by J. Lee Ready
However, no sooner had Hausser traveled southwards to set up headquarters in Kharkov than he was informed that the Kursk offensive had been called off. The Soviets had counterattacked in so many other places that the entire German line in Russia was barely able to hold, let alone advance. Both Model’s Ninth Army and Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army were in danger of being encircled, so Hoth’s forces began to withdraw to his original start line abandoning every yard gained by Hausser.
As the days went by the truth dawned on Hausser and his men and it was a heartbreaking reality. The British claim that the turning point in the war against Germany was their victory at Alamein. The Americans insist it was their June 1944 invasion of Normandy. The Soviets are adamant it was their victory at Stalingrad in February 1943. But for the Germans it was unquestionably Kursk in July 1943. From this battle onward the Germans would be on the strategic defensive everywhere. Any offensives launched by the Germans from now on would only be tactical in nature, i. e. tied to a specific battlefield. More importantly, every German whether Nazi or anti-Nazi knew that the Communists were coming and that they would not stop. No one would be safe from their atheistic barbarity - not one concentration camp guard, not one soldier, not one housewife, not one nun, not one child, no one. And furthermore any defeat suffered by the Germans at the hands of the British and/or Americans would only hasten the Communist conquest. In other words while the Communists were trying to break down the front door to Germany, the Anglo-Americans were trying to smash through the back door.
Already the British and American governments had publicly announced their intention to enslave the entire German people, even including those Germans who opposed the Nazis! If any German doubted that the Anglo-Americans were actually so heartless that they would go through with this, he only had to look at the cities of Germany that were being pounded into rubble by British and American bombers. These so-called democracies were butchering women and children by the thousand. For the month of July 1943 civilian deaths in the city of Hamburg alone were greater than German military dead on the Russian front.
From this month onwards the Germans fought on because they had no choice!
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Hausser’s SS troops did not have too much time to ponder the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, for they were ordered to rush down south to the Mius River to stem a new Soviet offensive. By the time they reached the river they found that the local German defenders had repelled the onslaught, which was just as well for Hausser’s men had not yet recuperated from their ordeal at Kursk. Yet they were now ordered to attack! The SS Das Reich and SS Totenkopf charged forward on 30 July and on the first day they busted through the hastily dug Soviet defenses, sending the T-34s reeling in retreat.
Meanwhile the SS LAH was ordered to Italy, an astonishing but welcome order. The men started dreaming of Chianti and Italian girls. As a parting gift they gave their armored vehicles and hiwis to SS Das Reich.
SS Das Reich would need them, because Hausser was told to rush back northwards to his old stomping grounds to fight his old enemy. On 12 August at Valki Hausser’s SS Das Reich and SS Totenkopf launched a counterattack against the Soviet Fifth Guards Army.
This same day Soviet troops of the Steppe Front and South West Front reached Kharkov. Hausser’s small gain did not influence the big picture. His men were soon ordered to rest. Rest was certainly needed by every man.
Obersturmbannfuehrer Otto Baum had been wounded, but this did not keep him out of action - he was too concerned for his men - but two days later he was wounded again. This double blow curtailed his activities for a while.
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Chapter Twenty-seven
YUGOSLAVIA SPRING-SUMMER 1943
By early 1943 Himmler was deeply involved in the Yugoslavian conflict, though he invariably kept behind the scenes. First of all his SS RSHA [SD, Gestapo and Kripo] was active in northern Slovenia, Banat and Serbia and to a lesser extent in Bosnia. Secondly his Orpo was represented in these same locales by German police battalions, a Lithuanian schuma battalion, the Russian Self-Defense Corps and three regiments and ten independent battalions of Banat Volksdeutsch policemen. Himmler eventually gained permission from the Croatian government to send the Austrian Brigadefuehrer Konstantin Kammerhofer to Croatia as HSSPF, where he began raising schuma battalions.
Gruppenfuehrer August von Meyszner had spent the last ten years working as a senior policeman in Berlin, Vienna, the Sudetenland and Oslo, but he found his new job as HSSPF for Serbia to be far more difficult, because his new office in Belgrade was in the middle of a battlefield. He could only travel with a well armed escort.
In addition to the SS RSHA and Orpo, Himmler’s Waffen SS was active here too in the form of the 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain Division.
On 16 January 1943 the Axis forces in Yugoslavia combined to launch one last offensive that would destroy the Titoists forever, attacking into southern Serbia from the north with the Croatian Army. This included the 369th Devil’s Division which had a German army cadre. While from the west advanced the Italian V Corps, and from the northeast the German 187th Infantry Division, 717th Security Division and 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain Division. Tito’s escape routes to the south were blocked by the Cetniks and some Italian garrisons along the Neretva River.
The battlefield was one of snow-covered foggy forested mountains. After twenty-four hours of battle, the Titoists began to retreat southwards. German, Croat and Italian aircraft hounded them whenever visibility allowed, while the Axis ground forces traipsed after them. The Prinz Eugen’s mountain climbing experts and ski troops were especially welcome here.
However, the Titoists had strong rearguards equipped with artillery and anti-tank guns, and it took a month for the Axis troops to climb and fight their way to the Neretva, only to find that the Titoists had wiped out two Italian garrisons and had crossed the Neretva.
The combined Axis forces had suffered about 3,000 killed and wounded and many men were crippled by frostbite and respiratory ailments. They claimed to have killed 8,500 partisans, but this counted every dead body they found along the path of the Titoists, many of whom had died in bombing raids and others from cold or sickness. As many of the partisans were women it was hard to tell the civilians, except for the aged and small children.
The Titoists kept moving to the southwest, and by the end of March they had punched a hole through the Italians and Cetniks and had reached Montenegro, where they found local support and temporary sanctuary.
For six weeks the Axis troops rested and waited for the fog to lift and the snow to melt, and then on 16 May they launched a spring offensive. This one, they assured everyone, would wipe out the Titoists once and for all. They attacked from the east near Kolos and Pljevlja with the Italian Taurinense Division, German 1st Mountain Division and Bulgarian 61st Regiment, while the Croatian Army advanced from the Drina River in the north. From the northwest the German Brandenburg Infantry and 118th Jaeger Divisions attacked. From the west towards the Piva River advanced the Italian Venezia and Ferrara Divisions and the 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain Division. This maneuver trapped the Titoists in the valleys of the Lim and Tara.
The skies were clear and Axis planes easily found the partisans, but the foot soldiers still found the mountains hard going.
The Titoists failed to break through the Italians so they ran for the Sutjeska River. The SS Prinz Eugen and 1st Mountain Divisions were ordered to smash through Tito’s rearguards and finish him off. The Germans did indeed break through by 12 June, but it was too late. The Titoists had escaped the trap yet again. Six more days of fighting against rearguards did not alter this brutal truth.
Hitler realized that more ‘German’ reinforcements were necessary to destroy the Titoists, but he was loathe to send any more army combat units here, because they were desperately needed in Russia. Himmler decided to fill the gap and ordered the 4th SS Polizei Motorized Division, 4th SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Brigade and the 1st Cossack Cavalry D
ivision to Yugoslavia. At first the Cossacks did not want to obey SS orders, especially because they believed the Yugoslavian conflict was none of their business. It took a visit by Pyotr Krasnov himself to calm them down. He explained that the Titoists were Communists, the same enemy as in Russia. Following this the Cossacks agreed to go. At this time the Kuban Cossack militia joined this division.
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Chapter Twenty-eight
THE PARTISAN NIGHTMARE 1943
By June 1943 the only surviving Jewish ghettoes in Eastern Europe were at Bialystok, Vilnius, Kovno, Lida, Lodz, Lublin, Minsk, Riga and Siauliai.
In June the German authorities were alerted that the Polish villages of Hucisko, Przewrotne and Cisie were hiding Jews and Polish partisans. They responded by attacking the villages using Polish police and German Army military police. They shot almost every Jew and everyone caught hiding Jews and burned their homes. No real partisan presence was encountered. Raids such as these were commonplace.
Lublin’s Jewish population had been whittled down by deportations, until only a thousand or so was left. Gruppenfuehrer Jacob Sporrenberg the local SSPF was ordered to finish them off. Rather than use his own men, he borrowed a handful of SS KZL inner perimeter personnel from Majdanek and Birkenau, putting Scharfuehrer Otto Mohl in command. The fact that a mere NCO was placed in charge of this ‘aktion’ is evidence of the disdain the SS KZL placed on such work these days. Sporrenberg ordered the 25th SS Police Regiment to stand by to make sure no one interfered. Then Mohl and his killers ran through the ghetto streets and buildings shooting every man, woman and child they could find.
However, not every ghetto and camp was so docile. Serious revolts broke out this summer in several labor camps. In each incident the kommandant and his guards seem to have become so arrogant that they let their guard down.
Franz Stangl arrived at Treblinka to straighten out the lax attitude permeating the camp, and he soon turned the camp into an efficient killing machine, massacring innocents by the thousand. However, on 2 August the Jewish sonderkommando revolted. The Ukrainian guards were momentarily paralyzed with indecision, but German officers yelled orders and soon the guards regained their composure and put down the rebellion with a withering fire of poorly aimed shots.
On 16 August the staff of SSPF Brigadefuehrer Otto Hellwig ordered the Judenrat of Bialystok ghetto to tell the Jewish police to round up 9,000 people for deportation, but they refused. This made the Germans and Byelorussians very angry, because it meant they had to send in their own people to do the dirty work. For the operation they assembled several battalions of German policemen and Byelorussian schumas and the local Byelorussian police and some SD and Gestapo. They became even angrier after moving in, because a Jew shot dead a Gestapo member. In a panic the frenzied Germans and Byelorussians sprayed bullets everywhere, shooting 120 people before they calmed down. The Jewish ‘terrorists’ here had a mere handful of firearms, yet it took Hellwig and all his forces fully eight days to root out all of them. Only then could he begin the round up.
Vilnius ghetto also experienced a small revolt at this time.
At Sobibor the prisoners of a sonderkommando refused to process another trainload of Jewish victims, even when threatened with death. They were all shot and a new sonderkommando had to be created from the next trainload of Jews.
On 20 August 1943 the town of Kamin Kashyrshky was attacked by a band of UPA armed with rifles, machine guns, mortars and artillery. The various Axis depots in the town barricaded themselves and fought back, while radioing for reinforcements. They consisted of local Polish policemen, a few SD, Kripo and Gestapo, some Luftwaffe personnel, a unit of Volksdeutsch militia, 200 German army rear-echelon soldiers and 147 German policemen. After stealing what they needed the guerillas left. The defenders suffered 100 Germans killed and 14 missing and 10 Poles killed and one missing. There were many wounded.
On 2 September there was another mutiny by the sonderkommando at Treblinka. It too was put down with ferocity by the Ukrainian guards. Obviously Stangl did not have as much control over his prisoners as he said he did. The Ukrainian guards at these camps were hiwis, but this summer a few took advantage of the loosening of race restrictions and actually enlisted into the SS.
At Sobibor an outside working party of thirteen sonderkommando killed their sole Ukrainian guard and ran off.
On 10 September five slaves at Miedzyrzec labor camp killed two of their guards before being shot down.
On 13 September the Treblinka sonderkommando revolted again. Some of these Jews had been captured while serving in the Red Army and they used their military experience to good effect. They broke into the offices and guard barracks, where they killed twenty SS KZL and Ukrainian hiwis with knives and axes. Some set fire to the wooden buildings, while the remainder charged in their hundreds towards the outer gates. The Ukrainians in the towers machine-gunned them, but the prisoners knew they had nothing to lose and continued to run. Perhaps 200 broke out of the camp and reached the woods.
The Jews of Vilnius ghetto now staged a similar revolt, running in their thousands out of the ghetto, overwhelming the Lithuanian police at the gates, running through a gauntlet of Lithuanian schumas that fired in wild panic, and running on through the city. Several hundred Jews reached the countryside and scattered.
Sobibor had set up a POW - prisoner of war camp for a few hundred Soviet soldiers next to the main camp. These veterans, who were experienced in hand to hand combat, saw how the Jews were being butchered. Among the soldiers were Jews and Communist commissars, who did not want to end up like the Jews next door. On 14 October all the POWs rebelled and quickly broke into the concentration camp where they joined forces with the men and women of the sonderkommando, and together armed with axes they attacked the guards. Most of the thirty SS KZL inner perimeter guards wore only holstered pistols and did not stand a chance. Then the prisoners charged towards the outer gates, though they knew it meant running right through the 200 Ukrainian outer perimeter guards. Most were shot down, but some broke down the fence with the weight of their bodies, charged across a minefield, exploding the mines with their bodies, until a few survivors managed to enter the woods. Eleven SS men and two hiwis had been killed and many were wounded. The hiwis then roamed the camp, finishing off the hundred or so wounded inmates, and then searched the buildings and found 160 in hiding, which they gunned down.
The camp guards radioed for help, and in response the KdS for this region sent seven of his Germans to take charge of the Ukrainians, who appeared panicky. Meanwhile he notified the military and police that 300 or so ‘Communists and criminals’ had escaped. Immediately German troops and Polish policemen began hunting down the escapees. There were Polish partisans in the area and some of the escapees ran into them. Most of the partisans accepted the Russian POWs, but they murdered the Jews. Some partisan bands murdered the Russians too. The surviving prisoners hid in the woods and on farms, but many an escapee was turned in to the police by a Polish farmer.
The rebels in these camps figured that if even just one of them survived it was a successful revolt, but they achieved a greater success than they had hoped for. Himmler decided to close down Sobibor and Treblinka. The buildings were to be dismantled and the ground landscaped.
It is noteworthy that the actual German exterminators in these two camps numbered fewer than a hundred, and of these ‘Germans’ only about half were real Germans. Yet their victims numbered in the hundreds of thousands!
By the end of September 1943 the Vilnius, Minsk and Bialystok ghettoes had been eliminated. Their inhabitants had either been killed or if still relatively healthy had been taken to labor camps and concentration camps. A few had escaped. Riga was next on the list of ghettoes to be eliminated.
Birkenau of the Auschwitz network proved to be the most successful killing machine, and in November its kommandant Obersturmbannfuehrer Rudolf Hoess was rewarded for his efforts. He was promoted to serve in the office of the inspector-general of c
oncentration camps at SS WVHA headquarters back in Germany. His replacement, the Warthelander Obersturmbannfuehrer Arthur Liebenhenschel, found the administration of the fifty plus camps that made up the vast Auschwitz complex too much to handle: it required 7,500 guards; so he divided them into three main sections. Not only did he change the administration, but there is evidence he treated the inmates of the labor camps more humanely than Hoess had done. He was a product of Eicke’s training, having worked at Lichtenburg and Oranienburg.
Officers and NCOs of the SS KZL often received medals for merit, and this in itself did not bother the members of the Waffen SS one bit, but the SS KZL were given medals ‘with swords’, i.e. a clasp on the ribbon that denoted military service rather than civilian government service! Hence another lie, the pretense by the SS KZL that were ‘fighting’ in this war just as much as a front line soldier of the Waffen SS. Every time a Waffen SS soldier saw one of these SS KZL people with his ‘swords’, say for example at a train station, it made him see red.
It is noticeable that most of the officers directly involved in exterminations received few promotions. Eichmann had risen meteorically, but Hoess and Liebenhenschel as obersturmbannfuehrers controlled 7,500 personnel, when the same rank in the Allgemeine SS would not command more than a few hundred or in the Waffen SS a thousand men at most. Even taking into consideration the German habit of not linking rank to responsibility, it does seem that Himmler was deliberately keeping these fellows down. Hoess may have been evil, but he was a superb administrator, and should have been promoted two or even three ranks higher. Himmler ran his people by dangling carrots, but rarely allowing any of the carrots to be eaten.
