Hitler's Brandenburgers

by Lawrence Paterson

  7Von Lahousen later described fellow Austrian Fleck, who had agitated greatly as a member of the illegal Austrian Nazi organisations prior to the Anschluss, as a ‘fanatical Nazi, who was proud of his dynamiting operations in Austria. Removed by me from the Abwehr even before the French campaign.’

  8Dietrich F. Witzel, ‘Kommandoverbände der Abwehr II im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Militärgeschichtliches Beiheft zur Europäischen Wehrkunde, no. 5 (October 1990), pp. 6–7.

  9It was no surprise that recruits were enlisted from Australia and Ireland, as both nations had large German immigrant communities. German Palatines had attempted to settle in Britain during the eighteenth century and were moved onward to either Ireland or the United States while Germans made up the largest non-British/Irish settler community to Australia during the 1800s. Such men returning to the Reich as Volksdeutsche would consider themselves as being patriotic; far removed from the Australians that are known to have enlisted in the SS ‘Britisch Freikorps’ during the Second World War.

  10See Martom Cüppers, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Krista Smith, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine (Enigma Books, 2010).

  11Gartenfeld later commanded reconnaissance units and was awarded the Knight’s Cross in March 1943 while part of 2./Versuchsverbänd Ob.d.L that specialised in flying captured enemy aircraft and, in his case, landing agents successfully behind Soviet lines. He subsequently also served as commander of I./KG 200 and was employed after the war by the ‘Gehlen Organisation’.

  12Dietrich F. Witzel, ‘Kommandoverbände der Abwehr II im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Militärgeschichtliches Beihef zur Europäischen Wehrkunde, No. 5 (October 1990), pp. 6–20.

  2 Operation ‘Weserübung’ and ‘Case Yellow’: Scandinavia and the West

  1Sorgenfrey was later killed on 25 April 1941 in a training accident in Brandenburg.

  2Peter Wilkinson and Joan Astley, Gubbins & SOE (Pen & Sword, 2010), p. 58.

  3During January 1940 two Luftwaffe officers had made a forced landing in Belgium carrying plans for the forthcoming invasion which they failed to destroy in what is now called the ‘Mechelen Incident’. Fortunately for German planners, Allied intelligence doubted the documents’ veracity.

  4Ulrich von Hassell, The Ulrich von Hassell Diaries (Frontline Books, 2011), p. 73.

  5Werner Warmbrunn, The Dutch Under German Occupation 1940–1945 (Stanford University Press, 1963), p. 7. July. See also Peter Voute, Only a Free Man (The Lightning Tree, 1982), p. 22.

  6Gisele de Posch, ‘WW2 People’s War’, article ID: A3942885, contributed on: 24 April 2005. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/85/a3942885.shtml

  7Corporal Touw was posthumously awarded the Bronze Cross by Royal Decree during May 1946 (one of fifteen won that day), with the following citation: ‘Showed exceptional courage hindering an enemy attempt at attacking the guard at the east side of the railway bridge at Buggenum on 10 May 1940, during which he was killed.’

  8Helmuth Spaeter, Die Brandenburger (Karl-Heinz Dissberger, 1991), pp. 59–60. Oberfeldwebel Stöhr later perished in the Soviet Union south of Stalingrad, wounded on 24 August 1942 and dying four days later.

  9After crossing the river and breaking through the Dutch ‘Peel Line’, the armoured train was derailed during its return trip to Germany after running into a barrier that had been closed.

  10Spaeter, Die Brandenburger, p. 61.

  11Einstmann’s battlegroup was the so-called ‘Grave Group’ and comprised the reconnaissance battalion of the SS Verfügungstruppe and a Wehrmacht machine-gun battalion and artillery battalion detached from the 254th Infantry Division.

  12The four Belgian Volksdeutsche – Joseph Hoffmann, Nikolaus Huppertz, Henri Noel and Wilhelm Pip – had deserted from the Belgian military in early 1940 and gravitated towards the Brandenburgers, who also enlisted other Belgian deserters in the months leading up to ‘Case Yellow’.

  13‘The Flooding of the Yser’ by Belgian Minister of Justice Carton De Wiart; an address delivered in London in June 1915. Charles F. Horne (ed.), Source Records of the Great War, Vol. II (National Alumni, 1923).

  3 The Regiment Brandenburg

  1Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch, Bd. I, 25–8 June, 1940. Quoted in Klaus Urner, Let’s Swallow Switzerland: Hitler’s Plans Against the Swiss Confederation (Lexington Books, 2001), p. 155.

  2National Archives, KV2/769, Haller, Dr Kurt; Extract of Special Interrogation Report 19 August 1946.

  3Central Intelligence Agency, Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment 970, US Army, APO757, German Intelligence Services, 9 February 1946.

  4Extract from a personal diary kept by Theodor von Hippel, provided by his personal estate and quoted in Spaeter, Die Brandenburger, pp. 78–9.

  5Von Aulock had served in Flanders as platoon leader, company commander and battalion adjutant during the First World War, subsequently joining a Freikorps before being discharged from the Army at the rank of Captain in 1920. Uninterested in a military career, he was, however, recalled to active duty on the 1939 German mobilisation. After his brief tenure with the Brandenburgers he was appointed to the staff of the military commander north-west France. During the defensive fighting near Paris he commanded an ad hoc infantry unit and was captured on 2 September 1944. His brother was Oberst Andreas Maria Karl von Aulock who had stubbornly held St Malo until overwhelmed by US forces.

  6National Archives, KV2/173.

  7Letter from von Hippel to Hildegard von Kotze dated 17 December 1968, quoted in Heinz Höhne, Canaris, Hitler’s Master Spy (Cooper Square Press, 1999), p. 377.

  8Rudloff worked in Spain and Portugal until June 1942 whereupon he was transferred to the Soviet Union to establish Abwehr anti-partisan and counterespionage units and then on to North Africa in October that year. His duties were counter-intelligence by nature, based in Tripoli. During 1943 he served in France, joining the retreat into Germany during 1944 and surrendering on 8 May 1945 as Commander Leitstelle der Front-Aufklaärungs-Kommando III, Oberbefehlshaber West. He later served as a reserve officer in the Bundeswehr.

  9Central Intelligence Agency, Pouch 70, 2-196, reports by Generalmajor Lahousen, ‘Canaris Secret Organisation Part I & II’, p. 6.

  10Ibid.

  11Hitler reportedly later ordered the killing of General Giraud who had been captured in 1940 and escaped from his POW camp with Canaris’ help. Canaris used the sudden death of Heydrich to complicate the issue of who had been tasked with the murders in ficticious conversations between himself and Heydrich and when they had been instructed, thereby never passing the instruction further down the chain of command.

  12Sepp De Giampietro, Das falsche Opfer? (Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1984), pp. 49–51.

  4 Declared and Undeclared War in the Balkans

  1This was the same haul of captured documents that had revealed Switzerland’s planned mutual defence pact with France.

  2Grabert remained with the Company as a Zugführer. According to Sepp De Giampietro (Pioneertruppführer in the 8th Company), the arrival of Buchler as company chief was not entirely welcomed as he ‘seemed very arrogant’ from the outset.

  3Bazing was a veteran of the First World War and was serving as Engineer Officer with the German Wehrmacht Mission in Romania at the time of ‘Marita’. He was later promoted and ended the war as Generalmajor in command of the 89th Infantry Division. He was interned in Switzerland on 2 May 1945 and released in November 1947.

  4Pinkert’s brother Gerhard was also a Brandenburger.

  5Franz J. Haller, Arbeitskreis Visuelle Dokumentation Südtiroler Volkskultur e.V., Südtirol Archiv, 1936–1938, Arthur Scheler.

  5 Hitler Turns East: The Invasion fothe Soviet Union

  1Walli I was in turn subdivided thus: IX – Intelligence on ground forces; IL (Luft) – Intelligence on air forces; I Wi – Economic intelligence; I G – Fabrication of false documents; I I – Ciphers, codes and transmitters.

  Walli III was subdivided thus: 1 – Command group – general admi
nistration and planning; 2 – Intelligence analysis; 3 – Military topographical preparation; 4 – Radio transmiter group (in conjunction with Walli I); 5 – Repairs of transport for field operatives.

  2Hinrich-Boy Christiansen, Mit Hurra gegen die Wand (Books on Demand GmbH, 2010), p. 11.

  3The SD – eager to challenge the dominance of the Abwehr – had then established a school for the training of prospective recruits from Ukrainian collaborators, Polish police officers and other Sipo or SD personnel, including V-Leute. By July 1941, the school had relocated to Bad Rabka.

  4Spaeter, Die Brandenburger, p. 135. Herbert Kriegsheim later wrote a novelised account of his time as a Brandenburger, accurate to his wartime experience, though, of course, we must allow for dramatic licence. This also appears in that book, Getarnt, Getäuscht und doch Getreu; Die geheimnisvollen ‘Brandenburger’ (Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1959).

  5Spaeter, Die Brandenburger, pp. 160–1.

  6The five men killed were Gefreiter Rudolf Wieser, Jäger Adam Schmiedt, Sonnhofer, Taaktmann and Kurt Weiss.

  7Gefreiter Heinz Rösler, Anton Stauder, Karl Innerhofer and Oberschutz Matthias Plattner were also killed.

  8Letter written 17 July 1941.

  9http://volodymyrmuseum.com/krayeznavchi/118-pochatok-viyny-22061941rustyluh-lutsk

  10Bandera was released in the vain hope that he would rally Ukrainian supporters to the lost German cause. Though he survived the war, in 1959 he was murdered by the KGB in Munich, Germany.

  11Nachtigall commander and veteran Brandenburger Herzner was later shot in the back and severely wounded in 1942 and taken to the SS hospital at Hohenlychen. The hospital acted as a sanatorium but also hosted somewhat sinister experiments with sulphonamide on the treatment of battlefield injuries. Human experimentation was carried out on female inmates from Ravensbrück concentration camp and probably on wounded troops brought for treatment. The final circumstances of Herzner’s death on 3 September 1942 are unknown; he was apparently last seen lying on a float in a lake on the hospital grounds and then disappeared. His body was found two hours later and he was posthumously promoted to Hauptmann and buried with honours in Potsdam.

  12Oberländer was captured by US forces in 1945 though the OSS fully appreciated his expertise on Eastern European matters and he passed with ease through the ‘denazification’ process. Somewhat ironically, he became the West German government’s Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims between October 1953 and May 1960. In 1960, Oberländer was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by an East German court, for his alleged involvement in the Lviv massacre of 1941 and in 1996 a new case was opened against him in which he was charged with the murder of a female teacher in Kislovodsk in 1942 while he was in command of Sonderverbänd Bergmann. Oberländer died two years later, denying all the allegations.

  13National Archives, KV2/173, p. 17.

  14Quoted in Nuremberg Judgement: War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity; http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judwarcr.asp#prisoners

  15Oberleutnant Alfred Wohlgefahrt, Oberleutnant Dr Erich Benkelberg, Oberleutnant der Reserve Karl Troebs and Leutnant Rudolf Gluening were all killed in action that day.

  6 War in the Desert

  1National Archives, HW14/122; Frank Laurence Lucas (a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Hut 3 Army and Luftwaffe Enigma Intelligence Section, Bletchley Park) letter to DD1 (Deputy Director 1 responsible for security and the production and distribution of intelligence), 21 February 1945.

  2Wilhelm Kohlhaas, Hitler-Abenteuer im Irak (Verlag Herder, 1989), p. 26.

  3National Archives, KV3/88, CICI Counter-Intelligence Summary No. 23, 13 April 1944, f 18a.

  4Matin Baraki, Die Beziehungen zwischen Afghanistan und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1945–1978 (Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften, 1996), p. 64.

  5A young Hindu girl had converted to Islam and married a Pashtun in the frontier province of Bannu. Accused by her family of kidnapping the girl, the Pashtun was ruled against by the British colonial court who judged her to have been a minor and, while no evidence of abduction was proven, she was ordered to live with a third party until reaching the age of majority. The Muslim community read the verdict as religious bigotry.

  6Quoted in Jeffery J. Roberts, The Origins of Conflict in Afghanistan (Praeger, 2003), p. 79, n. 21.

  7CIA Archives, SIME/CO.101.903, S.I.M.E Report No. 4, Interrogation Hans-Jürgen Kirchner.

  8Ibid.

  9See Glossary for Sonderführer.

  10Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Keyes was also awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

  11Von Tiesenhausen waited for the required length of time before continuing his patrol in which he would later sink the battleship HMS Barham on 25 November.

  12Desmond Young, Rommel: The Desert Fox (Collins Publishing, 1950), p. 134.

  13The description of the two spies is taken from the manuscript of Ritter’s own memoirs, Deckname Dr Rantzou (p. 413), quoted in Saul Kelly, The Hunt For Zerzura (John Murray, 2003), p. 176. His account differs somewhat from that supplied by the interrogation of Johann Eppler.

  14Ritter was posted to personnel reserve and then a Flak unit before briefly serving in the Supply Regiment ‘Hermann Göring’. He ended the war a Major commanding Flak Regiment 60 in Hamburg.

  15Wilscher was a Sudeten German who had worked in West and Central Africa as a forestry engineer. After his Brandenburg service he joined Otto Skorzeny’s SS Jagdverbände and commanded the sniper school in Zeithain (Saxony) at the rank of Untersturmführer. Before the war he had been a expert hunter and his skill with the rifle was notable. A bearer of the EK I, he continued to wear his Brandenburger sleeve insignia while in the SS and was remembered as ‘very arrogant’ by some of his fellow members in Skorzeny’s unit. He survived the war and later established a big-game hunting company based in Hamburg with regular safaris to Africa. He died on 21 July 1988.

  16National Archives, WO 208/5520, ‘Interrogation Reports on German Prisoners of War: S/50/1/0842-0847, Consolidated Reports on Johann Eppler and Heinrich Sandstede (known as Kondor Max and Moritz)’.

  17Hauer was later repatriated to Vienna in 1946 by the British.

  18National Archives, KV2/1468, Eppler, Hans W.

  19Timothy Mulligan, ‘The German Navy Evaluates Its Cryptographic Security’, October 1941’, Military Affairs, Vol. 49, No. 2 (1985), pp. 75–9, p. 75.

  20National Archives, WO 208/5520, ‘Interrogation Reports on German Prisoners of War: S/50/1/0842-0847, Consolidated Reports on Johann Eppler and Heinrich Sandstede (known as Kondor Max and Moritz)’.

  21National Archives, KV2/1467.

  22It appears that Voppel was later commissioned in the Kriegsmarine Artillery as an Oberleutnant where he won the German Cross in Silver.

  23Between autumn 1942 and spring 1943 an office codenamed ‘Dora II’ functioned in Berlin under the direction of Luftwaffe Major Gericke. This both evaluated the information received from ‘Dora’ and passed it on to the appropriate military authorities and kept ‘Dora’ supplied with the necessary personnel and material. After the retreat from North Africa, ‘Dora’ received a more extensive commission. While Haeckel moved on, Schulz-Kampfhaenkel was made Reichsförschungsrat (Special Commissioner of Geographical Questions) and took over the scientific leadership of ‘Dora’ in the western and eastern theatres. The new tasks included determining the best methods of camouflaging defensive works by means of foliage, investigating the practicability of the Russian swamp areas for tanks, as illustrated on Russian maps, and the production of new reliable maps.

  24The details of this aircraft remain sketchy at best. It is possible that it was a captured Spitfire provided under exactly the circumstances described, but perhaps more plausibly could have been one of the Hurricane fighters captured in North Africa during 1941 and 1942.

  25Recollections of a Brandenburger named Lohse, quoted in Spaeter, Die Brandenburger, p. 256.

  26Spaeter, Die Brandenburg
er, pp. 258–9.

  27Yasmin Opielok, ‘Rommels Fahrer in Afrika entdeckt’, Welt Am Sonntag (February 2001), Article 609680.

  28Lazarus had been a Colonial Office surveyor in peace-time and was tasked with continuing his geographical survey work alongside intelligence gathering for the Allied forces.

  7 Rebuilding

  1US Department of State, German Foreign Ministry Records, Wipert von Blücher (German ambassador to Finland) telegram to Foreign Ministry, No 1204, 28 January 1941. Quoted in William L. Langer and Everett S. Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1953), p. 831.

  2The six Finnish SS men were Scharführer Kaarlo Paananen, Unterscharführer Lauri Tolomen, Unterscharführer Lauri Kuosmanen, Unterscharführer Paavo Pasanen, Rottenführer Paavo Korhonen, Sturmann Lauri Kuittinen.

  3Bundesarchiv, RHG21-2/709, Bericht des Chefs Abwehr II, Nr. 1509/42 gKdos v. 26.6.1942.

  8 ‘Case Blue’/Operation ‘Braunschweig’: The 1942 Summer Offensive in the Soviet Union

  1Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militargerichtshof, Nürnberg, 14. Nov. 1945–1. Okt. 1946 (Nürnberg: Internationales Militartribunal in Nürnberg, 1947–9), 7: 290.

  2The newspaper Die Bewegung, of the Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Studentenbundes (National Socialist German Student Union) published this account of Grabert’s death in January 1944, though some names differ from official records. The account was entitled ‘A heroic figure from our ranks. Witness the best of Student Life.’

  3The NKVD played a significant role in the fighting in the Caucasus during 1942. As well as their normal security duties as part of Stalin’s oppressive regime, large numbers were brought in to the region to quell Chechen uprisings and safeguard vital installations such as oil refineries and pipelines.

  4Spaeter, Die Brandenburger, pp. 209–11. The casualties that day in Dondukovskaya were: Leutnant Dr Hans Pils, Feldwebel Hermann Schink, Unteroffizier Felix Graf Schaffgotsch, Obergefreiter Faller, Gefreiter Jaki Maier, Gefreiter Hubert Binder, Gefreiter Walter Perntner, Gefreiter Sepp Taschler, Sanitäts Gefreiter Rudi Wittmann.