Waffen-SS

by Adrian Gilbert

  While the men of the Totenkopf Division lacked the finer tactical skills displayed in offensive operations by the best army panzer divisions and other elite Waffen-SS formations, such as Reich or Leibstandarte, they had repeatedly proved themselves in defensive fighting.

  A final, minor, German offensive was launched on 16 October to assist Army Group Center’s attack on Moscow. By now the Red Army had built solid defenses in depth along the line allotted to Totenkopf, and the underresourced attack came to a limping halt a few days later. From this point onward, Eicke’s men went over to a permanent defensive, while at the same time conducting ruthless antipartisan sweeps in their rear areas. During November the SS troops dug trenches and constructed wooden, earth-covered bunkers. The division’s engineers laid swathes of barbed wire in front of the main defensive line, along with 1,557 antitank and 490 antipersonnel mines.14

  As the men prepared their defenses, the weather got steadily colder. The first recorded snow came on 10 October—a fall of eighteen inches—and by November the climate alternated between heavy rain and vicious cold snaps whose biting frosts brought nighttime temperatures to as low as–29 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Totenkopf infantryman Paul Kretzler—who had spent two months recovering from battlefield wounds—returned to the division with the onset of winter: “We were stuck in the mud and I had a terrible time trying to find the unit I was assigned to, for the old hands had gone—killed, wounded or missing—and the replacements, although good lads, were not of the same caliber. Quite suddenly it all turned to ice and snow and this was far worse for we had no winter clothing at all. There was much suffering as we tried to improve our position and keep our vehicles in motion. Everything froze and we were short of lubricants.”15

  Hitler and the German high command had been so certain of a swift victory that suitable provision for winter warfare had been ignored, with disastrous consequences for the men forced to fight in such extreme conditions. Kretzler’s comment on the poor quality of Totenkopf ’s replacements had already been taken up by Eicke, who complained at the lack of suitable training of these new arrivals. He also considered them physically and morally inferior when compared to his old soldiers, being particularly contemptuous of the Volksdeutsche recruits now starting to join the replacement pool. In total, the division received just under 5,000 reinforcements, insufficient to cover the nearly 9,000 men who had become casualties since the beginning of Barbarossa—nearly half the division’s regulation strength.16

  Not unreasonably, Eicke demanded that the division be withdrawn from the front to recover and rebuild. His superiors were understanding of the division’s plight but issued no withdrawal orders to the exhausted SS units. It was pointed out that other army formations were also in a similar situation. During November and December the Totenkopf Division held its ground, the bitterly cold weather its prime enemy for the time being.

  EVEN MORE EXTREME climatic conditions would be encountered by Kampfgruppe Nord in the far northern part of Finland, fighting as part of a combined German-Finnish army. Hitler, fearful that a Soviet attack from the port of Murmansk might endanger the strategically vital Swedish iron-ore mines, decided to eliminate the threat by capturing Murmansk. The first stage of the operation was to cut the Soviet supply line to the isolated port. Kampfgruppe Nord was assigned to take part in this action.

  When Obergruppenführer Demelhuber took command of Kampfgruppe Nord in May 1941, he was horrified at its unreadiness for combat. Almost all of its men were former concentration-camp guards or policemen, reinforced with some overage reservists. While on occupation duty in Norway, the units had been allowed to stagnate. Demelhuber immediately asked for a couple of months of intensive training to bring the men up to a suitable standard before any frontline action was considered. With invasion imminent, however, the request was glibly refused on the basis that the troops’ fervent commitment to National Socialism would overcome any military shortcomings.

  On 1 July 1941 a German-Finnish force, including Kampfgruppe Nord, advanced through the pine forests typical of the region and crossed the border into the Soviet Union, their objective to capture the fortified town of Salla. A heavy Luftwaffe bombardment helped to suppress the Red Army defenses, although it had the unfortunate side effect of setting the trees on fire, which hampered and confused the German advance and provided the Soviet defenses with a useful smoke screen.

  On encountering the enemy, the now disorganized SS units were easily repulsed. A resumption of the German attack was set for 4 July but was preempted by a Soviet armored thrust in the early hours of the same day. The sudden appearance of Red Army tanks crashing through the undergrowth caused panic among the SS troops; some even committed the cardinal military sin of throwing away their weapons as they ran for their lives.

  The solid defense of the Germans and Finns on either side of Kampfgruppe Nord prevented the Red Army from exploiting its success, and the gap in the German line was restored. Waffen-SS casualties amounted to 73 killed, 232 wounded, and 147 missing (most of these prisoners).17 The theater commander, General von Falkenhorst, was so unsure of Kampfgruppe Nord that he temporarily broke up the formation and distributed its individual units among his German and Finnish troops.

  Himmler was mortified by Kampfgruppe Nord’s disgrace, not least by the knowledge that most of the missing had allowed themselves to be captured (he believed an SS man should die rather than surrender). Himmler suppressed all intelligence of the defeat, although he did take practical steps to improve the formation by sending more experienced reinforcements when it was upgraded to become SS Division Nord in September. Early in 1942 it was redesignated as a mountain division, and with the arrival of better-quality manpower and improved training the SS-Gebirgs (Mountain) Division Nord would play a more effective role in the northern war against the Soviet Union.

  Chapter 13

  ACROSS THE UKRAINE: ARMY GROUP SOUTH

  IN THE SOUTHERN sector of the German invasion front—stretching from the near-impassable Pripet Marshes to the Black Sea—were the Axis troops of Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s Army Group South. In addition to his regular German formations, Rundstedt commanded a substantial Romanian force of uncertain quality. The spearhead of the German attack was provided by Colonel General von Kleist’s First Panzer Group. Kleist’s initial objective was the capture of Kiev and then, in conjunction with the supporting infantry armies, the destruction of Soviet forces to the west of the River Dnieper. Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler” and the Wiking Division would provide Kleist’s panzers with additional mobile firepower.

  General Mikhail Kirponos, the Red Army commander facing Army Group South, had disregarded Stalin’s order to ignore any German “provocations,” and during the night of 21–22 June he alerted his troops to be prepared for action. As a result, his command was better prepared than most to react to the invasion, and from the moment German troops crossed the border they faced stiff resistance. Throughout the first week of Barbarossa, Army Group South made steady if unspectacular progress, with none of the dramatic panzer advances and encirclement battles that characterized the initial efforts of the other two army groups.

  Sepp Dietrich and his Leibstandarte had to wait until the end of June before they were summoned forward in support of General von Mackensen’s III Motorized Corps. Once over the border into Ukraine, they immediately found themselves fending off a series of fierce, if not especially skilled, Soviet counterattacks. For a full two weeks Leibstandarte would hold a defensive line to protect the northern flank of Panzer Group Kleist. Only on 16 July, with the arrival of the infantry from Sixth Army, was Dietrich given the signal to follow the panzers in their drive toward Kiev.

  On 25 June the units of Felix Steiner’s Wiking Division were attached to General von Wietersheim’s XIV Panzer Corps in its advance past Lemberg (L’viv) and Tarnopol. The death of the “Westland” commander, Standartenführer Wäckerle, on 2 July led to his replacement by the fifty-nine-year-old Standartenführer Artur P
hleps. It was not only his relatively advanced age that made Phleps an unusual choice for a regimental commander of a Waffen-SS fighting unit. Phleps had been born in the Siebenbürgen, an ethnic German enclave in Romania, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He served as a staff officer in the Austrian Army during World War I and after 1918 returned to his homeland and joined the Romanian Army, reaching the rank of lieutenant general before political intrigue forced his retirement in 1941.

  A committed German nationalist and Nazi supporter, Phleps moved to Germany and as a member of the Volksdeutsche community asked Gottlob Berger to be allowed to join the Waffen-SS (under his mother’s maiden name of Stolz). Berger readily agreed, and he was initially assigned to the Wiking Division as an unattached staff officer. A tall, austere individual—sporting a distinctive Hitler mustache—he was well known for his plain speaking. He also proved an able leader of “Westland,” before a subsequent promotion gave him command of the Volksdeutsche Prinz Eugen Mountain Division in 1942.

  The 1940 campaign in the West had further convinced Steiner that operational flexibility was essential for mechanized formations. Thus, for the invasion of Ukraine he utilized three Kampfgruppen based around reinforced infantry regiments: von Oberkamp’s “Germania,” Stolz’s (or Phlep’s) “Westland,” and Scholz’s “Nordland.” The use of such battle groups had become standard practice in the German armed forces, but Steiner also encouraged more ad hoc groupings of infantry, artillery, and supporting arms that could be formed and dissolved according to short-term need. A typical example of this approach was the way in which Oberkamp exploited his success in the crossing of the River Slutsch on 6–7 July by immediately forming an improvised “fast battalion” of two motorcycle companies, an antitank company, and infantry-gun and Flak platoons.1

  DURING JULY, AS the hard-marching infantry of Army Group South began to make progress in their drive into Ukraine, the possibility of conducting an encirclement battle became apparent to Rundstedt and his staff. In the German advance toward Kiev, the bulk of two Soviet armies had become marooned around Uman, to the south of the Ukrainian capital. While General Stülpnagel’s Seventeenth Army, with some Axis support from Romanian, Hungarian, and Slovak contingents, marched to the south of Uman, Kleist’s First Panzer Group circled the city from the north, the two pincers meeting on 2 August. Attempts by the Red Army to break out were contained by the Axis, and after a week of increasingly hopeless fighting Soviet troops began to surrender. Red Army casualties were heavy: approximately 100,000 killed or wounded and a similar number captured.

  During the operation, Leibstandarte had been temporarily loaned to General Kempf ’s XLVIII Corps, which had taken Novo Archangelsk the day before the pocket was sealed. Kempf was full of praise for the contribution made by Dietrich’s men: “Committed at the focus of the battle for the seizure of the key enemy position at Archangelsk, Leibstandarte SS ‘Adolf Hitler,’ with incomparable dash, took the city and the heights to the south. In the spirit of the most devoted brotherhood of arms, they intervened on their own initiative in the arduous struggle of the 16th Infantry Division (motorized) on their left flank and routed the enemy, destroying numerous tanks.”2

  While the Uman operation was still ongoing, the Wiking Division was deployed to the north, defending the encirclement from Soviet relief efforts and pushing east toward the River Dnieper. By the end of July Steiner ordered the division to go over to an all-out offensive, calling upon the Luftwaffe to provide support on a mass scale. At this stage in the war, the German Air Force was in the ascendant, its Stukas breaking up enemy tank attacks or pounding defenses, seemingly at will. Once the dive-bombers had done their work, Wiking advanced, alongside an army panzer regiment. “The enemy fled in panic,” wrote the Wiking divisional history. “Cavalry units trying to reach safety in flight rushed together from all directions. Horse-drawn batteries were shot up as they attempted to withdraw. On the way stood abandoned anti-tank guns and overturned vehicles, while dead horses were strewn about.”3

  An improvised Soviet defensive line around Taraschtscha on the River Ros was broken in a determined attack led by Stolz’s “Westland” Kampfgruppe, the enemy bundled eastward with heavy losses. Wiking casualties were also severe, especially in “Westland,” which suffered 92 officers and men killed and 360 wounded. The battle bonded the Dutch and Flemish volunteers with their German comrades, proof that given the right training and leadership, non-Germans could fight to the standard of an elite German infantry unit.

  As Wiking’s forward units advanced beyond Taraschtscha, so Einsatzgruppen EK5 moved in to exterminate the town’s large Jewish population. Assisted by troops from Wiking’s rear echelon, the men of EK5 began their work, killing 1,000 Jews in the action.4 The relationship between Waffen-SS field units and SS death squads was always much closer than that maintained by postwar Waffen-SS apologists.

  During August, Wiking—now part of III Panzer Corps—took the operational initiative, fighting alongside army tank units in scattering the now disorganized Soviet forces. Wiking marched southward along the western side of the Dnieper toward the river’s great bend at Dnepropetrovsk. The good progress made by Rundstedt’s forces was, however, hampered by Hitler’s sudden order to dispatch the bulk of Kleist’s First Panzer Group northward to join Guderian’s panzers in the great encirclement maneuver to the east of Kiev. It would only be from mid-September onward that Kleist’s panzers were able to return to Army Group South and the ongoing battle for the southern and eastern Ukraine.

  LEIBSTANDARTE, WITH KEMPF ’s praise still ringing in its ears after the Uman battle, was ordered south to capture Kherson on the Black Sea. The SS division reached the coast and after a short but fierce battle with Soviet marine infantry captured the port on 19 August. The engagement provided the division’s antitank artillery with some unusual targets, such as ships attempting to escape from the harbor to open sea.

  According to an account written by an Erich Stahl (also known as Erich Kern), an Austrian journalist then serving with Leibstandarte, during the drive to Kherson men of his regiment discovered the bodies of German soldiers mutilated by the Red Army. As a consequence, according to Stahl, an order was given by Dietrich not to take prisoners for the next three days, with the end result that 4,000 Red Army soldiers were killed while surrendering.5 Although there was no documentary or other evidence to support this assertion, it was taken as fact by a number of authorities and, in one case, subsequently confused with the discovery of 6 mutilated Leibstandarte corpses in Taganrog in March 1942.6 This is not to say that Leibstandarte did not kill enemy prisoners during Operation Barbarossa, and in one instance, at least, its troops—along with those from Wiking—were used in the roundup of Jews for execution in the autumn of 1941.7

  On 20 August Leibstandarte was given its first rest after seven weeks of almost continuous combat. Casualties had been relatively light, but the wear and tear on vehicles had been immense, with half the division’s inventory either destroyed or temporarily out of action.8 Leibstandarte was given a vital two weeks for rest and repairs—and the assimilation of 674 reinforcements—before assignment to General von Schobert’s Eleventh Army, and crossing the Dnieper in readiness for the assault on the Crimean peninsula.

  The Germans pushed on toward the Perekop Isthmus, the sole land route into the Crimea. The day before the assault was to be launched, Schobert was killed in an air crash (succeeded by Manstein a few days later). The attack still went ahead, led by the army’s 73rd Infantry Division and Leibstandarte’s reconnaissance battalion, commanded by Kurt Meyer. The Soviet defenses were well prepared and included an armored train, more than a match for the armored cars and 3.7cm antitank guns of Meyer’s battalion. This first German attack was repulsed with ease. Further assaults also came to nothing, forcing the newly arrived Manstein to initiate full-scale siege operations.

  ON 23 AUGUST, advance elements of Mackensen’s III Motorized Corps, along with Steiner’s Wiking Division, reached Dnepropetrovsk.
An important industrial center, Dnepropetrovsk was sited on both sides of the Dnieper at the point where the river made its abrupt right-angle turn to flow southwest into the Black Sea. “Germania” and “Nordland” opened the assault, followed by “Westland.” Within three days the southern half of the city was in German hands and a small bridgehead established on the far side of the river. Soviet artillery was rushed forward to support the defenders and accurately pounded German positions, making it virtually impossible to get more men and supplies to the bridgehead on the north bank. Only at night could the passage of the thousand-yard-wide Dnieper be made with any safety. The German gunners, chronically short of ammunition, could do little in reply.

  On the night of 31 August–1 September, Standartenführer Fritz von Scholz led his “Nordland” infantry along the rickety bridges spanning the Dnieper to the north bank. Once there, they reinforced their army colleagues from the 198th Infantry Division, in readiness for a determined Soviet counterattack. For the next week the German defenders faced a blizzard of Soviet fire, their entrenchments blown to pieces during the day and hastily rebuilt at night. The “Nordland” commander was singled out for his inspirational leadership, as described in the divisional history: “Night after night and morning after morning, Scholz walked or crawled through his positions, fighting beside his men and serving as an example.”9 From then on, his soldiers would know him as “Old Fritz,” in deference to the Prussian soldier-king Frederick the Great.

  While Scholz was helping hold the bridgehead perimeter, the remainder of the division crossed the river by bridge and boat. On the evening of 7 September Mackensen and Steiner believed they had the manpower to take the offensive. Wiking was chosen as the lead attack formation. The Germans had stockpiled enough ammunition for a sustained artillery bombardment, which began on the morning of the eighth. Soviet counterfire was heavier than expected, however, and the artillery duel continued throughout the morning.