Hitler's Commanders (53 page)

As a commanding officer, Sepp Dietrich was considered likable, enthusiastic, and courageous but not overly bright. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt called him “decent but stupid,” and SS General Willi Bittrich, who was his chief of staff in 1939, recalled, “I once spent an hour and a half trying to explain a situation to Sepp Dietrich with the aid of a map. It was quite useless. He understood nothing at all.”
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Undoubtedly an officer with inadequate training, he nevertheless ended up in charge of an entire SS panzer army at the end of the war. Fortunately for him, he had the natural shrewdness of a Bavarian peasant and a deep-seated common sense, which partially made up for his lack of education and training. He also had a habit of selecting excellent chiefs of staff, a talent that helped him immeasurably.

On June 30, 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, Dietrich personally commanded the firing squad that executed many senior members of the SA. “You have been condemned to death by the Fuehrer for high treason! Heil Hitler!” he shouted at each new victim. One of them was a long-time personal friend. “Sepp, my friend, what is happening? We are completely innocent!” cried SA Obergruppenfuehrer August Schneidhuber, as the SS put him up against the wall. Dietrich treated him like all the others; however, he became nauseated and left just before the SS riflemen opened up on Schneidhuber.
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For his services during the Blood Purge, Dietrich was promoted to SS-Obergruppenfuehrer (equivalent to a full general in the German Army). He led Hitler’s elite bodyguard unit in the reoccupation of the Saarland (1935), in the Anschluss (1938), in the march into the Sudetenland (1938), and in the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia (1939). He continued to direct it in the invasions of Poland (1939); Holland, Belgium, and France (1940); and Yugoslavia, Greece, and Russia (1941). During this period, the Leibstandarte was progressively upgraded into a motorized infantry division.

Sepp Dietrich played a most credible role in the Battle of Rostov on the Eastern Front in November and December 1941. After this battle (which Germany lost), Hitler arrived in southern Russia with the intention of sacking Colonel General Ewald von Kleist, the aristocratic commander of the 1st Panzer Army. Dietrich, however, stood up for Kleist and bluntly told the Fuehrer that he, Adolf Hitler, and not Kleist, had been wrong in the conduct of the battle. He also added that Hitler had been wrong to relieve Field Marshal von Rundstedt of his command for wanting to evacuate Rostov a few days earlier. Dietrich’s courageous intervention saved Kleist’s career and that of his chief of staff, Colonel (later Colonel General) Kurt Zeitzler, and eventually led to Rundstedt’s being recalled to active duty in March 1942. This would not be the last time Hitler’s former bodyguard saved an army comrade. In 1944, Dietrich’s personal intervention secured mercy for Lieutenant General Hans Speidel, Rommel’s former chief of staff, who had been arrested by Himmler’s security service in connection with the July 20 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Since Speidel was, in fact, guilty, Dietrich’s actions almost certainly saved his life.

At Rostov, Dietrich suffered first- and second-degree frostbite on the toes of his right foot. In January 1942, he returned to Germany to recover and, while home, married his second wife, Ursula Moninger, the daughter of a famous Karlsruhe brewery owner. Ursula had given birth to Dietrich’s first son, Wolf-Dieter, in 1939.
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Meanwhile, the Leibstandarte was withdrawn to France to rebuild and reequip. Dietrich joined it there in 1942 and led it back to the Russian Front in December. By that time it was an SS panzer grenadier division and had a strength of 21,000 men. Sepp Dietrich spent most of the rest of the war in combat. He assumed command of the I SS Panzer Corps on July 22, 1943, and of the 6th Panzer Army (later 6th SS Panzer Army) in late September 1944. In August 1944, he was promoted to Oberstgruppenfuehrer and became the 16th soldier (and one of only 27 in the war) to receive the Diamonds to his Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.

Despite the many honors provided to him by the Nazi government, Dietrich became increasingly disillusioned with Hitler’s leadership as the war progressed and was especially critical of his tendency to meddle in the detailed affairs of his generals. In July 1944, he told Field Marshal Erwin Rommel that he would obey his orders even if they conflicted with those of the Fuehrer. Whether he would have sided with the Desert Fox and the conspirators of July 20 in a showdown is anybody’s guess, because Rommel was critically wounded on July 17 and was still in a coma when the plot misfired.

Whatever else can be said of Dietrich, he genuinely liked his men and took care of them. In 1936, for example, he had occasion to order the arrest of a young SS lieutenant who lost his temper in a discussion in the officers’ mess and poured a stein of beer on a colleague’s head, thus provoking a fistfight. The normal disciplinary action for such conduct was a court-martial and dismissal from the Leibstandarte. However, when Dietrich learned that the young man’s wife was pregnant, he quietly had the charges dropped. This young officer was Kurt Meyer, who later became a Brigadefuehrer and, as one of Nazi Germany’s most decorated warriors, brilliantly led the 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitler Youth” in the Normandy campaign.
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Army General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin related another typical incident, which occurred in the campaign in Hungary near the end of the war. An 18-year-old boy who had been very much pampered by his mother was posted to a Waffen-SS tank crew; the men naturally had little sympathy for him and made life difficult for the spoiled youth. The boy soon deserted and headed for his home and his mother but was arrested en route. Duly tried, he was convicted and sentenced to death. It was up to his army commander, SS-Oberstgruppenfuehrer Dietrich, to confirm the sentence.

Instead of merely signing the death warrant, as many of Hitler’s commanders would have done at that stage of the war, Dietrich studied the records and ordered the condemned boy to appear before him. After listening to the lad’s tale of woe and mental anguish, the SS general rose and soundly boxed his ears. (This was the traditional, pre–World War I method Prussian officers used to handle minor infractions—and break eardrums!) He then sent the young private on a one-week leave to his mother’s, with orders to return to the 6th SS Panzer at the end of that time as a good soldier. The lad did as he was told and apparently grew up considerably in the process, as one might imagine. In any event he was a good soldier after that. And the record of the court-martial and death sentence disappeared.
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Dietrich put up a tenacious defense in Normandy and, like several of his army colleagues, called for a timely retreat from the Falaise sector before the Anglo-Americans could close the pocket. Ignored by Hitler, he did what he could to minimize the damage and was almost captured by a British patrol as a result. Dietrich was then sent back to Germany to organize the newly authorized 6th Panzer Army for the Hitler’s Ardennes counteroffensive. The SS general argued against this overly ambitious scheme, but when Hitler would not relent, Dietrich tried to make it work, without achieving any notable successes. He and his army were easily outperformed by General Baron Hasso von Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army to the south. Following this failure, Dietrich was sent to the East with his headquarters and was charged with conducting the Lake Balaton counteroffensive of 1945. Even though he attacked before all his units were ready, Dietrich did not achieve surprise and was soon defeated by the Red Army, which had a vast numerical superiority in every material category.

Furious over the lack of success of his elite SS troops in another fruitless counterattack in April 1945, Hitler issued an order stripping the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 9th SS Panzer divisions of their cuff bands. All four divisions were part of the 6th SS Panzer Army at the time. Dietrich retaliated by going one step further: he and his officers filled a chamber pot with their medals and prepared to send it to the Fuehrer Bunker in Berlin. Dietrich then instructed them to tie a Goetz von Berlichingen Division ribbon on it. (In Goethe’s drama
Goetz von Berlichingen
, the Knight tells the Bishop of Bamberg, “You can kiss my ass!” Dietrich knew that Hitler would fully understand the implications of his gesture.) As Louis Snyder wrote, “The incident expressed perfectly the personality of Sepp Dietrich.”
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As for the order to remove the cuff bands, the panzer army commander saw to it that it was not relayed to the rank and file (i.e., he ignored the order). Unfortunately, Hitler’s reaction to the chamber pot apparently was not recorded.

In spite of the chamber pot (or perhaps because of it), Sepp Dietrich was directed to hold Vienna at all costs from the onrushing Soviets in early April 1945. Dietrich knew that this was a hopeless mission. “We call ourselves
Panzerarmee 6
because we have only six panzers left,” he sneered grimly to his headquarters staff.
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Of course the hard-bitten and disillusioned but sensible commander had no intention of obeying such a ridiculous order. Despite Hitler’s directive that “he who gives the order to retreat is to be shot on the spot,”
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Dietrich pulled the remnants of his panzer army out of the Austrian capital on April 13. Fearing a possible reaction by Hitler, he surrounded himself and his headquarters with a heavily armed SS detachment, which was loyal to him personally. It turned out to be a needless precaution, because the Third Reich ended without Hitler trying to take any retaliatory action against his former favorite. Even so, Dietrich’s precautions were unquestionably sensible steps to take.

SS Colonel General Dietrich surrendered his army to the Americans in Austria on May 8, 1945, and was soon charged with murder in connection with the Malmedy massacre, where 86 American prisoners were executed by a group of SS men during the Battle of the Bulge. Since then, Charles Whiting has proven almost beyond question that Dietrich was nowhere near Malmedy at the time and knew nothing about the atrocity. Nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment on July 16, 1946. Ironically, he was confined in the fortress of Landsberg, where Adolf Hitler had written
Mein Kampf
22 years before. After the passions generated by the war died down somewhat, the former SS man was paroled on October 22, 1955.

Josef Dietrich’s legal problems were not over, however, because the West Germans were soon after him for another crime—and this time it was one he undoubtedly did commit. Duly convicted by a Munich court, he began serving an 18-month sentence on August 2, 1958, for his part in the Blood Purge of 1934. Again confined to Landsberg, he was released after only five months due to circulatory problems and a serious heart condition. He then returned to his family at Ludwigsburg—but not to his wife. She had apparently broken off her relationship with Dietrich during his first imprisonment, and they remained estranged. (She died in 1983.)

Now left alone in retirement, the former general of SS devoted himself to hunting and the activities of the HIAG. Unfortunately, because he could have told us much, he left no memoirs. Sepp Dietrich died suddenly in his bed (and perhaps in his sleep) of a massive heart attack on April 21, 1966. He was 73 years old.

helmut becker
, a protégé of Theodor Eicke, is typical of the controversy surrounding some of the leading members of the Waffen-SS today—especially those associated with the 3rd SS Panzer Division “Totenkopf.” He was born at Alt-Ruppin, Brandenburg province, on August 12, 1902, the son of Hermann Becker, a local housepainter. He graduated from the local high school (
Volksschule
) and started vocational training in Alt-Ruppin before he was accepted into the Reichsheer on August 1, 1920, as a private in the Prussian 5th Infantry Regiment, stationed at Neu-Ruppin in Brandenburg. The minimum service period in the Reichswehr at this time was 12 years, so Becker’s enlistment constituted a career choice. He served with the 16th Company of the 5th Infantry at Greifswald and with the 5th Company at Angermuende (70 miles northeast of Berlin), gradually rising to the rank of sergeant. By 1928 he was on the staff of the 2nd Artillery Regiment (2nd Infantry Division) at Stettin. When his enlistment expired in 1932, however, he was not selected for retention in the 100,000-man army. Naturally he was disappointed, but the Reichsheer was in a position to accept or retain only those it considered to be the very best, and they obviously did not consider Helmut Becker to be in this category. There is, however, no stigma attached to this; in fact, it was in the Reichsheer’s interests not to retain many of their experienced NCOs so that there would be vacancies for younger men, and the Reichsheer would not become an army of older people. Future SS generals Hermann Priess and Wilhelm Bittrich (who later smashed the British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem) were among those not selected for retention.
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In any event, Becker soon put on a new uniform: that of an
SS-Mann
(private of SS), which he joined on February 27, 1933. As we have seen, the SS at this time was full of enthusiastic young men but woefully short on people who could provide them with good (or even adequate) military training. Because of his experience in the Reichsheer and his own forceful personality Becker rose rapidly and within a year was an
Oberscharfuehrer
(equivalent to an Army
Feldwebel
, or sergeant first class in the present-day U.S. Army) and adjutant of the 74th SS-Standarte. He performed his tasks in this position so well that he was promoted to
Hauptscharfuehrer
(master sergeant) in March and, on June 17, 1934, became an SS-Untersturmfuehrer (second lieutenant of SS). Nine months later he was promoted to first lieutenant of SS (
SS-Obersturmfuehrer
). In the meantime, Helmut Becker served as a military trainer at Greifswald and as adjutant of the II Battalion of the SS-Standarte Germania.
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He seems to have found his home, however, when he was transferred to the 1st SS-Totenkopf-Standarte Oberbayern—one of Eicke’s paramilitary Death’s Head regiments of concentration camp guards—in 1935.