by J. Lee Ready
In fact there were now enough Latvians left over to form the independent 106th SS Lettische Panzergrenadier Regiment.
To placate the Latvians somewhat the man appointed to be inspector-general of all Latvian SS was Gruppenfuehrer Rudolf Bangerskis, a Latvian war hero from the 1918-21 Latvian war against the Soviets. Voldemar Veiss was another influential Latvian who helped to convince his fellow countrymen to accept German service.
As yet the only members of the Turkestani Legion that Himmler had managed to gain were those serving in the East Turkic SS Corps.
The Swedish government began backing away from Hitler in 1943 and refused to allow any more of its young men to enlist into the SS, but those already serving could stay. Most were in the SS Wiking and SS Nord Divisions.
Most Finns in the SS [both Finnish- and Swedish-speaking] had gone home by late 1943, though a few volunteered to remain with the SS Wiking Division. This division also had Swiss members. One of the best tank commanders in the division was Hauptsturmfuehrer Karl Nicolussi-Leck, an Italian Volksdeutsch from the South Tyrol.
The 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain Division was currently recuperating from its battles with Titoists and Italians. Generally speaking these Yugoslavian Volksdeutsch, most of whom were not German citizens, had performed well. By this date 44,000 Yugoslavian Volksdeutsch had joined the SS, willingly or otherwise.
The 11th SS Nordland Infantry Division, in addition to its Danes and Norwegians, retained a good number of Volksdeutsch from Hungary and Romania - men who were not German citizens. By this date 31,000 Hungarian Volksdeutsch and 44,000 Romanian Volksdeutsch had enlisted into the SS. Both groups were proud of their membership in the SS and were grateful for Himmler’s acceptance of them as ‘long lost Germans’, but they also clamored to be allowed their own units.
The 13th SS Handschar Mountain Division of Bosnian Moslems and Yugoslavian Volksdeutsch was still training in France, when its curriculum was interrupted by a deadly mutiny. The actual rebels were few in number and Moslem clerics managed to calm the situation. Nonetheless the SS higher command reacted by picking out several hundred ‘unreliable’ men and sending them to slave labor.
Himmler decided to expand Obersturmbannfuehrer Gesele’s SS Reichsfuehrer Brigade, which had survived its Corsican ‘vacation’, and he renamed it the 16th SS Reichsfuehrer Infantry Division. The additional personnel would consist of German conscripts and Volksdeutsch volunteers from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. They did their initial training maneuvers in Slovenia. Gesele would command a regiment within the new division. Sturmbannfuehrer Walter Reder would lead its reconnaissance battalion.
Himmler was also building the 17th SS GvB - Goetz von Berlichingen Panzergrenadier Division, named after a 16th century German adventurer. At its training camp in France the commander Brigadefuehrer Werner Ostendorff was taking in German conscripts and Volksdeutsch volunteers from several eastern European countries, plus he was given Luftwaffe ground crewmen and Kriegsmarine sailors. One wonders if Ostendorff saw the irony. Prior to joining the SS in 1935 he had been a Luftwaffe pilot.
By late 1943 the SS had recruited about 10,000 Italians, either as kawis for front line combat duty or as hiwis that served as guards at labor camps and concentration camps, sentries, interpreters, mechanics and laborers. They served in Italy, Albania, and Greece and throughout Yugoslavia.
The thousands of non-German members of the Gestapo and Kripo that had not joined the SS are nonetheless included in the above figures. They served as detectives, technicians, guides, interpreters, interrogators, informers and in administrative support.
There started to appear a sense of elitism within the Waffen SS that was very unhealthy. Some refused to accept foreign volunteers as 'real' Waffen SS, while others went even further refusing to accept the 4th SS Polizei Division. Some even refused to accept the SS LAH. It became silly. But then again this is common in large military formations. Unit commanders are entrusted to create good unit morale, but some go too far and create a unit elitism that is detrimental to cooperation and operational efficiency.
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In addition to the three quarters of a million men of the SS, by late 1943 Himmler also controlled another 700,000 men in his role as chief of the German Police, i.e. Orpo. Actual Germans within the Orpo numbered about a quarter of a million, and they were divided into the cops on the beat, the Police Reserve and the specialty departments. The beat cops were divided into Schutzpolizei for cities, Gemeindepolizei for small towns and Gendarmerie for rural areas. The Police Reserve served in battalions and regiments and could be sent anywhere. The specialty departments included such areas as the Bahnschutzpolizei [Train Station Police], Zugschutz [Train Guards] and Grenzschutz [Border Guards]. Often these ‘Germans’ were in fact Volksdeutsch, and as most German men aged 17 to 45 were in the military, a large number of the ‘real Germans’ in the police were over 46 years old.
Himmler was always on the lookout for good police commanders. Sometimes his choices appear strange. In summer 1943 he brought Hermann Hoefle into the SS as a gruppenfuehrer and made him HSSPF for central Germany. Hoefle was a Freikorps veteran, and Himmler always liked to do good things for fellow Freikorps veterans. Yet one may ask why did Hoefle accept the job? He had been a good friend of Ernst Roehm and thus had no love for the SS. He had retired from the German Army as a major and since 1934 had risen in the NSKK to obergruppenfuehrer.
The 2nd SS Police Regiment was surely taken aback when they received a new battalion commander, for Sturmbannfuehrer Friedrich Buchardt had been head of the Lodz SD and had then spent several months with SS Einsatzgruppe B slaughtering Jews and other undesirables. He was a Latvian Volksdeutsch from Riga. Another battalion commander in this regiment was Standartenfuehrer Ernst Hartmann, a famous pilot who had resigned from the SS in 1932 [or had been asked to resign], then had rejoined in 1937, and then had been dismissed from the SS for alcoholism, but Himmler had given him a second chance [or was it a third?] and had made him a cop. So much for the lie about the high character standards of the SS and police.
In addition to these quarter million ‘Germans’ of the Orpo, there were also the Orpo’s foreign auxiliary police, i.e. the schumas – by late 1943 consisting of 3,000 Poles, 5,000 Dutch, 15,000 Croatians, 18,000 Latvians, 12,000 Lithuanians, 13,000 Estonians, 8,000 Byelorussians and 45,000 Ukrainians. Himmler had recently recruited five more Ukrainian schuma regiments, one of which, the 7th, was transferred to France.
The largest of the ROA units under Himmler’s control was the Russian Self-Defense Corps in Yugoslavia, whose 15,000 men had schuma status.
The 10,000 Tatar members of the Crimean Self-Defense Corps also had schuma status.
Pavlov’s five regiments of Cossacks were schumas. During 1943 these horsemen had retreated a thousand miles to Sandomierz.
In addition to the schumas Himmler also controlled 20,000 hiwas. The eastern Ukrainian hiwas had been forced to retreat into the western Ukraine [Galicia], and the Russian hiwas had been forced to retreat into Byelorussia.
All of the above were Orpo, but there was also the Ordnungsdienst, the Nazi generic name for the local cops in the conquered territories. A conservative estimate is that these policemen – Dutch, Belgians, Poles, Czechs, Frenchmen, Norwegians, Danes, and Serbs and so on - probably numbered about 300,000, and possibly much higher. E. g. in late 1943 there were 16,000 Polish policemen. Himmler was in control of all of them.
Thousands of ordinary Russian and Ukrainian cops had been forced to retreat westwards. If caught by the Soviet NKVD, which followed in the wake of the advancing Red Army, they would have been executed for having followed Nazi orders. They knew that if the NKVD could not find them, they would imprison their entire extended families instead, so they brought their relatives with them on the retreat. Thus the retreating German columns were crammed with civilians on horse-drawn wagons and with pushcarts carrying all their worldly goods. Naturally these cops were unemployed once they left their jurisdiction and th
ey needed a paycheck fast. Most would eventually enlist into the schumas.
Therefore Himmler was currently giving orders on any given day to about one and a half million men and women [either SS or police], of which half were German. If one counts only people born within the January 1938 borders of Germany as ‘real’ Germans, then but one third of Himmler’s personnel fit that bill.
The odd thing was that while Hitler’s empire was measured by the land acreage he conquered, Himmler’s empire was measured by the number of uniformed personnel he controlled. In other words while Hitler’s empire was now swiftly shrinking, Himmler’s was expanding.
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Two new players now arose in the ‘foreign soldier’ game: Goering and Speer. In late 1943 Goering appointed his first inspector-general of Luftwaffe osttruppen and hiwis, General Aschenbrenner. Luftwaffe osttruppen manned flak batteries, served in airfield security detachments and maintained aircraft, and a few even flew combat missions in Russian, Latvian and Estonian squadrons. The Luftwaffe kept the same distinction between osttruppen and hiwis as did the army, namely that a non-German unit, e.g. all Latvian or all Estonian, was considered osttruppen. But if the unit was predominantly German, its foreign members were known as hiwis. The Luftwaffe had its own ground forces [paratrooper divisions, panzer divisions and field [infantry] divisions], and their hiwis performed the same duties as army hiwis. However, the majority of Luftwaffe hiwis served as flakhilfe, i.e. helping to man anti-aircraft guns. From 9 September 1943 the Luftwaffe began recruiting Italians for this job.
The other new player was Albert Speer. Beginning as Hitler’s personal architect, this still young man had risen meteorically to command the OT and the NSKK and had become Minister of Armaments all at the same time. He increased membership of the OT dramatically by recruiting foreigners and he increased the number of slave workers that had to be guarded by the OT’s Schutzkommando. He also established Legion Speer, which would administer all the foreign volunteers of the NSKK, such as the Belgian Rex Regiment. As fuel became ever more scarce, vehicles had to be rationed to the various units of the Third Reich. As a result there was an increasing call upon the NSKK, the mission of which was to move by truck such formations as an army regiment or an airfield base unit or a civil service department whenever it needed to be moved. NSKK personnel including the foreigners of Legion Speer that found themselves attached to a particular unit for a time began to wear the uniform of that unit, rather than NSKK uniform, be it the German Army, SS, Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine, but they retained NSKK insignia. Yet, they were never counted on the strength reports of these units as they were attached not assigned. They were normally eligible only for civilian medals, because they were not members of the armed forces, but it is understandable that Allied troops considered them to be ‘soldiers’ and treated them accordingly.
NSKK membership might have reached a quarter of a million, but how many were ‘foreigners’ is anyone’s guess. Unfortunately much of the NSKK paperwork was kept inaccurately, and some was destroyed in bombing raids and battles.
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Ever since the death of Heydrich, who was a personal friend of Admiral Canaris, Himmler had had his eye on Canaris’ Abwehr, the German armed forces intelligence department, i.e. Hitler’s chief spy and saboteur agency. Himmler was sure that Canaris was disloyal to the Fuehrer. In 1943 the Gestapo arrested the Confessing Church clergyman Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on the face of it because of his anti-Nazi sermons. However, he was an Abwehr agent, and the Gestapo suspected he was a member of Canaris’ anti-Nazi resistance. It is true he knew enough to hang Canaris, but under interrogation he continuously refused to betray Canaris.
But by February 1944 Himmler had gathered enough evidence against Canaris from other sources to arrest Canaris for treason.
While SD officers of Amt VI of the RSHA now stepped in to take over the Abwehr’s cloak and dagger boys, Himmler placed the Abwehr’s sabotage troops under Skorzeny’s SS Friedenthal Hunting Group. Upon inspection Skorzeny found that these commando-style soldiers consisted of Germans, Volksdeutsch and foreigners from all over Europe. They were now all admitted into the SS. One of them, the Austrian Sturmbannfuehrer Walter Girg, would be awarded the Knight’s Cross twice for his behind enemy lines shenanigans.
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There was yet another Himmler Empire, the business and industrial one. Considerable money flowed into the SS WVHA by the renting of slaves. Theoretically the use of slaves released hundreds of thousands of German workers who could be taken into the army. However, slaves made poor workers. On the one hand this was the fault of the slaves, because they worked as slow as possible and often committed sabotage, but on the other hand it was the fault of the SS WVHA, which never provided the slaves with sufficient food, housing and medicines to keep them healthy and alert enough to work, especially at skilled jobs. SS KZL guards also hindered the operation by pilfering the food that was intended for the slaves.
Despite these limitations Himmler had expected his greatest money earner to be the SS-owned enterprises, most of which were housed inside labor camps and concentration camps. Just as Himmler listened to medical quacks trying to sell him a new ‘cure’, hoping to get an assignment as a concentration camp doctor, so he also listened to scientific and engineering quacks trying to sell him their latest invention, hoping to gain a workshop inside a labor camp. But Himmler knew less about business than he did about medicine, and he insisted on placing men in charge who were just as inept as he - old SS cronies. Most of the planned operations never got off the drawing board, and those that did were poorly implemented. Slaves were constantly being diverted to manufacture products that the SS guards wanted, either for their own use or to sell outside the camp on the black market. Himmler always excused his lackluster performance in business ventures by claiming that private industries as well as Nazi bosses like Speer, Sauckel and Goering were always trying to undermine his efforts, which was only partly true.
On occasion Himmler told such whopping lies about his industrial empire, it is a wonder Hitler or anyone believed him. He claimed to have produced one third of the Luftwaffe’s fighter planes currently in action, based solely on the fact that at Flossenburg and Mauthausen there were small machine shops making a portion of a fighter plane’s frame!
Ironically few of Himmler’s own factories were bombed by the Allies, primarily because they were of such little value to the German war effort that it was not worthwhile to the Allies to risk planes to destroy them, and risk killing innocent slaves. An armaments factory at Buchenwald was bombed, killing 96 guards and 110 slaves, and wounding hundreds more.
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Chapter Thirty-one
RETREAT FROM RUSSIA
Bronislaw Kaminski had retreated all the way from Lokot bringing 20,000 men and 30,000 women and children with him. Himmler and von Gottberg asked him to form the SS RONA Sturmbrigade from 1,700 of his best men with full SS membership for these Russians and the rank of brigadefuehrer for Kaminski. The latter graciously accepted. Himmler was aware that this new SS ‘general’ was a second degree Mischling. Two Russians, a Pole and a Jew made up Kaminski’s grandparents. So much for the racial purity of the SS. Lies, all lies. The SS RONA began patrolling the area Lepel-Borisov.
The Soviets, following their achievement at Kursk, went over to the strategic offensive. Stalin at last began taking advice from his generals, especially Giorgi Zhukov, and he declared that henceforth somewhere along the line the Red Army would be on the offensive every day from now on until the Nazis were destroyed and Germany occupied.
The 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division and the Estonian SS Narva Battalion were soon under Soviet pressure around Isjum, where the Narva’s German commander Sturmbannfuehrer Georg Eberhardt was killed. A Wiking tank NCO, twenty-three year old Oberscharfuehrer Helmut Bauer, earned the award of the Knight’s Cross here.
In September 1943 the 2nd SS Das Reich, 5th SS Wiking and 3rd SS Totenkopf Panzer Divisions were ordered
to hold Kharkov, and they proceeded to do so under heavy attack, but the weaker army units on their flanks were destroyed or fell back. Once again the SS had to retreat and then try to stabilize the line. The Austrian commander of the SS Der Fuehrer Regiment [of the SS Das Reich], Standartenfuehrer Sylvester Stadler, was awarded an immediate decoration for his courageous leadership. Stadler was not a Nazi. The tank commander of the SS Wiking, Obersturmbannfuehrer Johannes Muehlenkamp, also performed wonders. Another hero here was Haupsturmfuehrer Guenther Sitter, a Polish Volksdeutsch.
One of the replacement company commanders to reach the SS Totenkopf was a surprise to the men. Gerret Korsemann was a well-decorated World War One veteran and professional policeman. So far in this war he had served in high positions, attaining the rank of Allgemeine SS gruppenfuehrer and the job of HSSPF for Central Russia. But perhaps he had made Hitler or Himmler angry in some manner, for he was suddenly charged with cowardice and sent into combat. The Waffen SS had room for him at a rank six grades lower than his Allgemeine SS rank.
By October the SS Das Reich and SS Wiking were under heavy assault from the Voronezh Front on the east bank of the Desna River east of Kiev, but the SS Totenkopf had been moved 300 miles to the south, where commanded by Brigadefuehrer Hellmuth Becker it was soon hammered by the Soviet South West Front east of the Dnepr River. Time and again German tank commanders, such as Fritz Biermeier, proved their superior tactical skills. E.g. on one occasion Hauptsturmfuehrer Rudolf Saeumenicht saw scores of enemy tanks approaching. With only a dozen tanks in his little part of the SS Totenkopf, and some of them outclassed by the enemy machines, he could have been forgiven for retreating, but he knew he would open up his division’s foot soldiers to the enemy’s wrath. Therefore, to give them time to fall back, he counter attacked! Unbelievably for the loss of just two tanks his small formation knocked out forty-two Soviet armored fighting vehicles.
