The Daring Dozen (34 page)

Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was still alive to witness the reunification of Germany in 1990, a joyous moment for a patriot who had emerged from the shameful years of the Third Reich with his honour intact. Now von der Heydte had also witnessed the fall of Communism in his country. He died in July 1994 aged 87, a death largely unreported in the new Germany, although the handful of men who had served under the ‘Rosary Paratrooper’ honoured the passing of one of the greatest airborne commanders of any nation.

Like Friedrich von der Heydte, Adrian von Fölkersam came from blue-blooded stock and was a soldier of great courage and resourcefulness. There, however, the similarities ended. Whereas von der Heydte was a fervent anti-Nazi, Adrian von Fölkersam served in the Waffen SS and fought alongside SS Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny in his elite commando unit.

There was another difference between the two men; whereas von der Heydte despised Russia, von Fölkersam was born in St Petersburg, the son of an admiral who had served in the Tsarist Russian Navy, fighting against the Japanese in the war of 1904–05.

Adrian von Fölkersam’s family fled Russia when the Revolution started and they settled in Germany. After school he completed a bachelor’s degree in economics at Berlin University, and lived for a while in Vienna. Von Fölkersam was 25 when World War II started, a thin, wiry man with the air of an academic. It was his gift for languages that led him to become a Brandenburg commando.

The Brandenburgers were the brainchild of Captain Theodor von Hippel, a World War I veteran who had served under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in German East Africa. During the campaign against the British, the Germans had operated as guerrilla fighters with stunning success and von Hippel believed the German Army should once again employ such tactics, creating small units of highly-trained men to operate behind enemy lines.

As Ralph Bagnold would discover when he first took his idea for the Long Range Desert Group to the British high command, von Hippel also learned that senior officers within the Germany Army were dismissive of the idea of an irregular unit. Undaunted by the rejection, in the summer of 1939 von Hippel approached Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, commander of the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, and received permission to form a 900-strong force. Canaris informed von Hippel that the force would be based at Brandenburgan-der-Havel, just an hour from Berlin and within easy reach of Canaris’ HQ.

Throughout the winter of 1939/40 von Hippel recruited the men for his unit, now known as the ‘Brandenburgers’ because of the location of their base. Some he found within the Abwehr, others were from the Free Corps of Sudetenland, and many were bored soldiers who had missed out on the invasion of Poland.

What von Hippel sought were men who had more than just toughness. His experiences in East Africa in World War I had taught him that it was the man who could think for himself, the man of initiative, who made the most effective Special Forces soldier. He also wanted soldiers who were fluent in English and Russian, useful for when Germany looked to attack those two nations.

One of the first to join the Brandenburgers was Adrian von Fölkersam. Fluent in English and Russian, he was a lieutenant in the autumn of 1939 and though the exact details of his recruitment are imprecise, there might have been a personal connection between von Hippel and the young officer.

Von Fölkersam joined 4 Company, one of three companies based at Brandenburg with another one at Cologne and a fifth in Austria. One of the men who served under von Fölkersam at this time was Hans-Dietrich Hossfelder, a 19-year-old from Breslau in the German-held region of Silesia. ‘My superior officer during this period was Adrian von Fölkersam, a wonderful officer who spoke the cleanest Russian I had ever heard,’ recalled Hossfelder in an interview in 1985.
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Von Fölkersam, Hossfelder and the other men of the Brandenburgers underwent a rigorous training programme at Quenzgut, the Abwehr training school just outside Brandenburg. In a thickly wooded area bordering Lake Quenz, Quenzgut was where the men were drilled in sabotage, explosives, weapons, unarmed combat and parachuting. They were also schooled in how to pass themselves off as Russian army officers and members of the Soviet secret police – the NKVD – and they learned how to drive Russian and British vehicles.

‘This camp was run by the Abwehr with SS instructors,’ remembered Hossfelder. ‘We were up at four in the morning, running ten kilometres, then coming back, have a shower, eat breakfast, attack the obstacle course, then do a ten mile rucksack run. After this it was about 1600 hours so we had dinner. We would receive political indoctrination on the tenets of National Socialism, why we were fighting the war, how great Hitler was, and why we had to swear an oath of allegiance to him. They showed us propaganda films, mostly illustrating why the Jews were our greatest enemy.’
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In April 1940 von Fölkersam’s 4 Company, under the command of Lieutenant Wilhelm Walther, had been moved to Münstereifel in the Rhineland in readiness for the invasion of the Low Countries. When the attack started on 10 May, 4 Company was tasked with seizing a number of bridges over the Juliana Canal, the 22-mile long waterway in the south of Holland near the town of Gennep, to facilitate the advance of the 7th German Infantry Division.

Among the bridges captured by the Brandenburgers on the night of 9/10 May was the Gennep railway bridge, across which roared two motorized divisions in the hours that followed. There were failures, however; at the Buggenum railway bridge near Roermond, a unit from 4 Company disguised as Dutch railway workers arrived to inform the Dutch soldiers on guard that they were there to inspect the structure. In fact they planned to remove the explosive charges put in place by the Dutch and then overpower the guards. At first the Dutch believed their story, but when they saw the Germans tampering with the charges, they detonated the explosives, killing three Brandenburgers and wounding three more. Nonetheless, von Fölkersam’s 4 Company’s had contributed much to the successful invasion of the Low Countries and their reward was a letter of thanks from General Albert Wodrig, commander of the XXVI Corps, and a Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for Lieutenant Wilhelm Walther. It was the first such decoration for a Brandenburger, but an award that in time would also be bestowed on von Fölkersam.

Months of frustration followed for the Brandenburgers after the successful conquest of Holland, Belgium and France. In late June the unit moved to Normandy in readiness for the invasion of Britain, training for a seaborne assault on Dover ahead of the main German task force. As they trained throughout the summer of 1940 they witnessed the aerial dogfights between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force, a battle in which the British eventually triumphed. The invasion of England was postponed and von Fölkersam and the other commandos returned to their barracks at Brandenburg.

For the next 18 months the Brandenburgers fought in a variety of theatres, from Greece to Yugoslavia to Romania, but by the early summer of 1942 the entire unit was deployed to the mountainous Caucasus region of south-west Russia to seize the oil facilities of Maikop and Baku. With the German Army fighting on two fronts in 1942, against the Russians in the East and against Anglo-American forces in North Africa, their war machine was badly in need of oil. Hitler had told General Friedrich von Paulus, commander of Sixth Army, that the seizure of the oilfields was a priority.

In August three German divisions – the 5th SS Panzer, the 13th Panzer and the 16th Motorized Infantry – launched an all-out offensive to capture the city of Maikop in the northern Caucasus. Two units of Brandenburgers were assigned to the attack. One, led by Lieutenant Ernst Prohaska, had orders to seize and hold the bridge over the river Bjelaja so that the three divisions could race into Maikop, while von Fölkersam’s unit had a far more challenging mission. Leading a 63-strong team of commandos disguised as members of the NKVD, von Fölkersam was to enter Maikop and capture the oil storage tanks before they could be blown up by the Russian defenders. It was an operation fraught with danger and one that had only two possible outcomes: success or death. To be captured wearing the uniform of the NKVD would result in torture and execution.

Lieutenant Ernst Prohaska’s unit began their mission on the afternoon of 9 August; driving towards the bridge over the river Bjelaja in four captured Russian half-tracks, all were wearing Russian military uniforms over their German battledress. Passing through several Russian checkpoints with ease, the Brandenburgers arrived at the bridge to find a Soviet tanker stationed at one end with several soldiers nearby. In a carefully coordinated attack, the Germans opened fire on the soldiers, while others seized the tanker and another section searched the bridge for explosive charges. Within minutes the bridge was secured and soon the first German armour moved down it into Maikop.

By the time Prohaska’s section had accomplished their task, von Fölkersam’s unit was deep inside Maikop, having advanced from the direction of Alexandrovskaja on 2 August. Initially all had gone well, but then in the suburbs of the city their convoy had been stopped at a roadblock manned by some genuine members of the NKVD. In faultless Russian, von Fölkersam explained their mission – that they had been sent to destroy the oil storage tanks in the event of a German occupation of the city. He passed himself off as ‘Major Turchin from Stalingrad’ and was directed to the NKVD headquarters in the centre of Maikop. The general to whom von Fölkersam reported was utterly convinced by the German imposter as well as flattered that the NKVD should send a special team to assist in their hour of need.

Von Fölkersam asked for a tour of the city’s defences so he could best observe where his men were needed in the case of a German attack. The general obliged and for three days the Brandenburgers reconnoitred Maikop at their leisure; then on 8 August, with the sound of the German artillery growing louder from the south, von Fölkersam briefed his men that they would execute their orders at dawn on the 9th.

Splitting into three groups, one party, under the command of Lieutenant Franz Koudele, occupied the central telegraph office, informing the workers that the city was being abandoned and they must leave at once. Koudele and his Russian-speaking men manned the telephones and informed all callers that they had received orders from Moscow that Maikop was to be evacuated.

Von Fölkersam, meanwhile, toured the city’s defences, urgently telling the Russian soldiers that orders had been received for the immediate withdrawal of all troops. As the exodus gathered pace, a third party of Brandenburgers drove to the oil storage tanks and arrived just as a detachment of Russian engineers were in the process of destroying the facilities. One tank was already in flames but von Fölkersam’s men ordered the engineers to leave for their own safety – they would finish the job.

The audacious mission had been achieved without a single fatality, and for his courage and leadership von Fölkersam was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.
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By the summer of 1943 the Brandenburgers had become a victim of their own success. No longer a small unit engaged in guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines, they had been expanded into a division and attached to the Grossdeutschland Panzer Corps. Disenchanted with what he saw as the misuse of the commando concept, von Fölkersam secured an interview with Major Otto Skorzeny, days after his brilliant operation to free Benito Mussolini from captivity at the Campo Imperatore Hotel in the mountains of Abruzzo. ‘He told me that there was great dissatisfaction in the ranks of the old Brandenburgers,’ recalled Skorzeny, who was the commander of a newly formed Special Forces unit, the SS Sonderlehrgang zbV Friedenthal.
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Von Fölkersam told Skorzeny why he was dissatisfied and asked if he and ten other Brandenburg veterans could join his unit. ‘I immediately took a great fancy to von Fölkersam, both as a man and a soldier,’ said Skorzeny, ‘and felt sure that in a tight corner I would certainly find him an experienced and valuable helper. I was only too pleased to assure him that I would do what I could.’
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It took all of Skorzeny’s charm and powers of persuasion to convince Admiral Canaris to agree to the transfer of von Fölkersam and the others to the SS Sonderlehrgang zbV Friedenthal. But in November 1943 the request was granted and von Fölkersam joined the unit as Skorzeny’s chief staff officer.

One of von Fölkersam’s first tasks was to plan for the Allied invasion of France, expected some time in 1944. Skorzeny had been given a list of ten likely landing places for an invasion fleet along the northern French coast, and von Fölkersam was instructed to think how best they could resist the Allies should they try to establish a bridgehead in the Cherbourg (Cotentin) Peninsula. ‘We suggested that we should establish small units at the points of greatest danger with a commission to attack prospective enemy headquarters and communication centres,’ said Skorzeny, who submitted the plan to the German High Command but heard nothing further.