SS und Polizei: Myths and Lies of Hitler's SS and Police

by J. Lee Ready

  Not all of the ‘mad doctors’ in these camps were men. Oberaufseherin Dr Maria Mandel was an Austrian who performed her experiments methodically in one of the Auschwitz camps. Like Hoess she loved classical music and she organized an orchestra among the prisoners. They played at special functions such as the gassing of new arrivals at Birkenau. She thought it soothed everyone. Another woman Dr Herta Oberheuser specialized in inflicting wounds on children to study the effects.

  In July 1943 the SS WVHA gained control of Albrecht Schmelt’s little ‘empire’, specifically his 160 slave labor camps, and the guards of SS Organisation Schmelt were inducted into the SS KZL. However, this did not change camp life for the inmates. The same guards kept security at the camps and the same Werkschutz marched the workers to and from the same jobs. The difference was that the salary earned by each slave and paid by their civilian employers would now go into the SS WVHA coffers instead of into Schmelt’s pockets.

  There was one other difference. Some of these German civilian employers had been deliberately hiding Jews or handing out work permits to save Jews from extermination. The SS WVHA put a stop to this. They brought in the Gestapo, who executed one of the employers, Alfred Rossner.

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  Chapter Twenty-five

  THE ANTI-PARTISAN WAR: SPRING 1943

  In March 1943 Brigadefuehrer Walter Schimana the SSPF for Byelorussia formed the temporary SS Battlegroup Schimana from members of the Gestapo, Kripo, SD, Byelorussian schumas, local Byelorussian policemen and German police battalions. With them he swept the region between Minsk and Borisov for partisans.

  In Ukrainia there were police outposts garrisoned by mixed teams of German policemen, Ukrainian schumas and Ukrainian hiwas. In April 1943 UPA partisans destroyed the ones at Horokhiv, Tsuman and Olyka. The police barracks at Ivanova Dolnya, which was manned by hundreds of German and Polish policemen, was attacked by UPA on 21 April 1943. The raid failed, but police casualties were very high.

  In May 1943 near Kremianets a column of several hundred German policemen, some SS officers and 180 Polish policemen was ambushed by UPA, losing ninety killed and wounded.

  On 9 May a German police battalion armed with artillery attacked Yapolot, a UPA strongpoint, but the Germans were forced to withdraw.

  On the 12th a German police battalion attacked a UPA band at Kolky, but after losing fifty men the Germans had to let the guerillas escape.

  On 14 May near Labosha a German police battalion was ambushed by UPA. Losing thirty-five dead almost at once the police were pinned down and had to radio for reinforcements. Other police rescued them.

  The partisan problem stretched all the way from the Russian Front westwards to the Wartheland and from the Black Sea coast to the frozen Arctic north. More anti-partisan units were needed, but where would they come from, the generals wondered? Himmler helped somewhat by transferring the 26th SS Police Regiment from Norway to the General Government.

  By May 1943 the German Army was under so much pressure from partisans that prior to their general summer offensive against the Red Army, the generals decided to drive the Communist partisans out of a large region behind their lines in Central Russia. The first sweep was Operation May Storm, using the 8th Panzer Division and Oberst von Renteln’s Cossack Horse Cavalry Regiment. They were fairly successful.

  Then came another army sweep: Operation Robber Baron near Lokot, launched by no fewer than seven divisions: namely one Hungarian infantry, one German panzer and five German infantry, aided by plenty of hiwis and Kaminski’s RONA. Together they killed 1,584 partisans and arrested 1,568 suspects. As the army was in control here there were no massacres of suspects or unarmed villagers.

  Then near Bryansk the army launched Operation Volunteer Guard with two infantry divisions, two regiments and the 807th Azerbaijani Battalion, plus some of Kaminski’s RONA. This endeavor succeeded in killing or capturing 2,000 partisans in ten days. A neighboring operation, aptly named Neighbor Helper, was delivered by one German division and one Hungarian division, plus more of Kaminski’s troops and they netted 869 partisans.

  On 3 June Zelewski and Himmler launched their own anti-partisan operation in Byelorussia, Operation Cottbus, which was directed by Obergruppenfuehrer von Gottberg the HSSPF for Byelorussia, and he used the German 2nd SS Police Regiment commanded by Standartenfuehrer Guenther Anhalt, the 31st SS Police Regiment commanded by Polizei Oberst Heinrich Hannibal, several Byelorussian schuma battalions, the Druzhina and the Dirlewanger SS Battalion, a total of 16,662 personnel. [The 31st SS Police Regiment included the 2/1st SS Police Regiment]

  Dirlewanger and his men had been bored for two years, having spent their time in Poland guarding slaves. They wanted a real battle and at last they got their chance.

  After three weeks of combat von Gottberg could report he had lost 59 killed and several hundred wounded, but his men had picked up 492 rifles and pistols from dead partisans: from 9,500 dead partisans to be exact! It is obvious that Dirlewanger’s men had enjoyed their ‘battle’, massacring entire villages of ‘partisans’.

  Meanwhile in Western Russia Zelewski authorized another operation by ten German police battalions, some Polish schumas, three battalions of Cossacks and two Hungarian security regiments. They killed or arrested 15,000 ‘partisans’.

  Medals for heroism were being awarded for these anti-partisan sweeps, but surely few were honestly earned. The commander of the 31st SS Police Regiment, Polizei Oberst Hannibal, won the Knights Cross. He was a professional policeman who had refused to join the SS.

  It is interesting to contrast the partisan deaths in operations controlled by the army with those controlled by the SS. This discrepancy was not lost on the army generals, and they now ordered that all surrendering partisans must be taken alive.

  On 23 June 1943 a train carrying SD and Gestapo was blown up and wrecked by a band of UPA, following which the partisans sprayed the train with bullets. 150 Germans died.

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  Chapter Twenty-six

  KURSK: THE TURNING POINT

  By the spring of 1943 despite the complete loss of five Axis armies on the Russian Front and three in North Africa within the last six months Hitler was planning yet another major war-winning offensive in Russia, Operation Citadel. But secretly Hitler had approached Stalin for a peace treaty! Stalin, who had tried secretly to make peace several times now sensed weakness in the Nazis at last, so he refused the deal. Had it come to fruition, Hitler’s move would have betrayed all his partners, all the foreign legions and all the Soviet citizens who had joined his forces to cleanse the world of Communism. Post-war German anger towards those partners who eventually betrayed the Germans is therefore somewhat hypocritical. Hitler made no such moves towards the British or Americans. Perhaps he conceded that if Churchill and Roosevelt, the British and American leaders, suddenly made peace with Germany, their parliament and congress, respectively, would have refused to ratify it. Hitler knew that Stalin was unfettered by such democratic niceties. His parliament of puppets would dance to any tune he played.

  However, this secret diplomacy did have one effect. It delayed the German offensive, thus giving the Soviets time to prepare for it. Hitler had wanted to use the new Panther tank, but it had production problems, and this is another reason for the delay. But even had the Panthers been ready, he would still have made the peace overture.

  Stalin’s generals had finally come up with an idea of how to defeat the German blitzkrieg. They built the deepest front line in the history of warfare, so that no matter how far a German tank drove, it would still not reach the Soviet rear.

  The Germans were aware of the depth through their aerial reconnaissance and reports from spies, and knew it was a serious obstacle, yet Hitler was determined to attack, now that his peace offer had been rebuffed.

  Yet there was another obstacle to Hitler’s offensive, namely that the German Army was woefully under-equipped. The factories had created newer and better weapons, such as the Panther and Tige
r, but these were produced in insufficient numbers to replace those weapons that had been worn out, lost or destroyed.

  Hitler solved this problem and his generals’ complaints by shrinking his army divisions, especially the panzer units. It does appear that about this date Hitler started to live in a fantasy world, believing that if he called a formation a ‘division’ it was a ‘division’. In fact by spring 1943 his army panzer divisions were really no stronger than the panzergrenadier divisions of the previous year, and his current panzergrenadier divisions were little better than motorized infantry divisions.

  Thus in spring 1943 when Himmler renamed several of his panzergrenadier divisions as panzer divisions, it was not all that much of a leap. Not much extra equipment was added. Even then they remained superior in firepower to army panzer divisions. An SS panzer division now contained: two regiments of panzergrenadiers [each of three battalions in half-tracks]; one panzer regiment commanding a company of Tigers and three tank battalions [each of about forty Mark IV and a few Mark III]; a reconnaissance battalion [with a company of motorcycles with sidecars, a company of armored cars and a company of Mark I and II tanks]; a battalion of pioneers [engineers]; a battalion of self-propelled flak guns; a large combat support component; and last but not least a powerful artillery formation of self-propelled artillery guns, StuG assault guns and self-propelled anti-tank guns - thirty-five pieces in all.

  These formations were commanded by some fine leaders, such as Martin Gross the tank leader of the SS LAH, who had Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Greece and Russia under his belt, and Berndt Lubich, a StuG commander in the SS Totenkopf. He was a Latvian Volksdeutsch.

  It is true that Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps [1st SS LAH Panzer, 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer and 3rd SS Totenkopf Panzer Divisions] would only provide 10% of the German manpower for the coming offensive, but his firepower and the expertise of his men made it the most effective 10%.

  The quality of officers of the Waffen SS had also reached a very high mark indeed. E. g. the Knights’ Cross was awarded to six members of the Das Reich Division in April 1943: Sturmbannfuehrer Sylvester Stadler, Sturmbannfuehrer Hans Weiss, Sturmbannfuehrer Christian Tychsen, Obersturmbannfuehrer Otto Kumm, Sturmbannfuehrer Vinzenz Kaiser and Obersturmmann Karl Heinz Worthmann.

  As part of the reshuffle of divisions the 8th SS Florian Geyer Cavalry Division, now commanded by Brigadefuehrer Fegelein, was transferred to Army Group South and given a defensive role. His younger brother Hauptsturmfuehrer Waldemar Fegelein was still with him. The new 9th SS Hohenstaufen Panzer and 10th SS Karl der Grosse Panzer Divisions, commanded by Gruppenfuehrer Willi Bittrich and Brigadefuehrer Lothar Debes, respectively, were being put together in France from German conscripts and Volksdeutsch volunteers. Their duty in France fulfilled two functions at once, training and security patrol. Debes was a well decorated retired army officer and World War One veteran, who had joined the SS to teach at the officer’s academy in 1937 and had then seen service in Russia with the 2nd SS Motorized Brigade. These two new divisions were given a sprinkling of cadre from veteran Waffen SS units.

  There were personnel changes too. By now the first SS conscripts were arriving, boys who had been but seven years old when Hitler came to power. They were full of Nazi idealism, but green as grass. Moreover the so-called all-German divisions were filling up with Volksdeutsch, turning them into formations as international as the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division. The value of these conscripts and foreigners was unknown. Those members of the foreign legions that had been conscripted into the SS were known to be good soldiers, but how would they fare, fighting for their new masters, the SS officers wondered?

  Of particular surprise to the veteran Waffen SS was the arrival of 2,500 bewildered Luftwaffe aircraft mechanics, who were suddenly transferred into the Waffen SS. It is even feasible that some of these Luftwaffe airmen were second degree Mischlings. So much for the so-called ‘volunteer spirit’. More lies. The officers of the SS LAH, such as Jochen Peiper, Teddi Wisch, Max Hansen, Rudolf Sandig, Gustav Knittel and the twenty-nine year old chief of operations Sturmbannfuehrer Rudolf Lehmann, could not understand how they were supposed to make SS warriors out of air force mechanics, many of whom appeared to be anti-SS. The Luftwaffe had already created its own infantry and panzer divisions from superfluous ground crewmen, and they had fought poorly. So the task of the SS instructors appeared daunting. These airmen that now had to put on SS uniforms were terrified, for they had heard such fantastic stories about SS training requirements and about the Waffen SS habit of aiming for the thick of the battle. In fact it would be harder for these transferees than they imagined, because by spring 1943 the fighting branch of the SS was [to use contemporary American slang] ‘flak happy’. In other words the soldiers of the SS LAH and SS Das Reich, and to a lesser extent in the other Waffen SS formations too, only really felt alive when someone was trying to kill them.

  All societies have such individuals, such as racing car drivers, bungee jumpers, skydivers and so on, but for entire units to be filled with them is extraordinary. These Luftwaffe transferees must have thought they had been given a death sentence.

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  For the schwerpunckt of Operation Citadel the Germans chose the Kursk salient, an area in Central Russia of low rolling hills and few trees - ideal tank country, which they had already fought over once before and knew well. Moreover the salient was rapidly filling with Soviet troops. A pincer movement, i.e. an attack from both north and south, should pinch off the salient and trap hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops, like the great pincer battles of 1941. Surely the Soviets must be running out of troops, the Germans thought. They had already killed them by the millions and had captured over three million.

  As far as the air forces were concerned the Kursk battle had already begun. In May and June 1943 the Luftwaffe flew 4,300 sorties just on the rail lines leading into the salient, along which the Red Army was resupplying. To counter this, the Soviets brought up more fighter planes and anti-aircraft guns, and mobilized a civilian work force, 25,000 strong, to build a new rail line parallel to the old one.

  Meanwhile in the German rear the Soviets maintained their own offensive against the German rail lines with air raids and with up close and personal partisan attacks. In May 1943 partisan sabotage of German rail lines leading to Kursk doubled in intensity to over a thousand incidents that month, and would increase in June.

  The soldiers of the Waffen SS wondered how so much movement of so much men and material could go unnoticed. Surely the Red Army would be waiting for them?

  Sturmbannfuehrer Gustav Knittel had a different problem than he usually faced. He had spent most of the war as a flak commander for the SS LAH, but recently he was promoted to command the divisional reconnaissance battalion. It would be his job to ensure the division did not run into an ambush - a heavy responsibility for this man still in his twenties.

  Of course the Soviets were expecting the attack. Stalin knew exactly where, when and how the Germans intended to defeat him, his intelligence section having put together a picture from several sources: spies, scouts, German prisoners, aerial reconnaissance and captured German airmen.

  Moreover, the British warned him of the coming offensive. They informed Stalin that the intelligence was reliable because they had a man in Hitler’s inner circle. The German Abwehr and SD suspected this was the case and nicknamed the traitor ‘Lucy’. But there was no ‘Lucy’. The British had simply broken the code by which Hitler sent messages to his major commands, and they could read them almost as quickly as the intended recipient. The British lied to Stalin about the source because they did not want him to know how advanced their code-breaking techniques had become. But, unknown to the British, Stalin knew all this, because he had a man [several in fact] in Britain’s inner circle.

  On the afternoon of 4 July 1943 the Waffen SS soldiers lifted their heads, staring in awe at waves of German bombers flying overhead in the gray sky, and watched as they bombed enemy
positions belonging to the Soviet Voronezh Front. Following this impressive air raid, German artillery opened fire on pre-arranged targets. One of the units firing was the 101st SS Vielfacherwerfer Battery. The noise was deafening. Many an artilleryman’s eardrum would be destroyed this day. No doubt the young seventeen and eighteen-year old replacements among the Waffen SS were thinking that surely there would be no Red Army left after this pounding.

  Then General Hermann Hoth, commander of the Fourth Panzer Army, ordered his XLVIII Panzer Corps of three panzer and one infantry divisions to charge northwards into the south flank of the Kursk salient. This attack was witnessed by the left [west] flank of Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps.

  Later in the day Hoth sent in the LII Corps on the left [west] of the XLVIII Panzer Corps. Then finally Hausser received the go ahead from Hoth, and Hausser immediately sent in small detachments to take some high ground - a few mounds of dirt from where artillery observers might better see the enemy. These small infantry teams went forward from the SS LAH, SS Das Reich and SS Totenkopf in the middle of a heavy thunderstorm, and taking advantage of the poor visibility the SS troopers gained the enemy observation posts very quickly. These advanced parties looked at the identity cards of their prisoners and confirmed to Hausser that he faced the Soviet Sixth Guards Army. So far, so good.

  All night long in the thunderstorm the German and Soviet artillery dueled. Flashes of gunfire mixed with flashes of lightning to create an eerie atmosphere. The SS Das Reich was fortunate to have an excellent artillery commander, Obersturmbannfuehrer Karl Kreutz.