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

by J. Lee Ready

  By now Oskar Dirlewanger had expanded his SS battalion into a brigade by recruiting criminals from German, Polish, Byelorussian and Russian prisons and German military prisons and even taking in habitual criminals who had been sent to concentration camps. His personnel were of many different nationalities, and possibly there were Jews among them. He certainly must have had Mischlings, for Dirlewanger never asked.

  In spring 1944 several Ukrainian schuma battalions that had been fighting partisans in Poland, the Ukraine and France were disbanded and their personnel were assigned as replacements for the 14th SS Galizien Grenadier Division, raising its strength to about 18,000 men. The newcomers found morale to be shaky. Recently one of the division’s Ukrainian soldiers had been executed by the SS divisional staff for a minor infraction. Days later the German who had arrested the soldier was found murdered. With common sense as his guide the divisional commander Obergruppenfuehrer Freitag chose not to pursue the matter further.

  In July 1944 just west of Brody in Galicia the 14th SS Galizien Grenadier Division disembarked from trains and began setting up a defensive line to get ready for the arrival of the enemy: the 1st Ukrainian Front. Obersturmbannfuehrer Friedrich Beyersdorff now commanded the divisional artillery.

  Beginning on the 12th and for four days thereafter the men of the SS Galizien fired their rifles, machine guns, mortars and artillery along a 21-mile front, literally scything down waves of charging Soviet horse cavalry. The slaughter of horses and men was astronomical. It was not all one-sided though, for these SS were under constant artillery bombardment and air raids. On the 15th Soviet tanks broke through on the flanks. The Ukrainian SS counterattacked, but failed to stop them, and on the 16th they received permission to begin a fighting withdrawal westwards towards the Bug River.

  This was a particularly heartbreaking retreat for the Ukrainians, for not only would they be retreating out of the Ukraine, probably forever, but they had to leave their seriously wounded behind, knowing the Soviets would execute them. Each company in turn began a fire and movement withdrawal under enemy artillery salvoes and periodic strafing by planes.

  On the 18th the Ukrainians learned that they had not retreated fast enough, and now along with seven other German divisions they were surrounded! For another week they continued to retreat, leaving suicidal rearguards behind every day and fighting off Soviet attempts to turn their flanks. Accompanying the soldiers were hundreds of hiwis and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, who had no ambition to welcome the NKVD. Fritz Freitag, the Galizien commander, proved what a great warrior he was when the chips were down - he resigned! In disgust the staff of the Fourth Panzer Army sent army General Lindemann to take over the division!

  The SS Galizien was aided considerably by other Axis forces who were not trapped and who counterattacked to keep the bulk of the Soviets busy. Two of the formations trying to rescue the Ukrainians were the 18th SS Horst Wessel Panzergrenadier Division and Hauptsturmfuehrer Pierre Cance’s battalion of the SS Charlemagne Sturmbrigade. The Ukrainians were most grateful for the sacrifice of these Germans, Hungarian Volksdeutsch and Frenchmen.

  On 24 July the eight trapped divisions including the SS Galizien broke out of the trap and reached Uzhotsky. When the Ukrainians finally reassembled in the German rear they realized they were missing 7,000 men. [Some had joined the UPA partisans, who fought Nazis and Communists.]

  It would be hard to replace these losses, especially as the Galizien’s divisional replacement depot had been forced to retreat too and was ordered to send its trainees to the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division instead!

  The SS Charlemagne was now down to a strength of 1,688.

  Freitag now tried to excuse his own abysmal performance by claiming that only he was a hero and that everybody else was a coward. Unbelievably Himmler reinstated him in command and gave him the Knights Cross for bravery! Himmler was still a sucker for a hard luck story.

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  The SS Narva Battalion of Estonians quit its longstanding position of attachment to the SS Wiking Division and transferred to become part of the 20th SS Estnische Grenadier Division on the Russian-Estonian border. They perhaps suspected they were going from out of the frying pan into the fire, and this was true, for on 24 July the Soviets advanced into Estonia with no fewer than twenty divisions of the Leningrad Front and 3rd Baltic Front. The SS Estnische Division had no choice but to fall back at an angle and allow the Soviets to pour into Estonia.

  This placed Steiner's III SS Panzer Corps at Narva in serious jeopardy, so he ordered that his men should run for it to escape encirclement and should reach the newly dug Tannenberg Line about fifteen miles to the west before the Soviets got there. Just about everybody made it, except for the SS Seyffardt Regiment [of the 4th SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Brigade]. Though this regiment of Obersturmbannfuehrer Wolfgang Joerchel contained Dutchmen rather than Germans, they were Waffen SS troops all the same, and Steiner ordered a counterattack to rescue them. It failed bloodily. Joerchel only managed to bring out one fifth of his men. The 54th SS Panzerjaeger Detachment of StuGs was almost wiped out in this retreat.

  Steiner was fortunate at this time to gain a good artillery commander, Brigadefuehrer Peter Hansen.

  Estonian police were thrown into the line as stopgap measures to slow down the Soviets: the 42nd Estonian Schuma Battalion, the 1st and 5th SS Estonian Border Guard Regiments, the 2nd Estonian Police Regiment [of the 37th, 38th, and 40th Estonian Schuma Battalions]; and the 300th Police Special Purpose Division [of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th SS Estonian Border Guard Regiments]. These were all Estonians but for some German cadre and technicians. The schumas were Estonian members of the Orpo, but the border guards were Estonian members of the Estonian police [Ordnungsdienst] not members of the SS or Orpo. However, the staff officers of the 300th Division were German members of the Luftwaffe!

  In his capacity as HSSPF for the Baltic states Obergruppenfuehrer Friedrich Jeckeln formed a battlegroup of Latvian schumas and local Latvian police to defend the Latvian border, and the Lithuanian border was defended in part by three provisional regiments manned by Lithuanian schumas and members of the Lithuanian Fatherland Defense Force. Jeckeln had recently lost his son Klaus on the Eastern front. Jeckeln was an oddball among Himmler's butchers, for he was a true soldier as well as a murderer.

  Steiner placed the SS Nederland at the north end of the Tannenberg Line, with the SS Nordland in the middle. And his men were assaulted almost as soon as they reached the line. The Danes of the SS Nordland came in for a particularly fierce onslaught and they repelled the Soviets only by fixing bayonets. The Norwegians of this division supported them and together they restored the line.

  On 28 July the SS Nordland’s commander, von Rarancze, was killed, and to replace him came Oberfuehrer Juergen Ziegler, who was not a Nazi, and had only recently transferred to the SS from the army. South of them the Flemish troops of the 6th SS Langemarck Sturmbrigade defended a hill. There were also smaller detachments of Waffen SS spread along the line, including Dutch, Estonians, French, Swiss and Germans and perhaps twenty Brits of the SS British Free Corps. There were also small provisional units manned by members of the German Army, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, who had all been handed a rifle and told to hurry to the front line.

  In one incident German sailors fell back when Soviet tanks approached without infantry support, but Danes of the SS Nordland mounted on motorcycles with side cars and armed with panzerfaust anti-tank rockets counterattacked the tanks. They swerved and skidded between the tanks like apparitions, too fast for the tank gunners to react, and fired their panzerfausts into the rear of the tanks, and eventually the surviving bewildered Soviet tanks fled back to their own lines!

  The Danes repelled another assault the next day, so the Soviets altered their tactics. They infiltrated the sparsely held defenses with infantry during the night and wiped out two Danish panzergrenadier companies.

  Then it was the turn of the SS Langemarck to be assaulted, but they r
epulsed the Soviets again and again for three days, due in no small part to a Flemish anti-tank gunner Sturmmann Remi Schrijnen, who received the Knights Cross for his outstanding bravery here.

  But by July 28 the SS Langemarck had no choice but to abandon their hill, which uncovered the Danish flank of the SS Nordland. A counterattack restored the situation somewhat, but the Soviets kept the hill.

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  In summer 1944 the German line on the Eastern front almost broke in several areas. The Germans commandeered anyone they could find to stem the tide, including the 101st, 103rd and 104th SS Police Battalions.

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  This month the extermination center at Auschwitz-Birkenau recorded its highest daily number of persons gassed and burned: more than 9,000. Six huge pits were used to burn the bodies, as the number exceeded the capacity of the crematoriums. Within a few days the Gypsy labor camp in the Auschwitz complex would be emptied, its 4,000 survivors destined for the gas chambers.

  On 24 July Soviet troops reached the extermination center at Majdanek. This was the first such place reached by the Red Army. It had been hastily evacuated and almost none of the destruction ordered by Himmler had taken place. The hiwi guards and their German SS KZL masters had been too scared of being caught by the Soviets to stay behind and do a good job. The Soviet government now had proof that the corpse factories existed. However, their propaganda played down the nature of the victims, refusing to admit that Jews and Gypsies had been exterminated simply because of their race, and refusing to publicize that many of the victims were Germans, Austrians and Volksdeutsch that had opposed the Nazis, and refusing to admit that most of the guards had once been Soviet citizens. Instead they published the story that the killers were all German and had been exterminating every citizen of the Soviet Union they could find, regardless of race. Thus the lies continued.

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  On 16 July 1944 Dietrich, who had only just begun to relax a few miles behind the front, was ordered to send units to the French coast to prevent a new Allied landing. He sent a battlegroup commanded by Max Wuensche. The following day Dietrich, Meyer and Wisch received an honored guest, Generalfeldmarschal Rommel, who praised their accomplishments. They must have discussed the overwhelming air superiority of the Allies, for it hindered every move. On his return from the meeting Rommel’s car was strafed by a fighter and he was wounded.

  Unknown to Dietrich and his men, the Allies were planning a major armored breakthrough by British and American tanks. However, the higher echelons of the German armed forces did know it and were preparing accordingly.

  Before dawn at 0525 hours 18 July 1944 a heavy concentration of artillery fire fell on several positions in the German rear in the Caen area. Just minutes later 1,100 Allied heavy bombers arrived dropping bombs that exploded stone houses to smithereens, dug huge craters in fields, and disintegrated any poor unfortunate who stood in their way. These were followed as the sun rose by almost 500 medium bombers that were more specific in their aim, and these were followed by 300 fighters that picked out individuals and strafed mercilessly. Even one man on a bicycle was fair game. Then at 0800 another 500 medium bombers arrived to blow the rubble into dust.

  The people on the ground, both German troops and French civilians, considered this to be an exercise in mass murder.

  Following this came a creeping artillery barrage and moving right behind the artillery explosions was the British 11th Armored Division. Dietrich was informed by radio and he ordered his SS LAH back to the front at once to the immediate south of Caen along the Bourgebus Ridge.

  About noon Wisch with forty-six Panthers and his panzergrenadiers approached Soliers. The sky was so full of smoke and dust from the air raids and artillery bombardments that they could not see the Allied planes above them, and neither could they be seen.

  They found dazed German Army survivors in the village, but just north of the village they ran straight into British armor unaccompanied by infantry. Immediately the fight was on and within minutes Wisch and his staff witnessed several British tanks ‘brewing up’ i.e. burning. In mid-afternoon the British pulled back.

  That evening near Bras, 3,000 yards west of Soliers, some of the SS LAH’s StuGs surprised a British reconnaissance battalion trying to sneak past, and they knocked out sixteen British light tanks.

  Thus ended the day, which had begun so badly for the Germans, but had ended disastrously for the Allies. More than 120 British tanks had been destroyed and many others had been damaged. The Germans wondered what had happened to the British infantrymen, for they had seen few. The British were trying to shove three armored divisions over three bridges into a path less than 4,000 yards wide. As a result the British infantry was stuck in traffic.

  At dawn on the 19th Meyer’s SS HJ arrived on the battlefield. He would have come sooner, but had been awaiting Hitler’s permission to move! Meyer was concerned for it would take time to bring up everyone and place them into desirable defensive positions, and he expected a continuation of the British offensive this very dawn, but unbelievably the British gave him sufficient time. They did not advance.

  Indeed Sandig’s panzergrenadiers launched a company-sized probe and drove the British out of the hamlet of Le Poirier north of Soliers.

  Meyer put Sturmbannfuehrer Hans Waldmueller in command of an all-arms battlegroup at Frenouville 5,000 yards east of Soliers, and he installed Wuensche with an all-arms battlegroup to the right and rear [southeast] of Waldmueller at Emieville. Waldmueller was unusual among the divisional officers in that he had an SD background.

  Obligingly the British did not attack until the SS was ready for them. Wuensche’s panzergrenadiers easily repelled a British infantry brigade at Emieville as it tried to outflank Waldmueller’s right flank.

  At 1600 hours a company of Frey’s panzergrenadiers and some StuGs at Bras on the corps’ left flank were struck by British tanks. They finished off the British in just twenty minutes, not realizing they had met the main thrust of the British 11th Armored Division.

  However, another tank force approached Bras, and this time the StuGs fled when one of them was destroyed by a shell, abandoning the panzergrenadiers. Disgusted by this, the panzergrenadiers nonetheless fought on until they were almost crushed under the treads of British Sherman tanks and then at the last moment they gave up. Obviously German morale was beginning to break.

  Yet, Bras was but a forward position of Wisch’s defenses and when the British tanks continued on towards Hubert, Jochen Peiper’s Mark IV tanks lined up and bored armor-piercing shells straight into them. Some StuGs regained their nerve and returned to help Peiper, and Frey’s surviving panzergrenadiers opened fire too. The British fell back with heavy losses.

  In the early evening Sandig’s panzergrenadiers were pushed out of Le Poirier, and British tanks followed them onto Sandig’s main position around Soliers and the Bourgebus Ridge. Here the panzergrenadiers, ably assisted by a company of tanks and some anti-tank guns, provided a hot reception committee and took care of eight British tanks. The remaining Brits withdrew. After interrogating prisoners Sandig learned he had repulsed the 7th Armored Division.

  A major British attack by the Guards Armored Division just before dark was repelled by Waldmueller and Wuensche on the Frenouville-Emieville line, ably assisted by a fresh German unit: a company of SS-manned self-propelled Jagdpanzer anti-tank guns.

  With dusk approaching Frey and Peiper suspected that the British would now bombard them with artillery and bomb them from the air, so they abandoned their positions and fell back 2,000 yards towards Verrieres. The British did no such thing, but came on again in the fading light with another wave of tanks, but then thought better of it and stopped for the night. Frey and Peiper were astounded that the abandoned line had stopped the British attack!

  Dietrich in return for giving up a few fields of dead cows had stopped the largest concentration of British armor since Alamein, and he had not even needed to draw upon his reserves.

 
; The 20th did not see any alteration in the type of combat, because the skies that should have been clear by now as the dust and smoke from the bombing had drifted away were instead layered with low cloud, thus still preventing the Allies from making full use of their air supremacy. Dietrich had authorized a slight withdrawal from the northern edge of Bourgebus Ridge, Frenouville and Emieville, and as a result when the British artillery bombarded the line the shells fell on empty trenches. The British Guards Armored and 7th Armored Divisions then advanced, but not until the latter unit reached Verrieres in mid-morning did they discover Peiper and Frey, still feisty and full of fight and reinforced by Wittman’s Tigers. The British Tommies fell back.

  The next few hours were relatively quiet, the suspense being almost unbearable for the SS, for they did not know where or when the next assault would come.

  It came at 1500 hours at Verrieres. First of all the German defenders were pummeled by an artillery barrage, then they were strafed by Typhoon fighters that just managed to squeeze in below the clouds, and then from the western flank they were approached by ‘British’ infantry, waves of them unsupported by tanks. German forward artillery observers called in salvoes on the largest groups, while all the other Germans within range fired directly into them with whatever they had available. The ‘British’ foot soldiers went to ground, and soon began a more methodical advance using fire and movement tactics. The Germans soon learned their enemy was in fact a brigade of the relatively fresh Canadian 2nd Division.

  On the far southwest of the battlefield elements of the German Army’s 272nd Infantry Division fell back under pressure, but at Verrieres itself it was a couple of hours before Frey’s panzergrenadiers and some of SS LAH’s reconnaissance troops were forced to give ground.