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

by J. Lee Ready

  Troops were grabbed from wherever they could be found. SS Obersturmfuehrer Alois Obschil found himself commanding a company of army infantry in the 539th Volksgrenadier Division.

  The first permanent crossing of the Rhine in 1945 had been at Remagen, but the American generals knew it was in the worst place possible. Still they began to use it as bait, throwing in division after division to draw Germans to it like bees to honey, thus making it much easier for Patton in the south and Montgomery in the north to cross the Rhine. The latter’s crossing was in the most ideal position. Most of the GIs who fought at Remagen never learned they were merely fresh bait.

  Ironically of immediate concern to the Germans on the Western Front was not Patton nor Montgomery, but the US 3rd Armored Division which had broken through the German Fifteenth Army at Remagen and had driven a hundred miles along the Sieg River in twenty-four hours, thus piercing central Germany - an incredible accomplishment! Fortunately for the Germans the next town in the path of these hardy American tankers was Paderborn, and this raised the spirits of Generalfeldmarschal Model, commander of Army Group B, because the town was the location of an SS panzer school. Word was sent to Obersturmbannfuehrer Hans Stern to form his 3,000 instructors and students into a battlegroup, with orders to destroy the impudent Americans at once. As a morale-booster Himmler christened Stern's school ‘SS Panzer Brigade Westfalen’ [Westphalia].

  However, these young SS recruits needed no such boost. They were keen to get at the Americans for they had just survived an Allied air raid that killed 280 civilians and 50 foreign workers right before their eyes. The sight of shattered homes and the dead bodies of housewives and care-free kids was enough to steel their hearts. Nor did they need to be told the gravity of the situation. To their west on the Rhine the German Fifteenth Army had practically ceased to exist, and to their south the German Seventh Army was in retreat, while to their north the German First Parachute Army was backing away from the Rhine. These retreats abandoned the Ruhr industrial zone, which held a population of ten million, plus a quarter of a million soldiers of Model’s Army Group B, in addition to 100,000 other troops [flak, rear-echelon, Volksturm 2nd Levy etc]. If the US 3rd Armored Division was not stopped, the Ruhr zone would be surrounded. The fate of all these people depended on these few SS trainees at Paderborn.

  The German plan was that while Stern’s SS Panzer Brigade Westfalen held the tip of the American advance at Paderborn, the German Eleventh Army [ex-Eleventh SS Panzer Army] would counterattack the southern flank of the US 3rd Armored Division, while the XIII Corps would strike its northern flank.

  Initially the plan worked, for even before the Paderborn defenders were under serious pressure, General Fritz Bayerlein’s XIII Corps had good luck attacking during the night along a snow-covered landscape, running into the 3rd Armored Division’s headquarters. The American commander Major General Maurice Rose surrendered to a tank. But when Rose reached for something in his pocket, a nervous tank crewman thought he was going for a pistol and shot him dead. [As Rose was the only Jewish American divisional commander, some GIs thought he had been deliberately murdered.]

  Meantime the spearhead of Rose’s division ran into SS Panzer Brigade Westfalen, and the battle was on, fierce and brutal, where the SS-manned 70 ton King Tigers easily outclassed the American Shermans. To support his armored troops, Stern had mobilized every man he could find including the town’s Volksturm 2nd Levy and some wounded veterans at a nearby hospital.

  However, despite Bayerlein’s breakthrough, the Americans brought in four more divisions the next day to protect 3rd Armored Division’s lines of communication. Bayerlein had to back down. Where was Eleventh Army he wondered?

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  On 27 March the troops of the German First Army, including the survivors of the 17th SS GvB, were still trying to stop the US Seventh Army from crossing the Rhine near Mannheim, when they heard that the 38th SS Nibelungen Grenadier Division was on its way to help them. Surely they were elated, until they found out that this unit, named after semi-mythical 5th century German warriors, was brand new and consisted of trainees from the SS officer’s school at Bad Toelz, some members of Himmler’s personal bodyguard, two battalions of border guards and 8,000 conscripts as young as fifteen. There was but a smattering of veterans in the division, some of them from the SS Prinz Eugen and SS Battlegroup Nord. Sturmbannfuehrer Walter Schmidt a veteran of the SS Wiking commanded one of the battalions. The Siegling Police Battalion was attached. It was manned by the Volksdeutsch survivors of the 30th SS Weissrussische Division, homeless now that their division had been transferred to the ROA. One valuable veteran was Wilfried Richter, who had come up through the ranks to battalion commander, who wore three classes of the Iron Cross for bravery and who had performed impressively in the Demiansk pocket and was still in his twenties. The divisional commander was Obersturmbannfuehrer Richard Schulze-Kossens.

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  While Stern was fighting at Paderborn, he might have expected the Allgemeine SS stationed at nearby Wewelsburg Castle to help him. Or perhaps he knew what cowards they were, having spent the war here at Himmler’s mock medieval meditational retreat? As soon as they heard gunfire they fled, but rather than abandon 42 slave workers at the castle they shot them.

  By this date the Buchenwald complex consisted of no fewer than one hundred and seventy-four different camps. Labor sites were guarded by Werkschutz. Labor camps and concentration camps were guarded by SS KZL. POW camps were guarded by Army, Kriegsmarine or Luftwaffe, and all camps were administered by the SS WVHA. Himmler ordered the guards at every camp to shoot all their prisoners, rather than let them be liberated by the advancing Allies, but the guards almost to a man refused to shoot anybody. They simply ran for it at the first sign of Allied troops, usually a phone call from the nearest town. They abandoned their prisoners. Only at Ohrdruf railway construction factory did some of the Buchenwald SS KZL guards obey the execution order.

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  On 15 March the Soviets, Titoists and Bulgarians together launched a major offensive north from Belgrade between the Drava and Sava Rivers hoping to strike into Croatia and place themselves in the rear of those Axis forces on the Drava facing the Hungarian border. Even Hitler saw the danger and on the 17th he authorized the withdrawal of the Drava River defenders.

  To hold the Soviets back long enough for the men and equipment to escape northwards, someone had to keep the Soviets busy. The XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps drew the short straw. They were ordered to counterattack. For this they were reinforced by a battalion of Arabs and SS Battlegroup Hanke. For three days they fought doggedly, but could not stop the deluge of enemy troops and tanks. On the 20th they too fell back.

  This put the 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain Division in a serious predicament at Sarajevo, for the main enemy thrust threatened to cut them off from their lines of supply to the northwest. Moreover, they too came under attack now and they fought determinedly in the hills encompassing the city. For heroism in this fighting one of the division’s battalion commanders, Hauptsturmfuehrer Franz Krombholz, was awarded the Knight's Cross. He was a twenty-four year-old Czech Volksdeutsch.

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  On 16 March the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front launched a massive onslaught in Hungary between Bicska and Lake Valence with the obvious intention of crashing into Austria. Gille’s IV SS Panzer Corps of the 3rd SS Totenkopf and 5th SS Wiking Panzer Divisions held back fierce charges by waves of Red Army infantry, but on their flanks the seven divisions of the Hungarian Third Army collapsed, their troops either running away or being overrun. All of the Germans now had no option but to retire and try to stem the advance somewhere else. Dietrich asked permission for his Sixth SS Panzer Army to retreat.

  This was a heartbreaking order for the ordinary troops, but they knew that if Dietrich felt it necessary then it really was. Morale was sagging, especially when the news of the loss of the ‘old hares’ kept coming in, such as the death of Hauptsturmfuehrer Christian Bac
hman a well decorated twenty-five year old veteran of the 3rd SS Totenkopf, and Obersturmfuehrer Werner Wolff, the hero of Prokhorovka. He was twenty-two. Another terrible loss was Heinz von Westernhagen. He had been relieved of command of the 501st SS Heavy Tank Detachment. Perhaps this was a political move or perhaps his old head wound had been causing him to waver. Either way the dismissal came as a shock to Westernhagen and within minutes he shot himself. Was he afraid of some ill news becoming public? Had he been accused of cowardice? Or had he been accused of treason and he killed himself to protect his family from Hitler’s wrath? To keep morale the rank and file were told he had been killed in action.

  The SS Wiking retreated, then stopped and turned at Stuhlweissenburg, but it was soon in trouble, so Oberfuehrer Ullrich asked that his division be allowed to fall back, but his request was refused. The refusal came all the way from Hitler. Ullrich was not prepared to watch his men die for Hitler, so he ordered a withdrawal, which was covered by Brigadefuehrer Sylvester Stadler’s 9th SS Hohenstaufen Panzer Division.

  Like Ullrich and Stadler, Dietrich felt he had no choice but to disobey Hitler’s command to stand fast, and he ordered the entire Sixth SS Panzer Army to withdraw along the shore of Lake Balaton, otherwise he would have been trapped.

  Now the old Army vs. Waffen SS rivalry came into play. The German Army generals blamed the SS for not having the will to fight! When Hitler was informed of this and of Dietrich’s insubordination he went into one of his uncontrollable rages and he ordered the SS LAH, SS Das Reich, SS Totenkopf and SS Hohenstaufen to be stripped of their unit titles and their sleeve badges as they were no longer elite units. Himmler refused to stand up to Hitler in defense of his men and he passed on the order.

  Undoubtedly this was an unbelievable order to those few SS officers and men that had still retained faith in the Fuehrer, but evidently most of the Waffen SS soldiers by now no longer had faith in any of the leading Nazis, Hitler and Himmler included.

  Dietrich refused to implement the sleeve badge order and he refused to cancel the retreat, and he told the SS LAH to leave a series of rearguards.

  The SS Wiking had to fight some fierce rearguard actions of its own too. They had recently been joined by Brigadefuehrer Alfred Berndt of the SD, one time Rommel aide, who had entered the Waffen SS as a hauptsturmfuehrer. He proved to be a brave officer, but was killed in action in this retreat.

  The SS HJ lost an excellent tank commander at this time, Sturmbannfuehrer Siegfried Siegel, who was blasted with shrapnel, losing an arm.

  The SS LAH lost Hauptsturmfuehrer Hans Malkomes, killed, who had been leading the division’s Panthers since Normandy.

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  Chapter Forty-four

  APRIL 1945

  By April the survivors of the 33rd SS Charlemagne Grenadier Division were in such terrible shape that the division was taken to southern Germany for a refit. It would be reconstituted by Obersturmbannfuehrer Heinrich Hersche, a retired Swiss Army officer. These men had survived the battles at Koeslin, Danzig and the retreat through Kolberg. But Hersche and their commander, Krukenberg, realized the division required more than a refit of equipment. It needed to lose some dead wood, so they dismissed about 400 men, sending them into the factories where they might make better workers than they did soldiers, and they also put several hundred faint-hearts into an SS Construction Battalion. Then they restructured the division to befit the few personnel that remained and thus the division became a sturmbrigade again.

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  At the beginning of April the people of Austria watched with despair as Axis troops fell back under constant enemy pressure, those from Hungary entering the southeast of Austria and those from Silesia in Eastern Germany entering the northeast of Austria. In the latter area the 31st SS Boehmen-Maehren Grenadier Division retreated to the Heidersdorf position. Whittled down to just a few thousand men, the morale of this division was nonetheless bolstered when informed they were being reinforced by three SS battlegroups - Trabandt, Konopacki and Schulze. However, their hopes plummeted when they saw upon closer examination that Wilhelm Trabandt’s battlegroup consisted of teenage Czech Volksdeutsch conscripts, that the Konopacki unit was in fact the 10th SS Training and Replacement Battalion of the SS Frundsberg Division, and the Schulze outfit was raised by drafting inmates of military prisons, whose crimes would be pardoned if they fought well.

  Retreating from Hungary the 1st SS LAH, 3rd SS Totenkopf and 9th SS Hohenstaufen Panzer Divisions backed up towards the city of Vienna - which was the hometown of some of these men. The 12th SS HJ Panzer Division withdrew due westwards into the mountains southwest of Vienna. Hungary was now completely abandoned, a catastrophic loss for Hitler, not least because he would no longer have access to the Lake Balaton oilfield.

  Dietrich and the other German commanders in Austria knew there were two routes by which the Soviets could approach Vienna from Lake Balaton, the northern route through Gyoer [Hungary] and Bratislava [Slovakia], and the southern route through Szombathely [Hungary] and Wiener Neustadt [Austria]. They hoped the enemy would choose only one, but to their dismay the Soviet 2nd Ukrainian Front took the northern route and the 3rd Ukrainian Front took the southern path.

  The northern route was defended by the German Eighth and Hungarian Third Armies, but both were already running. On 1 April they abandoned Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. That city’s Gestapo, SD, Kripo, Slovakian Police and local fascist militia had already fled, but Himmler ordered the 31st SS Boehmen-Maehren Grenadier Division [including its attached SS battle groups Konopacki, Schulze and Trabandt] to defend the city. He also tossed the 21st SS Police Regiment into this forlorn battle - a lamb thrown to the Russian bear.

  Meanwhile along the southern route Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army was fighting a withdrawal action, pulling out of Szombathely on 1 April. The Viennese just forty miles away could hear the artillery fire on the front line.

  Dietrich ordered his SS LAH to hold off the Soviet attack at Wiener Neustadt on the 2nd, while he carried the remainder of his army towards Vienna. He knew the city had good flak defenses that could be used with devastating power against waves of screaming Soviet infantry, and that some of the flak guns were 88mm, the dreaded gun that could turn a Soviet tank into scrap metal with one shot.

  Furthermore, he was informed the city had as many as 100,000 Volksturm 2nd Levy, who would now stop performing their essential jobs and take up the rifle. Some of these men were members of the Allgemeine SS 18th Cavalry Regiment, 14th Pioneer Company and 11th Otto Planetta and 89th Holzweber Infantry Regiments. No good in a mobile battle, they should nonetheless be able to fight well in a house to house encounter. This was after all their city. One of the high Nazi officials in Austria, fifty-seven year old Hugo Jury, formed a Volksturm unit and led them with a rifle in his hand. He was a reservist SS obergruppenfuehrer.

  By 3 April one Soviet force had masked the SS LAH at Wiener Neustadt, while the remainder of the 3rd Ukrainian Front had reached Moellersdorf, a suburb of Vienna, where the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division was waiting for them - the battle began. Suddenly shells began bursting among buildings known to Mozart and Beethoven. Vienna, a city that hated Nazism, now huddled down to fight to the death against atheistic communism. Casualties rose quickly. Sturmbannfuehrer Dieter Kesten, the Das Reich’s tank expert, was killed.

  Dorothea Neff, like other Viennese, was afraid of the air raids and terrified of the coming battle and even more scared of the probable Soviet occupation of her beloved city. A famous actress she was the darling of the social scene and had often entertained top Nazis at cocktail parties in her home. In one aspect, however, the defeat of the Nazis would bring her relief. She had been hiding a Jewish female friend in her home for four years.

  Throughout the city women and children took to the cellars and air raid shelters, while all males from the age of fifteen and three months up to sixty were handed an armband and a rifle or a panzerfaust and told to defend their street to the last man. Ma
ny of these essential workers already had a sense of discipline, e.g. policemen, firefighters and members of one of the paramilitary forces such as the NSKK or OT. Most were military veterans and a large number of those aged forty-three and older had fought in World War One with the Austrian Army. The Nazi leadership placed much faith in them.

  Moreover the city had a large garrison of rear-echelon troops and men undergoing advanced instruction from all branches of the service including the Waffen SS.

  However, Gruppenfuehrer Walter Schimana, HSSPF for the Danube region of Austria, who had his headquarters here, had no ambition to go down fighting. He and his staff fled.

  Hitler placed the city under the command of Baldur von Schirach, the half-American, who was happier instructing children in Nazi ideology than he was at playing soldier. He expected the city’s mayor to help him: Hans Blaschke was a reservist brigadefuehrer in the Allgemeine SS.

  This same day Bratislava fell to the Soviet juggernaut. Its defenders, mostly German and Slovakian policemen and some rear-echelon troops, had fought better than expected, but their resistance was futile. The 31st SS Boehmen-Maehren Grenadier Division and its attached battlegroups - Trabandt, Konopacki and Schulze - had tried to advance along roads jammed with refugees pushing in the opposite direction and all under constant bombing and strafing by Soviet fighter planes, and as a result they had failed to reach the city in time.