Waffen-SS

by Adrian Gilbert

  IF HIMMLER WAS troubled by the loss of his cherished ambition to control a Germanic Europe, the people of Germany had more pressing concerns as defeat and enemy occupation stared them in the face. Although still cowed by the Gestapo, few in the civilian population now had much enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. Native Berliner and Leibstandarte soldier Erwin Bartmann discovered this changing atmosphere as he left his parents’ house in readiness to defend the city against the advancing Red Army in January 1945. He encountered a crowd who, when they saw his uniform, shouted insults and even threw stones at him. Bartmann conceded, “Bearing the name ‘Adolf Hitler’ on the cuff band of my tunic, they saw me as the personification of everything they detested. The days when people would go out of their way to curry favor with any member of Leibstandarte had come to a bitter end.”2

  The threat posed by the Soviet drive on Berlin forced the German armed forces to throw everything against the advancing Red Army. As a result, a Leibstandarte soldier like Bartmann found himself sent to an ad hoc formation—Regiment Falke—on the River Oder rather than dispatched to Hungary to rejoin his division. On 16 January the Red Army had broken through German defenses on the River Vistula in Poland, driving west with the German capital its goal. Such was the determination of Stalin’s generals to reach Berlin that little attention was given to German positions in the Baltic coastal region of Pomerania, directly to the north of the main Soviet advance.

  Hitler and his military planners decided to attack the exposed Soviet right flank from Pomerania, the offensive code-named Operation Sonnenwende (Solstice). Overall command had been assigned to Himmler—as chief of Army Group Vistula—but through Guderian’s intervention, the capable General Walther Wenck took operational control. The attack would be spearheaded by Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner’s Eleventh Army, a mixed army and Waffen-SS force better known as the Eleventh SS Panzer Army.

  The SS part of Steiner’s force included the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg, 11th SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, and 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division (transferred from Greece), plus the recently upgraded formations from Western Europe: 23rd SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nederland, 27th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division Langemarck, and 28th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division Wallonien. A formidable force on paper, in reality the SS units were understrength and short of fuel and ammunition. Such was the desperation to find sufficient infantry that a group of German soldiers leaving a cinema performance were “press-ganged” into the Nederland Division, only a day before the offensive was to be launched.3

  After a preliminary attack made by Nordland on 15 February, the main German assault took place the following day. The Soviets fell back, and over the next two days the Germans made reasonable headway. The besieged outpost of Arnswalde was reached and its garrison and refugees escorted to safety. As the Soviet armies advanced into Germany, so hundreds of thousands of civilians fled to escape their vengeance. The German armed forces did their best to shepherd them westward, with the long columns of refugees clogging the roads making movement of all kinds difficult.

  The Eastern Front in the North, 1943–1945

  On 18 February the arrival of Soviet reinforcements brought the armored drive to a halt, the offensive formally abandoned that evening to avoid more fruitless casualties in an attritional battle that would always favor the enemy. Operation Sonnenwende had failed to overcome the Soviet defenses, but it had bought time for Hitler. The Red Army high command now felt it necessary to redirect forces to eliminate the German positions in eastern Pomerania, delaying the proposed attack on Berlin.

  On 24 February Brigadeführer Heinz Harmel’s Frundsberg Division was sent south to defend Frankfurt on the River Oder, but almost immediately was ordered back to Pomerania in light of the Red Army’s new assault. Arriving in early March, Frundsberg joined the other Waffen-SS formations in a series of delaying actions as they fell back to the River Oder, where a bridgehead was established at Altdamm. On 19 March Soviet pressure forced its abandonment, the Germans retreating to new positions around Stettin on the western side of the river.

  Frundsberg was briefly held in army reserve before dispatch to Silesia when the Red Army launched its final offensive of the war on 16 April. This was a broad-front operation that smashed into the Oder-Neisse Line and broke through the German defenses in several places. The German Ninth Army was trapped in the Halbe pocket to the south of Berlin. Among the encircled formations were the V SS Mountain Corps, containing several low-grade Waffen-SS units, and Obergruppenführer Kleinheisterkamp’s XI SS Panzer Corps, which, despite its designation, was primarily an infantry formation, its troops coming from the army. Of greater military significance were the King Tiger tanks of the 502nd SS Heavy Panzer Battalion, now attached to Ninth Army.

  Farther south still was the Spremberg pocket, which contained Frundsberg and two battered army divisions. Only a few miles wide, the pocket came under intense Soviet bombardment, which included the Katyusha rocket launchers German soldiers called “Stalin’s organ,” after their pipelike appearance and demented wailing sound when fired. Günter Grass, the trainee tank gunner in Frundsberg, had just arrived at the front and was walking through a grove of birch trees that contained some trucks, armored personnel carriers, and two Jagdpanthers. There he came under fire for the first time:

  Two or three rocket launchers blanket the grove. They are ruthlessly thorough, mowing down whatever cover the young trees might promise. There is no place to hide, or is there? For a simple gunner, at least. I see myself doing as I was taught: crawling under one of the Jagdpanthers. We are protected by the tracks on either side. The organ goes on playing for what is most likely a three-minute eternity—scared to death, I piss my pants—and then silence. I crawled out from under the Jagdpanther. Still wobbly on my feet, I was assaulted by images. The birches looked as if they had been broken over somebody’s knee. There were bodies everywhere, one next to another and one on top of the other, dead, still alive, writhing, impaled by branches, peppered with shell splinters. Many were in acrobatic contortions. Body parts were strewn around.4

  Despite Grass’s harrowing personal account, Harmel and his fellow divisional commanders had managed to construct a reasonable defensive perimeter, although their chief consideration was planning a breakout to the west. To their dismay, however, two orders arrived in quick succession, one from Field-Marshal Schörner, the commander of Army Group Center, and the other from Hitler himself. Addressed to Harmel, they both demanded he lead an attack due north to take the advancing Soviet forces in the flank. Harmel realized that this would entail their almost total destruction, but to disobey a direct Führer Order was a crime punishable by death and the imprisonment of the culprit’s family in a concentration camp. On 20 April Harmel, after discussion with his army colleagues, took the decision to risk Hitler’s punishment by refusing the order. He then gave the order to evacuate the pocket and escape westward.

  By 26 April the remnants of the Frundsberg Division had managed to reach the relative safety of an assembly area near Dresden. Harmel was flown to Schörner’s headquarters and summarily relieved of his command before transfer to the officer reserve. Given the nature of his crime, the punishment was relatively lenient: he was redirected to lead a collection of SS officer cadets and replacement units to keep open escape routes from northern Yugoslavia into Austria, before surrendering to the British on 8 May.5

  The new commander of the Frundsberg Division, Obersturmbannführer Roestel, attempted to hold the new position to the west of Dresden, which by early May was surrounded by the Red Army. On 5 May Frundsberg began a second breakout, to reach U.S. Army lines on the far side of the River Elbe (surrender to the Western Allies rather than the Red Army had become a priority for the Waffen-SS). Obersturmführer Bachmann led what remained of the panzer regiment—including the last Sherman tanks captured during Operation Nordwind—to cut a path through enemy-held territory. As the division fought its way westward, it came under constant attac
k, eventually disintegrating into small groups and individuals, many killed or captured by the Red Army. The survivors reached the Elbe between 10 and 12 May.

  General Busse’s Ninth Army, in the Halbe pocket, also faced destruction, as superior Soviet forces began to squeeze the perimeter. On 23 April Hitler was persuaded to allow Ninth Army to break out of the pocket on the basis that it could link up with General Wenck’s Twelfth Army and together drive forward to relieve Berlin, now under siege. Busse and Wenck had no intention of rescuing the Führer in Berlin, however, both having agreed to create a corridor south of the capital for Ninth Army to escape the pocket, before both armies marched toward the Elbe. Around 80,000 troops took part in the operation, joined by thousands of civilians from the Halbe area fleeing the Red Army.6

  An initial breakout attempt on the night of 25–26 April achieved little, and it was only on the twenty-eighth that the main German force was able to fight its way past Halbe. With the remaining King Tigers of the 502nd SS Panzer Battalion in the lead, the Germans struggled through the sprawling forests to the south of Berlin. Organized into separate columns, repeated bombardments from artillery and the Red Air Force caused forest fires that led to the fragmentation of the breakout force. Although many of the retreating masses were either killed or captured, such was their desperation that around 25,000 soldiers and several thousand civilians reached the Twelfth Army outposts from 3 May onward.7 The soldiers of Twelfth and Ninth Armies then fell back west to the Elbe and to surrender. Matthias Kleinheisterkamp, commander of the XI SS Panzer Corps, was one of those who failed to get to safety; captured by Soviet troops, he committed suicide.

  GIVEN GERMANY’S HOPELESS position in early 1945, it was remarkable how so many within the Waffen-SS continued to fight with undiminished resolve. The strength of Nazi propaganda was one element in maintaining such a level of military commitment, creating a commonly held assumption that defeat would lead to the literal destruction of Germany in a devastating apocalypse. The brutality of the war on the Eastern Front encouraged such a view. The rank and file kept faith in what Goebbels and Hitler told them, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. Soldiers still believed the official pronouncements of how Germany’s new “wonder weapons”—jet fighters, V1 and V2 rockets, and more—would turn the tide of war in their favor. Erik Wallin of the Nordland Division remained hopeful of such an outcome, even in March 1945: “Certainly, on our side, we knew that important things were going on, that sensational weapons would soon be put into action, and, thanks to that, the war would take on a completely new character. The new jet-propelled fighter-planes, which were far superior to the best British and American planes, were already in action and had caused heavy casualties among their bombers. We knew that even better things were coming.”8 Wallin’s concern was that they might not be ready in time, and while this proved to be the case, the new weapons would never have been sufficient to tip the military balance in Germany’s favor.

  A further factor hovering behind all soldiers on the front line was the harsh military discipline of the German armed forces, made harsher still by the Nazi regime. During the war 15,000 German servicemen were put to death for capital crimes,9 and in 1945 roving patrols of military police, Gestapo, and other SS units were authorized to hang any soldiers or civilians they believed to be lacking in resolve when encountering the invader.

  Field Marshal Schörner earned a reputation for brutality toward wavering German troops. Günter Grass recalled his fear when escaping from the Spremberg pocket: “Even though I had no direct contact with the enemy, I was scared to death. The soldiers hanging from the trees along the road were a constant warning of the risk run by every one of us who could not prove that he belonged to a company or was on his way to this or that unit with signed and sealed travel orders.” Grass concluded, “Schörner and his orders were more to be feared than the enemy.”10

  Arguably more powerful than such negative factors in maintaining a fighting spirit was the intense comradeship that had developed within the Waffen-SS, which also focused men’s minds exclusively on the battle before them. Hauptsturmführer Heinz Meier of Leibstandarte wrote of the deep bonds that bound them together: “In the fighting arm we were all as if sheltered in a family, which explains the preparedness, up until the obviously recognizable final collapse, to risk our lives for it. What else really remained in this comradeship? In officers’ circles we never discussed other possibilities, that we must just keep on fighting. Hardly anybody considered how it would look at the end, let alone mentioned it openly. It is certain that even in the last hopeless days there was no question of laying down our weapons.”11

  The resolve to fight to the last was evident in the performance of those Waffen-SS units assigned to the defense of Berlin. And as these soldiers waged an impossible battle in the rubble of Germany’s capital, Adolf Hitler took shelter in the Führerbunker, a concrete construction dug underneath the Chancellery. Hitler’s physical and mental deterioration was obvious to all who saw him in the final weeks of the Thousand-Year Reich, but the power of his will was undiminished.

  On 20 April the Red Army was sufficiently close to Berlin that its long-range artillery could pound the city center. The date was also Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and he welcomed a gathering of leading Nazis who included Göring, Goebbels, Bormann, Speer, Ribbentrop, and Himmler. During the conference that followed the birthday speeches, it was agreed that command of German forces outside of Berlin should be delegated to others. Admiral Dönitz would be responsible for northern Germany, while Field Marshal Kesselring would have control to the south. Hitler was undecided whether he should stay in Berlin or fly out to the southern redoubt in Austria and join his SS panzer divisions. After the conference, Himmler left for the sanatorium in Hohenlychen (to the north of Berlin), where he once again conferred with Count Bernadotte to bring about a negotiated peace.

  On 21 April a confident but deluded Hitler set about preparing what he believed would be the operation to destroy the Soviet armies now besieging Berlin. He issued orders for Ninth and Twelfth Armies to march on Berlin once they had united. In the meantime, he ordered Steiner’s Eleventh SS Panzer Army to immediately drive toward central Berlin. By this time Steiner’s force had been reduced to little more than a headquarters, as division after division had been removed to fight elsewhere. Hitler seemed unaware of this development, and his sudden, manic enthusiasm for the assault was unbounded. He demanded that every available soldier, tank, or aircraft be subordinated to Steiner, making it clear that “any commanding officer who keeps men back will forfeit his life within five hours.”12

  On 22 April Hitler eagerly awaited details of Steiner’s offensive, but no information was relayed to the bunker. At 3:00 P.M. the daily staff conference began, and it was only then that the news arrived: there had been no offensive at all, made worse by reports that Soviet tanks were now within the city boundary. Steiner had not followed Hitler’s orders on the basis that the formations promised him had not arrived and that to attack with the untrained Luftwaffe infantry and Hitler Youth at his disposal would be totally irresponsible.

  Hitler flew into a rage whose virulence had never been seen before. He lambasted the failures of the German armed forces, lamenting that he was the victim of treason of all kinds. The tirade lasted a full three hours, after which an exhausted Hitler quietly declared he had had enough; the Third Reich had let him down, and he would remain in the bunker to await his inevitable fate.13 According to historian George Stein, the reason for Hitler’s extraordinary outburst was not just the failure of the Wehrmacht—which had “failed” him many times before—but what he saw as betrayal by the Waffen-SS. Hitler’s stenographer Gerhard Herrgesell explained that the Führer had lost “confidence in the Waffen-SS for the first time. He had always counted on the Waffen-SS as elite troops which would never fail him.” Herrgesell concluded that in Hitler’s eyes, his special guard had “lost heart” and that “no force however well trained and equipped could fi
ght if it lost heart, and now his last reserve was gone.”14

  Hitler’s suspicions of SS treachery were confirmed when he heard of Himmler’s attempts to secure a negotiated peace with the Western Allies on 28 April. Bernadotte had informed Eisenhower of Himmler’s proposals, and the U.S. general had passed on the information to the BBC for its regular European broadcasts. A furious Hitler dismissed Himmler from the SS and ordered his immediate arrest. Hitler then instructed Wilhelm Mohnke, commander of the SS troops defending the bunker complex, to interrogate Hermann Fegelein, the former SS cavalry general who had been appointed as Himmler’s representative at Führer headquarters. A drunken Fegelein, who was already under arrest for attempting to flee his post, admitted to having some knowledge of Himmler’s plans. He was taken out of the bunker and shot. Himmler, meanwhile, fled north to Dönitz’s headquarters at Flensberg in northern Germany.

  On 29 April the Red Army closed on the city center, and at 1:00 A.M. on the thirtieth the Führerbunker was informed that all attempts to reach Berlin and rescue Hitler had failed. On the afternoon of 30 April Adolf Hitler committed suicide with his long-term mistress and now wife, Eva Braun, their bodies doused with gasoline and burned in the Reich Chancellery garden. Goebbels and his family followed the Führer’s lead the next day. According to the terms of Hitler’s last will and testament, Dönitz was made head of what remained of the Nazi state.

  While Hitler had been fulminating at the treachery of those around him, the rank and file of the Waffen-SS in Berlin were faithfully adhering to their motto: “My honor is loyalty.” As well as the remnants of the Nordland Division, other Waffen-SS units in Berlin included those from the French Charlemagne Division, a depleted battalion of Latvians, soldiers from Himmler’s escort unit, and Leibstandarte battalion based in Berlin. Fighting alongside the Waffen-SS were battered army units, men of the (overage) Volkssturm, and boys from the Hitler Youth.