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

by J. Lee Ready

  Then on 10 February Army Group Vistula was assaulted by the Soviet 2nd Byelorussian Front between Grudziadz and Sepolno. The Soviets were obviously hoping to reach the Baltic Sea and cut off Army Group Vistula. Within this army group Steiner’s Eleventh SS Army fought frenziedly. Degrelle’s Corps West of the SS Wallonie, SS Langemarck and the attached Spaniards gunned down attacking Soviets at the rate of ten to one in places, but the enemy kept coming. The III SS Panzergrenadier Corps [11th SS Nordland Panzergrenadier and 23rd SS Nederland Grenadier Divisions] had it equally rough. Steiner requested reinforcements, and Lammerding sent him the 15th SS Lettische Grenadier Division. After seven days of slaughter, Steiner counterattacked on the 16th in the Stargard-Pyritz sector with all his units plus the 10th SS Frundsberg Panzer Division, the latter having just come from the Western Front. All of these formations had received replacements just recently. One of the Frundsberg’s replacements was seventeen year old Sturmmann Guenther Grass, a Danziger, who was dissatisfied that he had been conscripted into the Waffen SS. He had asked for the submarine service. Steiner’s counter attack was only able to make four miles in four days, and even this small gain was miraculous. His men were outnumbered at every encounter, and the Soviets had some good quality weapons by now, including the new 46-ton IS-122 ‘Stalin’ tank armed with a huge 122mm gun and protected by frontal armor 230mm thick.

  On the 18th the SS Wallonie was slammed by major Soviet forces, and within hours the division had been sliced into pockets. The Walloons cried out for help, and the neighboring Germans, Norwegians, Danes, Flemings, Dutch and Volksdeutsch tried to aid the Walloons, but got nowhere and by the 20th Steiner’s Eleventh SS Panzer Army had been pushed back to its start line.

  On the 22nd the Soviets launched the second phase of their offensive with odds in their favor of four to one, this time breaking into the 15th SS Lettische and causing wild havoc.

  To complicate matters Hitler suddenly pulled Steiner and his SS staff out of the line and gave his 200,000 men to the already overworked Third Panzer Army headquarters.

  This same day the 33rd SS Charlemagne Grenadier Division was brought to the eastern front, and they began to form up in the city of Stettin in order to join the battle, but before they could do so they came under fierce Soviet air attacks.

  Nonetheless on the 25th the SS Charlemagne began to move up to the front, but before they reached it they were astonished to run straight into the 2nd Byelorussian Front near Hammerstein. Obviously the front line in this sector had been overrun. Taken by surprise, the Frenchmen did not stand a chance. Gruppenfuehrer Gustav Krukenberg knew he could not hold his division together, so this diplomat turned army staff officer and recent SS convert in his first combat command ordered a complete retreat. He told his men to make their way northwards to the coast in several convoys. He was at Elsenau and would command all divisional troops in his immediate area, and he gave similar orders to Oberfuehrer Edgar Puaud at Barenhuette, Obersturmbannfuehrer Jean Bassompierre at Neustettin and Obersturmfuehrer Henri-Joseph Fenet at Hammerstein, while he ordered the divisional rear echelon to try to retrace their steps back to Stettin and if not to also make for the north coast. Bassompierre was closest to the coast and he decided to wait for Fenet and Puaud.

  Following forty-eight hours of fighting and marching in freezing temperatures and over hard-packed snow Puaud’s column linked up with Fenet and together they marched on towards Neustettin. On the 28th Puaud and Fenet linked with Bassompierre, and leaving a rearguard of 300 men at Neustettin, they all moved out on the road to the north. Meanwhile Krukenberg’s column reached Belgard.

  Standartenfuehrer Rudolf Lange, now KdS Posen, who had spent much of the war murdering innocent people, did not retreat fast enough - he was killed by the Soviet advance.

  The new 32nd SS ‘30te Januar’ Grenadier Division showed up on this front just in time to join the retreat. It was now led by Oberfuehrer Adolf Ax, who had given up trying to reach the 15th SS Lettische.

  Hitler decided that the city of Breslau had to be held at all costs, though its garrison consisted only of rear-echelon troops and Volksturm 2nd Levy. Thirty-three year old Obersturmbannfuehrer Georg Besslein commanded the various types of SS personnel in the city including Gestapo, SD, Kripo and the Allgemeine SS [the latter being elements of the 11th Cavalry and 16th, 43rd and 98th Infantry Regiments]. With these personnel he created the provisional 1st SS Besslein Fortress and 2nd SS Mohr Fortress Regiments. Before the end of February the city was surrounded and fighting for its life.

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  Chapter Forty-three

  MARCH 1945

  By March 1945 just about every male member of the many Dutch Nazi organizations in the Netherlands had been transferred to the 34th SS Landstorm Grenadier Division, holding a stable line in the south of the country, or to the 23rd SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Division, which was battling the Soviet advance in Pomerania.

  The Anglo-Americans had reached the Rhine River at Arnhem in the Netherlands by September 1944 and at Strasbourg in France by November 1944, but they had not crossed. Nor had they yet reached the central Rhine by 1 March 1945.

  Then suddenly on 7 March 1945 the US 9th Armored Division captured an intact rail bridge on the Rhine River at Remagen in west central Germany. This was obviously of great concern to the German high command, but fortunately for them Remagen lay on the edge of the Siebengebirge, the seven highest mountains in Germany outside of the Alps. The terrain alone would slow the Americans, and a decent defense by German Fifteenth Army should hold them for quite a while.

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  Himmler decided it would be conducive to good morale for the two remaining Hungarian SS grenadier divisions, 25th SS Hunyadi and 26th SS Ungarische, to come under one umbrella, so he inducted Hungarian General Ferenc Feketehalmiczeydner into the Waffen SS as an obergruppenfuehrer and placed him in command of XVII SS Corps to control these two divisions. This Hungarian was Himmler’s sort of chap - as a Hungarian general in 1941 he had ordered the massacre of Jews in Yugoslavia. However, the grateful Hungarian found the offer of this job from Himmler to be a hollow one, because these two divisions were already almost surrounded by Soviet armies.

  SS Battlegroup Ney was reinforced with the 1st SS Hungarian Ski Battalion, which had reached regimental size by now. This added strength was most welcome because the battlegroup had just been given a major task, to hold a base line on the Austrian-Hungarian border, so that Dietrich could reassemble his Sixth SS Panzer Army nearby.

  Dietrich was fortunate to still have some valuable veterans, such as Hans Malkomes the Panther leader; Dieter Kesten, the brilliant tank commander; Albert Klett, a highly decorated twenty-nine year old Romanian Volksdeutsch; Hans Charpentier an Alsatian veteran of the Florian Geyer; Rudolf Lehmann a battlegroup commander; Jochen Peiper, whose exploits were now legendary; Fritz Vogt, a master of armored warfare, who had begun his service with the SS Verfuegungstruppe in the pre-war days, and was still only twenty-seven; Christian Bachman a well decorated veteran of the 3rd SS Totenkopf now twenty-five years old; Werner Wolff, the hero of Prokhorovka; Siegfried Siegel the great tank commander; Heinz von Westernhagen the Tiger commander; and the Danish Soeren Kam, who had recently been awarded the Knight's Cross.

  This reassembly was necessary because Hitler planned another major offensive of the scale of the Ardennes offensive, namely an attack by Army Group South using the Sixth SS Panzer Army, Sixth Army, Eighth Army and Hungarian Third Army between Lake Balaton and Lake Valence, while Army Group Southeast would make a diversionary assault by advancing its Second Panzer Army across the Drava River from Croatia into Hungary. On Dietrich’s northern flank his base line would be protected by the IV SS Panzer Corps [of the 3rd SS Totenkopf and 5th SS Wiking Panzer Divisions].

  Dietrich launched a preliminary attack at Gran and his I SS Panzer Corps of the 1st SS LAH and 12th SS HJ Panzer Divisions advanced relatively easily. However, this was an error for two reasons. First it alerted the Soviets to the f
act that the Germans still had an offensive capability, and secondly it gave the generals at Hitler’s headquarters the assumption that the coming offensive would be easy. But they did not take into consideration the ground temperature. At Gran the ground was frozen hard and the German armor could go wherever it wished. However, by the date of the real offensive, 6 March, the ground had thawed into mud, making it rough going for heavy armor, especially the Tigers of the 501st SS Heavy Panzer Detachment.

  As if this was not enough of an encumbrance, when the offensive began on the 6th the general staff did everything wrong - no reconnaissance, no artillery barrage and no truck transportation to the assault jump-off points. Thus the troops were cold, exhausted and hungry even before they attacked, and the Soviets were waiting for them with newly laid minefields and well sited anti-tank guns and artillery. Needless to say, it was a slaughter. The SS HJ was unable to advance at all. The SS LAH did manage to move, but after a full day’s battle they had only gained the Soviet first line. The SS Das Reich, unlike the others, used a preparatory artillery barrage, but then attacked far too late to make use of it, yet they did make some yardage. The following day both of Dietrich’s corps were counterattacked by the Soviets, and the SS troops were barely able to hang on, let alone advance. And more ‘old hares’ were being lost all the time, including Albert Klett and Hans Charpentier.

  On the 9th Standartenfuehrer Rudolf Lehmann took command of the SS Das Reich. At thirty-one he was one of the youngest divisional commanders on either side in the war.

  After six days of bloody struggle the SS LAH and SS HJ finally managed to cross the Sio Canal, an objective originally scheduled for day one. II SS Panzer Corps and three flanking Hungarian divisions just barely reached the canal. Dietrich was a realist and he knew he would need an intact army to fight off the Soviet invasion of Austria that was surely coming, so he asked that the offensive be called off.

  However, there was one exception to this fiasco. Peiper’s battlegroup of the SS LAH had charged ahead a full 45 miles!

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  Stargard in northeastern Germany was evacuated on 3 March. At last the German high command accepted that Army Group Vistula and the other formations east of the Oder-Neisse should no longer fight for every inch of ground, but should try to escape the enemy encirclement. Now almost half a million German troops and two million civilians began heading for the Oder hoping to get across. The main crossing places were: the spit of land east of Usedom that cut’s the Oderhaff Bay off from the Baltic Sea; Stettin 60 miles to the south at the head of the bay; Schwedt 35 miles upriver to the south; Kuestrin another 60 miles upriver; Frankfurt an der Oder another 30 miles southwards; and Guben another 40 miles southwards on the Neisse River.

  Degrelle pulled his 28th SS Wallonie Grenadier Division back from Wittichow on 3 March and hoped to hold Luebow with them, but two days later Soviet tanks pushed his Belgians aside as if they were a platoon rather than a division.

  By 3 March Krukenberg’s column of the 33rd SS Charlemagne Grenadier Division had reached Kolberg on the coast, and the columns of Fenet, Puaud and Bassompierre of this French division were not far behind. The rear echelon of the SS Charlemagne had fought its way to Koeslin on the coast where it linked up with the 23rd SS Nederland Grenadier Division, but on 5 March Soviet troops broke through to Koeslin, despite fanatic resistance by the Dutch and French.

  Also this day Bassompierre’s rearguard near Kolberg was severely mauled by an enemy attack and then it was surrounded. However, his column did manage to enter Kolberg. Untersturmfuehrer Ludwig was assigned as a liaison officer, because, a Swiss, he spoke French. Meantime Krukenberg’s column was already moving on, and he encouraged Puaud and Fenet to hurry up and join his main body before Soviet tanks could chop them up.

  On the night of the 6th Puaud’s forces tried to cross a foggy plain, but the fog suddenly lifted. All hell broke loose as the Soviets opened up with everything they had. The column was annihilated and Puaud was declared missing in action.

  Fenet and Krukenberg made it to Meseritz, where they stopped to try to grab any straggler they could find – French, German, whoever, -- and also to create some form of order among the thousands of German civilians who were fleeing the Soviet onslaught under long range shellfire and air attacks.

  By the 11th Krukenberg and Fenet had reached the sea, where ships were waiting for them, protected by two German warships. That night they began to sail to the island of Wollin, which would give them a momentary respite. But Bassompierre’s column was still trapped at Kolberg. Meanwhile another lost column of the SS Charlemagne made it to Danzig and joined the defenses of that port city.

  Himmler now suffered the humiliation that so many others of Hitler’s ‘generals’ had suffered in this war. Hitler relieved him of command of Army Group Vistula because he had retreated, and he was replaced by army General Gotthard Heinrici. This general was already in Himmler’s bad books because he had refused to divorce his 1st Degree Mischling wife!

  Naturally Himmler reacted with anger blaming everyone else, but surely he must have felt relief. When he received his dismissal order, he was in fact not even at his headquarters, but had entered a clinic on sick leave with a ‘mystery illness’. Was the illness ‘pure blind panic’ one wonders?

  Degrelle brought the remnants of his SS Corps West across the Oder at Stettin, and then he turned and put a portion of the SS Wallonie into the line, thus enabling the 10th SS Frundsberg Panzer and 11th SS Nordland Panzergrenadier Divisions to escape. This maneuver was too late for Obersturmbannfuehrer Albrecht Kruegel, who was killed. He was replaced as head of the 1st SS Danmarck Regiment by Obersturmbannfuehrer Klotz.

  Only now could Degrelle take a roll call of the SS Wallonie and he counted only 700 combat troops left. He sent the SS Nederland, SS Langemarck and SS Wallonie Divisions to the Schwedt area to regroup behind the protection of Skorzeny’s SS Provisional Division Schwedt. The SS Frundsberg remained at Stettin.

  The new 32nd SS ‘30te Januar’ Division settled in along the Oder, changing commanders yet again. Standartenfuehrer Hans Kempin was now in the driver’s seat.

  On 12 March the Germans launched a major counter assault near Strigau east of the Neisse. Included in this foray was Lombard’s 31st SS Boehmen-Maehren Grenadier Division. His teenage soldiers were horrified when they liberated some small German towns that had been briefly occupied by the enemy. Evidently the Soviets had run amok, looting everything they could carry, raping every female old enough to walk and butchering any man who tried to stop them. Seeing the aftermath of this horror certainly put new spirit into the young SS troopers. But the enemy here was too numerous, and within a day the SS division was compelled to back off. Meanwhile, Goebbels the Nazi Propaganda Minister informed the people of central Germany what they had to look forward to if the Soviets crossed the Oder-Neisse.

  The German Army’s Pomeranian Division with its attached SS NCOs was completely destroyed at Dievenow.

  On the 17th Bassompierre’s pocket of the SS Charlemagne surrendered at Kolberg. A mere handful of his men had managed to sail away. The loss of Kolberg was a disaster for Hitler’s propaganda minister Goebbels, who had just spent much-needed money and had borrowed much-needed soldiers to make a movie about a historic siege of Kolberg during the Napoleonic Wars. But now that Kolberg had surrendered he knew his movie would probably not be a box office hit! Oddly enough the film recalled a historic German fight to save the city from the French, whereas the current battle consisted of French troops trying to save the city for Germany.

  The 20th SS Estnische Grenadier Division continued to fight a withdrawal action in Silesia towards the Neisse. Here on 19 March their long time commander, Brigadefuehrer Augsberger, was killed in action. He was replaced by Brigadefuehrer Maack.

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  SS Battlegroup Nord, following its participation in Operation North Wind, had been in the rear in February, and was then transferred Buchholz to protect the approaches to Worms. Here on t
his ‘quiet’ sector facing the Americans Haupsturmfuehrer Guenther Degen breathed his last. This decorated veteran was twenty-seven. On 16 March SS Battlegroup Nord was attacked by the US 90th Infantry Division. Within a day these SS veterans of the Arctic Circle began falling back towards the Rhine. Despite their pitiable state these SS soldiers were considered by the Americans to be some of their toughest opponents.

  The 17th SS GvB Panzergrenadier Division, following its retraining by the German Army, had dug in at Rimlingen between the French border and the Rhine River, and was now led by Oberfuehrer Fritz Klingenberg. Commanding a division was a far cry from the days when he captured Belgrade with just ten men. On the 18th the division was hammered by American artillery, and rather than wait for the ground assault, the division immediately took off on the run towards the Rhine. After fighting a withdrawal action for a week, Klingenberg tried to defend Schwetzingen, but it was hopeless, and another mad dash for the great river began. Indeed those members of this division that managed to escape across the Rhine on the 25th considered themselves very fortunate indeed. Klingenberg lay dead.

  Already on the 23rd the US Third Army had begun crossing the Rhine at a point 100 miles south of Remagen against light defenses of the German Seventh Army. The following morning the British Second Army and US Ninth Army began crossing the Rhine 90 miles north of Remagen against tough opposition by the German First Parachute Army. To facilitate the Allied crossing here, the British 6th and US 17th Airborne Divisions dropped by parachute and glider on the east bank.

  With Anglo-American forces now east of the Rhine in three major locations, orders went out from Hitler’s headquarters fast and furious for everyone to try to contain them. In Munich Obersturmbannfuehrer Dirnagel received orders to turn his SS anti-aircraft school into an anti-tank unit and take it to the front line. Obviously this came as a surprise, but it did make sense. So he built his force around a dozen 88mm flak guns, which had proven to be excellent anti-tank weapons, and he backed them up with scores of smaller 20mm and 37mm self-propelled flak guns, which would be excellent anti-personnel weapons and good for shooting up soft-skinned vehicles, while the remainder of the staff and trainees were placed into two infantry battalions to protect the guns. All told he managed to gather about 2,500 men. This SS Battlegroup Dirnagel was placed under the command of XIII SS Corps and went into action against US forces at Riedbach on 29 March.