Waffen-SS

by Adrian Gilbert

  On 21 May—as Totenkopf was holding the Allied counterattack around Arras—the SS-V Division advanced deeper into France. The German high command had made the decision to adopt a defensive posture on the southern flank of the panzer corridor while committing all mobile divisions to drive northward to trap and then destroy the Anglo-French-Belgian armies.

  Faced by this threat, the Allied command set up a series of defensive lines to slow the German advance. Initially, they hoped this might be a means of stabilizing the front, but as the Germans pushed farther into France they became stop lines for rearguard actions, to buy time for a mass evacuation from the port of Dunkirk. On the eastern side of the steadily shrinking Allied pocket was an ad hoc position built on a series of canals and canalized rivers stretching from the coast to Béthune, much of it utilizing the La Bassée Canal. Known as the Canal Line, it was held primarily by British troops, and it was here that all three Waffen-SS formations would be severely tested.

  After crossing into France with the SS-V Division, Leibstandarte was dispatched to join Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps, driving toward the northern section of the Canal Line, opposite the town of Watten. To the south of the line, Totenkopf—reorganized following its action at Arras—marched on British positions around Béthune. Deployed between Leibstandarte and Totenkopf, the SS-V Division moved swiftly to capture Aire, at the junction of the La Bassée and Lys Canals. Led by Keppler’s “Der Führer” Regiment, forward units reached Aire on the evening of 22 May, well ahead of the rest of the German advance.

  While preparing to establish bridgeheads across the Canal Line for the following morning, the Germans were unaware of the presence of a strong French armored force. In the early hours of 23 May the French struck, tank columns advancing through the dispersed German lines. “Der Führer’s” III Battalion (now under Otto Kumm) found itself heavily engaged.

  Although the battalion had never faced tanks before, there was no panic among the troops, even when they discovered that their 3.7cm “door knockers” were all but useless in fending off frontal assaults by the French tanks. In one instance the crew of an antitank gun waited until the tank was only twenty yards away before opening fire, bringing its progress to a halt at only five yards’ range. The infantry had their own methods to deal with the enemy armor. They formed bundles from their “potato-masher” grenades, rushing from cover to jam them into the tanks’ road wheels or under their hulls to bring them to a halt, before throwing further grenades into any open tank hatches.

  The French armored charge was based on desperation, with no seeming objective in mind. During the afternoon, “Germania” moved up to support “Der Führer,” bringing the attack to a halt; fifty-four French tanks and other armored vehicles were destroyed and more than 3,500 soldiers captured.7 Among the booty taken from the French were the instruments from a marching band, subsequently played by the men of the reconnaissance battalion, loudly and tunelessly. Later in the day the Luftwaffe made an appearance, and as well as strafing the retreating French the aircraft managed to attack both “Der Führer” and “Germania” before disappearing back to their bases. With the repulse of the French tanks, the entire SS-V Division was in place, ready to initiate a planned assault across the Canal Line on the twenty-fourth.

  Allied defenses opposite the SS-V Division were not organized when two battalions of the “Germania” Regiment crossed the La Bassée Canal at dawn on 24 May. They faced little opposition and established a bridgehead at St. Venant before pushing forward to the banks of the Lys Canal.

  Farther south, Eicke’s Totenkopf Division had reached Béthune and the Canal Line late on the evening of 23 May. Without waiting to assess the situation, Eicke ordered an immediate attack, but this was easily thrown back by the British. On the following morning, Eicke, waving his pistol aloft, personally led the 1st Totenkopf Infantry Regiment across the canal. Although coming under heavy fire, Eicke and his men established a bridgehead, which they expanded over the course of the day as more units crossed over to their side. But to Eicke’s bewilderment and dismay, he then received a surprise order to cease the action and withdraw back across the canal. The retreat proved a difficult task, and as British small-arms fire increased the last Totenkopf units were forced to throw away their heavy gear and swim across the canal to gain cover on the south bank.

  Eicke was understandably furious at the order, which put his troops back at square one for the loss of 168 casualties. He had a stand-up row with his corps commander, General Erich Hoepner, who had arrived at Béthune to oversee the operation. Hoepner, who held a poor view of the Waffen-SS, openly berated Eicke for his conduct and for challenging the order, calling him “a butcher and no soldier.”8

  Hoepner’s order had, in fact, come from General von Rundstedt, the Army Group A commander. Rundstedt wanted to rest and refit his panzer divisions for the forthcoming battle with the main French Army to the south, and on 24 May he began to put the brakes on his army group’s advance. Hitler held similar views, and in the late afternoon he issued the stop order that halted Army Group A along the Canal Line. Bock’s Army Group B would now act as the main hammer to Army Group A’s anvil. Hitler’s decision was also influenced by Göring’s promise that his Luftwaffe would destroy the remnants of the Allied armies as they tried to embark from Dunkirk.

  The commanders in the field were mystified by the order, believing the Allies to be on the point of collapse. General Guderian, whose XIX Panzer Corps was opposite the Aa Canal at the north of the line, accepted the order with the greatest reluctance. Early on the twenty-fifth he recalled motoring over to Leibstandarte’s headquarters to ensure that they too were following Hitler’s directive:

  When I arrived there I found the Leibstandarte engaged in crossing the Aa. On the far bank was Mont Watten, a height of only some 235 feet, but that was enough in this flat marshland to dominate the whole surrounding countryside. On top of the hillock, among the ruins of an old castle, I found the divisional commander, Sepp Dietrich. When I asked why he was disobeying orders, he replied that the enemy on Mont Watten could “look right down the throat” of anybody on the far bank of the canal. Sepp Dietrich had therefore decided on the 24 May to take it on his own initiative. In view of the success they were having I approved the decision taken by the commander on the spot.9

  As the German panzers waited along the Canal Line, the Allies proceeded with the withdrawal toward Dunkirk, their rear guards on the eastern side of the pocket just sufficient to hold the infantry of Army Group B. The truth then began to dawn on Hitler and his senior Wehrmacht commanders that the Allies might escape the German trap. Accordingly, the stop order was revoked on the evening of 26 May, with operations to begin in earnest the following morning.

  In the SS-V Division, Hausser was instructed to cross the canal and attack the British defending the Nieppe Forest, although Steiner’s “Deutschland” Regiment was assigned to assist the advance of the 3rd Panzer Division against St. Venant and Merville. In the attack through the Nieppe Forest, the Kampfgruppe (battle group) based around “Der Führer” made some progress on the forest’s more open left flank, but the “Germania” Kampfgruppe became hopelessly bogged down, with the British infantry stubbornly contesting every yard. As night fell the SS-V had advanced only a few miles, with at least half of the forest still in British hands.

  Supported by the tanks of the 3rd Panzer Division, “Deutschland” had more success, forcing the British back to the Lys Canal. This relatively narrow water barrier was breached in several places during the evening, but the SS infantry faced repeated counterattacks from French and British armor. The Allied tanks were eventually driven off, and Merville was reached at the end of the day. During the night, the soldiers of “Deutschland” wrested control of the village from its British defenders.

  For the Totenkopf Division, farther south along the Canal Line, 27 May would be a day of sustained combat. In anticipation of the resumption of offensive operations, Eicke had infiltrated patrols across the L
a Bassée Canal on the evening of the twenty-sixth, SS combat pioneers working through the night to build pontoon bridges over the waterway. The division was to advance due north of Béthune and meet up with Steiner’s “Deutschland” regiment on the Lys between Merville and Estaires.

  Totenkopf ’s British opponents had been instructed to hold the Canal Line before slowly falling back to the new defensive position along the Lys a few miles farther north. The infantry of Totenkopf were able to cross the canal, but to their dismay this was not the easy victory they anticipated, as the flexible British defense remained unbroken, continuing to inflict casualties on the SS.

  The 2nd Totenkopf Infantry Regiment, commanded by Standartenführer Bertling, crashed into the British lines but was caught in heavy cross fire, its advance brought to a standstill. Radio contact with divisional HQ was lost, and to Eicke, at least, it seemed that the regiment was on the point of destruction. Fearing the worst, Eicke ordered a halt to the divisional attack and around midday instructed Standartenführer Götze, commander of the 3rd Totenkopf Infantry Regiment, to break off his northward advance and come to Bertling’s aid.

  The confusion that reigned in Eicke’s headquarters was made worse by the sudden collapse of Montigny, the division’s capable chief operational officer. Diagnosed with a hemorrhaging stomach ulcer, Montigny was evacuated back to Germany, removing in one stroke the coolest head in the division.10 Götze, meanwhile, had detached a battalion from his regiment, which he personally led toward the British holding the hamlet of Le Paradis. In the ensuing attack the British were forced backward, but in the process Götze was killed by a rifle bullet.

  The last British resistance was maintained in a farmhouse at Le Paradis, held by around 100 men of the 2nd Norfolk Regiment. Completely surrounded and out of ammunition, the men of the Norfolks eventually surrendered to the 14th Company of the 2nd Totenkopf Infantry Regiment, commanded by Obersturmführer Fritz Knöchlein. After the Norfolks’ surrender, the men were kicked and hit with rifle butts and then lined up against a wall by the farmhouse. Facing them were two tripod-mounted machine guns that opened fire without warning. The men collapsed in a long heap. Knöchlein instructed his men to finish off anyone showing signs of life with bayonet thrusts or shots to the head.

  The whole action took over an hour, and when Knöchlein was satisfied that there were no survivors, he ordered his troops to join the main advance toward Estaires and the Lys Canal. Despite the best efforts of the SS killers, two badly wounded British soldiers survived, tended by French civilians and then picked up by a German Army unit. The two men would later provide testimony that led to Knöchlein’s postwar trial, where he was found guilty and hanged.11

  Totenkopf casualties for the twenty-seventh—just under 700 men killed, wounded, and missing—reflected the intensity of the combat.12 The Waffen-SS formations involved in the canal battles attested to the tenacity of their opponents. Of the fighting on 27 May, the SS-V divisional history wrote: “The British showed on that day that they could fight extremely hard and with great determination. The young soldiers in the elite British regiments all fought with exceptional bravery.”13 Even Eicke acknowledged that his British opponents “fought magnificently and grimly to the death.”14

  After the hard fighting of 27 May, both the SS-V and Totenkopf proceeded more cautiously on the following day. The bulk of Hausser’s division slowly pushed its way through the Nieppe Forest, while the detached “Deutschland” regiment remained in position along the Lys. Totenkopf was ordered to cross the Lys on the twenty-eighth, but the effect of exhaustion and heavy casualties saw a lackluster performance from the SS division: all attempts to break the line were driven off by artillery fire and a series of British counterattacks. General Hoepner, exasperated at the division’s failure, telephoned Eicke in the evening and demanded a continuation of the offensive the following morning. Eicke was saved from further embarrassment when the British rear guard, having achieved its objective, began to fall back to the Dunkirk perimeter.

  FARTHER NORTH ON the Canal Line, Leibstandarte prepared to resume offensive action from its jumping-off point on the heights above Watten on 27 May. Progress was slow, however, and even with direct support from a unit of army panzers, the regiment’s objective for the day—the village of Wormhoudt—was not reached. On 28 May the advance continued but again was held up by determined resistance. Anxious at this failure, Dietrich, along with his adjutant Max Wünsche, drove forward in their Mercedes staff car to reinvigorate the attack. General Guderian recounted the subsequent events:

  Dietrich, while driving from the front, came under fire from a party of Englishmen who were still holding out in a solitary house behind our lines. They set his car on fire and compelled him and his companions to take shelter in the ditch. Dietrich and his adjutant crawled into a large drain pipe, where the ditch ran under a cross road, and in order to protect himself from the burning petrol of his car covered his face and hands with damp mud. A wireless truck following his command car signaled for help and we were able to send part of the 3rd Panzer Regiment to get him out of his unpleasant predicament. He soon appeared at my headquarters covered from head to toe in mud and had to accept some very ribald comments on our part.15

  It was only in the midafternoon that Leibstandarte infantry reached Wormhoudt, and the rest of the day was spent in bitter hand-to-hand combat before the village fell to the Germans at around 10:00 P.M. Substantial numbers of Allied soldiers were captured by Leibstandarte. The ferocity of the fighting and the casualties suffered by Leibstandarte’s II Battalion, commanded by Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Mohnke, led to several incidents where captured British soldiers were killed, culminating in a further massacre of Allied prisoners, most from the 2nd Royal Warwickshire Regiment under the command of Captain James Lynn-Allen. The Warwickshires’ regimental history described the prisoners’ fate:

  They were double-marched to the barn, and thrust at with bayonets on the way. Wounded and unwounded alike were then herded into the barn. Captain Lynn-Allen immediately protested. He was answered with taunts, and several hand grenades were thrown among the crowded troops, killing and wounding many of them. Survivors were then taken outside to be shot, in batches of five. After this had happened twice, those left behind refused to come out; whereupon the Germans fired indiscriminately into the barn until they had judged that none were left alive.16

  Out of the approximately 95 men imprisoned in the barn, 15 individuals survived and were subsequently treated for their wounds by German Army units and then imprisoned. A British inquiry was held after the war, but Mohnke was then in Soviet captivity, and after his release in 1955 it was deemed there was insufficient evidence to mount a prosecution against him or any other individual.17

  After the fall of Wormhoudt, Leibstandarte slowly pushed forward against the perimeter defenses established by the Allies around Dunkirk, but the staff of Army Group A once again returned to the continuing battle with the French to the south. The remainder of the campaign in Flanders was left to the infantry of Army Group B, confirmed by the removal of the elite German panzer and mechanized divisions from the Dunkirk area at the end of May.

  Soldiers from “Der Führer” had advanced as far as the hilltop town of Cassel, and they looked down across the flat plain toward Dunkirk. They could clearly see British soldiers retreating toward the port and the long columns of black smoke that marked the Luftwaffe’s bombing of the port installations. The Allied rear guards (primarily French) were sufficient, however, to hold the advancing German infantry, while the aerial bombardment proved less effective than Göring had promised. When the Germans marched into Dunkirk on 4 June, 338,000 Allied troops (including 110,000 French) had been rescued from German captivity.

  Chapter 8

  FRANCE DEFEATED

  THE END OF hostilities in Flanders afforded the Wehrmacht a brief and necessary opportunity to rest and refit. Twenty days of combat and maneuver had taken its toll on the vast array of vehicles deployed by the mechani
zed formations; maintenance and replacement became a priority. The exhausted troops also found an opportunity to rest. For the officers, the pause was a chance to restore the order and discipline that inevitably slipped while on campaign. This was especially true of the soldiers’ appearance. Even in Leibstandarte, improvements in soldierly bearing were called for. According to one history of the formation, “The men were ordered to cease wearing civilian business suits, which some had apparently ‘liberated,’ and to banish dogs, dolls, and stuffed animals from their vehicles, which in Dietrich’s words had taken on a ‘gypsy like appearance.’”1

  Totenkopf underwent a similar overhaul, its commander, Theodor Eicke, issuing an order of the day to “re-establish good order and discipline.” Eicke warned his men that they were not to be caught looting from the civilian population: “We are currently subject to sharp criticism from all quarters and are thus obligated to ensure that we show no weakness or give cause for such criticism. Two wrongs don’t make a right! Experience in the last few days has shown that through the small mistakes of isolated individuals, incidents have been ascribed to our division that are not reflective of the facts.”2