The Charlemagne Murders

by Douglass, Carl;

  With both official German and French sanction, entrance requirements for the Waffen SS were reduced to make it possible for a wider population to have the privilege to enter the elite corps. Recruitment became very active and invited in hundreds of people already working for the Germans—former French veterans and members of the French Right-wing political groups: the PPF, RNP, PSF, the MSR, and the large reservoir of French STO workers already in the employ of the Nazi government in Germany. This change in policy brought in an astonishing number and variety of new recruits from all over the world—as farflung as French Indochina, North African blacks, and Sri Lanka. Not all recruits were accepted into the Waffen SS owing to their still stringent requirements. Only thirty percent of applicants were ever actually sent to Waffen SS training camp in Sennheim, Alsace Lorraine.

  Along the way to becoming the Charlemagne Division, there were several iterations of names of the outfit: Karl der Gross, Fanzösisches SS Regiment, SS Freiwilligen Regiment, Freiwilligen-Sturmbrigade Nr 8, SS Sturmbridge Frankreich. Originally, what came to be the fully accepted Waffen 33rd Division der SS Charlemagne was looked upon as a unit of inferiority composed of non-Aryans, Eastern Europeans, and even Russians. All of that began to change rapidly after D-Day—June 6, 1944. First of all, the French who collaborated with or fought with the Germans had to abandon France and take up their lot with what was beginning to look like the losing side—they had no other viable choice. As the Germans and collaborationists fled the now liberated soil of France, they encountered a bloody and hypocritical orgy of vengeance. Those who stayed professed involvement with De Gaulle’s Free French or at least the partisan resistance underground. They committed atrocities against remaining and fleeing collaborationists and the girls who shared their sexual favors with the occupiers. Many of those fleeing to safety were ambushed and killed before they could reach the safety of Germany.

  In the spring of 1944, an OKW [German High Command] general order laid out plans to unite all foreign soldiers into the Waffen SS. During that summer of 1944, the French Legionnaires fighting for Germany began to coalesce and to build their legend. Their fighting reputation was enhanced by their defense at the Bohr in Russia and in Galicia at the junction between Poland and the Ukraine. Germany now was in the throes of a three-front war: Russia, Western Europe, and Italy, and the situation was changing from “negative” to “dire.” Acting out of necessity, Germany approved a French unit—the Milice—for recruitment services in unoccupied countries and assigned them to the task of rounding up Jews for deportation to death camps and to fight against Resistance units, including those in France. They were also active in carrying out political assassinations. This all included intimidation, overt brutality and torture, and resulted in a minor civil war in France. In 1944, when France was liberated by the Allies, the Milice unit members and their families fled to Germany. Most of the Milice members joined the Charlemagne Division shortly thereafter. They formed the bulk of the Division when it was ordered to the Eastern Front.

  Although the French brigade was not yet considered combat-ready, it became necessary for the German high command to form them up into a 1st Battalion under Waffen-Hauptstürmführer Pierre Cance, a French volunteer. That put a thousand minimally-trained French volunteers with twenty officers and nine-hundred-eighty noncoms to face the Red hordes. They had only light weapons—no tanks, planes, or heavy artillery, and all around them seasoned German companies and regiments were being obliterated by the onslaught of seemingly unstoppable Red Army units advancing west. The French unit seemed doomed, but despite all the odds against them, the survivors lived to form the hardcore center of the final iteration of the French volunteer units—the Charlemagne Division—in 1945. In early 1945, the division commander at the time, SS -Oberführer Puaud, received assurance from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler that his men would not be sent to the western front, where they might have to fight fellow Frenchmen. He was also told that they would fight under the French flag and continue to have Catholic military chaplains. Himmler also promised that France would regain its sovereignty after Germany’s victory.

  The task of effecting the formal organization of the Charlemagne Division fell to SS Major General Dr. Gustav Krukenberg. In a sense the legendary story of the division started then, and lasted only one year.

  At the critical point in 1944, the French Battalion was pressed into action to seal off the gap in the Wehrmacht’s eastern front. On August 8, section commander Sturmmann Delatte became technically the first French Waffen SS soldier to be killed in action. He was certainly not to be the last. The second company of the Charlemagne Division was next put into action under Léon Gaultier, a former history teacher who left his profession to fight in the anticommunism movement. August 10, 1944 was a bad day for the Charlemagne Division: twenty men were killed, including the commanders—a company commander, six platoon commanders, and twenty section commanders. The worst thing for the division was that there were no replacements for those commanders. However, they succeeded in sealing the gap, and the fighting at Sanok died down. It was the usual practice to send the SS troops to the hottest combat areas, so after minimal rest, the division was moved two hundred kilometers west—a harbinger of things to come. By then, six officers and 130 other ranks were killed; eight officers and 661 other ranks were wounded and forty men were MIA—846 out of the original 1000 men were out of commission.

  The French Division had proved itself in combat. Fifty-eight Iron Crosses were awarded later that month—twenty-nine posthumously. They moved west under constant combat pressure from the Russians until they finally established a base camp in northern Germany. Himmler decided on August 10, 1944 to unite all forces made up of Frenchmen into the final entity—The Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS Charlemagne (franz. Nr.1) with Oberst Edgar Punaud of the LVF placed in command. The unit’s initial battles were fought in Pomerania, and its final battle—indeed, the end of its existence—was fought in Berlin in 1945. Honorific titles were seldom awarded to any SS organization, but Himmler believed that the French had earned the right to be known by the name Charlemagne—a Frankish-Carolingian king of the near-modern era—and by then a pan-Germanic iconic hero. Other honorific units often proved to be a disappointment or even an embarrassment to the SS by achieving notoriety not for combat heroism, but for the slaughter of helpless civilians—e.g. the Bosnian Muslim Division. The division was assigned the number 33 after a Hungarian unit of volksdeustchemen. An elite subunit within the division was created as the kampfschule Close Combat School for the final battle in Berlin.

  The division had only five infantry battalions, limited heavy firepower, and almost no chance for reinforcement, even from its inception. That would have required considerable time to improve, and, as it turned out, time was a commodity sorely lacking for the Charlemagne Division and Hitler. To compensate for the lack of volunteers and the severe attrition from combat, the SS ceased from all its elitist requirements and let any volunteer in from January 1945 until the end. For the first time, men were conscripted for SS service; it was no longer a privilege, and it no longer represented a military force with mythic Germanic honor attached to it. The final pre-Battle of Berlin count for the division was a scanty 7,340 men. Many of the original anticommunist fighters objected to the integral union of German and French soldiers, but all of them knew that any such elitism was absurd. They were—like it or not—united in the final defense of Nazi Germany.

  The Charlemagne Division began to receive hastily trained outsiders to beef up its ranks—men who had had to attend crash courses in how the division functioned. The French, like their German SS counterparts, had all sworn to be fidèle et brave jusqúà la mort [to be brave and loyal to Adolf Hitler until death], and that would have to be enough to sustain them in the coming battles which they all knew were doomed to defeat and the end of the Third Reich. They were in a short period of wildflecken [the calm before the inevitable storm gathering and advancing from the east].

  T
he division moved west by railway, defending itself in a rearguard action all the way against overwhelming superiority in Red Army numbers, reinforcements, heavy armaments, and mobility. The Charlemagne mounted a nearly suicidal series of battles to protect the railway corridor. Russian casualties were horrendous, with whole companies and brigades of tanks reduced to naught by well-placed German/French fire. Finally, however, the massive power of the Soviets overwhelmed the French positions and broke the Charlemagne lines. Tanks and corpses littered the ground everywhere as the still fighting Frenchmen made an orderly retreat further west through a hell in the snow.

  The Charlemagne Division was becoming splintered, and its ability to continue fighting came under question. At Elsenau, the Compagnie d’Honneur school reinforcements and the nearly exhausted Charlemagne soldiers hunkered down under sheets commandeered from German farmers to camouflage them under the snow. Having been prewarned of the advancing Soviet tanks, the division staged an ambush and destroyed the armored vehicles in an unprecedented victory. The hapless and unexpecting Soviet infantry was massacred by French machinegun fire coming from hiding holes all along the road. Supporting Russian infantry arrived too late and slaughtered as well. Again and again the Soviets charged and were mowed down by the withering fire of revenge-seeking Frenchmen. It was sheer butchery. The Soviet dead lay in piles all along the road. At five-thirty in the afternoon, the division made an orderly retreat further west to avoid contact with the oncoming Soviet armor divisions. The cost for the Charlemagne was very great. More than a thousand men were lost—a number that could not be fully replaced.

  The division retreated west on the fifth of March and found itself in an open field, exhausted, almost out of ammunition, and most of them wounded, freezing, and starving. Russian infantry and heavy armor flanked them and began a systematic and pulpifying fire on the French SS lines. The Soviet infantrymen ran amok, slaughtering any Frenchman who moved. The battle—if it could be dignified as such—was over in minutes, and the field was littered with almost exclusively French dead. Only a handful escaped. The defenders of the town they had been defending scattered into the hills, and many of them froze to death after simply sitting down in the snow too exhausted to walk any further. Objectively, the Charlemagne Division had ceased to exist as a formal unit.

  The last action of the Charlemagne Division, such as still existed—and indeed the once invincible German military machine—occurred in the Gotterdämmerung [End of Days] in Berlin. When the division was deployed for the first time in February 1945, there were eight thousand men. In April, they regrouped south of Berlin with only a little over a thousand men. The German empire was decimated, shrinking from all sides by the day. The German military machine was being ground to pieces, and the Red Army was at the gates of Berlin. The only question remaining was who would arrive first in the bleeding heart of the runt Germany; that group or nation would hold all the cards in the postwar era.

  The last stand defense of Hitler and Berlin rested on hastily reassembled units of the LVII Corps of the Wehrmacht, a few Kriegsmarine companies, some Luftwaffe stragglers, and three Waffen SS divisions—none of which was made up of Germans. Those foreign divisions were the Nordland Division (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland), 15th Waffen SS Latvian, and lastly, the battered and bedraggled 33rd Waffen SS Charlemagne Division. Though few in number and most of them wounded at least once, the division was still proud of its ongoing contribution to the destruction of communism.

  Stalin’s Russia amassed a two-and-a-half million men, nearly forty-two thousand big guns and mortars, six-and-a-quarter thousand tanks and self-propelled guns, and seventy-five hundred airplanes. As it happened, the greater part of the Waffen SS was absent: they were defending Austria. The total number of Germans defending Berlin was no more than one hundred thousand, and they collectively had only one hundred tanks. No one expected a prolonged siege—a Stalingrad. What happened in this Gotterdämmerung, this much-vaunted final cataclysm according to Goebbels, was—for the Germans, at least—a hopeless and forlorn anticlimax. The heroes of the German side were not even Germans: they were French.

  To prepare for the struggle, Hitler’s remaining generals reorganized the Waffen SS divisions and released from service those whose hearts were no longer in the fight. Some stragglers filtered in from the massacre in Pomerania. The entire Compagnie d’Honneur elected to fight to the end. About four hundred hardcore Frenchmen joined the defectors. The extremely uneven fight to the finish commenced on the morning of April 16, 1945.

  The masses of Russian men and machines rushed towards Berlin, taking out the meager tank and infantry units scattered along the way to impede the Russian juggernaut. Zukhov’s army was hardly unscathed. When the last resistance outside the city was quashed, 30,000 Russians were dead. The dire straits of the men defending Berlin was highlighted by a change of command of the majority of the defenders because of a severe illness. The new commander was the Nordlander, Joachim Ziegler, who rallied the remaining Charlemagne grenadiers into a cohesive unit. The almagamated unit which now formed the Charlemagne Division consisted of about 400–500 men who formed a kampfgruppe. A few trucks and even private automobiles were found to move the fighting unit into the heart of Berlin. They pounded their way through the mounting chaos on the roads which were, by then, glutted with terrified civilian refugees and deserting military men. The Charlemagne Division drove to the Reichsportsfeld in Charlottenburg—the site of the 1936 Olympics—and regrouped. They stocked up on the abundant supplies abandoned by the fleeing Luftwaffe.

  The reequipped, well-fed, and reformed battalion drove out towards the east and the waiting Russians in the morning. The scene in the innermost part of Berlin was surreal. It was unnaturally quiet for a weekday, and many people were still going to work. What was missing was a defense buildup proportional to the threat. Further out in Hasenbeide, the scene was war and chaos. The Charlemagne headquarters was bombed. Ziegler was relieved of command, and the division moved into the central city and made their headquarters in the Berlin Opera House. During the night, Charlemagne commandoes destroyed two Russian tanks, and the division planned a major counterattack in the morning. The French grenadiers proved to be very effective in the street-by-street and house-to-house highly mobile combat. Antitank guns were employed to great effect by destroying the front and the rear tanks of a Russion battalion, thus rendering the entire one hundred tanks either destroyed or helpless. The advance was successful in driving the Russians back a significant distance, but at a cost of one quarter of their strength.

  Russian artillery caught a company of grenadiers in the open and killed fifteen of them. Elsewhere, the great Russian onslaught was rushing towards Berlin’s center, cracking the Nazi defenses as they went. At this point, the division was reinforced by a unit of Hitler youth—mere boys. Each boy carried a panzerfäust [a simple metal tube with an attached hollow charge which had an effective range of less than one hundred yards], a World War I Mauser rifle, and a handful of ammunition. The very ignorance and youthful enthusiasm of the reinforcements made them absurdly unafraid, and they were able to destroy tanks and kill infantrymen with the weapons they carried which were often bigger than they were. They were able to hold off attack after attack of the heavy armor of the Russian tank corps. Despite such consummate bravery and success, a great many of the boys and old men were hanged by mobile SS units for failure to defend their sectors.

  As the pincers of the Russian tanks and infantry closed inexorably in, yet another reorganization occurred, this one placing the Charlemagne Division in command of the final defenses around the Chancellery and Hitler himself. At that point, two of the remaining five company commanders had been killed, and half of the men. Finally, on April 28, the defense was reduced to a ring around the Belle-Alliance-Platz; and the Russians stormed in. Attack after attack was defeated by the Frenchmen, and Soviet casualties mounted to a horrific level. Corpses of dead Russians lay in piles that impeded their progress. Whole buildi
ngs fell in on the defenders, finally leaving alive only the exceptional among them. Krukenberg described the night as “darkness, chased away by this enormous brazier the city has become, has vanished….” The rumbling upheaveal of the battle submerged the city, as Krukenberg described it. The French Charlemagne Division established their reputation that day. The remaining grenadiers now knew they were not going to win, but they remained determined to resist.

  The noise was deafening, and conversation, even shouting, was impossible. The men of the division became essentially solitary and independent, effectively taking out huge numbers of the enemy as the Russians closed in by the sheer mass of their numbers and the superiority of their equipment. As that dreadful Saturday drew to a close, the Charlemagne grenadiers were still in control. Russian tanks still fell prey to the courageous employment of the crude panzerfäusts, but the incredible number of the tanks advancing down the rubble-strewn streets was becoming overwhelming. Now they began to blow any building to pieces from which German fire came, and grenadiers were being crushed in the falling buildings. Any SS soldier who surrendered was murdered. All contact with other fighting units was lost. The divison fought, died, pulled back and regrouped, and fought again. Any relief achieved was temporary. Incredibly they were still cohesive and effective throughout the twenty-ninth, despite the apparently inexhaustible supply of Soviet fighting units and equipment. The Charlemagne guns began to run out of ammunition.

  On April 30, SS headquarters was moved to a library cellar where the ever-dwindling coterie of French soldiers gathered to plot and plan their desperate resistance. Men received paper bandages and two hours rest before returning to battle. Evacuation of wounded was no longer possible. By some nearly superhuman demonstration of grit, the library was surrounded by twenty-one hulks of burned-out tanks by nightfall of that long day. The Soviet tankers and infantry recognized that the battle was nearly at an end, and they were reluctant to launch another suicidal attack, preferring to let the wider nature of the conflict take its course.