Waffen-SS

by Adrian Gilbert

  A FEW MILES north of Brody, 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking had already been in action in the defense of Kovel. The extensive refit and reinforcement of Wiking after its ordeal in the Cherkassy-Korsun pocket was far from complete when elements of the division were ordered back into combat. The German garrison in Kovel had come under increasing Soviet pressure, and on 12 March 1944 the new Wiking commander, Gruppenführer Herbert Gille, was ordered to support the position with all troops at his disposal. At this time, the separate components of the division were spread out across Europe, with the panzer regiment headquarters and one of the tank battalions undergoing training in France. Gille flew into Kovel, while infantry from the “Westland” and “Germania” Regiments—equipped only with small arms—managed to march into the city just before it was surrounded by the Red Army.

  Gille reorganized Kovel’s defenses, while awaiting the arrival of a suitably armed and equipped German relief force (a breakout was deemed impractical in light of the 2,000 German wounded held within the city). A scratch relief force had been assembled by 29 March, spearheaded by 8th Company of the Wiking’s 5th Panzer Regiment. Commanded by Obersturmführer Karl Nicolussi-Leck—a former law student from South Tyrol—the company had sixteen new Panther tanks. Determined Soviet resistance and heavy snowfall brought the German advance to a halt, but despite orders to abort the relief mission Nicolussi-Leck and his seven remaining Panthers managed to fight their way through to Kovel on the evening of the thirtieth.8 In early April other Wiking and army units attacked in force, and by 24 April they had destroyed what remained of the Soviet forces around Kovel.

  For the Wiking Division, the Kovel action was just a foretaste of what was to come as the Soviet summer offensive gained momentum. Mühlenkamp’s 5th Panzer Regiment fielded two powerful tank units: I Battalion was equipped with twenty-seven combat-ready Panzer Mark IVs and twenty combat-ready StuG IVs, while II Battalion had seventy-seven combat-ready Panzer Mark V Panthers.9 Wiking had withdrawn from Kovel in early June to position a few miles to the west around Maciejow. The II Battalion spotted a vast Soviet tank force about to advance past their positions on 6 July. Obersturmführer Lichte described the German reaction:

  The panzer crews—the commanders in their turrets, the gunners at their sights, the loaders, drivers and radio operators—could not believe their eyes when they saw the dust-shrouded steel armada dive out of the horizon like a steamroller crushing everything in its path.

  The companies stood ready in their partially covered and well-camouflaged positions so that they were able to bring concentrated fire to bear with the assurance of getting a hit. Detached from them was Obersturmführer Olin who had driven into position with several Panthers. This daring Finnish officer, who had not returned home with his comrades from the Finnish Battalion, had the assignment to open fire first and draw the enemy’s attention. Cold-bloodedly, Olin first allowed 10 enemy tanks to drive past and then knocked out the first and last, and eventually the rest. As expected, the Soviet tanks oriented themselves in the wrong direction and, strung out in a long formation, presented a full broadside to the German guns.

  “Open fire!” Soon after the first barrage nearly 50 Soviet tanks were destroyed. Everywhere were burning steel hulks and smoldering wreckage. One armor-piercing shell after another left the barrels of the Panther’s guns. The duel lasted half an hour and ended in a battle in which 103 Soviet tanks were hit and destroyed.10

  The battle continued for another three days: Mühlenkamp’s panzers, supported by army units, knocked out nearly 300 enemy armored fighting vehicles, repulsing the entire Soviet attack. This was arguably Wiking’s finest defensive action, but the panzer regiment had no time to rest on its laurels: on 13 July it was dispatched northward to join the rest of the division in Poland.

  An attempt to defend Bialystok, on the Polish-Belorussian border, was abandoned, with the advance units from Wiking falling back in good order while awaiting the remainder of the division. Also dispatched to defend western Poland was the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf. It had been forced to abandon Grodno on 18 July, and like Wiking it conducted a series of rearguard actions intended to slow the advance of the Red Army as it drove toward Warsaw.

  During the retreat, news reached SS soldiers of the attempted assassination of the Führer on 20 July by a group of army officers. They had hoped to kill Hitler by setting off a bomb in his headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia and to then negotiate a peace with the Allies. Hitler was only slightly wounded by the blast, but the attempt sent shock waves throughout the entire Nazi system. It would seem that most soldiers found the whole business deeply repugnant. The reaction from Werner Volkner, a Flak gunner in Totenkopf, was fairly typical: “The men are full of rage, and their anger knows no bounds. How was it possible that such a criminal act could be perpetrated by officers of the Wehrmacht? It was like a stab in the back for the soldiers on the front line.”11 One immediate consequence of the failed coup was to enhance the prestige and importance of Himmler and the SS at the expense of the army, now very much in disgrace.

  Shortly before the bomb exploded, Hitler had authorized the formation of IV SS Panzer Corps in Poland, an expedient combination of the Wiking and Totenkopf Divisions. Gille—promoted to Obergruppenführer—was appointed to command the new formation, with Mühlenkamp taking over Wiking. The IV SS Panzer Corps was assigned a crucial role in the defense of Warsaw, and during August it received reinforcements that included the 19th Panzer and 73rd Infantry Divisions, in addition to a Hungarian cavalry division and some SS corps troops that included a heavy-artillery battalion.

  As the Red Army advanced on Warsaw, the Polish Resistance—in the form of the Polish Home Army—launched an audacious bid on 1 August to take control of the city. Substantial areas of central Warsaw were captured by the Poles in the opening phases of the uprising, but in the end German might prevailed, and in an exceptionally brutal operation the revolt was completely suppressed by 2 October.

  The Warsaw Uprising has become one of the more controversial episodes of World War II. Stalin totally refused to help the Polish Home Army—ideological opponents of Soviet communism—and he was condemned in the West for not ordering his troop to drive into the city. Yet the Red Army, despite being exhausted by several months of hard campaigning, continued to batter the German defensive lines around Warsaw right up until the end of October.

  The Germans divided the defense of Warsaw against the Red Army into three linked battles. In the First Defensive Battle (18–30 August), Gille’s panzer corps, deployed to the northeast of Warsaw, fought several successful delaying actions. One exception was the skirmish at Slanzany when the bridge over the River Bug held by Wiking’s I Panzer Battalion was destroyed by Soviet artillery fire on 26 August. In the ensuing confusion the battalion commander was killed, and twelve panzers had to be abandoned on the river’s far bank.12

  During the Second Defensive Battle (31 August–9 October) the Red Army methodically ground down the German defenses. After the collapse of the 73rd Infantry Division, they captured the Warsaw suburb of Praga on the east bank of the Vistula on 14 September. At this point they halted the direct attack on the capital, leaving the Polish Home Army to its fate. But there was no slackening to the north of Warsaw, as the Soviets drove against the positions held by Wiking and Totenkopf.

  As the SS frontline troops defended their positions, they could look back and see the clouds of smoke over the city center. Fritz Messerle, commander of the SS heavy-artillery battalion, recalled that “fires raged day and night, explosions flashed and a dull rumble was heard in the distance. Clearly visible through field glasses were Stukas frequently flying combat missions against the city.” On 18 September Messerle was alerted that an Allied airborne attack was under way:

  A formation of American B-17s could be seen coming from the west. The 8.8cm Flak opened fire, and individual B-17s fell to the ground in flames. Then the giant formation opened its bomb-bay doors. The sky was sown with parachutes in
a matter of seconds. Those must have been the paratroopers. Damned! This could get hot! The main objective of the drop was behind the positions to the right. Then relief! It was apparent through field glasses that there weren’t any human beings hanging from the chutes; instead were rather respectable supply canisters, of which several dropped in the immediate vicinity and were gleefully chased down.13

  Few of the canisters reached the Home Army, and for several weeks the Germans were the grateful beneficiaries of American chocolates and cigarettes, as well as small arms and ammunition. In the Wiking Division there was a vogue for carrying Colt automatic pistols.14

  During the first week in October the IV SS Panzer Corps was squeezed into a V-shaped piece of land between the confluence of the Narew and Vistula Rivers, immediately to the north of Warsaw. Known as the “wet triangle,” this forested and marshy ground would be the setting for the Third Defensive Battle for Warsaw (10–30 October). Aware that his position would be the objective of a Soviet attack on 9–10 October, Gille lobbied his superiors for reinforcements, but these were refused. As the former senior gunner in the SS-VT, he assembled all the artillery resources at his disposal to lay down orchestrated disruptive fire on the Soviet assembly areas during the forty-eight hours before the proposed offensive.

  Gille’s fire plan seemed to have worked, with reports coming in that the enemy attack was repeatedly postponed, and when it went ahead on 10 October the SS units were well prepared. On 12 October “Westland’s” III Battalion, holding a forward position in the German line, was completely overwhelmed by the Soviet attack and annihilated. The sacrifice helped slow the Soviet advance, subsequently blocked by Totenkopf. On the fifteenth, Alfred Titschkus, an NCO in Totenkopf ’s reconnaissance battalion, demonstrated the bloody-minded attitude of his division:

  Titschkus repulsed repeated Russian attacks in close combat with his small group of men. Alone, he fought off the enemy who had briefly penetrated his sector with his submachine gun and hand grenades, although he had already been wounded several times by grenade shrapnel. Even after the Russians penetrated his squad’s sector again and killed five of his six men in their hole, he didn’t abandon his position. He fought on alone at close quarters against the overwhelming enemy forces. After the immediate and successful friendly counterattack, one could count the 25 enemy soldiers that Titschkus had killed in front of and behind his position.15

  In the intense and confused fighting of this engagement, victory or defeat hung in the balance for several days. Totenkopf ’s Werner Volkner—just as his antiaircraft position was on the verge of being overwhelmed—saw the arrival of the most bizarre reinforcements: “I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were chaps in partial German uniform, some of them had top hats and bowler hats instead of steel helmets and one or two of them were in top hats and tails. It looked if these chaps were going to a carnival instead of going into action. Later we were told it was a unit of men from a penal battalion.”16 As in the Red Army, the Wehrmacht made extensive use of penal units for military transgressors, victory or death their only option. Whatever the success of this unit, the Soviet attacks were held, so that by the end of October the fighting around Warsaw died into insignificance—and would remain so for the remainder of 1944.

  Chapter 23

  PARTISAN WARS: THE EASTERN FRONT

  THAT GERMANY MUST dominate central and eastern Europe was central to Hitler’s worldview, and even before the invasion of Poland in 1939 the SS had drawn up plans to impose its authority over its subject peoples. Himmler and the Wehrmacht high command had agreed that while the army would control the frontline areas, the SS would be responsible for security in territories to the rear. In Poland armed SS police battalions operated with Einsatzgruppen killing squads and the Totenkopfstandarten. Once the Soviet Union had been invaded, Himmler sent in his private army—the SS Cavalry Brigade and 1st and 2nd SS Infantry Brigades—to support the repression of the civilian population. A prominent figure in these actions was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a senior SS police officer who coordinated police, Waffen-SS, and army units—plus local nationalist auxiliaries—in the occupied territories.

  The concept of counterinsurgency or antipartisan warfare developed by Hitler and Himmler differed from the usual understanding of the term. In this, the occupying power acted in a reactive manner, taking military action against armed insurrection and using the police to punish lesser forms of dissent, all to ensure a compliant subject population. The Nazi model, by contrast, was proactive, systematically seeking out those who they deemed enemies of the state.

  Central to Nazi propaganda was the association of Jews with partisans, analogous to the other myth of Jews being synonymous with communists. One of its maxims stated: “Where the partisan is, the Jew is, and where the Jew is, the partisan is.”1 When interrogated by the Allies after the war, Bach-Zelewski admitted to this conflation: “The fight against the partisans was used as an excuse to carry out other measures, such as the extermination of the Jews and gypsies, the systematic reduction of the Slavic peoples.”2

  Once an area was conquered by the Wehrmacht, the SS would take immediate measures to find and hunt down their enemies. On a practical level, these measures placed enormous demands on the SS counterinsurgency units, a task they were unable to fulfill on their own. To prevent a breakdown in these actions, all sections of the German armed forces and their allies could be called upon to engage in antipartisan operations when demanded.

  After the war, Wehrmacht commanders assiduously denied involvement in actions against the civilian population, placing the blame elsewhere. Senior officers from the Waffen-SS, in their turn, followed the line that the atrocities inherent in antipartisan operations were the work of other elements of the SS. Their repeated denials were clearly nonsense. In addition to his Waffen-SS cavalry and infantry brigades, Himmler created numerous other Waffen-SS formations—such as the Prinz Eugen and Handschar Divisions—specifically for antipartisan operations.

  And while the crack field divisions of the Waffen-SS were normally engaged in conventional military operations, they too, on occasion, were deployed in support of antipartisan actions. During the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Leibstandarte and the Wiking Division were involved in the rounding up and killing of Jews in the Ukraine;3 in 1943 the Nordland Division was engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Croatia;4 and during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising units from both Wiking and Totenkopf worked with other SS troops in antipartisan sweeps that led to the destruction of Polish villages and the killing of civilians.5

  The Wehrmacht possessed a well-developed body of theory and practice for countering insurgency, derived from the German Army’s experiences as an occupying power in the Franco-Prussian War and World War I and from its colonial campaigns in Africa. Central to German thinking was the idea of Schrecklichkeit (frightfulness), involving severe reprisals for civil disobedience, including the taking and shooting of hostages and the destruction of villages and even whole towns. During its march through Belgium in 1914, the German Army had taken this a step further by enacting “reprisals” before the “provocations” had a chance to take place. This, it was believed, would cow the civilian population into submission and free as many soldiers as possible from occupation duties to service at the front.

  Hitler was fully in accord with this approach to managing enemy civilians, as he made clear in his war directive of 23 July 1941:

  The troops available for securing the conquered Eastern territories will, in view of the size of area, be sufficient for their duties only if the occupying power meets resistance, not by legal punishment of the guilty, but by striking such terror into the population that it loses all will to resist. The commanders concerned are to be held responsible, together with the troops at their disposal, for quiet conditions in their areas. They will contrive to maintain order, not by requesting reinforcements, but by employing suitably draconian methods.6

  In the Nazi lexicon of counterinsurgency, the word for ant
ipartisan warfare (Partisanenbekämpfung) was officially replaced by antibandit warfare (Bandenbekämpfung). This was, in part, to downplay any positive military associations with the term partisan and to emphasize the criminal element of the word bandit as a gangster or outcast. But more than this, Bandenbekämpfung was co-opted by the Nazis as an ideological tool, to justify the killings, the mass deportations of civilians from the East as forced labor in the Reich, and the asset stripping of agricultural, industrial, and financial resources. Those civilians who opposed Nazi Germany were designated as bandits, beyond the protection of any law.7

  In the initial stages of Operation Barbarossa, antipartisan activities consisted, in the main, of killing Jews and rounding up Soviet soldiers cut off from their units by the speed of the German advance. During 1942 this began to change, with attempts by local people to organize resistance. They, in turn, were backed by the Soviet government, which, after initial indifference, began to see the merits of guerrilla warfare. Although still relatively low-key, the partisan activity was sufficient for Hitler to issue Directive 46—“Instructions for Intensified Action Against Banditry in the East”—on 18 August 1942.8

  The directive underlined the importance of antipartisan warfare to all German civil and military organizations and to regulate and codify how this war should be fought. The directive confirmed the role of higher SS and police leaders (Höhere SS und Polizeiführer), who acted as Himmler’s deputies in the occupied regions, coordinating the various SS agencies (including the Waffen-SS) in security matters.