Hitler's Brandenburgers

by Lawrence Paterson

  The day after Fölkersam’s mission ended, Leutnant Prochaska was tasked with capturing the road bridge over the River Belaya at Belorechensk to the north-east. The reconstructed 8th Company used Volltarnung as they travelled ahead of armoured elements of 13th Panzer Division. They departed the German lines in four captured Russian trucks, mingling with the last wave of retreating Red Army troops as fighting continued at the city fringe. Challenged when approaching the bridge by a Soviet officer, Prochaska claimed that they had been assigned the task of protecting the crossing and they were waved onwards. Upon reaching their objective they were halted again, this time by a Soviet military policeman attempting to thin the flow of traffic. As the policeman waved them onwards, the leading truck’s starter failed and several Brandenburgers dismounted to attempt to push start the truck once more, assisted by the Russian policeman. After the engine sparked into life, they continued over the river, reaching the far bank where the entire company rapidly disembarked to overwhelm the crew of a stationary tank as well as engineers that had rigged the span for demolition while a small number of Brandenburgers raced across the bridge itself, removing demolition charges and throwing them into the water below.

  Prochaska fired two white flares to signal success to the waiting panzer spearhead, which appeared shortly on the northern bank. As Soviet fire broke out from the opposite river bank, Prochaska sprinted across the bridge to guide oncoming armoured vehicles past an abandoned panje wagon and a long black limousine that had recently been vacated by its officer occupant. Running towards the German tanks, he was hit in the head by enemy fire and killed instantly. Six other men from the 8th Company were also killed: Fritz Erstürung, Sepp Schöfer, Hans Gruber, Max Galauf, Willy and Fritz Renz. The German tanks continued across, relieving the hastily entrenched Brandenburgers and racing onwards towards the oil installations that had been captured by Fölkersam’s men to the south-east. Leutnant Renner took temporary charge of the 8th Company – replaced by Hauptmann Helmut Pinkert on 1 October – and Ernst Prochaska, who had led the company for only a matter of weeks, was posthumously awarded the Knight’s Cross on 16 September 1942.

  To the west, Oberleutnant Karl-Heinz Oesterwitz’s 7th Company moved ahead of the SS Division ‘Wiking’ disguised in Red Army greatcoats over their uniforms and side caps adorned with the infantryman’s red star. Aboard three trucks they overtook the advancing SS column, narrowly missing being fired on by jumpy crewmen of the leading ‘Wiking’ armoured vehicles. Passing over the newly named ‘Prochaska Bridge’, they infiltrated the Soviet front line where they caused a localised rout ahead of the advancing ‘Wiking’ troops by feigning panic which spread infectiously through hastily prepared defensive works. Reaching Pshekhskaya, the Brandenburgers removed their disguises and attacked an artillery battery, killing most of the crews before the rest fled and abandoned the guns to the Germans. In short order, Oesterwitz and his men stormed both the road and rail bridges over the Pshekha River with three men wounded during the fighting but none killed. For this he would later be decorated with the German Cross in Gold and the road appeared open for the ‘Wiking’ SS troops to advance on Tuapse.

  Near Dondukovskaya, on the banks of the Fars River, Oberleutnant Zülch prepared to lead the 5th Company south-east towards Cherkessk, a town that had grown up during the previous century around a Russian fort on the Kuban River. Beyond lay the foothills of the Caucasian Mountains, the summit of Mount Elbrus only 100km away, and the town marked a midway point between Maykop and the Grozny oilfields. The company advanced in the heat of the Caucasian summer in German vehicles as light reconnaissance infantry. Leutnant Konrad Steidl, commander of one of the half-companies, recorded the advance in a personal diary, this extract from 10 August later reproduced in Spaeter’s book:

  Burnt-out vehicles, German and Russian and the fresh corpses of horses and Red Army soldiers lined the sides of the road. From time to time we could hear gunfire. There was trouble brewing so we travel cautiously, though over great distances. We were aiming for the town of Dondukovskaya. Suddenly, from there are loud bangs from all the shrubs and bushes. Grenades land on the roadway. Wounded scream, the first of our vehicles burn. Zülch is at the head of the column with his Kübel. I leave my seat, get my half-company in cover and race with my motorcycle to Zülch.

  From the houses, enemy mortar fire whistles. My commander gives me my orders: Move immediately to attack the west edge of Donukovskaya and storm the adjacent village.

  There is already an ‘Ölkompanie’ [technicians tasked with taking charge of the captured oil installations] in the village, its survivors involved in a difficult struggle as the village has been attacked. I stormed with my soldiers to the left and right of the street and, using smoke, fought hand-to-hand from house to house and bunker to bunker. In a couple of hours, I had taken back control of the road with my men and we prepared for a second attack against the village itself. Martl already has a heavy machine-gun platoon ready in the corn field. He digs in and is quite nervous, because Russian machine-gun fire and grenades land all around us. He sits about 200m from the edge of the field. My attack goes over an open space. It will be hard. I lie with my platoon at the edge of a ditch and discuss the attack with them. Heavy shells are exploding close to us. A sudden scream; a direct hit on the street amidst one of my groups, Leutnant [Dr Hans Adolf Rudolf] Pils, Walter Perntner, Feldwebel Schink and five of our best men are killed instantly. There is also a large number wounded.

  I give the signal to attack and jump up, firing my submachine gun, and with a ‘Hurra’ I’m first from the ditch to charge the supressed enemies. Behind me on a broad front, wide apart, are my soldiers. At the same time, our heavy weapons keep the Russians’ heads down. It crackles like hell. Already I only have 20m to go. The bullets whistle in front of my nose into the dry ground. When we reach them we rushed forward against the Russians with hand grenades. The sweat runs in streams. My people are breathless, yet I urge them on against the enemy’s positions in the village. My bunch is quite scattered – Schmied Sepp looks after the wounded. With a few men, amongst them one of my biggest daredevils Vladimir Mark, I stormed the Russian huts with hand grenades and took eighty prisoners.

  Walter Ladendorff reached me with an order from Zülch to withdraw and take secure positions on both sides of the road. Strong Russian forces are reported on all sides, we must form a ‘hedgehog’. It is said that we are surrounded. Oberjäger Felix Graf Schaffgotsch, one of our best, is also dead. The losses are great after half a day’s fighting.

  I let them build deep emplacements, as we expect a Russian attack with artillery support in the early morning. In the evening, I was ordered with Sepp to report to Zülch. In the candlelight, we sit together briefly and lie down in the holes. At midnight, I squat in the foremost hole with my pack and await the attack predicted by Zülch. In one hand I have a flare gun, in the other a pistol as I squat freezing next to Feldwebel Ortner’s heavy machine gun.

  The expected attack doesn’t come. In the morning, an armoured section from the 13th Panzer Division arrives. This is a ‘food’ for me. I immediately contact a ‘box’ [tank] with a 7.5cm cannon, take a few men and act as their reconnaissance. Shortly, a sniper shoots at us. As we open fire in our attack, the village, in which a Russian company has again taken up position, is set on fire. I return with sixty prisoners.

  In the afternoon Zülch and I mount a daring escapade: we roar into a Russian infantry battalion with two tanks and beat it into flight. Thereupon, three of us are going to storm a collective farm – we are racing without breath over an open field. There are still 200m to the finish line. Zülch’s elegant boots are smeared to the top with dirt, heavy clumps of clay cling to my mountain boots. We can hardly do more, the ‘chorus’ is getting increasingly angry, it whistles and crackles around us, it would be madness to go on without cover. So, we lie a few hours before the collective farm until darkness falls. With our hands, we dig holes in the clay ground – I really got to know Oberleutna
nt Zülch’s iron calmness and cold-bloodedness. On the following day, the company reunited with us in Dondukovskaya. Zülch speaks. It feels strange; the fresh graves are in front of us, simple wooden crosses with the tattered steel helmets. Our daring Leutnant Hans Pils will no longer move with us over the endless steppe into the distant Caucasus. But we roll on and, with heavy hearts, leave our dead behind.4

  The Brandenburgers continued to lead the advance into the Caucasus, both in plain German uniform as light infantry and in disguise, as infiltrators. Casualties continued to mount against increasingly desperate Soviet resistance. Maykop and its surrounding oilfields had been taken, the smallest of the three oil-producing areas and the drive towards the remainder needed to be made with consolidated force. Unfortunately for the Germans, Hitler’s micromanagement of his forces caused unnecessary logistical shuffling and a swirling change of offensive focus. With Luftwaffe air cover removed to support Sixth Army at Stalingrad, progress in the Caucasus slowed still further and on 9 September, Army Group A commander Feldmarschall Wilhelm List was relieved of his command, Hitler assuming direct control. Meanwhile, news had been received that all was not well in the Maykop oilfields.

  The Technische Brigade Mineralöl (Mineral Oil Technical Brigade) had been formed as a specialised Wehrmacht unit during the winter of 1941/2. Their express purpose was to take charge of the oilfields of Maykop, Baku and Grozny and begin immediate production for German usage. After ordinary infantry training, the brigade had been posted to Ploieşti for advanced technical instruction before heading towards Rostov-on-Don alongside the German advance. The unit comprised 6,500 men divided into three specialised battalions – Drilling, Processing and Transport – and was commanded by Luftwaffe Generalleutnant Erich Homburg, assisted by chief technician Dr Günther Schlicht. Amongst their heavy equipment were one hundred deep bore drills and ten mobile distillation plants.

  A full month after the capture of Maykop, German forces took control of the wells at Neftegorsk and Khadyzhensk where large-scale sabotage had already taken place. Concrete or scrap metal had been used to block wells, pipelines blown up and compressor installations destroyed by the retreating Red Army. Although the brigade moved in to begin immediate repairs Dr Schlicht reported that, despite progress, the extensive damage would take years to fully repair. To make matters worse, bands of Soviet partisans, whose ranks had been swollen by isolated groups of Red Army troops, had begun harassing attacks that killed members of the brigade and destroyed valuable technical equipment. The Soviet road and railway system made replacing heavy machinery virtually impossible, choked as it was already with military supplies. With the Black Sea ports not yet in German hands, this latter fact also begged the question of how, if significant quantities of oil or petroleum were successfully produced, it was to be transported to fuel-hungry troops elsewhere. What limited oil production was considered possible would not begin again until 21 November 1942, while to the north the Red Army completed its encirclement of Stalingrad and the complexion of Germany’s Eastern Front changed irrevocably.

  To complete the imbalance between German and Soviet oil production, Hitler had also refused to allow Luftwaffe bombers to raid the oil installations at Baku that supplied most of the Soviet military. With the Red Air Force struggling against Luftwaffe strength and freshly captured German airstrips within bombing range, Hitler demanded instead that Göring divert his forces to concentrate on the capture of Stalingrad, a subsidiary target at best in the original offensive plans. Not until 7 October 1942, when it became obvious that the thrust towards Baku and Grozny had failed, did he authorise the bombing of the oilfields ‘as strongly as possible’, calling for ‘massive attacks’ on Grozny on 22 September. By this time the Luftwaffe was exhausted and Soviet aerial strength in the Caucasus had been given time to recuperate. The German raids that followed certainly inflicted damage and left plumes of smoke towering above the refineries, but with bomber strength split between the oilfields and Stalingrad, the impact on overall Soviet oil production was negligible. The ultimate prize of Baku was beyond reach of bombers operating from the nearest secure airfields and though Grozny suffered severe damage, it was all too little and too late.

  During August Oberleutnant Hütten’s 11th Company had been deployed in Aramawir, securing the town which lay at the junction of the III and LVII Panzer Corps. Moving east, Hütten advanced through Voroshilovsk (now known as Stavropol) before swinging south-east towards Prochladnyj and beyond over the Terek River that flows through Georgia from the Caspian Sea. The 4th (Light) Fallschirmjäger Company was also prepared for a possible airborne operation in the Terek region as Oberleutnant Oskar Schatz and eighty men of the 2nd Company reached the town of Maysky. After crossing the Nalchik River, they were preparing to bridge the Terek, the final water barrier before the Grozny oilfields a little over 100km away. There, on 22 August, as panzers rolled into the village in support, a direct hit from enemy shellfire killed Schatz and his radio operator as they joined a forward artillery observer studying Soviet positions. The observer was badly wounded and died later that night. The two Brandenburgers were buried in the soft ground of a local school. His parachute drop cancelled, Hauptmann Kürschner’s Fallschirmjäger would be thrown into the maelstrom at the Terek River during October, acting as light infantry before being hastily withdrawn to the north.

  During August Oberleutnant Hütten’s 11th Company had been deployed in Aramawir, securing the town which lay at the junction of the III and LVII Panzer Corps. Moving east, Hütten advanced through Voroshilovsk (now known as Stavropol) before swinging south-east towards Prochladnyj and beyond over the Terek River that flows through Georgia from the Caspian Sea. The 4th (Light) Fallschirmjäger Company was also prepared for a possible airborne operation in the Terek region as Oberleutnant Oskar Schatz and eighty men of the 2nd Company reached the town of Maysky. After crossing the Nalchik River, they were preparing to bridge the Terek, the final water barrier before the Grozny oilfields a little over 100km away. There, on 22 August, as panzers rolled into the village in support, a direct hit from enemy shellfire killed Schatz and his radio operator as they joined a forward artillery observer studying Soviet positions. The observer was badly wounded and died later that night. The two Brandenburgers were buried in the soft ground of a local school. His parachute drop cancelled, Hauptmann Kürschner’s Fallschirmjäger would be thrown into the maelstrom at the Terek River during October, acting as light infantry before being hastily withdrawn to the north.

  Operation ‘Blücher’: the German Attack across the Kuban Strait

  During July, all except the 1st Platoon of Leichte Pionierkompanie Brandenburg had transferred to the Crimea in preparation for the Eleventh Army’s attack across the Kerch Strait on to the Taman Peninsula. The Crimean Peninsula had finally fallen completely to German forces with the surrender of the last defenders of Sevastopol on 4 July, only partisan activity and small Soviet coastal raids remaining. Across the strait, Soviet troops had been virtually trapped within the Taman pocket since the forces of Operation ‘Edelweiss’ had passed Rostov-on-Don headed south towards the coastal port of Novorossiysk. The Soviet Black Sea Fleet began evacuating troops from the Sea of Asov while OKW planned the assault, designated ‘Blücher’, by five entire infantry divisions with Kriegsmarine support. Hauptmann Horlbeck took 2nd Platoon under the command of Oberleutnant Kriegsheim and 3rd Platoon commanded by Oberleutnant Dr Wagner to Mama Tartarskaja on the Sea of Asov coast northwest of Kerch. There they prepared for their mission at the spearhead of the attack across the Kerch Strait.

  At 0200hrs on 2 September, the long-awaited – and frequently postponed – Operation ‘Blücher’ began. Horlbeck’s men were tasked with three separate and simultaneous missions. The first was the neutralisation of Soviet positions at Cape Pekly on the Sea of Asov, next was the occupation of the straggling exposed island of Tusla that lay between the Kuban and Taman peninsulas and last the storming of a stranded freighter SS Gornjak that lay in shallow water
off the Bay of Taman and aboard which a Red Army observation post had been established.

  A six-man raiding party approached Cape Pekly unobserved and disembarked successfully before being spotted by an enemy sentry. The attackers opened fire and stormed the small string of bunkers and trenches with grenades and satchel charges, quickly overwhelming the defenders. The attack on the Gornjak was also successful, a single guard quietly killed while the rest of the raiding party slipped aboard and captured the remaining Russians. On Tusla, three Sturmboote landed after a final approach to shore without engines. Nearing the low coastline at separate points, they were spotted before making landfall. However, the Soviet defenders that had been protected by their squat bunker made the mistake of emerging to engage the first boat sighted and were shot by the second landing party. As the Brandenburgers rushed their enemy, two of them were killed by gunfire and two wounded before the small island was taken.

  Brandenburgers then marched inland to attack Soviet artillery batteries at Zaporozhskaya, as the main German infantry landings began. Three assault detachments of the 46th Infantry Division were put ashore from MFPs, Siebel ferries and Sturmboote covered by the 3rd R-Flotilla with S-boats and Italian MAS flanking to the south. With strong Luftwaffe support, German troops quickly took several villages south and south-west of the bridgehead while MFPs provided covering artillery fire. By 1500hrs the northern part of the Taman Peninsula was in German hands, followed by landings on the promontory south-west of Tamanskiy that encountering little resistance. Romanian cavalry advanced from Temryuk and it appeared that the battle for the Taman bridgehead would be over within days; possibly leading to the wholesale collapse of Soviet forces in Krasnodar as, to the south, German forces battled into the outskirts of Novorossiysk, Brandenburgers of Oberleutnant Ronte’s 10th Company involved in the advance.