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  Von Schalburg (left) shows a united front with Clausen (right). Clausen’s heavy drinking would eventually contribute to his mental breakdown.

  Extremely rare photograph of Frikorps Danmark volunteers ready to fly into the Demyansk Pocket in the ever-reliable Junkers Ju-52 transport planes, the revered ‘Auntie Ju’s’.

  The Frikorps was now officially sanctioned, but this was not a rallying call designed to appeal to Clausen’s cohorts. For the several hundred Danish Nazis who had already stepped forward to enlist, Kryssing’s appointment was deeply unpopular and fuelled widespread anger. The men were moved from their initial base, at Hamburg Langenhorn, out east to Posen-Treskau in Silesia, but the move did nothing to lessen tensions and within a few months training had virtually stopped. The 1,164-man Frikorps was at war with itself. Graffiti began to appear on barrack walls reading ‘Away with the democrat Kryssing’, and the situation worsened when Kryssing had a young Danish volunteer arrested for spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. The Germans looked on with growing alarm and when it became clear that Kryssing had lost the confidence of many of his men, they acted. Along with a number of his fellow officers, Kryssing was removed from the Frikorps on 8 February 1942 and assigned elsewhere. Most of the deposed officers went to the SS-Wiking and ended up serving with distinction on the Eastern Front. As for Kryssing himself, he served in the Totenkopf, then the Wiking and ended up becoming the first non-German to attain general rank in the Wehrmacht when he was appointed to lead the 9,000 strong ‘Coastal Battlegroup’ at Oranienbaum in August 1943. Many of his former men were then in the new Scandinavian SS-Nordland Division right next door.

  Christian Fredrik von Schalburg

  With Kryssing’s departure a new commander was needed, and one was found from among the Danish ranks in the SS-Wiking – Count Christian Fredrik von Schalburg. Born in 1906 in Poltava, southern Russia, to a Danish father and aristocratic Russian mother, when still a boy his family fled Lenin’s new Bolshevik Soviet Union to Denmark where he was raised as a member of his class and commissioned into the social élite of the Danish Royal Life Guards Regiment. Handsome, popular and a good officer, the young Count rose to the rank of Captain and married into the German nobility (which allowed him to adopt the ‘von’ title). However his personal politics landed him in trouble. Von Schalburg was not a conservative like other members of his class such as Kryssing, he was a confirmed neo-Nazi. Not only did he join Clausen’s DNSAP, he became the head of its youth wing – the NSU. Not a man given to subtlety or quiet diplomacy, von Schalburg trumpeted his involvement in the DNSAP, leading youth marches and giving public speeches in his Life Guards uniform. This was all too much for his military superiors, who consequently demanded his resignation. Leaving the army, he signed up as one of Tretow-Loof’s company commanders in the Danish battalion being formed to fight the Russians in the Winter War, following which he came home to find the Germans ensconced in his homeland. Quickly reconciling himself to the new order, he joined the fledgling SS-Nordland as an officer and went with the Wiking as it advanced into the Soviet Union. Von Schalburg led his men from the front and earned both classes of the Iron Cross for his bravery during the summer’s fighting. Promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer, he took command of the Nordland’s 1st Battalion during the heavy autumn battles, and was part of a coterie of middle-ranking Danish officers in the Wiking – which included the anglophile artilleryman Johannes Brennecke, his old Winter War comrade Paul Rantzau-Engelhardt and his fellow Sturmbannführer, Svend Wodschow. His subsequent appointment to lead the Frikorps was an inspired decision. He was well-known in Denmark and was acceptable both to the Danish Nazis and to the conservatives. At last the bickering could stop and real training begin.

  The new year of 1942 had ushered in a new commander and a new spirit in the unit, in a few months time it would be confirmed as ready for combat and sent east. Unlike every other national legion, that journey would not end in the siege lines around Leningrad but in the cauldron of the Demyansk Pocket, where it would fight alongside the SS-Totenkopf Division for its very life.

  III

  1942: Nazi Germany’s High Water Mark –

  Leningrad, Demyansk and the Caucasus

  The violent cursed host came rushing through, threatening cruel perils, and after slaying with mad savagery the rest of the brothers they approached the holy father to compel him to give up the shrine, but the saint remained with unarmed hand and was torn limb from limb.

  The Viking raid on St Columba’s shrine on Iona in ad 825. A.O. Anderson, Early Sources of Scottish History 1922.

  Scandinavians across the Waffen-SS

  The failure of Typhoon at the very gates of Moscow signalled a series of Red Army winter counter-offensives that left tens of thousands of men dead in the snow. The majority were Soviet, but enough were German to leave the Wehrmacht chastened and weakened as 1942’s spring thaw arrived. At that time the Wehrmacht drew up a secret report, for OKW-eyes only, that stated that of their 162 combat divisions on the Russian Front, only eight were capable of offensive operations, and that the total armoured might of the German Army’s 16 panzer divisions was a miserable 140 tanks out of the original 3,332. The Red Army had also taken an unimaginable bludgeoning in the previous eight months or so, and had effectively lost its entire pre-war strength with more than 4,500,000 men either dead, wounded or in German Prisoner-of-War camps slowly starving to death. The Soviet Supreme Command, the STAVKA, had responded energetically and millions of men were called to the colours, but it would take time to equip and train them to face the Wehrmacht. Time was a problem for the Soviets but a killer for the Germans now that the United States and its awesome military potential was in the war. So OKW drew up plans to launch yet another massive strike in the summer and finish off the Soviets for good.

  A signpost put up by DNL members to remind themselves just how very far they are from home as they besiege Leningrad. (Erik Wiborg)

  The Scandinavian Waffen-SS would play their part in the coming campaign at both ends of the extraorinarily long Eastern Front. In the north, the now combat-ready Norwegian DNL, 1,218 men strong, was moving up to the trench lines surrounding Leningrad, while the 1,164 Danes of the Frikorps Danmark were nearing their baptism of fire in the inferno of the Demyansk Pocket hundreds of miles to the south. Farther south still, the SS-Wiking Division was licking its wounds from the winter fighting on the Mius River, while absorbing fresh intakes from the training depots. Having proved itself the previous year, the Wiking was to have a starring role in the coming German offensive.

  Recruitment disaster

  Not all was well with the Scandinavian Waffen-SS however, far from it. The advent of Barbarossa had indeed swelled the ranks of volunteers, but mainly in the two new national legions. Straight recruitment into the Wiking in particular was hard going. The SS authorities had hoped that a wave of anti-communist feeling in Scandinavia would see this number rocket and these fresh drafts would then swell the ranks of the Wiking over the winter. In reality, the numbers were relatively modest, so that by the beginning of February 1942 there were still only 947 Norwegians and 630 Danes in the ranks of the Wiking, while the 39 Swedes who had volunteered were spread across almost half a dozen Waffen-SS divisions (there was also one Swede in the Army’s 3rd Panzer Division and another in the Luftwaffe’s 8th Field Division). Unsurprisingly, the Swedish government was far happier to see their citizens enlist in the Finnish Army, so much so that the Finns formed an all-Swede unit, the Hangö Battalion, as part of the Finnish 13th Infantry Regiment that fought the Red Army on the Svir Front.

  You did not have to look far to find the reasons why recruitment was so meagre. Gottlob Berger made the point crystal clear in a letter he wrote to Himmler on 9 February 1942. Berger outlined the problem, emphasising just how bad the situation was, and then laid the blame squarely at the feet of his rival, SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner. Berger pointed out that while his recruiters were responsible for drumming up the volunteers in the
occupied lands, as soon as they signed on the dotted line they became the responsibility of Jüttner’s massive SS-Leadership Office (SS-FHA – 45,000 men strong no less). Jüttner would then train and equip them and allocate them to field units to maintain manning. This division of responsibility was, according to Berger, the root of the problem. While his staff made arrangements with volunteers around retention of any rank they had previously held, preference of unit to serve in, and other basic terms and conditions, all of this was blown out of the water by the heavy-handed methods and lack of sensitivity displayed by Jüttner’s organisation. The Swedish Army, for instance, was interested in seconding a number of officers to serve with the Germans to gain valuable frontline experience but despite Berger’s enthusiasm for the project, it came to nothing. Berger outlined the action of the SS-FHA that caused the venture to fail in a personal letter to Himmler: ‘The unceremonious discharge of one [Swedish] officer resulted in the closing off to us of the previously friendly Swedish officer corps and the destruction of a new and promising recruiting effort.’

  The situation was even worse in Denmark after an incredible foul-up. In one disastrous incident, nine young Danish volunteers were sent to Das Reich after receiving only four weeks basic training and were all killed in action within days. Back in Denmark the news spread like wildfire and caused outrage. Recruitment fell like a stone as disgust mounted at what Danes saw as a lack of care and a breach of faith by the Waffen-SS. It also left Gottlob Berger privately ranting against what he rightly viewed as gross incompetence by the office of his arch-rival.

  The result was widespread disillusionment among those willing to come forward. If he wanted to, Berger could also have quoted other examples from reports sent to him from the field, including the views of the controversial pre-war Norwegian writer, Winter War veteran, and now Waffen-SS DNL volunteer, Nils Per Immerslund:

  Every tie, every connection, between Germany and Norway is lacking. The Germans think the volunteers will accept whatever treatment is meted out, and that Germany is hugely superior, but this was before they knew it for what it really is and by now even the old Norwegian Nazis could no longer deny it.

  This was an important opinion given how high profile Immerslund was, both back home in Norway and within the Scandinavian Waffen-SS as a whole. The 31-year-old had already made a name for himself before the war through both his writing and his fighting, which saw him serve in Röhm’s SA in Germany and Franco’s Falange during the Spanish Civil War. His blond hair, blue eyes, film star looks and extreme views led him to be nicknamed ‘the Aryan idol’ (‘det ariske idol’ in Norwegian) in his homeland, but his self-loathing triggered by his homosexuality led him to seek out danger and take terrible risks. He ended up leaving the DNL, and became a correspondent in the SS’s own regiment of war reporters, the Kurt Eggers. Serving with the SS-Nord in Finland he was wounded in action and died on 7 December 1943 in an Oslo hospital.

  The anger of many of the volunteers at the treatment they received did not only manifest itself in words. In time-honoured military fashion some voted with their feet. Volunteers went home on leave and then fled to Sweden to avoid having to go back to their units, and on 12 March 1942 Felix Steiner reported back to SS headquarters in Berlin that, for the very first time in the war, the Waffen-SS had suffered from desertion at the front. Two Scandinavian privates serving in the SS-Nordland Regiment’s 1st Company had gone over to the Russians from their advanced outpost in the frontline. The resulting uproar was loud. Himmler wrote to Berger on 14 April about the incident:

  The Missing in Action report from SS Division Wiking on Privates Asbjørn Beckstrøm and Ludwig Kuta, a Norwegian and a Dane who both shamefully deserted, once again reinforces my opinion that the ideological and military training of Germanic volunteers must be increased to obtain real success or our earlier efforts will be jeopardised.

  In the Reichsführer’s mind, the application of National Socialist principles may have been the key to success, but the problems he was trying to address were often of great personal significance. Himmler himself admitted that up to a third of volunteers had been disowned by their families as a result of their enlistment, and some wives had even left their husbands over the issue. The Norwegian volunteer, Leo Larsen, expressed the problem succinctly when he wrote from the Front to a friend in 1942: ‘My father has very little sympathy with my political beliefs. So little, that when I tried to visit him on Christmas Eve while on leave (I hadn’t seen him for 7–8 months) he threw me out.’

  A group of Finnish SS officers conferring in the endless spaces of Russia, autumn 1942. (Olli Wikberg)

  The newly-formed Finnish SS Battalion parades in front of Colonel Horn (officer saluting), the Finnish Military Attaché to Germany, and their new commander Hans Collani (far right) at Gross-Born on 15 October 1941. Horn presented the Battalion with a new unit flag at this ceremony. The flag was lost during the retreats of spring 1943. (Olli Wikberg)

  This quote was included in an SS censor’s report sent direct to Himmler. Larsen was not alone, the Dutch Westland volunteer Jan Munk said of his own family’s reaction to his decision to volunteer: ‘I became the “black sheep” of my family. The great majority of Dutch people were strongly ant-Nazi. Certainly my parents were, my younger brother joined the Resistance, as did my elder sister’s husband.’ But Munk was also one of the lucky ones: ‘My parents never let me down though. My mother kept writing to me regularly as did my brother and two sisters. Fortunately mother kept all the letters that I sent to her and also photos and items that I left with her when on leave.’

  The Finnish Waffen-SS Volunteer Battalion

  What of the Finns? Well over a thousand had volunteered during 1941, and more than four hundred (those with combat experience) had spent the year fighting in the ranks of the Wiking. Eighty-one were killed in action in Barbarossa, with many more wounded, having fought the Red Army before they knew what to expect. The second tranche of 800 or so had spent all of summer and autumn being put through their paces on the training grounds of Vienna, Stralsund and Gross-Born. Apart from their battalion commander, Hans Collani, German involvement was not stifling, and to all intents and purposes the unit was an extension of the Finnish Army that just happened to wear Waffen-SS uniform. Receiving their Finnish-style battle standard in a ceremony on 15 October from Colonel Horn, the Finnish Military Attaché, the battalion was declared combat-ready on 3 December and dispatched east to join the Wiking in southern Russia in the New Year. It would prove a very welcome reinforcement to the depleted ranks of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS.

  The SS-Wiking – there and back again to the Caucasus

  1942 was set by both sides to be the decisive year of the war in the East. Hitler was determined finally to crush the Bolshevik threat, while Stalin was equally determined to see the Wehrmacht thrown out of Russia altogether. From the opening days of Barbarossa the previous summer, the Soviets had viewed Army Group Centre as the very fulcrum of the German war effort, and they assumed that the Germans shared this opinion. Accordingly STAVKA’s expectation was for an offensive under Field Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge – in a play on the German word for ‘clever’, klug, he was known as ‘clever Hans’ – who had replaced the ill von Bock on 19 December, in the centre, aimed at capturing Moscow. They were to be mistaken. While taking the capital of the Soviet Union and destroying the huge array of forces grouped around it might have seemed an obvious target, the Soviets had misread Hitler’s growing obsession with raw materials and the economics of war. The clue had been given the previous summer when, instead of thrusting forward and taking the capital in the autumn, Army Group Centre’s precious panzers had been diverted south for the encirclement battles in the Ukraine. Hitler ranted on about taking the Soviet Union’s ‘breadbasket’ and its industrial heartland in the Donets basin, and come 1942 he had the opportunity again to follow his own compulsion.

  A group of Nordland Regiment grenadiers during the Wiking’s advance into the Caucasus in the
summer of 1942. It is a lull in the fighting, hence they are wearing caps and not helmets.

  Hitler was clear to his generals; the main offensive would be launched by Army Group South and not Centre, and its objectives were the capture and securing of the oilfields in the Caucasus. With the Red Army growing stronger every day, and with Moscow and Leningrad still free, Nazi Germany’s military might would be aimed at one of the most mountainous and turbulent regions in all of the Soviet Union, with few major cities and no strategic significance. Ultimately, this momentous decision would lead to the turning point of the whole war, when the most powerful field army the Wehrmacht possessed died in the snow and rubble of Stalingrad.

  Case Blue (Fall Blau) was the codename given to the Wehrmacht’s southern offensive in 1942. Outlined in Führer Directive No. 21, of 5 April, the situation was described thus:

  The winter battle in Russia is drawing to its close. The enemy has suffered very heavy losses in men and materiel. In his anxiety to exploit what seemed like initial successes he has spent, during this winter, the bulk of his reserves earmarked for later operations … The aim is to destroy what manpower the Soviets have left for resistance and to deprive them as far as possible of their vital military-economic potential.

  This was strategic planning in cloud cuckoo land. Not only was the Red Army mobilising millions more men from its unconquered Russian heartland, but more than 1,500 factories, dismantled in 1941 and shipped eastwards, were now in full production and pumping equipment through the Soviet system. The scale of munitions production alone had quadrupled from the 1940 level of 63 million tonnes to over 250 million tonnes in the spring of 1942. On top of this, vast reservoirs of vital supplies from Britain and the USA were pouring through the port of Murmansk in the far north, as the Germans were punished for their inability to take the city that winter. On board those Allied convoys were boots, coats, tanks and aircraft, and thousands of sturdy American-made trucks, which were slowly but steadily transforming the Red Army from a foot and horse-borne force to an army superior in mechanisation to its supposedly more advanced German enemy. Time was running out for the Reich, but it had another chance to win that spring.