The Himmler's SS (43 page)

SS panzergrenadiers entrenched in a village on the eastern front, October 1944.

On 12 January 1945, a great Soviet offensive was launched across Poland in preparation for the final assault on Berlin. Even so, Hitler's main concern was to safeguard the tenuous hold he still maintained over the Hungarian oilfields. The SS cavalry divisions ‘Florian Geyer' and ‘Maria Theresa' were besieged in Budapest, and in an effort to relieve them ‘Totenkopf' and ‘Wiking' were transferred from their key positions on the German–Polish border. A month-long battle failed to save the city, however, and it fell to the Russians on 13 February, with only 785 German soldiers escaping from the original garrison of 50,000 men. The 6th SS-Panzer Army was immediately moved in from the west and on 6 March a German counter-attack began. It was conducted by the largest aggregation of Waffen-SS forces ever witnessed during the war, comprising the Leibstandarte, ‘Das Reich', ‘Totenkopf', ‘Wiking', ‘Hohenstaufen', ‘Hitlerjugend' and ‘Reichsführer-SS', the latter division having been transferred from northern Italy. At first the SS did well, but there were insufficient back-up resources and by mid-March their advance had been halted.

‘Sepp' Dietrich at the time of the Ardennes offensive, wearing his collar patches as SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer und Panzer Generaloberst der Waffen-SS, the senior active tank man at the front. Although promoted to this rank on 20 April 1942, Wehrmacht pressure prevented him from using it or adopting the appropriate insignia until he had secured command of a suitably large force, which he did in the autumn of 1944 with the formation of the 6th SS-Panzer Army.

The failure of the Waffen-SS in Hungary, following on from the collapse of the Ardennes offensive, had a devastating psychological effect on Hitler, who had come to expect the impossible from them, and he openly accused Dietrich and his subordinates of betrayal. Despite that, SS troops carried on fighting as loyally as ever as they slowly retreated into Germany, bowed under the weight of superior Allied numbers and equipment. By now, thousands of grounded Luftwaffe personnel and ‘beached' sailors from the Kriegsmarine had been pressed into an infantry role alongside the Waffen-SS. During the last week in April, when Soviet forces broke into Berlin, Felix Steiner led a battle group of hard-core Waffen-SS including elements of the ‘Polizei', ‘Frundsberg', ‘Nordland', ‘Wallonien', ‘Charlemagne' and ‘Nederland' divisions, as well as some 600 men from Himmler's personal escort battalion, in a life and death struggle to defend the Führerbunker. However, most other SS units had by then accepted the reality of the situation and were pushing westwards to surrender to the Anglo-American Allies, rather than risk capture by the Russians.

It is estimated that some 180,000 Waffen-SS soldiers were killed in action during the Second World War, with about 400,000 wounded and a further 70,000 listed ‘missing'. The entire establishment of the élite divisions, Leibstandarte, ‘Das Reich' and ‘Totenkopf', were casualties several times over, with only a few battle-hardened veterans surviving to train the continual injections of young Germans and Volksdeutsche fed in as replacements via the divisional training battalions. A close comparison between the number of men recorded killed, wounded or missing in the ‘Totenkopf' division (60,000) and ‘Wiking' division (19,000) gives a startlingly different loss ratio. Since both divisions served for the most part alongside each other, the only reason for such horrendous losses must have been the mishandling, or at least rough handling, of ‘Totenkopf' troops by their commanders. Certainly, Eicke and his successors were not renowned as humanitarians and it is known that ‘Totenkopf' had more requests for ‘transfers out' than any other Waffen-SS division. A large proportion of the men who volunteered for service in the SS paratroop forces were ‘Totenkopf' transferees, and it was widely recognised that the paratroop battalion was virtually a suicide squad. The fact that many hardened soldiers chose to escape from ‘Totenkopf' by signing up with the paras gives an indication of the severity and long-term nature of the suffering which ‘Totenkopf' troops had to endure. Among other Waffen-SS men, Death's Head units became known colloquially as ‘Knochenstürme' (Bones Companies), or ‘that lost lot'.

By 1944–5, SS soldiers were normally in their late teens, and the average age of a Waffen-SS junior officer was twenty, with a life expectancy of two months at the front. Moreover, it was not uncommon for divisional commanders to be in their early thirties, men like Kraas, Kumm, Meyer, Mohnke, Wisch and Witt who had joined the LAH or SS-VT around 1934 and progressed through the ranks. The combination of youthful enthusiasm, political indoctrination and hard-bitten experience was a winning one, and goes a long way to explaining how a division such as ‘Hitlerjugend' could suffer 60 per cent casualties over a four-week period in 1944 and yet still retain its aggressive spirit, thereby gaining for the entire Waffen-SS the admiration of friend and foe alike.

The Flemish SS-Sturmmann Richard ‘Remi' Schrijnen of 3rd Company, SS-Freiwilligen Sturmbrigade ‘Langemarck', being paraded before his fellow soldiers near Prague after receiving the Knight's Cross on 21 September 1944. He is accompanied by Konrad Schellong, the brigade commander, and adjutant Willy Teichert.

Ultimately, more than half the membership of the Waffen-SS comprised non-Germans. In line with Himmler's intention that the SS should develop as a Germanic, rather than a German, organisation, small numbers of suitable foreign nationals had been admitted to the armed SS even before the war, including at least one soldier of dual German/British nationality who served with the SS-VT Standarte ‘Deutschland'. Docu-mentary proof of Aryan descent was initially a prerequisite for acceptance, but with the rapid expansion of the Waffen-SS after 1940 the racial rule became something of a dead letter. During the war, the hard-pressed RuSHA authorities were content to accept a signed declaration of Aryan descent from enlisted German and west European Waffen-SS men, which could be investigated later when necessity demanded or when the opportunity presented itself.

With the German conquest of western Europe, the door to a huge pool of manpower which the Wehrmacht had no authority to conscript was opened to Berger's recruiting officers. Large numbers of pro-Germans, anti-Bolsheviks, members of local pseudo-Nazi political parties, adventurers and simple opportunists were only too eager to throw in their lot with the winning side. The first complete unit of foreign volunteers to be raised by the SS was the Standarte ‘Nordland', from Norwegians and Danes. It was soon joined by the Standarte ‘Westland', comprising Dutchmen and Flemings, and in December 1940 these two formations combined with the SS-VT Standarte ‘Germania' to become SS-Division ‘Wiking', a truly European force. The main impetus to the recruiting of further so-called ‘foreign legions' was the impending invasion of the Soviet Union, and in order to attract sufficient numbers of these troops the Germans reluctantly accepted that they would have to co-operate with the pro-Nazi political parties in each country, and that the new units would have to retain some of their own national characteristics. The idea of national legions was quickly extended from the Germanic countries to those ideologically sympathetic to Germany, such as Croatia. However, during the early stages of the war at least, Himmler was not prepared to accept racially dubious volunteers into the SS and so the eastern legions, such as the French, Walloon Belgians and Spaniards, were assigned to the army.

Léon Degrelle and men of his Walloon Division in Pomerania, 9 March 1945. Degrelle wears the Close Combat Clasp in Gold and his unique ‘Wallonien' cuff title hand-embroidered in Gothic script. The SS-Unterscharführer in the foreground is a Frenchman, Jean Lejeune. When Belgium was liberated at the end of 1944, Degrelle was sentenced to death in absentia as a collaborator. In May 1945 he flew from Oslo to Spain in Albert Speer's private aircraft. He was protected by General Franco, became a wealthy industrialist and was granted Spanish citizenship in 1954, taking the new name of Léon José de Ramirez Reina. In the 1960s he attended his daughter's wedding wearing the full uniform of an SS-Standartenführer! Degrelle, who dubbed himself the world's last Fascist leader, died on 1 April 1994, aged 87.

During 1940–1, the SS-sponsored legions ‘Flandern', ‘Niederlande', ‘Norwegen' and ‘Freikorps Danmark' were raised. Their troops were distinguished from those in the German SS proper by special national badges and by their oath, which committed them solely to the war against communism. The legions were categorised as being ‘attached to' rather than ‘part of' the Waffen-SS, and were designated by the new title of ‘Freiwilligen' or ‘Volunteer' units. The recruitment programme soon ran into difficulties, however, when the legionaries found that many of their German colleagues held them in low regard. Despite promises of free land in the conquered east for all victorious SS soldiers, and the bestowal of full German citizenship upon every foreign volunteer after the war, morale plummetted, particularly when ‘Flandern' was decimated in Russia early in 1942 and had to be disbanded. The other three legions were reinforced and, at the end of 1942, amalgamated to form the ‘Nordland' division. A year later the Dutch contingent was sufficiently strong to be removed and given the status of an independent brigade, which eventually developed into the ‘Nederland' division. Both ‘Nordland' and ‘Nederland' fought well on the eastern front, particularly in defence of the Baltic states, and, together with the rest of Felix Steiner's 3rd (Germanic) SS-Panzer-Korps, they took part in the celebrated ‘Battle of the European SS' at Narva in July 1944 before being destroyed in the final struggle for Berlin the following year. Other western SS formations of note included the ‘Wallonien' Division, which was transferred from the army as a brigade in 1943 and fought with distinction under the Belgian fascist leader Léon Degrelle; and the French ‘Charlemagne' Division, again transferred from the army, which was one of the most redoubtable defenders of Berlin. A fifty-eight-strong ‘British Free Corps' was drawn from former British Union of Fascists members and other disaffected individuals in British prisoner-of-war camps, but was of propaganda value only.