Hitler's Brandenburgers

by Lawrence Paterson

  General Hellmuth Felmy had begun his military career in 1904, joining the Imperial German Army before moving on to the fledgling air force. He began the Second World War as commander of Luftflotte 2 before his dismissal in January 1940 following the debacle of the Mechelen Incident. During the First World War, he had commanded Fliegerabteilung 300 in the Palestinian theatre, working alongside the Turkish military. His expertise and familiarity with the Middle East resulted in Felmy being called back into active service following his 1940 dismissal and tasked with taking charge of the German mission to Iraq. ‘Sonderverbänd F’ was created in Potsdam by an amalgamation of several units, one of which was Oberleutnant Fendt’s 11th Company of the Brandenburger Regiment, nine 37mm PaK being taken on company strength after attachment to Felmy’s command. The remainder of the Sonderverbänd’s combat units were sourced from various parent units, each of a specialist service branch. Alongside Fendt’s Brandenburgers Sonderverbänd F comprised: 2nd Company (Mountain troops), 3rd Company (Infantry), 4th Machine Gun Company, 5th Artillery Company (with three StuG IIIDs), 6th Flak Company (twelve 20mm cannon), 7th Engineer Company and 8th Anti-Tank Company (nine 50mm PaK 38s). A Luftwaffe component would later be added for the impending Iraqi operation.

  Felmy’s Orderly Officer Leutnant Stocky had been instrumental in assisting with the original formation of Sonderverbänd F, aided by Kurt Wieland who had been born in Württemberg, but had lived most of his life in Palestine. Wieland had been a weapons instructor for the Gebirgsjäger elements of the Brandenburg Regiment in Baden before transfer to the headquarters of Felmy’s new unit with the rank of Gefreiter. After creation in Potsdam, Felmy’s formation was to transfer to conquered Ukraine for training, Wieland being sent ahead with a skeleton staff from the Sonderverbänd to prepare a holding camp near Stalino (now Donetsk). They were not to be used in combat while events of the Iraqi coup d’état unfolded, instead being held in readiness for despatch to the Middle East. However, events on the Eastern Front intervened and they were finally committed to the fighting against the Red Army after the advance on Odessa had bogged down against strong resistance. Wieland was wounded during the fighting and subsequently returned to Berlin where his qualities were soon recognised and he underwent officer training once fit for duty again.

  While his ground troops were diverted to the Eastern Front, Felmy’s immediate concern was a Luftwaffe element that was still bound for Iraq. Two squadrons of aircraft – twelve Bf 110 twin-engine heavy fighters (4/Zerstörergeschwader 76) and twelve He 111 medium bombers (4/Kampfgeschwader 4) – were flown via Athens to Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul and ultimately Baghdad for what would transpire to be a short and unsuccessful tenure. The German Luftwaffe personnel (named Sonderkommando Junck after their commander Oberst Werner Junck, designated Fliegerführer Irak) soon discovered that they lacked spare parts, sand filters, tyres suitable for the soft desert sand and modifications to their aircrafts’ cooling systems that the harsh climate required. Ammunition and fuel were also in short supply, as were local geographical knowledge and military intelligence for the planning and execution of bombing raids. Though they did indeed fly several combat missions, the aircrafts’ Luftwaffe insignia being overpainted with Iraqi colours, their impact on the fighting was negligible and before long British troops were advancing virtually unhindered on Baghdad to quell the nationalist uprising.

  The first ground skirmishes in the city took place at the end of May 1941 and as the coup had obviously failed the Luftwaffe aircraft returned to Mosul before they were finally abandoned for shipping to Greece aboard Italian transports. While British forces were being hounded out of Greece and then Crete, the former pro-British Iraqi regent had returned to his homeland and on 4 June 1941 the last pockets of resistance in Mosul were crushed. With Iraq again firmly in Allied hands, British and Commonwealth troops were now ideally poised for future operations against Vichy-controlled Syria.

  Following the end of the Iraqi revolt, Sonderverbänd F was repurposed for future deployment to North Africa after its brief tenure at Odessa. Composed entirely of ground troops, the unit was redesignated Sonderverbänd 288 and some members transferred ahead of the main body to North Africa with the purpose of training Arabs, the addition of the Brandenburger men having brought a strong cadre familiar with the Middle East and North Africa, including several ex-members of the French Foreign Legion. During November 1941, the initial wave of troops under Felmy’s overall command departed an Italian port on troopships bound for Benghazi. The motorised unit was intended to take part in the planned Axis advance through Libya and onwards to the Caucasian oilfields by way of Persia, Iraq and Palestine after a successful seizure of the Suez Canal. However, it was not to be. They and the later creation Sonderverbänd 287 operated under direct OKW command in action, eventually being formed into standard Panzergrenadier units and therefore no longer part of the Brandenburger story.

  Despite failure in Iraq, the Middle East remained a fertile area for special operations and undercover work, though there appears to have been little successfully undertaken by the Germans. Both the Abwehr and SD were active in Iran, the latter attempting to oust OKW influence from the region during 1943 by inserting a swathe of new agents by aircraft. Heydrich’s SD was actively attempting to usurp Abwehr dominance of international intelligence operations, though by comparison they were still an immature service and lacked the established manpower pool provided by such highly trained and skilled organisations as the Brandenburg Regiment. However, the SD’s resolute ambition extended their reach into what had been the Abwehr’s Middle Eastern domain and Hauptmann Wilhelm Kohlhaas later remembered the German Consul Fritz Grobba’s telling statement regarding what the diplomat perceived as lacklustre Abwehr support for the Iraqi insurgency.

  [The two Brandenburgers] had, during the winter, appealed to the ambassador as a well-known oriental activist, but now they did not want to give up their regiment. Dr Grobba soon became rude with the words: ‘If the Abwehr does not do it, I’ll hand it over to the SD.’

  I eventually succeeded, but it was not the last time that he had relations with our, still vague, black competition and he let us feel that he was no longer so highly attached to Canaris to whom he owed his fate in diplomacy and his Baghdad post.2

  Current printed mythology seems to accredit the Brandenburgers with an attack on the Iranian refinery at Abadan (Operation ‘Amina’) but there is no documentary evidence that I can find to support this. The refinery, owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, produced 8 million tons of oil in 1940 and was a crucial part of the Allied war effort. A tangible pro-German stance in the country, coupled with the presence of an estimated 3,000 German nationals, led to the August–September 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of the country that secured not only the oilfields but also the Persian Corridor of the Trans-Iranian Railway; one of the safest routes for Allied Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union free from Axis interference.

  The Abwehr did indeed develop a plan for sabotaging the refinery as the invasion of the Soviet Caucasus appeared to nearing success. The Abwehr believed that if the refinery were threatened with potential capture it was likely to be destroyed by the British Army who held it. Charles Bedaux, economic adviser to Vichy and the Reich, developed a plan whereby to save the refinery it would be deliberately pre-emptively sabotaged, but in such a way that it appeared destroyed to its British operators but capable of being rapidly repaired. Bedaux’s idea was to fill the bores and pipelines with fluid sand available from the grinding of locally sourced sandstone, rather than using coarse desert sand that would cause serious internal damage. In this way, the pipelines could be filled within three days and then cleaned out within two. However, the operation never left the drawing board as the failing invasion of the Soviet Union and disaster at El Alamein consumed resources beyond expectations, including the men of the Brandenburgers. The Anglo-Soviet invasion did, however, produce some benefit to the Abwehr as noted by British intelligence in 1944:

  It app
ears that when Russian troops entered Persia, many Persian students in Germany remembered stories which they had heard of Russian behaviour in their country in the last war and were hoodwinked by German propaganda about Russian atrocities. Several of them were so indignant that they wrote letters to Hitler and other Nazi leaders, demanding to be allowed to serve in the German Army … Dr Wagner of the Abwehr, who was then working under the cover name of Wendel, therefore wrote himself to all Persians in Germany – to those who had not written letters as well as to those who had – inviting them to a meeting in Berlin. Thanks to the promises of Shahrukh that they would all be given important posts when the Germans entered Persia, many of the students accepted the offer and went to train at Meseritz. Here the Free Corps formed a part of the Sonderkommando Bayader [sic], which included other peoples like Uzbeks and Indians.3

  Afghanistan also attracted the attention of the Brandenburger Regiment. Leutnant Witzel of the 4th Company, rated by the Allies in subsequent intelligence reports as ‘one of the ablest men of the Abwehr’, was attached to the German legation in Kabul during 1941 alongside two dedicated radio operatives. It was Witzel who coordinated the planning for a German expedition to the North-West Frontier with India to attempt to initiate tribal sabotage against British forces in the region. Contemporary documents of the NSDAP record that ‘the Führer wishes the study of a deployment in Afghanistan against India following Operation “Barbarossa”’.4 The leading Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg also wrote in his political diary that ‘it would be possible in an emergency to use this country on the German side if necessary for actions against British India or Soviet Russia.’ During February 1941, the head of the German Army, Alfred Jodl, suggested that ‘an uprising of the mountain peoples along the Indian frontier, probably also in Afghanistan’ could be fuelled to ‘create a difficult trouble spot for England’.

  Economic cooperation between Afghanistan and Germany was already well underway by the time that war had broken out in Europe. The Organisation Todt was active in the country, planning and supervising the construction of improved infrastructure including roads and bridges. German engineers were also conducting the joint exploitation of mineral reserves and later still, Germany purchased large quantities of cotton and wool for the manufacture of uniforms while during 1939 there were secret German arms deliveries to Kabul destined for the Afghan military. By that stage, Germany had become Afghanistan’s largest trading partner and in 1937, Deutsche Lufthansa had begun scheduled flights to Kabul.

  However, while Hitler may have defined clear objectives for cooperation with Middle Eastern and Arab countries in his war, he was far less enthusiastic about India, which he saw as naturally subject to British rule. On 17 October 1941, he remarked in conversation with his inner circle of confidants that ‘If the English were to be driven out of India, India would perish. Our role in Russia will be analogous to that of England in India.’ The logic of the encirclement of oil-producing regions through operations in the Middle East and Caucasus was apparent to the dictator; the need for military adventures to conquer the Far East was not. Nonetheless, the Brandenburgers had already attracted some Indian members by the time that the noted nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Germany to appeal for assistance in his fight against British rule. Bose, the former Mayor of Calcutta, had escaped house arrest that had resulted from his anti-British agitation and the organisation of civil disobedience. Crossing the Afghan border assisted by Abwehr men posing as road builders, he had departed Kabul on 18 March 1941 to Samarkand and thence onward to Moscow by train and to Berlin by aircraft, arriving in the German capital on 3 April 1941. While Hitler may not have altered his position on India to be any more sympathetic to Bose’s cause, there were those in OKW, the Foreign Ministry and even Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, that desired more tangible cooperation between Germany and Indian revolutionaries.

  Bose sent two of his most trusted men to the town of Annaberg to search for potential recruits to an Indian Wehrmacht unit during 1941 – N.G. Swami and Abid Hasan – who had both served at some point in the Lehrregiment ‘Brandenburg’. Their drive was successful and Austrian Abwehr Hauptmann Walter Harbich was placed in command of a company of approximately 100 men of this newly created ‘Azad Hid Fauj’ (Free India Army) and together with Hasan travelled to the Regenwurmlager near Meseritz. There they found Tajik, Uzbek and Persian recruits already training with similar ambitions for their homelands. Harbich’s Indian troops were all former prisoners of war and began training in the arts of sabotage, radio construction and use, parachuting, climbing and cipher methods. Their eventual purpose was to parachute into India, particularly the area of the North-West Frontier and begin operations to destabilise British colonial rule through acts of sabotage while also recruiting and training fresh converts to their cause with the methods they had learned. What became known as Operation ‘Tiger’ had been born.

  Ribbentrop authorised 1 million marks for the support of ‘Tiger’ and plans were made to construct an airstrip in tribal territory for use by Fw 200 Condor aircraft carrying supplies for the Indian commandos. However, those ambitious plans never came to fruition and parachute drops remained the method of insertion for both men and material. Meanwhile, as the Indians trained, the lawless North-West Frontier appeared to already provide a fertile area for German-backed insurrection as early as 1941.

  In April, the Abwehr sent Witzel to Kabul to form a forward intelligence station for operations against British India. He arrived in Afghanistan via Moscow and passage through the Uzbek town of Termez, disguised as a courier of the Foreign Office. High on his priorities was the establishment of a dialogue with the Pashtun tribal leader Mirza Ali Khan, who had managed to loosely unite various tribal factions against British colonial rule in 1936 after a series of British legal judgements had enraged Muslim tribesmen.5 Calling for ‘jihad’ against the British, Mirza Ali Khan instigated a brief conventional war, before adopting guerrilla tactics that continued until the end of British rule in 1947. Known as the ‘Fakir of Ipi’, the Muslim leader was considered by Witzel a potential tool to be used by German interests in the intended war against British India. British journalists had already leapt to much the same conclusion, already claiming that European fascism was the root cause behind the unrest, the Daily Herald’s headline of 16 April 1937 reading: ‘Mussolini was behind the revolt in north Waziristan.’

  During 1941 Witzig was joined in Afghanistan by two other Brandenburgers; Manfred Oberdörffer and Fred Brandt. Oberdörffer was the son of a Hamburg merchant, remembered by a fellow student as ‘blond, blue-eyed, robust, uncompromising … a volcanic soul … an equally ingenious and vulnerable human being’. Oberdörffer completed his medical studies and departed Germany for journeys through Africa and Asia as a researcher into leprosy. The young man was a devout National Socialist and had been horrified to discover a Jewish grandfather in his family tree, deciding to work outside Germany rather than be subjected to the scrutiny of his heritage required for NSDAP membership.

  Following the outbreak of war, he returned to Germany and was recruited into the Brandenburg Battalion during June 1940, unable to be called a Wehrmacht doctor (Arzt) due to his non-Aryan background, but instead known as a ‘medic’ (Sanitäter). Following the usual intensive training, he reached the rank of Gefreiter and was stationed in the north of France where some leprosy cases had been discovered amongst French-African prisoners of war. By November 1940 he had returned to Brandenburg an der Havel until, during May 1941, he was abruptly posted overseas to join Witzig, his regimental comrades unaware of what his destination had been until a package arrived from Kabul carrying 1,000 cigarettes as a gift from Oberdörffer to his former comrades.

  Fred Brandt was a German-Latvian who had been born in St Petersburg, Russia. Brandt had been occupied as a lepidopterist in Iran before the outbreak of war and had become fluent in both Persian and Arabic as well as the languages of his birth. Recruited by the Abwehr in 1940 he had trained with the Branden
burgers in Quenzgut, being promoted to the rank of Gefreiter and sent with Oberdörffer to serve as translator and to utilise his familiarity with local customs.

  Their part of Operation ‘Tiger’ was to supply the Fakir of Ipi with money; in this instance, a suitcase full of forged banknotes from the printing presses at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They departed German on 21 May 1941, travelling as leprosy researchers despite the disease being almost completely unheard-of in Afghanistan. Their journey was to Moscow by railway sleeper-car, south to Baku on the Caspian Sea before the pair sailed by steamer to the Iranian port of Bandar Azali from where they hired a car and local driver to take them onward to Kabul.

  Oberdörffer possessed something of a tempestuous personality, with a profound weakness for women, and relations between the two men quickly became strained due to his somewhat cavalier manner in dealing with their various contacts. He had spent days in brooding silence as their driver spoke only a local dialect that Brandt could understand but Oberdörffer could not. The German’s mood finally lightened with the addition of two extraneous passengers that joined them for their journey as far as Herat where the original Persian driver departed, to be replaced by an Afghan of whom Brandt harboured severe mistrust. The two Abwehr men had not established any genuine rapport and Oberdörffer refused to listen to his concerns about their new driver, seemingly enthusiastic that he could at last converse in English with the new man.

  In Kabul, Brandt was disconcerted to learn that their arrival was widely expected and after contacting Witzig, the pair also visited the representative of their Axis ally in Kabul, Italian Consul Pietro Quaroni. A skilled diplomat, Quaroni had clashed with his own government over his disagreement at their departure from the League of Nations in 1935 and thereafter had been ‘relegated’ to the Middle East, far away from the fascist government’s obvious displeasure. Oberdörffer was apparently captivated by Quaroni’s wife Natalia, the woman claiming to be a ‘White Russian’ though Brandt’s conversations with her soon revealed her to be a Bolshevik. Brandt maintained a professional detachment and conducted his own investigations into the Fakir, encouraged by stories he had learned which all shared the same common thrust: the warlord of the Waziri tribe was deeply untrustworthy as his primary concern was purely the benefit of his own people, not international affairs or relations with other warring nations. However, Brandt was unable to influence Oberdörffer with his acquired knowledge and instead despatched messages to Berlin pleading for freedom of independent action away from his distracted companion, who Brandt believed was inept at every aspect of successful espionage. However, his pleas were firmly rebuffed by Berlin, who curtly reminded Brandt that he was on active service and under Oberdörffer’s command.