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

by J. Lee Ready

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  Not too far from Prague on 6 May Gustav Lombard’s 31st SS Boehmen-Maehren Grenadier Division actually launched a counterattack against Soviet units, but it gained nothing. Lombard now ordered his men to destroy their equipment and run for it. He knew the Americans had reached Pilsen and he told his men to make their way there, though he knew they would be at the mercy of Czech partisans until they reached that city.

  This day the survivors of SS Battlegroup Dirnagel and 17th SS GvB Panzergrenadier Division surrendered to American forces at Achensee. In both units well-earned decorations were handed out minutes before the surrender. The previous day Gruppenfuehrer Werner Ostendorff, who had helped form the SS GvB, had died of wounds.

  The surviving soldiers of the SS Das Reich, SS Wiking and SS Totenkopf fled westwards also hoping to surrender to the Americans. Dietrich knew time was running out so he handed out well deserved awards: Oskar Drexler, Walther Mattusch, Franz Reiche, Franz Dreicke, Karl Buehler, Fritz Rieflin and Heinrich Bastian were awarded the Knight's Cross, and Heinz Werner, Rudolf Lehmann and Karl Kreutz were awarded the oak leaves to their Knight's Crosses, and Otto Weidinger and Guenther Wisliceny were awarded swords to their Knight's Crosses. These were the last awards Dietrich issued. Mattusch was a Czech Volksdeutsch. Wisliceny was an East Prussian with Polish ancestry.

  The XVII SS Corps and the remnants of the 25th SS Hunyadi and 26th SS Ungarische Grenadier Divisions surrendered to the Americans at Attersee in Austria.

  Today the garrison of Breslau surrendered to the Soviets. This garrison, including the 1st SS Besslein and 2nd SS Mohr Fortress Regiments, had put up a magnificent performance. Four of the SS men had earned the Knight's Cross here: Obersturmbannfuehrer Georg Besslein, Unterscharfuehrer Rudolf Gruenner and the twenty-four year old Austrian Obersturmfuehrer Franz Budka; as did twenty-nine year old Obersturmfuehrer Alfred Rogge, who lay dying in hospital.

  In Austria a handful of German Army soldiers surrendered to an American platoon and informed the Yanks that the SS KZL guards at nearby Itter Castle refused to give up. The German soldiers offered to join forces to attack the SS! The Americans agreed and together they assaulted the fortress and killed the guards. One of the prisoners they liberated was a sister of Charles de Gaulle the [Allied] President of France.

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  At 2 am on 7 May as per Doenitz’s orders German emissaries signed a complete surrender to all the Allies effective in twenty-two hours. The Soviets insisted on their own ceremony, which delayed the surrender to the Red Army for another twenty-four hours after that.

  This day British troops in Austria ran into an SS detachment at Villach that would not give up, which resulted in one more quick and one-sided fight. However, most Germans encountered by the British here were happy to surrender to them, including SS Battlegroup Hanke and the 16th SS Reichsfuehrer Panzergrenadier Division.

  Obersturmbannfuehrer Weidinger and his battlegroup of the Das Reich reached Prague this day, which he found was in a state of revolt and teeming with German soldiers including females, SS and police and thousands of German and Volksdeutsch civilians and an entire train full of wounded.

  Among his problems were Nazi party officials and Gestapo and SD, who demanded he counterattack the ROA units in the city and that once he had destroyed them he could suppress the rebellion, after which he should repel the Soviet 1st, 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts that were speedily advancing upon the city. Yet he had his orders, and in any case he had no intention of ordering his men to commit suicide, for that would have been the result if he accepted even the first part of their demands.

  Now the Czech partisan commanders in Prague came up with a plan. They would protect the German garrison from the Czech people if the Germans agreed to march out of the city and abandon most of their heavy weapons. The Germans eagerly agreed. In fact it seemed like such a good idea that Vlasov switched sides again and ordered his ROA troops to join the retreating Germans!

  Weidinger knew it was a gamble, but at this stage he had little choice. Weidinger made the deal and his column began moving westwards, every vehicle crammed with troops, wounded, elderly, women and children. The Czech partisans were only partially successful in protecting the Germans on the march, for many a Czech farmer wanted to get in one last shot at a Nazi. And of course no one could protect the Germans from constant strafing by Soviet planes.

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  By 8 May, which according to the Western Allies was the first day of peace in Europe, the 27th SS Langemarck and 28th SS Wallonie Grenadier Divisions had disintegrated, their members surrendering more or less individually to the British along a line stretching all the way from Berlin to Luebeck, though some were caught by the Soviets.

  Just south of that line the 32nd SS ‘30te Januar’ Grenadier Division surrendered to US forces at Tangermuende due west of Berlin. In this area Brigadefuehrer Schmedes and a few hundred survivors of the 36th SS Dirlewanger Grenadier Division crossed to the west bank of the Elbe River and surrendered to the Americans, and the 23rd SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Division surrendered to Americans at Magdeburg. The police chief of Magdeburg, Brigadefuehrer Andreas Bolek, shot himself. He had been run out of his birth homeland and later in life he was run out of his adopted homeland. He was evidently tired of running.

  This day Dietrich ordered his Sixth SS Panzer Army to destroy its remaining vehicles and cross the Enns River to surrender to the Americans. The first of his men to do so was Brigadefuehrer Kraas who surrendered the survivors of his 12th SS HJ Panzer Division to US forces at Enns in Austria. The 38th SS Nibelungen Grenadier Division surrendered to Americans at Alpen-Donau, while the 37th SS Luetzow Cavalry Division gave up to US units in Austria and the 9th SS Hohenstaufen and 1st SS LAH Panzer Divisions capitulated to the Americans at Steyr in Austria. Most of these divisions barely numbered a few hundred men each. The pitiable survivors of the 1st SS Hungarian Ski Battalion also reached the US lines in western Austria to surrender.

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  On 9 May, which according to the Soviets was the first day of peace in Europe, Paul Hausser, not having any units left to command, willingly surrendered to a lone surprised GI in Austria.

  The 35th SS Polizei Grenadier Division never did fully escape the Halbe Pocket and this day the remnants formerly capitulated to the Soviets. The 31st SS Boehmen-Maehren Grenadier Division did not need to surrender: it had been destroyed at Koeniggratz.

  Some elements of Oberfuehrer Karl Burk’s 15th SS Lettische Grenadier Division managed to reach the Elbe River and surrender to the Americans, but the remainder was caught by the Red Army at Neu-Ruppin and forced to capitulate.

  The 14th SS Galizien Grenadier Division [now also known as the 1st Division of the Ukrainian Liberation Army] surrendered to British forces at Radstadt in Austria. Soviet artillery fire was still falling within yards of them as they reached British lines.

  This day the SS Horst Wessel Battlegroup was destroyed at Hirschberg by Soviet forces, its commander Standartenfuehrer Heinrich Petersen committing suicide.

  The 10th SS Frundsberg Panzer Division had reached the Teplitz-Theresienstadt area of the Sudetenland, but so had the Soviets. The division gave up.

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  On 10 May Obersturmbannfuehrer Weidinger and most of his rescue column reached American positions in the Sudetenland and surrendered. However, many of his charges had become scattered owing to air raids and assaults by mobs of Czech civilians and attacks by local Czech guerillas that had ignored the ‘deal’ their bosses had made. Standartenfuehrer Wolfgang Joerchel tried to slip past some Czech partisans but was caught. They murdered him. Hauptsturmfuehrer Paul Maitla was also taken prisoner and murdered by these partisans. This Estonian paid with his life for the crimes of others.

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  On 11 May the Titoists entered Carinthia with the intention of conquering this Austrian province. They clashed with German stragglers and Cetnik partisans. But, the British made it known that they would use m
ilitary force to enable a free Austria to retain this province, so Tito retreated back into Yugoslavia.

  The 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain Division had already called it a day, handing over their weapons to the Titoists.

  German Army Group Kurland in Latvia surrendered this day. The Soviets counted their prisoners here: 183,000 Germans and 14,000 Latvians, most of the latter being members of the VI SS Corps of the 19th SS Lettische Grenadier Division and the 106th SS Lettische Panzergrenadier Regiment. Medals were in order on this last day of service, including Knight's Crosses to Latvians Karlis Sensbergs, Andreje Freimanis, Voldemar Reinholds and Alfreds Riekstins.

  Generalfeldmarschal Schoerner ordered his Army Group Center to surrender to the Soviets in the Czech Protectorate, though he himself flew out to safety! As a result the 20th SS Estnische Grenadier Division gave up to the Soviets at Melnick near Prague.

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  Each day more German stragglers walked up to Allied soldiers to surrender. On 19 May British troops in Austria, having been at peace for almost two weeks, were startled to see a handful of oddly dressed officers approach their camp. It was Generalleutnant von Pannwitz and the staff of his XV SS Cavalry Corps, and he asked permission to surrender. The British agreed and counted no fewer than 39,000 Cossack troops along with 12,000 Cossack women and children.

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  SUMMARY

  The SS existed for twenty years. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had been conceived. The war was over.

  Of course, one of the great myths of World War Two is that the killing stopped in 1945. It did not. The greatest tragedy is that the British handed over to Stalin’s NKVD every hiwi and osttruppen, including SS members, that they had captured and who had come from the Soviet Union [1938 borders]. This was in flagrant violation of international law. They knew full well that the NKVD was at best imprisoning these men [and women and children] in concentration camps. On occasion British troops who handed over a trainload or boatload of these people actually witnessed the NKVD lining them up and machine-gunning these unfortunates without even bothering to take their names, let alone ask if they were guilty of something. Naturally many refused to go quietly and the British troops had to use force to round them up, and in a few cases they had to hunt down these people and kill them. Many committed suicide, and some mothers murdered their children rather than see them taken away by the NKVD to be raised as atheists.

  Initially the Americans too handed over their prisoners that fit this criteria, but once they realized what fate awaited them they ceased. The British, however, fed the Soviet NKVD mincing machine with fresh blood for four years with the purpose of buying off Stalin! The British were afraid the Americans would leave them alone in Europe, as they had done after World War One, and this would mean that only the weakened British Army would stand between Stalin and his conquest of Western Europe.

  In 1949 to hurry up the American withdrawal Stalin blocked all food convoys by rail and truck to the Allied enclave in Berlin, but the Americans responded by flying in food, a major undertaking which was not thought possible, and this convinced the British that the Americans were in Europe to stay. Therefore, they ceased to feed the NKVD machine guns, not that they had many victims left in any case.

  Fewer than a hundred British soldiers refused to participate in this new Holocaust that killed or enslaved over a million people. A half-century later, most Britons still refuse to believe that their ‘lads’ could do such a thing.

  However, the British refused to hand over citizens of nations overrun by the Soviets after 1938. But what was to happen to them? They could never go home, for the Soviets would arrest them. The US Army offered a deal to these tens of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Western Byelorussians and Galizien Ukrainians who had served as hiwis, osttruppen etc in the German SS, police and army: namely join the US Army as members of labor battalions. They eagerly accepted. They wore US uniform with their nationality written on the shoulder and served at US bases in Germany for the next thirty years. They were periodically armed for sentry duty.

  The members of the 14th SS Galizien Grenadier Division were in a unique situation in summer 1945 as they sat in a British prisoner of war camp in Italy. Their German title said the men were raised in that portion of the Ukraine [Galicia] conquered by the Soviets in 1939 and this meant they were not on the British deportation list. However, the British knew that most of the men were in fact Ukrainians from the Soviet Union and they secretly planned to ship them all off to the NKVD. By absolute fluke one of the prisoners could speak English and he overheard some British officers discussing the secret plan and he informed his Ukrainian seniors. In pure desperation the highest-ranking prisoners offered the services of all the Ukrainians in this division to the Polish Army of General Anders that had served alongside the British during the war. These Poles were aware of the brutality inflicted upon Poles by Ukrainians during the war, especially by schumas, police, hiwis, Werkschutz and SS, and they knew that this division was drawn from such men. Yet they accepted the division! Anders’ Army was a military force without a country, because the Communists were in control of Poland by now, i.e. the Polish First and Second Armies [Berling’s forces] backed up by Soviet guns. Anders’ men were currently in Italy, hoping to convince the Americans and British to join them in a war against Berling and the Soviets, thus they needed all the reinforcements they could get, and were willing to turn a blind eye to past transgressions. There was in fact a precedent for this, as even during the war the Anders Army had recruited Poles who had been captured while wearing German uniform, so what was 15,000 more?

  The British were indeed happy to solve the problem this way, telling the angry NKVD that all the divisional members were Galizien Ukrainians and thus had been Polish citizens in 1939 and that Anders therefore had every right to them.

  However, by 1946 the Anders Army finally realized that the Anglo-Americans would never liberate Poland. The British government felt guilty about this – they had after all begun the war to save Poland, had they not – so to appease their own conscience they offered civilian residency in Britain to the entire Anders Army, including the ex-members of the SS Galizien Division. They were all moved to Britain and were discharged, and they settled down to live like good little Englishmen! Most married British women.

  But the story did not stop here. By 1950 Britain found herself at war with the Communists in Korea and Malaya, and her army was stretched thin. Therefore, the British recreated the wartime Home Guard. Someone remembered the thousands of Ukrainians and what good SS soldiers they had been, so the Home Guard sent letters to these veterans politely asking if they would like to join up. To these men a request from the government was in effect an order. They thought that if they refused the British would deport them to the Soviet Union. Therefore many joined the British Home Guard and some became officers. Thus during the Korean War the British people could sleep soundly in their beds knowing the Home Guard was protecting them, but unaware that part of this force was practically an entire SS division!

  At the end of the war the French made an offer to everyone they had captured wearing German uniform including SS personnel: namely remain in despicable prison conditions for years, where death by disease was a serious risk, or become a soldier for France. Several thousand opted to serve. Indeed when the French held their victory celebration in Paris in June 1945, many of the marching soldiers being cheered by the happy crowds had spent the war in German uniform!

  The French soon had a new war, and this one was in Indo-China [Vietnam] against the Communist Viet Minh. It has sometimes been described as the Second SS War, because so many SS veterans soldiered here.

  During this period of the Cold War the Communists claimed that the British, French and Americans were the new Nazis. Preposterous of course, but the British, French and Americans were using ex-SS soldiers!

  The Soviets were just as hypocritical. Many of those Communist Germans of the militant Red Guard that had fo
ught in the streets against Hitler’s stormtroopers in the 1920s and early 1930s had in fact donned SA or SS uniform once Hitler came to power, but at the end of World War Two, they suddenly ‘remembered’ they were Communists not Nazis, so they volunteered to serve the Soviets. Many were placed into the new police force in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany known as the Volkspolizei [People‘s Police]. Gruppenfuehrer George Ebrecht of the SS RuSHA, who had been captured by the Soviets, was hired by them to help create a new government for this zone: the future DDR - Democratic Republic of [East] Germany. Some men always manage to tumble to the top!

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  In 1945 for two weeks after May 9 Nazi Germany was at peace with the Allies! SS sentries remained on duty. Military police continued to execute captured deserters! Indeed the SD actually tried to make itself useful to the Anglo-Americans.

  Then on 23 May 1945 the Allies tired of playing this game and decided to close down the government of President Doenitz. The SS was disbanded. Yet this organization has never been out of the news in the sixty years since then. As for the German police, the advancing Anglo-Americans actually began to use German policemen even before the German surrender! Some of these policemen were reservists in the SS!