Waffen-SS

by Adrian Gilbert

  ONCE THE ARMISTICE with France was in place and the Atlantic Seaboard secured by second-rank infantry units, the SS-V and Totenkopf Divisions withdrew from the Franco-Spanish border, the former to the Netherlands to supervise the disarmament of the Dutch Army and the latter to new positions in German-occupied France. Leibstandarte had originally been promised a victory parade in Paris under the gaze of the Führer, but when Hitler decided on a more low-key sightseeing trip of the French capital, the regiment was diverted to take up garrison duties in the Alsatian city of Metz. At the time, there was talk of peace and disarmament, but this would not last long.

  Chapter 9

  TRANSITION AND EXPANSION

  DURING THE LATE summer and early autumn of 1940, the Wehrmacht prepared for Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain. While the Luftwaffe fought the Royal Air Force (RAF) for supremacy in the skies over southern England, the German Navy and Army rehearsed amphibious landings. Both Leibstandarte and the SS-V Division took part in the preparations, acquainting themselves with the use of life jackets and conducting disembarkation drills on the Moselle and other European waterways. Yet neither the navy nor the army demonstrated much enthusiasm for the operation, especially while Britain remained undefeated in the air.

  The lack of confidence felt by the Wehrmacht’s senior commanders filtered down through the ranks, and the comments of Obersturmführer Peter Zahnfeld were not untypical: “There followed a certain amount of half-hearted preparation as barges were readied and landings practiced. It was all very experimental. We were in no way ready for such an operation over the sea. For myself I was very relieved when it all fizzled out.”1

  Hitler’s interest in Sealion wavered. On the basis of his success in France, he had hoped to force Britain to accept a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, but his overtures were firmly rebuffed. Even while the air battles were ongoing, Hitler returned to the project that mattered to him most, the destruction of the Soviet Union and the creation of a German empire in central and eastern Europe. As early as 31 July 1940 he had informed his generals that they must prepare for an invasion of Soviet Russia. On 17 September Sealion was postponed indefinitely.

  During 1940 the Waffen-SS made fundamental changes to its command structure. Gottlob Berger’s promotion to lead the SS Main Office (SS Hauptamt) on 1 June made him the most important figure in the Waffen-SS administration. This preeminence was not to last long, however, when on 15 August Himmler ordered the formation of the SS Leadership Main Office (SS Führungshauptamt). With Brigadeführer Hans Jütttner as its chief of staff (and effective head), the SS Leadership Main Office took over and developed the responsibilities of Hausser’s old SS-VT Inspectorate. It was also a statement of intent by Himmler that his military force required its own command headquarters in the same way that OKH acted for the German Army.

  Berger’s Main Office was still crucial to Waffen-SS development, as its responsibilities included education, indoctrination, and, above all, the recruitment and replacement of all personnel. Thus, Berger remained in his position as Himmler’s chief recruiting sergeant. Jüttner was the classic Nazi bureaucrat, seemingly without personality, efficient and ruthless, and quite distinct from the garrulous, overbearing Berger. Himmler had set up these two separate main offices so that Jüttner and Berger worked in competition with each other for his favor.

  Despite the rivalries between the two men, they were at least united in their determination to curtail the influence and activities of Theodor Eicke and his burgeoning Totenkopf empire. After taking command of the Totenkopf Division, Eicke continued his relationship with the concentration-camp system, illegally siphoning off men, vehicles, and other equipment from the camps for the use of his own division. Eicke refused to accept the authority of Jüttner and Berger, claiming that his rank and experience made him answerable to the Reichsführer-SS alone.

  Himmler tended to indulge Eicke, but eventually his patience was tested to the breaking point, especially when he discovered that Eicke was publicly naming and shaming officers. They even included senior officers such as Standartenführer Kleinheisterkamp—a bête noire of Eicke’s—who had been confined to quarters for apparently failing to carry out a divisional order.2 At the end of January 1941 Himmler wrote to Eicke in a letter that rebuked his behavior, as well as casting doubts on his sanity and fitness to command. This was followed by a series of reforms initiated by Jüttner, which formally took away control of the camps and the separate Totenkopf regiments from Eicke. He also removed Eicke’s old concentration-camp cronies from positions of authority, replacing them with his own subordinates.

  Eicke never gave up his belief in his authority transcending that of a divisional commander, but while continuing to fight the SS high command he worked hard to improve Totenkopf as a fighting formation. Ideological indoctrination was not skimped, either, with a comprehensive Nazi curriculum codified into a two-volume reference guide entitled Schwert und Plug (Sword and Plough). Despite his mistrust of outside institutions, Eicke took up an army offer of training assistance in matters such as artillery support and air-ground cooperation. He also threw himself into improving his own military knowledge. Heinz Höhne retold the story of how he “shut himself up in his billet for days at a time, cut the tactical signs out of the situation maps and played a war game with them on the floor of his room—all in deadly secret lest his senior general staff officer notice his suddenly acquired taste for military matters.”3

  Fortunately for Eicke, his senior staff officer, the unpopular Kurt Knoblauch, was transferred to work directly for Himmler. Eicke was allowed to choose his replacement: Sturmbannführer Heinz Lammerding, commander of the Totenkopf engineer battalion. Before joining the SS in 1935, Lammerding had been a construction engineer, and his talents were put to good use by Eicke, who swiftly appointed him as engineer officer within the concentration-camp inspectorate. In 1939 Lammerding transferred to the Totenkopf Division, proving an able and loyal lieutenant. He would go on to lead Das Reich in France during 1944.

  LEIBSTANDARTE SS “ADOLF HITLER” was officially upgraded from a reinforced regiment to a powerful motorized infantry brigade; its artillery battalion was increased to regimental size, along with an armored car company, Flak company, and a battalion each of engineers and signals. But in a case of Peter robbing Paul, the extra artillery came from the Totenkopf and SS-V Divisions.

  The drain on Hausser’s SS-V Division did not stop there. At the end of 1940, it became the “mother” formation for the Wiking Division, commanded by the recently promoted Brigadeführer Felix Steiner. The entire “Germania” Regiment was transferred to the new formation, its chief, Karl-Maria Demelhuber, leaving the regiment to take up an administrative post in the Netherlands. Other units transferred from the SS-V to Wiking included an artillery battalion, reconnaissance and antitank battalions, as well as maintenance and medical units.4

  The gap left by “Germania’s” departure from the SS-V was filled by the 11th Totenkopf Standarte, a former concentration-camp guard unit that had gained an infamous reputation for ill-disciplined brutality in Poland. Its new commander, Obersturmbannführer Brandt—formerly of the reconnaissance battalion—faced a serious challenge in bringing these troops to a standard close to that of the rest of the division. The other departed units were replaced from within the division.

  In December the division was renamed Deutschland, but shortly afterward, to avoid confusion with the “Deutschland” Regiment, it was changed to Reich (later Das Reich). The new Reich Division was then ordered to leave the Netherlands for deployment in Vesoul, in France’s Haute Saone area. Once in France, training continued with renewed vigor. To improve mobile firepower, an assault-gun battery was formed in February 1941, followed by the creation of a motorcycle battalion. In March, a consignment of nine 5cm Pak 38 antitank guns arrived, the first stage in replacing the old 3.7cm “door knockers” that had proved so ineffectual during the 1940 campaign.

  DURING GERMANY’S CONQUEST of Norway in 19
40, Hitler ordered Himmler to send SS troops to act as a garrison for the settlement of Kirkenes in the far northern part of the country. The assembled battalion was dispatched to Norway at the end of June 1940. Further troops arrived in October to form SS Infantry Regiment 9. In the spring of 1941 two Totenkopfstandarten (redesignated as SS Infantry Regiments 6 and 7) were also sent north, and after reinforcement with artillery and ancillary units they formed Kampfgruppe Nord—the first step in the development of 6th SS Mountain (Gebirgs) Division Nord.

  After the disbandment of three more Totenkopfstandarten, through personnel shortages, Himmler was determined to hold on to the units still under his personal control. This was not only for reason of power and prestige but also to conduct antipartisan and anti-Jewish operations once the Soviet Union was invaded. In May 1941 he formed his own Reichsführer-SS Headquarters Staff (Kommando Stab des Reichsführer-SS), appointing Kurt Knoblauch from the Totenkopf Division as his chief of staff. The 8th and 10th Standarten were formed into the motorized 1st SS Infantry Brigade, while 4th and 5th Standarten became the motorized 2nd SS Infantry Brigade. A final Standarte retained its independent role as SS Infantry Regiment 5.

  Mounted troops still had a useful role to play in antipartisan operations in eastern Europe and the Balkans. Accordingly, in 1939 Himmler had ordered the raising of a cavalry regiment, the SS Totenkopf Reiterstandarte, commanded by Hermann Fegelein.5 The son of a Bavarian horse master, Fegelein was a keen and capable horseman with many influential Nazi friends. He had enrolled as a cadet in the Bavarian state police, although he was expelled for stealing exam-paper answers. Unscrupulous and intensely ambitious, he soon came to the attention of Himmler, who encouraged him to expand the riding schools and clubs under SA or SS control.

  The SS Cavalry Regiment underwent rapid expansion in Poland, to include thirteen mounted squadrons and two batteries of artillery. The regiment’s prime function was to provide mobile support for police operations in rounding up and killing Jews and other perceived troublemakers. Many of the early volunteers had only joined the regiment through their love of horse riding and were unsuited to the rigors of paramilitary operations, leading to a high dropout rate. Doubts grew as to Himmler’s wisdom in forming such a unit, especially when charges of corruption were leveled at Fegelein and his officers.

  As Fegelein enjoyed Himmler’s protection, he was able to shrug off these charges with relative ease. He repaid the trust of the Reichsführer-SS with his determination for getting rid of undesirables. In one instance, on 8 April 1940, the regiment killed 250 Polish men from villages close to where partisans had been operating. Fegelein was highly satisfied with the conduct of his men: “The set tasks of burning down villages and executing sinister elements were completed in such a clean and SS-worthy way that every doubt about the troops’ strength of character had to be eliminated.”6 Recruitment of SS cavalrymen began to improve, allowing the formation of a second regiment in May 1940. One the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the two regiments would be combined as an SS cavalry brigade.

  One other unit under Himmler’s control was not formally part of the Waffen-SS until its incorporation as the 36th Grenadier Division in 1945. This was Sonderkommando (Special Command) Dirlewanger, commanded by Oskar Dirlewanger, a former Great War comrade of Gottlob Berger. An alcoholic and vicious sexual deviant, Dirlewanger acquired a string of convictions for possession of illegal arms and embezzlement before being sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. Kicked out of the SS, he was reinstated through Berger’s direct intervention. After the outbreak of war in 1939, Dirlewanger was given command of a battalion recruited from ex-criminals, many of them former poachers who, Hitler and Himmler believed, would make good soldiers in antipartisan operations. The Sonderkommando Dirlewanger terrorized the civilian population of occupied Poland before wreaking havoc on the Eastern Front.

  These units became Himmler’s private army, to use as he saw fit. But as the war in the East intensified, they would progressively come under Wehrmacht control, leaving Himmler distanced from the fighting elements of the Waffen-SS.

  BY THE SUMMER of 1940, the army began to realize that it had been hoodwinked by Berger. Alarmed by the expansionist ambitions of the Waffen-SS, the army exercised its right to put the brakes on new induction. In June Berger bitterly complained to Himmler that 15,000 recruits due to join the Waffen-SS had not been released by Wehrmacht district commands. The army continued its investigations into the practices of the SS Main Office, forcing a degree of circumspection on Berger’s recruiting practices.

  Berger also recognized that in wartime he would have difficulty finding sufficient replacements to keep existing formations in being. A proper reserve organization, where trained recruits flowed through the system to the front line when required—and where wounded men could be rehabilitated and returned to battle—was vital if a unit was to remain an effective fighting entity. The Waffen-SS in 1940 was still in the early stages of organizing a reserve system, which the army was undermining by limiting the release of reinforcements.

  There were, however, two other sources of previously untapped manpower that lay beyond the reaches of Wehrmacht control. First were the large numbers of people of German descent who had spread throughout Europe, these supposedly ethnic Germans termed Volksdeutsche by the Nazis. Second were non-Germans of “Nordic blood” who qualified as Germanics (Germanen). They included the peoples of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, the Flemish part of Belgium, and the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland. A handful of Germanic volunteers had been accepted into the Waffen-SS before the campaign in the West had begun. Now that many of these countries lay under German control, the Waffen-SS would have easier access to recruit men to the Nazi cause.

  While it would seem that Berger’s chief interest in these two sources of manpower was to make up the numbers, Himmler took a rather different position: the inclusion of Volksdeutsche and Germanics was not merely acceptable but positively desirable. Hitler was always an old-style nationalist, with Germany firmly at the center of his worldview. Possibly because of his Austrian ancestry, he maintained suspicions about the racial suitability of ethnic Germans from outside the Austro-German community, while Germanics would never be more than useful allies to be exploited in German interests. The more radical Himmler, by contrast, considered race to be of greater importance than nationality.

  Himmler envisioned Germany as the driving force behind a vast Aryan racial struggle for mastery of Europe. He expounded this idea well before the onset of war, as evidenced in this extract from a speech to senior SS leaders on 8 November 1938: “We must have no illusions about facing unparalleled conflicts of the most critical nature in the next ten years. It will not only be a struggle of the nations, which will be the excuse of our opponents, but it will be the ideological struggle with all Jewry, the freemasons, Marxists and churchmen of the world.”7 The induction of racially suitable people into the ranks of the Waffen-SS was more than just a military measure; it was part of a wider long-term strategy to increase the power of the SS over other Nazi organizations and, in a postwar future, to encourage the assimilation of other countries into a Greater Germanic Reich.8

  Himmler’s interest in recruiting Volksdeutsche and Germanics into the Waffen-SS also predated the outbreak of war. In the same November speech he had said, “I really have the intention to gather Germanic blood from all over the world, to plunder and steal it where I can. The Standarte ‘Germania’ didn’t get its name for nothing. Within no more than two years I have set myself the goal to have the Standarte ‘Germania’ consist entirely of non-German Teutons.”9 In the event, “Germania” remained a unit of Reich Germans, although it was joined in the Wiking Division by two other regiments that included men from the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

  Himmler’s early interest in Germanics was confirmed in a letter sent to a Nazi politician in March 1939 when he wrote that his intention was “to win ov
er men of Nordic blood for the active regiments of the SS from all Germanic-type nations with the exception of the Anglo-Saxons.”10 The concept of “blood sacrifice” had an almost sacramental importance to Himmler, and allied to this idea was the belief that the winnowing fires of combat would help overcome national and linguistic differences to forge a new Pan-Germanic community.

  Even though Himmler had planned in advance for the inclusion of Germanics into the Waffen-SS, the speed with which Berger’s Main Office moved to secure new recruits was surprisingly quick: the first recruiting centers were open by June 1940. The process was facilitated by the good contacts Berger had previously established with right-wing groups in supposedly Germanic countries. The SS “Nordland” Regiment established offices in Oslo and Copenhagen to recruit Norwegians and Danes, while the SS “Westland” Regiment followed suit in The Hague and Antwerp for Dutch and Flemish recruits. In the neutral countries of Sweden and Switzerland, German embassies and local Far Right parties discreetly encouraged volunteers to come forward.

  Himmler and Berger were overoptimistic in the appeal of their Germanic philosophy, expecting young men to suddenly renounce their own national affiliations and join the armed forces of the German state. Those men who crossed the line and volunteered for the Waffen-SS were treated as collaborators by the majority of the people in their homeland. Unsurprisingly, the take up of Nordic volunteers was minimal in the first year of recruitment, before the stimulus created by the invasion of the Soviet Union made itself felt. In this initial recruitment phase, German staff were sometimes less than truthful in what volunteering actually entailed. In one extreme case, a group of Danish recruits was unaware that they had signed up for military service at all, believing they were going to Germany for athletic and political training.11