Hitler's Brandenburgers

by Lawrence Paterson

  Meanwhile, amongst those men left behind in Tunisia were the last remnants of the Brandenburger ‘Tropical Company’. They had been repeatedly thrown into the line as light infantry during the Tunisian retreat, occasionally infiltrating the enemy lines on short sharp patrols and were gradually whittled down in numbers as they did whatever they could to hold open the last pockets of German troops and enable evacuation of as many as possible. The final survivors awaited captivity with some measure of peace, gathered in an olive grove with their commander Oberleutnant Hoffmann, singing regimental songs before the arrival of the enemy. Their unit’s epitaph can best be summed up by a quote frequently attributed to the former leader of the Afrika Korps, Erwin Rommel, when he reputedly said: ‘Koenen and his men are as much to me as a whole regiment.’ On 12 May, at 0040hrs, German high command received the final radio transmissions from Heeresgruppe Afrika. The Axis war in North Africa was finally over.

  OKW Diverts Brandenburger Strength

  Following Allied landings in North Africa and the German occupation of Vichy France in November 1942, fears arose once more of a potential Allied invasion of Spain. While requests to withdraw those parts of Verband 803 that were committed to the Eastern Front were denied, elements of Verband 802 were requested and approved to take part in Operation ‘Gisela’, the planned preemptive occupation of northern Spain and its ports from the French border to Vigo. Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, OKW Chief of Staff, was convinced there would be an Allied attack on 22 February, though the deadline passed without incident and ‘Gisela’ was finally abandoned as the threat posed to Spain from potential Allied invasion receded.

  On 30 January, Austrian Luftwaffe Generaloberst Alexander Löhr, who occupied the newly established post of Oberbefehlshaber Südost responsible for all forces in south-east Europe, requested the transfer of Brandenburg units to his command but was refused by both the Abwehr and OKH. Those units in Germany were considered at that stage to be understrength either through incomplete formation or having recently returned from being mauled on the Eastern Front. Although Löhr’s initial request was turned down, the battlefield of the south-east was to become the focal point of Brandenburg deployment in the immediate future. In Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito’s communist partisans were barely contained and growing in strength daily. The entire region was riven by nationalist, ideological and religious divisions that resulted in fierce and unrestrained warfare hallmarked by extreme brutality. The Brandenburgers were proving their adeptness at anti-partisan operations on the Eastern Front and would soon be redirected by the Wehrmacht to Löhr’s uncompromising battleground.

  After the final Axis collapse in North Africa, the Italian peninsula and islands appeared extremely vulnerable as the next stage of the Allied re-entry to Europe. After the predicted invasion of Spain failed to appear, Canaris twice warned that the Allies would attempt to occupy Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica during March; either convinced by Allied false intelligence or using his own ‘fog of war’ approach to undermine Hitler’s military position. OKW subsequently informed Oberbefehlshaber Süd, Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring in command of all Mediterranean and North African forces, that on 18 March 1943 ‘Sturmbrigade XI’ would be formed on Sardinia with the addition of the 14th ‘Unit’ (Einheit) of Sonderverbänd ‘Brandenburg’ which was to be brought to Livorno as soon as possible. This new formation, part of Verband 804 was Oberleutnant Hettinger’s 15th (Light) Company that had returned from Finland in December 1942. Barracked in Neuhaus im Triestingtal, Austria, they had officially been redesignated 14th Einheit on 3 December 1942 and were loaded on to transport at Weissenbach on 29 March, issued with tropical uniforms though they did not know their destination. After three days, they crossed the Italian border, reaching Livorno on 2 April where they were housed in the barracks of an Italian parachute unit. After a week in Livorno, Hettinger’s men were taken in the early morning to the harbour alongside other elements of the Sturmbrigade to board the passenger liner Corsair that had been impressed into service as a troopship.

  9.4 … The ‘Einstmann Brigade’ is still loading, funny bunch … Each group gets a bottle of schnapps, which soothes some of the nervous stomachs!

  10.4. Sardinia! Arrive in Porto Aranci, with a jetty built in the bay and a small train station, ‘Terra Nova’. Our platoon commander is Leutnant Gutweniger (the Finns named him ‘Wehän Hüver’ – ‘Less Good’!)

  12.4.Food is scarce, so ‘special operations (z.b.V. Einsatz)!’ The Einstmann Brigade has too much of it. Our ‘Gasparone Group’ – that is Manfred Stoll and other robbers – organised for the company fourteen tins of Bierwurst. We stowed it in rifle ammunition boxes!10

  The company remained on Sardinia until the island was evacuated in September, although on 20 April Hettinger was injured in an accident and was evacuated to hospital, being replaced by Hauptmann Benesch.

  On the Eastern Front the end of the year had brought retreat for the Wehrmacht. Brandenburg units were caught in the Elchotowo bottleneck of escaping Axis forces from the southern Caucasus. The Red Army’s ‘North Caucasus Operation’ had launched on 1 December, two armies of over 1 million men smashing into a weak Axis flank. The decision to retreat from the southern regions had already been taken to avoid encirclement as the offensive crashed into hard-pressed and overextended Axis lines. Heavy fighting followed and by the beginning of February Soviet troops had reached the southern and eastern approaches to Rostov-on-Don and the Sea of Azov. Troops of the Soviet Black Sea group reached Maykop on 29 January and by 4 February were on the banks of the Kuban River. Instructions were issued for a withdrawal of the Brandenburg troops:

  3 January 1943

  Situation Report:

  On Hitler’s orders, Corps for Special Assignments (General Felmy) and elements of the ‘Brandenburg’ Special Unit will be withdrawn from the Eastern Front and transferred to Tunisia.11

  However, in practice it was difficult to disengage those units fighting as Kampfgruppen against the tremendous strength of the Red Army offensive. Not until the end of March was the German front line stabilised north of Taganrog and the active Brandenburgers began to be withdrawn. By then Stalingrad had fallen and the Sixth Army had been destroyed.

  During March 1943, the Kriegsmarine safely transported 22,026 men, 1,655 prisoners, 1,551 civilians, 19,835 horses, 5,534 horse-drawn vehicles, 930 transport vehicles and 1,650 tons of military supplies across the Kuban Strait away from the advancing Soviets and back into the Crimea. Additionally, a ropeway had been built by the Organisation Todt allowing a total load capacity of 1,000 tons to cross per day. Orders from Berlin to construct a road-rail bridge never advanced beyond the early stages, though ironically the project was later finished off by the Red Army using materials abandoned by the Wehrmacht after their withdrawal from Kerch, but destroyed by drifting ice. In March 1943, the harbours of Anapa and Novorossiysk were still in German hands though rigged for demolition, and to stabilise German lines on the Taman Peninsula, the Soviet beachhead at Myskhako was attacked by the Seventeenth Army with Kriegsmarine support as Operation ‘Neptun’. After frequent postponements due to bad weather, the attack began on 17 April but was called off after a week in the face of mounting casualties and little headway.

  By then ‘Kampfgruppe Walther’ – formed from elements of 2nd, 3rd and 4th (Light) Companies – had returned to Germany. They had retreated to Rostov-on-Don, frequently fighting off Soviet infantry and armoured attacks with little more than desperate defiance. Hauptmann Werner John, leading the 3rd Company, was wounded while attacking a Soviet tank with a satchel charge, hit in the foot by machine-gun fire from another tank following behind. Nonetheless, the armoured vehicles were driven away or destroyed by the remainder of the company, which continued the retreat in good order although nearly completely out of ammunition. Their commander evacuated to hospital, the remaining forty-three men were led by Leutnant Geisenberger back to Germany during March after crossing the frozen Don delta. With the rest of Kampfgruppe Walther
that had covered the withdrawal of the last panzers across the Don, they were grouped at Freiburg where Verband 801 was forming, minus its 1st Battalion that remained in action in Latvia.

  Kampfgruppe Horlbeck fought in plummeting temperatures north-west of Ardon defending retreating forces as they withdrew past the Terek River. Leutnant Steidl later recounted a damning judgement on Horlbeck’s last days with the Kampfgruppe, saying that as they were involved in severe fighting at the line of the Malka River, Horlbeck ‘like a commanding General, did not meet with his troops’, leadership of the battlegroup being handled by Hauptmann Dieter Weithoener of the 2nd Battalion, Brandenburg Regiment. Steidl’s last mention of their previous commander is that the ‘fat, carefree Horlbeck wanders away.’12 Whatever the circumstances of Horlbeck’s departure, the Kampfgruppe was certainly renamed ‘Weithoener’ in January and fought its way back through Armavir and Kalnibolotskaya. The battered remains of 5th and 8th Companies were combined with ‘Kompanie Mertens’ and a Flak company commanded by Oberleutnant Wichmann and, covering the retreat of the 3rd Panzer Division, they fought off repeated Soviet attacks on the German bridgehead south of the frozen Don River delta at Asov.

  Frequently using the cover of blinding snowstorms, Soviet tanks and infantry continued to assault the Brandenburger lines, their flank held by men of Sonderverbänd Felmy. Repeatedly the Red Army were repulsed, extraordinary feats of heroism committed by Brandenburger units in hand-to-hand combat as they compensated for their lack of heavy weapons by hunting and destroying armoured vehicles using grenades and explosives. By the time that they withdrew across the Don River they had accumulated 650 Soviet prisoners which were herded to the north-west to an uncertain fate. By 18 February the last Brandenburg men were across and the bridge behind them destroyed. Kampfgruppe Weithoener, alongside the remaining scattered Brandenburg units from the Caucasus retreat, returned to bases in Germany and Austria. Only the 12th Company remained committed from those forces that had begun ‘Case Blue’, combing the German rear areas for partisans.

  Pfuhlstein had thrown himself energetically into the task of rebuilding and restructuring his new command. On 27 March, he submitted formal proposals to OKW on the future use of the Brandenburgers after they had fully transformed into a division; his designs endorsed by the Army General Staff who claimed at least partial control over the new Brandenburg Division for OKW. Jodl is recorded as writing at the beginning of April:

  The Wehrmacht’s Operational Staff lacks its own unit for OKW theatres of war. For every division, we must go begging, cap in hand, to OKH, often with considerable difficulty. This is both an unworthy and unbearable situation! The newly formed Brandenburg Division will therefore be directly subordinate to the Wehrmacht’s Operational Staff as its ‘house unit’ and therefore I will decide on its deployment.13

  Though Canaris and the Abwehr had not been completely removed from the Brandenburg hierarchy, they no longer had autonomy – another indication of the Abwehr’s general loss of prestige and reputation. Canaris now had only a partial say in Brandenburger activities, only the ‘Kurfürst’ Regiment – originally intended as 5th Regiment of the division, but removed from its structure – remained under Canaris’ sole control. On the date of Jodl’s words, the official order of battle of Pfuhlstein’s new unit was formalised. The ‘z.b.V.’ suffix that denoted the Brandenburgers’ special operations usage – and a final link to its original purpose – was no longer deemed applicable and thereafter they were simply entitled ‘Division Brandenburg’ (referred to hereafter in its anglicised ‘Brandenburg Division’ form). A new ‘Wappen’ was also to be used on divisional transport: a large white helmet with the red eagle of the Brandenburg region emblazoned upon it.

  Pfuhlstein, however, remained frustrated by a seeming ambivalence from the Abwehr’s top echelons towards his command. Later, Pfuhlstein related his conviction that Canaris remained motivated primarily by his desire to control a military formation that could either act as a personal bodyguard or protection for the Abwehr should the shifting sands of German political power struggles cause a ‘critical situation’.

  I received absolutely no help towards refurbishing the unit, neither from the department nor from Admiral Canaris. I gradually concluded that Admiral Canaris was quite uninterested in speedily returning my unit to the front.14

  Though the division still had no organic heavy weapons unit and therefore remained reliant on ‘parent’ formations, the order of battle had come to resemble more the lines of an ‘ordinary’ Jäger division; more heavily armed than a Gebirgsjäger division, but less than a standard infantry unit and therefore still capable of operating in adverse terrain.

  Brandenburg Division.

  Division Staff (Berlin).

  Commander: Generalmajor Alexander von Pfuhlstein.

  1st General Staff Officer: Major Frankfurth.

  Ia: Hauptmann Wülbers (from 31 May 1943).

  IIa and Division Adjutant: Hauptmann Helmut Pinkert.

  1st Jäger Regiment ‘Brandenburg’ (Major Walther).

  Regimental base: Freiburg im Breisgau.

  Regimental units: One company from Signals Battalion ‘Brandenburg’.

  1st Battalion (Rittmeister Plitt, later replaced by Hauptmann John after the latter’s wounds healed).

  1st, 2nd and 3rd Companies plus 4th (Light) Company (later transferred).

  2nd Battalion (Hauptmann G. Pinkert, later replaced by Oberleutnant Rosenow).

  5th, 6th, 7th Companies (8th Company never established).

  3rd Battalion (Hauptmann Gustav Froboese, later replaced by Oberleutnant Wandrey).

  9th, 10th, 11th, 12th Companies.

  2nd Regiment ‘Brandenburg’ (Oberstleutnant Wolfgang von Kobylinski, developed severe illness and died on 19 June; replaced by Oberstleutnant Franz Pfeiffer).

  Regimental base: Baden bei Wein (later moved to Admont).

  Regimental units: One company from Signals Battalion ‘Brandenburg’.

  1st Battalion (Hauptmann Weithoener).

  1st, 2nd, 3rd Companies plus 4th (Light) Company (later transferred).

  2nd Battalion (Hauptmann Oesterwitz).

  5th, 6th, 7th Companies plus 8th (Light) Company (later dissolved).

  3rd Battalion (Hauptmann Renner).

  9th, 10th, 11th Companies (12th Company never formed).

  3rd Regiment ‘Brandenburg’ (Oberstleutnant F. Jacobi).

  Regimental base: Düren/Rhld

  Regimental units: One company from Signals Battalion ‘Brandenburg’.

  1st Battalion (Oberleutnant Kriegsheim).

  1st, 2nd, 3rd Companies plus 4th (Light) Company (later dissolved).

  2nd Battalion (Hauptmann Bansen).

  5th, 6th, 7th, 8th Companies plus Italian III ‘M’ Assault Battalion ‘9 September’.

  3rd Battalion (Hauptmann Grawert),

  9th, 10th, 11th, 12th Companies.

  4th Regiment ‘Brandenburg’ (Oberstleutnant Heinz).

  Regimental base: Brandenburg an der Havel.

  1st Battalion (Hauptmann Hollmann – recalled from early retirement – later replaced by Hauptmann Gerlach).

  1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Companies (5th Company never formed).

  2nd Battalion (Hauptmann Dr Hartmann, later replaced by Oberleutnant Lau).

  6th, 7th, 8th Companies plus 9th (Light) Company (10th Company never formed).

  3rd Battalion (Hauptmann von Koenen).

  11th, 12th, 13th Companies.

  Independent Companies

  14th Company (Oberleutnant Hettinger), redesignated 16th (Light) Company in July 1943.

  15th (Light) Company (Oberleutnant Oschatz); Fallschirmjäger Company. This parachute unit was later expanded into the ‘Fallschirmjäger Battalion’ of four companies in March 1944, based in Stendal and commanded by Hauptmann Weithoener.

  Translator Company.

  Divisional Units

  Nachrictenabteilung (Signals Battalion) (Hauptmann Eltester), headquarters in Berlin, divided
between the regiments.

  Lehrregiment (Training Regiment) ‘Brandenburg’ (Major Martin).

  1st Battalion based in Brandenburg an der Havel.

  2nd Gebirgsjäger Battalion based in Baden bei Wein and later Veldes/Oberkrain.

  Küstenjäger Battalion based at Langenargen/Bodensee (Rittmeister Conrad von Leipzig).

  1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th (Heavy) Companies.

  Legionärbataillon ‘Alexander’ (Hauptmann Alexander Auch).

  1st ‘White Company’ and 2nd ‘Black Company’.

  Lehrregiment ‘Kurfürst’ (briefly held on divisional strength, this regiment comprised training personnel from the Quenzee establishment and was in effect a last attempt by the Abwehr to maintain some control over the division. It was, however, withdrawn from the Brandenburg Division on 1 April 1943 and replaced by Major Martin’s Lehrregiment above).

  There was also an important distinction to make between the strength of a Brandenburg and Wehrmacht infantry unit, as evidenced by this example from August 1943 written by Pfuhlstein:

  Battalion Strength: Infantry Brandenburger

  Officers 22 15

  NCOs 135 81

  Men 698 322

  Recruiting was still strong for the division; Koenen’s 3rd Battalion/4th Regiment recorded 28 NCOs, 81 NCO candidates and 541 other ranks taken on from four military districts in Germany at the beginning of June 1943.

  The Küstenjäger Abteilung had also had its order of battle confirmed on 10 January 1943. Formed from the Light Engineer Company with additional volunteers from all Wehrmacht services and the SS, the Abteilung mustered the following strength:

  Abteilung Headquarters (Oberleutnant Kriegsheim, superseded by Rittmeister Conrad von Leipzig);

  Naval adviser: Kapitänleutnant Martiny.

  1st Company to 3rd Company, each having approximately 230 men:

  1st Platoon – one heavy Sturmboot 42, one Pionier Landing Boat 41, two light machine guns;

  2nd Platoon – two heavy Sturmboote 42 (six planned), two Pionier Landing Boat 41, nine light machine guns;