WHILE LEIBSTANDARTE WAS fighting along the Bzura, Panzer Division Kempf was pushing southward to the River Bug. On 10 September engineers of Combat Group Kleinheisterkamp constructed an improvised bridge over the river at Brok (due east of Warsaw). As the senior officers of “Deutschland” crossed the Bug, they realized that the tide of the fighting was turning in their favor. Organized Polish resistance withered away; the remnants of the Polish Army were now retreating to the southwest of Poland in an attempt to form a “Romanian bridgehead.” Panzer Division Kempf was ordered to form a defensive line to block Polish attempts to break out from the Bzura pocket and Warsaw.
Any hopes the Poles had for continuing the war were dashed on 17 September when Soviet mechanized forces invaded the country from the east, in accordance with the agreement reached in the Soviet-German pact. Any Polish units still in existence were instructed to escape to Hungary or Romania.
As Panzer Division Kempf continued its advance, it became increasingly dispersed, fighting a succession of small actions against the fleeing Polish troops. Resupply became a problem, especially a serious shortage of fuel that was beginning to render the mechanized division immobile. Help came from the air, when on 14 September a flight of a Ju-52 transport aircraft landed near Steiner’s blocking position at Zelechov.15 The barrels of precious gasoline were swiftly unloaded, and the aircraft flew back to Germany with the division’s more seriously wounded—an excellent example of interservice cooperation then unknown in other armed forces.
With the reduction of the Bzura pocket on 17 September, the two remaining areas of serious Polish resistance were Warsaw and the nearby fortress of Modlin. The Polish capital was remorselessly pounded into submission, its inhabitants without food and drinkable water. Panzer Division Kempf (minus its panzer regiment) was assigned to the assault on Modlin, arriving on 20 September.
Under the command of Haupsturmführer Fritz Witt, three fighting patrols were dispatched to conduct a reconnaissance in force toward the fort complex. They soon came under heavy fire from previously concealed machine guns. “Eleven heavy and light machine guns were discovered,” wrote the divisional history, “thus fulfilling the purpose of the reconnaissance in force.”16 During the operation one of the company runners was shot in the throat. Witt calmly lifted him onto his shoulders and carried him to safety, all the while under machine-gun fire. Witt was the first soldier in the SS-VT to receive the Iron Cross (1st Class).
The Polish defenses were repeatedly attacked by Stuka dive-bombers as the Germans prepared their assault. At dawn on 28 September the soldiers of “Deutschland” went forward, their initial advance protected by a heavy artillery barrage. But as the SS troops closed on the forts, intelligence arrived that the Poles had accepted a German surrender offer. White flags began to appear, and the firing died down.
Warsaw had surrendered the previous day, so the capture of Modlin effectively brought the military side of the German invasion of Poland to a close. Leibstandarte was redeployed to Prague, receiving an enthusiastic welcome from ethnic Germans in the city. The SS-VT units were also sent to the former Czechoslovakia, where they would be reformed as a motorized infantry division.
THE DESTRUCTION OF Poland’s armed forces by the Wehrmacht was only the first step in the elimination of the Polish state in which the various organs of the SS would play a leading role. Heydrich dispatched seven Einsatzgruppen to begin the work, and operating alongside them were the three original Totenkopfstandarten—“Oberbayern,” “Brandenburg,” and “Thuringen”—under Theodor Eicke’s direct command. Their function was to confiscate Polish goods and follow Heydrich’s directive to kill intellectuals, officers, priests, and Jews and terrorize the remainder of the population.
In early October the three Totenkopfstandarten were withdrawn from Poland to become the nucleus of the future Totenkopf Division. Their work was continued by the recently raised independent Totenkopf units. Among them was the 12th Standarte, one of whose units spent nearly a month steadily killing more than 1,000 patients from a psychiatric hospital at Owinsk. The 11th Standarte was responsible for security in the Warsaw-Radom area and earned the special ire of General Blaskowitz for its overt displays of savagery against Poles and Jews, combined with repeated acts of drunkenness and looting.17 This unit would replace the “Germania” Regiment in the SS-V Division in December 1940.
The army’s criticism of the SS was that it flouted its authority in the forward zone. A case in point was the killing of fifty Jews on the authority of Leibstandarte music director Hermann Muller-John at Blonie on the night of 18–19 September. This infuriated General von Reichenau, who ordered Muller-John’s court-martial (subsequently abandoned). Reichenau—an ardent Nazi—did not publicly express regret over the killings but was exasperated that they took place without army sanction. During the course of the Polish campaign more than 16,000 Polish citizens were shot by the army—but under its orders.18
The army’s strictures on the behavior of the SS in Poland had little effect on the Nazi leadership. Himmler, in fact, persuaded the Führer to remove SS personnel in military areas from army jurisdiction. The decree of 17 October 1939 stated that SS men charged with crimes would not be subject to army courts-martial but instead were to be tried by special SS courts whose members were nominated by Hitler and Himmler.
More serious for the future development of the SS were the criticisms of its military performance. The army specifically argued that armed SS units had taken unnecessarily high casualties as a consequence of the inadequate training of its officers. Leibstandarte had certainly got off to a poor start during the opening phase of the campaign but had largely recovered during the fighting along the Bzura. Leibstandarte casualties included 432 killed, missing, and wounded, admittedly a relatively high figure for the amount of fighting conducted by the regiment.19 Casualty figures for the SS-VT within Panzer Division Kempf were embedded with those from other army units but were not especially high.20 Any shortcomings of performance on the part of “Deutschland” and associated SS units were in large part a consequence of army leadership failings. Kempf had not proved himself a capable general in Poland, and the SS troops under his command had suffered accordingly.
Overall, the Polish campaign was an invaluable training tool for the armed SS, enabling lessons to be learned in the months of peace that followed. And from Hausser’s perspective, once SS troops were removed from the constraints of army command they would reveal their true potential.
Chapter 5
DEPLOYMENT IN THE WEST
EVEN AS LEIBSTANDARTE was repelling Polish counterattacks along the River Bzura, Hitler was preparing for the confrontation with the French and British in the West. On 27 September 1939 he summoned his three service chiefs to the Chancellery in Berlin and instructed them to prepare an invasion plan, to be launched by the end of November. Taken by surprise, the generals procrastinated, arguing that their forces were unready for such a swift redeployment. And with the onset of a particularly harsh winter, the invasion was repeatedly postponed. These delays worked in the favor of the armed SS, most of whose units were still in the process of forming up.
Once the fighting in Poland was over, the creation of the motorized infantry division from the SS-VT took place at its new training grounds in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Designated as the SS-Verfugüngs (SS-V) Division, it was the cutting edge of the armed SS. During the Polish campaign Paul Hausser had spent an uncomfortable few weeks as an observer on Major General Kempf ’s staff, a frustrating role for an officer determined to lead his men into action. Now master in his own house, Hausser was ably assisted by Sturmbannführer Werner Ostendorff, the division’s chief of staff or chief operational officer, a former Luftwaffe airman who been plucked from the SS antiaircraft unit to fill this vital staff position.
For the first time, the three infantry regiments were brought together with their own artillery. “Deutschland” had proved itself an effective fighting unit in Poland and would act a
s the division’s lead regiment. “Germania”—under the command of Karl-Maria Demelhuber—had gained basic combat experience supporting the German advance into southern Poland. “Tosca” Demelhuber, however, lacked the seriousness demanded of the SS-V Division. Excluded from the division’s inner circle, he was transferred to a post in occupied Poland in November 1940. The Austrian “Der Führer” Regiment had not taken part in the Polish invasion due to the relative inexperience of its troops. The regiment’s commander, Georg Keppler, a former battalion CO in “Deutschland,” was a capable officer and a first-rate trainer of infantry.
Peter Hansen, the division’s senior artillery officer, had been a member of the General SS and an army major before accepting a promotion to Obersturmbannführer in the SS-VT in 1938. He would subsequently become the inspector for artillery in the Waffen-SS. The regiment was still short of its heavy howitzers, however, while the II Battalion was transferred to bolster the new Totenkopf Division. The remaining batteries gained valuable experience training with their own infantry.
Supporting the infantry and artillery were the signals, pioneer, and reconnaissance battalions, plus antitank and antiaircraft units. Wim Brandt, a doctor of engineering and the officer behind the Waffen-SS camouflage experiment, led the reconnaissance battalion. Equipped with motorcycles, motorcycle combinations, and armored cars, it was a formidable force that was expected not only to scout for intelligence but to fight for it as well. The more daring officers eagerly sought positions in a unit that was always in the lead as the division advanced into combat.
Equally vital, if more mundane, were the support services that kept the 20,000-plus troops of the division working effectively. They included ammunition, fuel, and transport columns, along with a bakery company, butcher platoon, reinforced military-police company, field post office, and a medical battalion of three ambulance platoons and a field hospital.
The SS-V Division was based on the triangular system (three infantry regiments) developed during World War I. In its motorized format, however, the whole division had become too cumbersome, as the divisional historian remarked: “The length of its march columns prevented the movement of the entire division in one day. It needed two routes of march, which was rarely possible when operating within a larger unit.”1 After the experience of the Polish campaign, the army changed to a simpler twin infantry-regiment system, although the armed SS persisted with the triangular system until after the invasion of the Soviet Union. All divisions of this early period of the war (1939–1941) were unbalanced in having too large an infantry component and insufficient heavy firepower from its artillery, antitank, and antiaircraft units.
On 28 November 1939 the SS-V Division began its redeployment to the West, assigned to General von Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, stationed close to the border with the Netherlands—a target in Germany’s invasion plan. To make the division less unwieldy, “Der Führer” (plus a battalion of artillery, a pioneer company, and supply column) was detached from the SS-V Division to Eighteenth Army’s X Corps.
Sepp Dietrich’s Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler” also left Czechoslovakia in November for transfer to the West. Assigned to Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps—which had been so successful in Poland—the men of Leibstandarte were quartered around Koblenz. Hitler visited his guard at Christmas, and at a celebration in Bad Emms he told the assembled officers, “It is for you, who are honored to carry my name, to stand at the forefront of the struggle.”2 Demonstrating his troops’ devotion to the Führer, Dietrich proclaimed in response, “We will always be his most loyal soldiers.”3 As Christmas gifts, each soldier received cake, cigarettes or tobacco, and a bottle of wine.
More useful presents for Leibstandarte included the arrival of a second infantry gun company, an engineer platoon, and an assault-gun battery. This latter unit was equipped with six of the new Sturmgeschütz III assault guns, built on the Panzer Mark III tank chassis and armed with a low-velocity 7.5cm gun. This was followed by the arrival of an SS artillery battalion, comprising three batteries of 10.5cm field howitzers. While still designated as a reinforced motorized infantry regiment, Leibstandarte was evolving into a miniaturized all-arms division.
In February 1940, to the disappointment of Leibstandarte officers hoping to fight with Guderian’s panzers, the regiment was transferred, like the SS-VT, to join Küchler’s Eighteenth Army. Throughout the spring of 1940, SS soldiers rehearsed the intricacies of seizing bridges and conducting river and canal crossings under enemy fire. Assigned to the 227th Infantry Division, Leibstandarte would act as the mobile spearhead of the division’s assault into the Netherlands, to seize the road and river crossings as far as the River IJssel.
AT THE CONCLUSION of the Polish campaign, the SS and army were once again locked in conflict over the future of the armed SS. The army tolerated the formation of Leibstandarte and SS-VT units as special troops under Hitler’s express direction, but resisted attempts at further expansion. During this period, Hitler was prepared to accept a limited increase in armed SS numbers but was mindful of the army’s misgivings. Hitler also saw the armed SS as an elite guard and did not favor diluting its special character through mass recruitment. Himmler, by contrast, had untrammeled ambitions for the SS; the advent of war had made a powerful armed SS all the more important.
To achieve these ambitions Himmler found a vital supporter and ally in Gottlob Berger, his head of recruitment. The son of a carpenter and sawmill owner from the old duchy of Swabia in southwest Germany, Berger fought in the 1914–1918 war and was wounded on four occasions. He reentered civilian life in January 1919 with an Iron Cross (1st Class) and a 70 percent war-disability pension. Berger then trained as a gymnastics teacher, joining the SA in 1930. Argumentative and loudmouthed, Berger fell out with the local SA leadership, one SA man rather primly condemning him for his “deplorable lack of self-criticism and soldierly modesty.”4
Joining the SS in 1936, Berger served in a number of relatively minor administrative posts, until 1 August 1938 when he was appointed chief of recruitment in the SS Main Office (Hauptamt). There he came to the attention of Himmler, who made him chief of the Main Office in April 1940. Journalist and SS historian Heinz Höhne called Berger “the real founder of the Waffen-SS,” and although this may be something of an exaggeration he was nonetheless central to its development.5
Berger became one of Himmler’s most loyal supporters, sharing his superior’s belief in an ever-larger SS. He soon earned the dislike of the Waffen-SS field commanders who feared such a rapid expansion of the armed SS; they also correctly believed him to be an informant, reporting back their rebellious gossip to the Reichsführer-SS. In the period after 1945 his contribution was written out of the semiofficial Waffen-SS record. The haughty Prussian Felix Steiner sarcastically dismissed him as the “Duke of Swabia” and claimed he had “had nothing to do with the Waffen-SS.” Wilhelm Bittrich called him a “swindler.”6 Bittrich was right to denounce Berger as a swindler, but he did so in the SS cause. Although physically ponderous, Berger had a nimble and resourceful mind, and from the outset he schemed against Wehrmacht restraints.
Hitler had accepted Himmler’s request for concentration-camp Totenkopfstandarten and units from the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) to become division-strength military formations. The concentration-camp guards and police were all part of Himmler’s SS empire and outside Wehrmacht control. Berger’s plan was to convert sufficient numbers of these men to make up the two new divisions and then to recruit their replacements from the civilian population. While the Wehrmacht could prevent potential recruits from being signed up to an SS military unit, they could not stop men from becoming “civil servants” in the concentration-camp and police forces. The growth of the independent Totenkopfstandarten—largely concealed from the army—had been rapid during 1939–1940. By the end of June 1940 there were fourteen Totenkopfstandarten, plus two Totenkopf cavalry regiments and support units, totaling 34,325 men.7
By this sleight of hand, Berger had
effectively doubled the size of the armed SS. He did not stop there, however, and in December 1939 set up a series of recruitment centers across Germany that paralleled those of the Wehrmacht itself. At this stage in the war, Berger’s recruitment offices were for volunteers only, and these might still be denied entry into the armed SS if they exceeded Wehrmacht quotas.
During the winter of 1939–1940 Berger and Himmler negotiated with OKW to place the armed SS on a more secure footing. Among many areas of dispute, two points were bitterly contested without resolution. Berger attempted to persuade OKW to accept service in the Totenkopfstandarten as compulsory military service (as it was in Leibstandarte and SS-VT) and to establish an independent peacetime military reserve, vital for the maintenance of units in wartime. The army refused both requests on the basis that they would have no control over them. When Himmler learned that Hitler had supported OKW on these matters, he reluctantly accepted defeat—albeit temporarily.
One area of agreement that was reached was the official designation of the militarized SS as the Waffen (armed) SS, along with a definition of what units and formations it would contain. The expression Waffen-SS was first used within the SS in November 1939, and by March 1940 it was recognized by other agencies, including the German armed forces. The official name removed the ambiguity of classification existing between the old armed SS units and the newer formations. In addition to Leibstandarte and SS-V Division, it was accepted that the Waffen-SS now included the Totenkopf and Polizei Divisions as well as the individual Totenkopfstandarten and the two SS Junker cadet schools, plus associated administrative organizations.8 This represented another step in legitimizing the Waffen-SS as a military force in its own right, in what the SS would subsequently call “the fourth branch of the Wehrmacht.”
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