Army of Evil: A History of the SS (44 page)

There is some evidence that a number of US prisoners of war had volunteered for German service in the final months of the war. In early March 1945, Berger reported to Himmler:

Himmler seems to have been distinctly underwhelmed by this “breakthrough.” His adjutant, Rudi Brandt, noted:

What became of these volunteers was not recorded.

O
VERALL, THEN, THE
Waffen-SS’s attempts to recruit foreigners from the Allied nations proved almost entirely fruitless. Some Americans may have volunteered to fight the Bolsheviks; but even if they did, their offer came far too late in the war to help the Germans. The Indian Legion was large enough to function as a military unit, but it ended up as a work party on the French coast. Meanwhile, the British Free Corps was conceived as little more than a propaganda operation, but it was ineffective even in that limited role: there seem to have been
only two public mentions of it during the war, both in Norwegian collaborationist newspapers. Such paltry returns were hardly commensurate with the effort that went into its recruitment.

In a way, the failure of these projects mirrored that of the Waffen-SS as a whole. The domestic threat to the National Socialist regime had been rendered negligible by the time the armed SS units came into being: opposition political parties and their associated paramilitary groups had already been banned, disarmed and suppressed. Realistically, only one force—the army—had the power to remove Hitler, and the armed SS would never be sufficiently strong to challenge that. Consequently, the Waffen-SS was never more than a modest adjunct to the German military machine. In fact—as a result of the complications which it caused in logistics, procurement, recruitment and so on—it probably diminished rather than enhanced the German state’s ability to wage war effectively.

*
It is likely that he took one of the service’s academic courses—which were designed specifically for foreign volunteers—in addition to providing physical labour.

*
He was accompanied on this journey by his two brothers, Eugene and Norman, who had joined him in Germany before the outbreak of war. However, it is unclear whether they had also enlisted in the SS.

*
An ethnic German area of Czechoslovakia.

*
This gave the party four seats in the hundred-member lower house and four in the fifty-member upper chamber.

*
To put this into perspective, the modern British Army consists of just two operational divisions, only one of which can be deployed at any one time.

*
Hitler’s indifference towards human suffering formed a bizarre contrast to his sentimental affection towards most animals.

*
He was awarded the Iron Cross, second and first class, and the Gold Württemberg Bravery Medal.

*
Dirlewanger was injured on three separate occasions during the war. In one of his very first actions in France in August 1914, he was shot in the foot, sabred in the chest and received shrapnel wounds to the head. Then, in September 1915, he received a gunshot wound to his hand and a bayonet wound to his leg. Finally, in April 1918, he was shot in the left shoulder. At the end of the war, he was classified as 40 per cent disabled.

†
On 12 April 1921, he was injured yet again—another head wound—but this does not seem to have impeded either his studies or his soldiering.

*
The Young Maidens was the junior branch of the NSDAP’s
Bund Deutscher Mädel
(League of German Maidens), the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth.

*
They had to sign a statement agreeing not to attempt to escape if they were allowed outside the confines of the camp.

†
Subsequently, they even proposed that Parrington should be the nominal commander of the British unit. However, this suggestion never reached him, and he never had anything to do with it.

*
This was standard practice for foreign volunteers, who generally served on a contract basis in the German armed forces and did not have the same legal obligation as German citizens to undergo military service.

*
He had been convicted by a French court of espionage on behalf of Germany in 1927 and sentenced to two years in prison, and he may have been working as a German agent even before the First World War.

*
Menz was murdered there, while Freeman eventually managed to escape.

*
Emilie Schenkl Bose (1910–96), who had been Bose’s secretary and whom he married in 1937.

*
Supposedly where the last stand of the Third Reich would take place. It never materialised.

B
y October 1940, Benito Mussolini had grown envious of his German ally’s military conquests in the West. Consequently, he launched an invasion of Greece through Albania. However, to the Italians’ surprise, the Greeks proved to be extremely tough opponents. The invasion force was grossly understrength and was forced back into Albania before the harsh winter led to a cessation of hostilities. Hitler chastised Mussolini for his “regrettable blunder,” but felt compelled to intervene to prevent a collapse of the Axis position in the Balkans.

Germany now pressured the government of Yugoslavia to join the Axis in order to facilitate a German assault on Greece. This was anathema to the Yugoslavs; but with the only alternative seeming to be a German invasion, the government eventually signed the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941. However, two days later, elements within the Yugoslavian armed forces allied with Serbian nationalists to launch a
coup d’état
. They deposed the Regent, Prince Paul, and proclaimed the eighteen-year-old King Peter II as the new ruler. Enraged by this affront, Hitler immediately ordered an invasion of Yugoslavia to run in
tandem with the attack on Greece. This meant that the planned invasion of the Soviet Union would have to be postponed.

Once again, Waffen-SS units were to be at the forefront of the German assault. The Special Purpose Division had spent the winter of 1940–41 in eastern France, training for the proposed invasion of Great Britain. In December, it had been renamed the
Deutschland
Division—which of course caused confusion with the regiment of the same name—so shortly thereafter it had been redesignated the
Reich
Division. On 28 March, it was ordered to move into south-western Romania. There it joined the XLI Panzer Corps to take part in the main thrust towards Belgrade. Meanwhile, the
Leibstandarte
, which was now of brigade strength and subordinated to the 12th Army, was to attack from Bulgaria, across southern Yugoslavia and into Greece.

The assault was launched on 6 April. In Yugoslavia, resistance was virtually non-existent. A combat group of the
Reich
Division, led by SS-Captain Fritz Klingenburg, raced across the country and reached Belgrade on 13 April, whereupon Klingenburg accepted the surrender of the city. The Yugoslavian Army surrendered four days later. The Germans lost just 151 dead in the entire campaign.

Resistance in Greece was somewhat stiffer, but the outcome was the same. A British expeditionary force had been rushed into the country during March, but it was ill equipped and its air support was no match for the large numbers of combat aircraft available to the Germans. In danger of being stranded, the British began an evacuation on 21 April. With no prospect of holding back the Germans, the Greek Army capitulated two days later. For the whole of the next week, the British fought some desperate rearguard actions as they sought to protect their evacuation sites. By 30 April, German troops controlled the whole country.

Now, a little behind schedule, Hitler was finally able to turn his attention to what had always been his primary target.

•    •     •

A
T 3 A.M.
on 22 June 1941, the largest military force ever assembled in Europe began to cross into Soviet territory: one hundred and fifty-three divisions, organised into three army groups
*
(North, Centre and South, commanded by Field Marshals von Leeb, von Bock and von Rundstedt, respectively), comprising more than 3.5 million soldiers and 3,600 tanks, and supported by three tactical air forces with around 2,700 aircraft. The front stretched from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Astonishingly, the invasion came as a surprise to the Soviets. Although their intelligence had watched the buildup of forces with increasing anxiety, Stalin had convinced himself that Hitler would not move east until Britain had been decisively defeated. After a decade of terror in the Soviet Union, no one was prepared to contradict him.

Of course, the destruction of the Soviet Union and its “Jewish Bolshevism” was at the core of Hitler’s personal belief system. He had floated the idea in
Mein Kampf
in 1924, but 1941 was probably the first realistic opportunity that he had to carry it out. It was a colossal gamble but he took it, perhaps feeling that the forces under his command were invincible after their lightning successes in the West, perhaps genuinely believing that the “inferior” Russians would be unable to put up any significant resistance. In spite of Germany’s shortage of men and
matériel
(at least when compared to the almost limitless resources of the Soviet Union), Hitler seems to have convinced himself that victory was inevitable. Then, once the Third Reich had conquered the USSR, it would have access to vast amounts of land, untold natural resources and millions of “primitive” people who could be forced into the largest slave labour force the world had ever seen. Hitler viewed it as the twentieth-century equivalent of Britain’s subjugation of India in the nineteenth, and envisaged similarly rich rewards.

As with the invasions in the West and the Balkans, the Waffen-SS played a full role in the opening stages of the campaign in the East.
The
Leibstandarte
was re-designated as a division in June 1941—becoming the
Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler Division—even though it boasted only eleven thousand men, significantly below conventional divisional strength. It was then attached to Army Group South, along with the newly formed
Wiking
Division. The
Reich
Division was placed in von Bock’s Army Group Centre, while the Death’s Head and Police divisions were subordinated to Army Group North for the push towards Leningrad.
¹

On paper, another new Waffen-SS division should also have been heavily involved in Operation Barbarossa (the code name of the invasion). In late 1940, the 6th and 7th Death’s Head regiments—comprising concentration camp guards and reservists—had been transferred to southern Norway to act as a garrison and security force. A few months later, these regiments were combined with a signals unit to form the
Nord
Battle Group, which was under the tactical command of the army. Then, on 17 June 1941, the unit was re-designated the
Nord
Division after the addition of a reconnaissance unit, an anti-aircraft battery, logistics units and so on. Five days later, it was on the Finnish-Soviet border, eager to join the offensive. However, it was far from ready for action: it had fired its artillery only once, its men were barely competent with their small arms, and its officers had had virtually no military training. Its performance in the opening few days of the invasion was so appalling that General von Falkenhorst, commanding the XXXVI Army Corps, had no option but to withdraw it from combat to reconstitute.
²