by J. Lee Ready
On 3 September General Rohr’s relief column captured the last building in the Old Town neighborhood of Warsaw, but as many as 5,000 guerillas had escaped through the sewers to other parts of the city.
On the 5th and 6th German artillery and aircraft pounded the Powisle neighborhood and then on the 7th the foot soldiers moved in. The opposition was fierce, and the Germans soon called for reinforcements. A Turkestani battalion was thrown in. Where possible the Germans called for a truce to allow civilians to get out of the way.
However, Rohr suddenly had a new problem. The 19th Panzer Division moved into the city, not from the west to put down the revolt, but from the east, retreating across the Vistula River with the Soviets nipping at their heels. Warsaw was now on the front line. Soviet artillery shells began landing in the streets and Soviet fighter planes began strafing to add to the terror. Rohr had hoped for some assistance from the panzer division, but was surprised when the panzer troops asked Rohr for help in defending the riverbank! The best he could do was to send them the 500th Armored Assault Engineer Battalion and 501st Engineer Battalion and a few German policemen.
Hitler dismissed von Vormann for this latest retreat, and the Ninth Army now went to General Smilo the Baron of Luttwitz.
On the 12th the 25th Panzer Division cleared out all guerillas on the west bank of the Vistula in the Zoliborz District of Warsaw, but they only did this so that they could dig in and face the river. By the 15th the last remnants of the German Ninth Army had crossed the river. Now here in the city along the riverbank were the 19th Panzer, 25th Panzer, 5th SS Wiking Panzer, Hermann Goering Panzer, Franconian-Sudetenland Panzer and 73rd Infantry Divisions. Outside the city on the flank was the 3rd SS Totenkopf Panzer Division. Everyone now expected a Soviet river crossing into the city at any moment.
On the night of the 15th the Germans silently watched as enemy soldiers boarded boats in the dark and paddled across the river. Only when the enemy was halfway across did the Germans open fire. They slaughtered the attempted crossing.
Actually the attackers were not members of the Soviet Red Army but were members of Berling’s Polish First Army. On the night of the 16th these Poles tried to cross again, and this time with good artillery support they gained a small bridgehead. A handful of guerillas were even able to reach them. However, the 19th Panzer Division would make sure that these Polish regulars did not advance further.
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The 4th SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Brigade had suffered terribly. Medals were awarded for well deserved courage. Two of its German officers received the Knight's Cross, but certainly morale was helped more by the award of the Knight's Cross to the lowly Dutch Rottenfuehrer Derk Elsko Bruins, an anti-tank gunner.
On 16 September in northern Estonia Gruppenfuehrer Felix Steiner’s III SS Corps was hit by a very heavy Soviet assault. Steiner now only had the 11th SS Nordland Panzergrenadier Division and 4th SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Brigade. Reports started coming in to Steiner’s headquarters that his men could not hold. Even die-hard warriors like Hauptsturmfuehrer Martin Guerz, a battalion commander in the Nordland, were demanding reinforcements. Steiner requested permission to withdraw from General Ferdinand Schoerner, commanding Army Group North, and he in turn passed on the request to Hitler, and predictably Hitler refused. Schoerner was a well-known Nazi, who had begun his military career as a conscripted grenadier, but he was no fool. He told Steiner and his SS to ignore Hitler and get out, and get out they did. But Steiner could not go too far, he knew. The sea was to his rear.
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At the beginning of September 1944 the Waffen SS set up a training camp just north of Oosterbeek in the Netherlands. The first arrivals did not realize they were going to be given a ringside seat in the next big battle on the Western Front. With irony the wooded camp was known as Waldfriede [Peaceful Woods]. The recruits saw no danger here, for it was sixty miles north of the current Allied positions, with several rivers between them and the Allies, and in any case the Allies in Belgium were aiming eastwards towards Germany not northwards towards the Netherlands. Sturmbannfuehrer Josef Krafft had been told to establish the camp here precisely because this was a backwater. This was also the reason why Obergruppenfuehrer Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps decided to regroup and refit near here, arriving in early September with the 9th SS Hohenstaufen and 10th SS Frundsberg Panzer Divisions. This was also the reason why Generalfeldmarschal Walter Model set up his headquarters nearby.
On the morning of September 17 there were several air raids on German installations in the Arnhem-Oosterbeek area. There had been air raids before, but never this many at once. However, the SS training camp at Waldfriede, and the various forest encampments of the II SS Panzer Corps, were not touched, bringing about a sigh of relief from the SS soldiery. The Allies obviously did not know they were here. [In fact according to Allied intelligence the Hohenstaufen and Frundsberg had been wiped out in Normandy].
However, the permanent barracks in the area were struck by the bombers, causing casualties among army rear-echelon troops. One of the barracks that was hit at Ede housed most of the Dutch SS Nordwest Guard Battalion. These men had been performing sentry duty at Dutch labor camps in the south of the country until the Allies came too close. But, as often happened in these air raids, the highest casualties were among the civilian population: one of the saddest episodes being the bombing of a mental hospital at Wolfheze.
At forty minutes past noon another air raid took place, and the flak gunners in the area were soon busy again, but there was no sound of bombs. Quickly, news began to reach the different headquarters in the area that some of the planes must have been hit as several parachutes were seen west of Wolfheze. A more interesting piece of news reached Krafft at Waldfriede, namely that a training patrol of his young recruits with a veteran instructor had fought a skirmish with British infantry! With reports of more sightings coming in to the senior German officers, it started to look like this was a British airborne operation dropping paratroopers rather than bombs, and this in broad daylight! German General Student watched one of the drops, and as Germany’s leading paratrooper expert he knew exactly what this was. Additionally, news was coming in from further south that American airborne troops were dropping around Nijmegen, Eindhoven and on the opposite side of the Grosbeek Hills. If true, this would be the largest airborne drop in history!
Krafft was smart enough to know that the Allies would never drop paratroopers without an attempt to rescue them by ground forces, and that they would have to cross bridges to do that. Therefore he decided that the bridges must be the goal of the paratroopers, so he put every trainee and instructor he had into a defensive line just east of Wolfheze, hoping to keep the British paratroopers away from the Arnhem road bridge over the Lech [North Rhine] until German reinforcements could arrive, and he placed a small detachment on the bridge.
Model did not initially think ‘bridges’, but suspected the paratroopers had come for him! He and his staff evacuated at once.
Meanwhile German rear-echelon troops of the army, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were reaching for rifles and rushing to the west of Arnhem and to the south of Nijmegen.
While one small detachment of Krafft’s unit was digging in, a party of jeeps approached them. The SS opened fire, knocking out two and driving the remainder away. They checked their prisoners and found that they were up against the British 1st Airborne Division. This news astonished Krafft - he was outnumbered ten to one!
The British were not the only ones to be ambushed. British paratroopers shot up a military car and killed General Friedrich Kussin, the German Army kommandant of the district.
Krafft sent a vehicle detachment forward and they soon encountered British paratroopers. The fight was now on. But unknown to Krafft, an entire British paratrooper battalion had walked right past his defenses and had reached Arnhem and was now battling with the SS detachment he had left at the bridge.
By late afternoon the Dutch SS Nordwest Guard Battalion had
recovered from the air raid, and they launched a rash counter attack on the landing zone of the British paratroopers near Wolfheze. After suffering high losses, the Dutch SS fell back, went to ground and began a desultory fire upon the British.
Meanwhile Model ordered Bittrich to counterattack the Allied paratroopers with his corps. The plan they came up with was for Obersturmbannfuehrer Walter Harzer, the chief of operations for the SS Hohenstaufen, to form a battlegroup and attack the British 1st Airborne Division in the Oosterbeek-Wolfheze area, while Standartenfuehrer Heinz Harmel would take a battlegroup from the SS Frundsberg to Nijmegen and prevent the American 82nd Airborne Division from capturing the bridge over the Waal [South Rhine]. Harzer was an ex-army gefreiter, who had been with the Waffen SS since before the war. He was very experienced, though only thirty-two. Harmel was a veteran of the Russian Front, where he had fought with the SS Das Reich. He was not a Nazi. As his home town in Lorraine was being threatened by an American push at this very moment, he probably would have rather been fighting there. One of his officers was Sturmbannfuehrer Leo Reinhold, who had just received the German Cross in Gold for his performance in Normandy. Big things were expected of this hero and his panzer battalion.
Nijmegen was already under attack by American paratroopers and was currently defended by several German Army rear echelon units plus Luftwaffe flak gunners and a Dutch schuma unit known as the SS Politie Regiment.
When Harzer arrived in Arnhem he gave orders for Obersturmbannfuehrer Ludwig Spindler to take 120 artillerymen of the Hohenstaufen and use them as infantry to reinforce Krafft’s line and to pick up stragglers along the way - anyone in uniform, Dutch or German. Within an hour Spindler’s men were in a shooting match with British paratroopers. Meantime, behind this line Harzer began to create a major defensive position.
By 2130 hours Krafft believed his trainees had performed valiantly, and quite right too, but now he ordered his men to retreat to the northeast during the night. Spindler soon fell back too.
On the morning of the 18th the British airborne troops advanced eastwards towards Arnhem and ran into Harzer’s main defensive line just west of Arnhem with the river on his left [south] flank. The British were flabbergasted to find abundant German armor in their path including tanks, armored cars and StuGs. They had been assured by their intelligence officers back in England that there were only rear-echelon troops in Arnhem. These paratroopers and glider troops were not equipped to fight armor! Within an hour Harzer had isolated a British company and forced it to surrender. Smaller British detachments were also rounded up.
The British had to admit that in this battle the Germans (SS included) were fighting in a gallant manner, i.e. with chivalrous gestures. E.g. many a wounded Briton was saved because the Germans quit shooting while he was evacuated either by British medics or German medics. However, this was still warfare and the Germans brought in flak guns from surrounding towns to fire upon the planes that were bringing British reinforcements and supplies. Every few minutes an Allied plane could be seen tumbling to earth in flames.
The British drop zone near Oosterbeek was still being fired upon by the Dutch SS and other ad hoc units, though the Dutch SS had suffered from desertions in the night. On this second day of battle these Axis forces received a major reinforcement – a battlegroup of the Dutch Landstorm. This sounded more powerful than it was. The Landstorm consisted of all male members of the Dutch Nazi Party aged 17 to 50. This battlegroup had been put together by Obersturmbannfuehrer Martin Kohlroser over the previous twenty-four hours, picking most of these men up from their homes or places of employment. They were terrified when they were ordered to fight veteran British airborne troops. Kohlroser was a German veteran of the SS LAH, SS Nord, SS Polizei and SS Frundsberg.
German sailors attacked into Renkum and fought a nasty little action against the British. Near Ede some of the Dutch SS Nordwest Guard Battalion were driving along a road when they were ambushed by British troops, losing a half-track.
In order to create some order out of this chaos the German Army established Provisional Division von Tettau to command all of the units in the area, Bittrich’s corps excepted. Model would thus command the battle through von Tettau and Bittrich.
Some of the British reinforcements this day parachuted right on top of the Axis troops. The Dutch SS shot many before their feet ever touched the ground. Others were shot while they were hanging from parachutes caught on tree branches. Gliders were also coming in, and the SS sprayed them with bullets before they landed and before the troops inside could get out. Of course the Dutch SS and Landstorm were petrified, for this was their first battle and they had never signed up to be combat troops. They were not about to give the enemy a sporting chance.
Meanwhile on this day Hauptsturmfuehrer Viktor Graebner decided to lead his reconnaissance battalion of the SS Hohenstaufen northwards into Arnhem over the road bridge, perhaps not realizing that the solitary British battalion that had sneaked into Arnhem had occupied the northern end of the bridge. Graebner’s vehicles drove onto the long bridge straight into a hail of fire from automatic weapons, anti-tank guns and piat anti-tank rockets. Graebner, a decorated Normandy veteran, was killed and his men were driven back, leaving scores of brave lads dead and wounded on the bridge.
The survivors of Graebner’s column radioed their comrades north of the river for help, and in response Harzer put together a small SS Hohenstaufen task force to eradicate this British battalion. These Germans soon began their assault, advancing at the rate of a few yards per hour in bloody house-to-house fighting, with civilians clamoring to get out of the way.
It was eventually apparent that these Brits at the bridge were planning to fight to the bitter end, so Bittrich ordered Harmel to send a small task force of his SS Frundsberg northwards from Nijmegen to attack the bridge from the south. Harmel accompanied the unit himself, but before attacking he asked the British to surrender. They refused.
By this second day of battle the mixed German defenders of Nijmegen and Eindhoven had been unable to prevent the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions from capturing several bridges at Eindhoven, Wyler, Mook and Grave and a bridge over the Maas River, but Harmel was not worried as he had left good-sized battlegroups both inside Nijmegen on the south bank of the Waal and on the opposite [north] bank. In fact these SS troops not only held the Waal bridges, but they actually trapped an American battalion inside Nijmegen. Thus the scene here was almost identical to that of Arnhem. Sturmbannfuehrer Reinhold, commanding an all arms force of tanks, artillery and panzergrenadiers, was fighting magnificently here. Like the British, the Americans were stunned to find themselves up against hardened SS panzer troops. Naturally they cussed out those British intelligence officers back in England that had prophesied an ‘easy show’.
By dawn on the 19th, the third day of battle, Harzer had been reinforced at Arnhem by some SS Hohenstaufen people who had been refitting in Germany, and they brought with them by rail new tanks and artillery pieces. As a result Harzer was well prepared to fight off two assaults this morning, one by three British battalions moving eastwards into Oosterbeek, and another by three British battalions advancing eastwards along the north bank of the river.
In the latter area Harzer set up a corridor of guns in houses, offices and warehouses through which the British were funneled. An entire British company was shot to pieces, following which SS medics went among the British wounded, caring for them and evacuating them to a nearby hospital.
At Oosterbeek the British supported their attack with 75mm artillery [brought by glider] and plenty of automatic weapons, but Harzer’s SS also had plenty of automatic weapons and all kinds of support, including towed artillery, self-propelled artillery, flak guns, armored cars, tanks and StuGs. It was an unequal battle.
Late in the morning Harzer organized a counterattack along the river by sending some men around to the British left [northern] flank, and they surprised a British company, most of whom managed to fall back firing. The SS follow
ed them and found a fresh British battalion getting ready to attack. The Germans instantly showered them with mortar shells and then charged into them with tanks and StuGs. The Brits scattered like mice. Panzergrenadiers now roamed the bank of the river searching buildings and taking British prisoners in twos and threes. The Germans did not realize it at first, but soon calculated that they had inflicted about 2,300 casualties on the British in these few streets along the river.
At Oosterbeek the Germans had completely stopped the British advance, and had counter-attacked on their right pushing as far as Wolfheze by nightfall.
Also on the 19th at the main British drop zone another paratroop and glider operation took place. Some of these reinforcements were Polish paratroopers. Along the perimeter the Germans fired at the aircraft and gliders and parachutes. Those unlucky enough to drop outside the British perimeter were quickly killed or captured.
At the north end of the road bridge in Arnhem members of the SS Hohenstaufen and SS Frundsberg were slowly advancing into the perimeter of the solitary British battalion, and at the first sign of firing from a building the Germans brought up StuGs and other self-propelled guns and sent shells straight into the multi-story structures, which usually collapsed in a heap of dust and rubble, the British ‘Tommies’ literally tumbling into the street.
This day Reinhold and the other members of the SS Frundsberg inside Nijmegen were finally forced to retreat across the bridge to the north bank of the Waal, leaving the town in American hands. The Americans had only been able to do this because they had been reinforced by British armor that had busted through the German front line and driven forty miles to rescue the US 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions. However, the Germans lined the north bank opposite Nijmegen with SS personnel and anyone else they could grab and stood ready to repel any attempt by the GIs and Tommies to cross the bridge.
