by the Polish campaign. Exchanging SS black for army field gray, done on the outbreak of war, did not transform party activists to German soldiers. Lectures on Nordic racial superiority and the world mission of the Third Reich were no substitute for a sense of terrain. Heedless—and brainless—valor was a quick ticket to a mass grave. Employed by regiments under army command, the SS distinguished itself by disproportionately high casualties, by junior officers who knew how to lead but not command; and by majors and colonels baffled by situations that required solutions more sophisticated than a headlong assault. The High Command also found SS units prone to commit atrocities against Poles and Jews more systematically, more publicly, and on a larger scale than the army was willing to stomach—yet.

  The SS response was standard military alibi: high-risk missions, inadequate equipment, misuse by unsympathetic generals. Supported by Hitler, Himmler took steps to bring the armed formations together as the Waffen SS, to form the three Verfügungs regiments into a motorized division, and to form another three-regiment motorized division around a cadre of concentration camp guards. The Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division was well named. Its commander, Theodor Eicke, was a protégé of Himmler’s whose motto was “tolerance is weakness.” He had been committed briefly to a mental hospital by a Party superior. He encouraged contempt for “military” virtues and behavior among the men he supervised as Inspector of Concentration Camps. But as a division commander Eicke had his points. He made his men obey superiors, focused their camp-conditioned viciousness with a spectacularly demanding training program, and used his connections to scrounge modern equipment for the collection of thugs and aspiring thugs who called him “Pop.”

  It must be noted that the often-cited distinction between the Waffen SS and the concentration camp system existed only in the minds of apologists. Throughout the war, exchanges took place between camp personnel and field units, usually on the basis of physical fitness.

  From the Leibstandarte the Waffen SS drew an identity as the Führer’s personal elite. The Verfügungstruppen contributed a willingness to learn soldiering from the professionals. Totenkopf emphasized ferocity for the fun of it. In the 1940 campaign the latter tendency predominated. Under orders, elements of Leibstandarte and Totenkopf carried out large-scale massacres of British POWs; in the Totenkopf, it was standard procedure to give no quarter to French black troops. Operational effectiveness was another matter. During the fight for Holland, Leibstandarte added a German general to its bag by severely wounding Kurt Student when some of its men opened fire on what turned out to be surrender negotiations. In a campaign otherwise characterized by low German casualties Verfügungsdivision was manhandled twice: by the British in front of Dunkirk and again at the Aire River on June 7 during the final attack on France.

  Hitler nevertheless had no problems with expanding and upgrading the Party’s army. Leibstandarte received enough new bells and whistles, including its own reconnaissance battalion and a full battalion of assault guns, to be redesignated a division. Verfügungsdivision got a new title: Das Reich. The major institutional development of the Waffen SS, however, was external. Volunteers for the Waffen SS were still ample, but the army controlled the supply through a regulation that no one registered for conscription could volunteer for any form of service until his local military district approved. With available manpower increasingly stretched between the Wehrmacht and industry, the kind of high-quality recruits demanded by the Waffen SS were an increasing source of friction well before preparations for Barbarossa
got underway.

  Gottlob Berger, in charge of SS recruitment since 1938, initially responded to the army’s barriers by turning to the ethnic German communities still not called “home to the Reich.” Several thousand volunteered, especially from Romania. Even before the overrunning of Western Europe, Berger proposed the enlistment of volunteers from racially suitable non-German sources. Himmler was not merely receptive but enthusiastic. He saw a future that would begin with a European crusade against Bolshevism and end with a Germania extending from the Atlantic to the Urals. The Waffen SS would be at the forefront of this effort, eventually developing into a multinational force that would not merely supplant the Wehrmacht but transcend it.

  In the summer of 1940 the SS began soliciting volunteers from Germany’s “Nordic” conquests: Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgian Flemings. In September, Hitler, despite reluctance to provoke an army that was also recruiting in the conquered territories, authorized a new SS division. Built around an experienced Verfügungs regiment, it would include a Regiment Westland drawn from Belgium and the Netherlands, and a Scandinavian Regiment Nordland. Hitler christened it the Viking Division and authorized its organization as a motorized division.

  The Viking Division generated as many myths and legends as any German formation of the Second World War. Foremost is its enduring image as a body of blond, blue-eyed, six-foot Scandinavians: berserkers. In fact, Viking from its inception had more Germans than “Nordics” in its ranks—more than 90 percent. In January 1942, an SS survey listed the number of Finns, Norwegians, and Danes at around 5,500, not all of them serving in Viking. Yet its non-Germans gave Viking a particular ambience, one that endured when most of the originals were dead or in hospitals.

  The Viking Division’s motivations have been endlessly debated. It is reasonable to suggest that most recruits, like most human beings generally, were motivated by combinations of factors whose respective influence was constantly changing. Some were proto-Europeans and some anti-Communists. Some saw German Europe as a given and wished to make their way in the new world. Others were indigenous fascists, encouraged or pressured by local movements seeking to curry influence. More volunteers than might be expected were motivated by economic considerations exacerbated by conquest and occupation. And a good many are best described as adventurers. The Low Countries and Scan dinavia had worked assiduously during the twentieth century to create societies congenial to slightly overweight men with briefcases. They offered little scope and less encouragement to the kind of large living suggested by the SS. Boredom can be as good a recruiting sergeant as hunger.

  Whatever their motivations, the “Nordics” provided the seedbed of the division’s professionalism. Unlike some of their counterparts in the German army’s European “legions,” Viking’s men had generally enlisted as individuals. Even when ideologically based, the volunteers’ motives seldom included the genocidal racism at the heart of the German SS. Their cadres, mostly from the Verfügungsdivision, were more concerned with making them battle-ready than with their ideological development. The Germans who filled out Viking’s ranks in good part acculturated to the foreigners—not least, as one old hand reminisced, because their exotic aura helped pick up girls.

  Its variant identity did not make Viking anything but an SS division. During service entirely on the Eastern Front, the men whose shoulder patch was a stylized longship acquired and preserved a reputation as not being freely given to the large-scale, gratuitous ferocity characteristic of their fellows. That of course did not avert shooting Jews on what admittedly by SS standards were limited numbers: a few hundred here and a few hundred somewhere else, usually justified as “reprisals” and underwritten by an internal order that Jew-killing was not a punishable offense.

  Leibstandarte and Das Reich served in the Balkan campaign, enhancing the Waffen SS reputation for aggressiveness and arrogance. An officer of Das Reich at the head of a dozen men was able to bluff the mayor of Belgrade into suspending resistance until it was too late. When some men of the Leibstandarte hesitated to advance against a Greek position, their battalion commander, himself in the front line, got them moving by throwing a grenade at them. “It’s not bragging when you back it up.” And if the army as an institution still found the Waffen SS as a concept unpleasant to swallow, its four motorized divisions on the ground looked better and better as Barbarossa’s orders of battle were finalized.

  In June 1941, the Waffen SS remained firmly under the army’s organizational thumb. Leibstandarte and Viking went with Army Group South, Das Reich with Center, and Totenkopf with North. Hoepner kept the Skulls in supporting roles. Mopping up stragglers and maintaining contact with Bock’s left flank, the division took heavy casualties as it fought toward Leningrad through the forests and swamps.

  Das Reich was initially not even allocated road space by Army Group Center, but when it found a way to the front it played a crucial role in the late July fighting around Yelna. One of its staff officers used the division’s last reserve, its pioneer battalion, to stop a major Soviet breakthrough. The corps report singles out the SS riflemen for “fearlessness and bravery,” swarming over heavy tanks to set them afire with gasoline when the antitank guns proved useless. And the casualty records show Das Reich took almost three times the losses of 10th Panzer Division, which fought alongside it.

  That pattern persisted throughout the drive for Moscow. As part of Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, Das Reich fought to within sight of Moscow, then was caught in the Soviet counterattack and hammered so badly its effective remnants were organized into a battle group and the remaining survivors sent all the way to France for rest and refitting. Not for a year would it return to the east, and to a new emergency.

  Leibstandarte was also held in the wings during Barbarossa’s early stages. It was a week before it joined III Panzer Corps, then XLVII Panzer Corps, for the drive into the Ukraine. Leibstandarte had always been the best of the Waffen SS formations, and it sustained that reputation both in the attack and while fending off Soviet counterattacks. It got as far as the Black Sea before turning north in November 1941 and rejoining III Panzer Corps to play a key part in capturing the city of Rostov. A Leibstandarte rifle company set up the victory by capturing a vital railway bridge before it could be blown. Its quick-thinking CO ordered his men to shoot up a locomotive and stormed across under cover of the clouds of steam.

  That was the kind of warrior performance that inspired Mackensen to inform Himmler that every unit wanted to have Leibstandarte on its flank in a tight spot. And if the “toughness” Mackensen praised manifested itself occasionally in the mass shooting of Soviet prisoners—as many as 4,000 in a single incident, according to one allegation—the usual explanation was that the shootings were reprisals for the murder and mutilation of captured SS men. It was a fig leaf, but it camouflaged what the army understood to be a negotiable trade for SS “discipline, eagerness, and enthusiasm.”

  Soviet counterattacks drove the Germans out of Rostov and inflicted heavy casualties. By the turn of the year, more than half Leibstandarte’s originals were dead or wounded. The replacement pool was almost exhausted; Soviet counterattacks so reduced its fighting power that Leibstandarte was not considered for Operation Blue. Instead it was withdrawn to France in June for refitting—and assignment to the newly forming SS Panzer Corps.

  Viking saw its first action fighting for Tarnopol in Galicia, then shifted south across the Dnieper and served alongside Leibstandarte in the capture and loss of Rostov. Viking also held the line in the Ukraine during a winter of counterattacks. Unlike Leibstandarte, Viking was not favored with reassignment to France. Instead, replenished and reequipped on the ground, it received its own tank battalion and proved a key to the successes of 1st Panzer Army during its drive into the Caucasus. Viking crossed the Kuban Steppe in hundred-degree temperatures, fought into Grozny as the oilfields burned, sent spearheads toward Astrakhan, and won consistent praise from the panzer corps to which it was assigned.

  By
no means was all of this flattery aimed at Himmler by uniformed politicians. Retitled “panzer grenadier” in October 1941, Viking increasingly assumed the role of a panzer division in a theater where armor was scarce and distances wide. Half its 50 tanks were Panzer IIIs, and its officers made up for the relative lack of armor with by-now predictable aggressive tactics that earned the grudging respect of the Soviets. Steiner proved a clear-eyed general as well as a hard-driving commander. As early as mid-September he reported to his SS superiors that Hitler’s directive was impossible: the Caucasus could not be crossed before winter set in.

  If Viking was at one end of the Waffen SS approach to war-making, Totenkopf set new standards at the other. The Skulls were one of the half dozen divisions and 100,000 men trapped in what came to be known as the Demyansk Pocket by the Soviet Northwest Front’s massive offensive of February 1942. When terrain, weather, and command arteriosclerosis put an end to the operation, Demyansk remained, attacked repeatedly by a total of five Soviet armies, and kept minimally supplied by air. And by all accounts and admissions, Totenkopf was the backbone of the defense. Combining with army troops or fighting on their own, the SS men held nothing back. Eicke’s pathological ferocity focused a spirit of “no quarter, no surrender” that rendered four-fifths of the division casualties by the time the pocket was relieved in April.

  Not many of the original concentration camp guards remained when Totenkopf’s remnants joined Leibstandarte and Das Reich in France. By this time the occupied zone was developing into a rest and refit area for divisions burned out in Russia. “To live like God in France” is a familiar German proverb, and the SS survivors took full advantages of the opportunities provided in a society still complaisant, if not enthusiastic, about its situation. It was not all down time. The SS divisions were reconfigured and upgraded to panzer grenadier status. The title was another fig leaf to keep the army quiet. While not officially renamed until October 1943, all three were full- fledged panzer divisions where it counted, with, thanks to the lobbying of Himmler and Hauser, two-battalion tank regiments, at least a battalion on infantry in half-tracks, and—eventually—a company of Tigers.