Hitler's Vikings Page 12

  Ornulf Bjornstadt, a Norwegian volunteer in the Germania, was in the line on a stretch of high ground near Grozny:

  When I settled down for the night in my foxhole which was on a hillock, it was raining hard. The temperature dropped and the water trapped in the foxhole iced over while I slept. When I awoke it was iron hard and I was literally frozen to one wall. I couldn’t move at all and my left side was totally paralysed. There was a bunker not far away where earlier there had been an attack by mortars which did plenty of damage, killing our company commander and wounding a lot of our men. Because of that there were doctors around and one managed to get to me after he heard me yelling. The only way to get me down the hillock was astride a motorcycle combination and I was bumped along until we reached a small town which had a hospital and spa baths originally used by senior Communist officials and now occupied by us.

  It was luxury to be between clean white sheets and the treatment was marvellous. There was even Norwegian staff, including nurses! I was in high fever when I arrived and then I became crippled with rheumatism, and it was a full month before I was able to be sent back to my unit, which was now in sight of a small Georgian village near the town of Osnokitsa. This was wooded country. The Elbrus, the highest mountain in the region and also all of Europe, towered above us. We set up a bunker in an abandoned house, establishing our mortar positions with infantry support, mine was near a creek – ideal because beyond was flat land leading to the village and it was good for observation.

  I was not on night duty at that time, which was lucky. One night there was a Russian scout patrol right in the path of my mortar position. Our men opened up. Next morning I discovered the body of a Russian officer slumped across my bunker. He had been caught in a burst of machine-gun fire.

  The enemy was very active, striking out from the village again and again, mostly by day. The latest mortar grenades we were issued were very effective against them. They would land on the flat ground and then bounce up into the air before exploding with a deadly cascade of shrapnel splinters.

  When we took Red Army prisoners we put them to good use, mostly digging trenches. I remember one wretched lad who was quivering with fear when we took him. He looked desperate and told me he wanted to be my friend. I took pity on him and put him to work as the company’s cook. He had that job for about three months before I turned him loose to go back to his own lines. What happened to him after that I don’t know.

  What Bjornstadt didn’t know at the time was that if the local Red Army commander had followed STAVKA’s express orders the young cook would have been tried for cowardice, found guilty and shot. In Stalin’s eyes there was no excuse for being captured.

  Bjornstadt was not the only volunteer to be struck down by the terrible conditions in the Caucasus. Over in the Nordland’s 7th Company the young Dane, Paul Hveger, was also suffering: ‘I’d served in all the fighting in 1941 and 1942 right up to the Caucasus and never been wounded; but then I contracted jaundice and was sent home. That was the end of my service with the Nordland.’

  With the Wehrmacht at the very end of its thousands of miles of supply lines, the increasingly bold Soviet forces launched attack after attack against their worn-out enemy. Bjornstadt and the rest of the Wiking’s grenadiers had to cut their way through to the suddenly trapped 13th Panzer Division and pull them out to safety. All along the Front, the Wehrmacht began to pull back, and the withdrawal became official on 11 December. Army Group A was heading back north.

  Stalingrad

  The reason for the retreat was simple. Up north on the Volga River, the entire German Sixth Army was dying in Stalingard’s choking ruins. The majority of Nazi Germany’s allied armies – two Rumanian, and one each of Hungarians and Italians – had also been shattered in the encirclement battle that trapped von Paulus’s men. In desperation, Hermann Hoth was leading his Fourth Panzer Army in Operation Winter Storm to try and cut a way through to their starving brethren. His panzers formed a wedge in front of a massive fleet of 800 trucks piled high with over 3,000 tons of supplies intended to revitalise the Sixth Army. All effort was thus focused on Stalingrad, and the cupboard for the Caucasus was literally bare. Now the threat was of destruction. If the Red Army could strike southwest from Stalingrad and take Rostov, then the whole of Army Group A would be cut-off in the Caucasus. One million men could be lost. For the Ostheer, the German Army in the East, it would be the end. There was no option, the Wiking’s Scandinavians would have to retrace their steps all the way back to the Don. Case Blue had failed.

  The cold reality of that summer’s defeat demonstrated that Nazi Germany simply did not possess the resources or strategic focus to deliver a killing blow to the Soviet Union. They lacked what the great post-war German historian Paul Carrell christened ‘the last battalion’ that could make all the difference and bring final victory.

  Away from the far south, 1942 was also the ‘year of the legions’; the Norwegians at Leningrad, and the Danes at Demyansk and Velikiye Luki.

  Leningrad – the DNL in the 2nd SS Motorised Infantry Brigade

  Built on reclaimed swamp land at the cost of thousands of labourers’ lives, Leningrad (the renamed St Petersburg), was an architectural jewel. The Neva River and its tributaries, then as now, flowed gently through picturesque canals and waterways, while the banks were lined with the imposing residences of Russia’s pre-Revolutionary Tsarist élite. Romanov palaces jostled with gothic-style opera houses and world-class museums, while Leningraders strolled through beautifully laid out parks and squares. Like every Russian city, Leningrad also had its enormous factory complexes belching out smoke, but unlike Moscow, there was very little that was grim or grey about the place proud to call itself the ‘Venice of the north’. When Barbarossa was launched, the citizens of the city felt they had little to fear given that the frontline was initially hundreds of miles to the west, but the huge German victories in the border battles and the loss of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had come as a great shock to the city, as the might of the Wehrmacht drew ever closer. A vengeful Finland had then launched its own offensive to the north of the city, recapturing all the ground it had been forced to cede to Russia after the Winter War. The Finns, though, did not press home their advantage, and were content to sit on the Svir River line and portray their advance as little more than the righting of a terrible wrong. The breathing space gave the Soviets the time and opportunity to turn their full attention on von Leeb’s Army Group North and its three armies: the Sixteenth, Eighteenth and Panzer Group 4.

  DNL legionnaires relax in the sun outside their bunker near Leningrad, 1942. (Erik Wiborg)

  Dominated by foot-marching infantry, and having an area of operations unsuited for fast, mobile troops, the northern prong of the German invasion force was the weakest and least important in the Barbarossa plans. Priority for men and equipment went to the far more glamorous sectors to the south, as the likes of Guderian, Hoth and von Manstein raced through Belarus, the Ukraine and across the Dnieper. The commanders of von Leeb’s infantry Armies, Ernst Busch and Georg von Küchler, were steady, professional soldiers, but not men to set the world alight. Erich Höppner, Panzer Group 4’s tall, aggressive commander, was a different proposition entirely, driving his men relentlessly onwards and even being somewhat reckless on occasions. With the Baltic States captured, and the Germans at the very gates of Leningrad, von Leeb did not have the strength to capture the city outright, and so settled into an uninspired siege of the city hoping to bring about its surrender by bombardment and starvation. Tens of miles of trenches were dug, as the German infantry began a front life their forefathers in the last war on the Western Front would have recognised. Legion Hauptscharführer Bjørn Østring said of the conditions:

  With temperatures below -30C it was terrible. The positions that we inherited from the attack units [elements of the 58th Infantry Division and the Leibstandarte] were established in a rush just after the cold weather started and after the Army were ordered out of the conquered p
arts of the city. An order from Hitler said that we would not take responsibility for the civilians of the city throughout the winter. The bunkers were virtually snow caves since the ground was frozen solid and was impossible to dig into. One of my units had it so low under the ‘ceiling’ of their bunker that our biggest soldier could not turn around at night as his hip was too wide! The soot from our improvised cod oil lamps made us look like Africans, but with white skin around the eyes where the back of our hand sometimes would wipe the moisture away.

  Bjørn Østring surveys the enemy in front of his trench near to Leningrad. (Erik Wiborg)

  Norwegian DNL legionnaires dig in around Leningrad, winter 1942. (Erik Wiborg)

  Making things worse was the fact that the already depleted formations of Army Group North had to besiege not one place but three. To the west of the city the Germans had been unable to take the huge naval base of Kronstadt and its environs on the Gulf of Finland, this was the so-called ‘Oranienbaum Pocket’ and was defended by the Soviet Coastal Army. To the east of the city the town of Schlüsselburg, on the shores of Lake Ladoga, held out. Both had to be invested, as well as Leningrad itself, and with the Red Army determined to break the siege from their lines on the Volkhov River to the east, von Leeb’s weary divisions were stretched very thin indeed. With the majority of OKW’s Strategic Reserve committed, and the lion’s share of reinforcements going to the southern and central fronts, a series of scratch formations were hastily put together to try and hold the lines in the north. One such unit was the 2nd SS Motorised Infantry Brigade (2. SS-Infanterie-Brigade (mot.) in German). Along with its sister formation, the 1st SS Motorised Infantry Brigade, this unit was to have one of the most controversial records in the history of the Waffen-SS.

  Originally formed from ‘spare’ Totenkopf regiments not required for the frontline divisions, the two brigades began life as anti-partisan security formations. They quickly established a reputation for brutality and ruthlessness. The cadre unit for the 2nd Brigade was Totenkopf Regiment 4, and a taste of its record can be found in its After Action Report for 26 October 1941. The report stated that after the radio interception of Soviet communications, the Brigade was put on readiness for an anticipated assault through the Skajadub Novka Bridgehead on the night of 25/26 October. The Soviets duly attacked, but had lost all surprise and were repulsed, with no SS losses, but ‘15 suspected terrorists and saboteurs from Tossno were sentenced to death and shot.’

  Over time, the Brigades were to become heavily manned by foreign volunteers with several thousand Latvians on the books, along with the Flemings of SS-Legion Flandern and the Norwegians of the DNL. In fact, the arrival of the DNL instituted a reorganisation of the 2nd Brigade with the splitting off of several units to form Battlegroup Jeckeln (Kampfgruppe Jeckeln) on 17 February 1942. Alongside the Norwegians were a mixture of SS and Army units including elements from the departing 58th Infantry Division (Reconnaissance Battalion 158, Anti-tank Battalion 158, two batteries of Artillery Regiment 158 and seven infantry gun platoons), the 212th Infantry Division’s 320th Infantry Regiment, four infantry gun platoons and the Artillery Regiment from the SS-Polizei Division, and last but not least, no fewer than five battalions of Order Police (Ordnungspolizei 56, 121, 305, 306 and 310). This curious mix of frontline and rear area units was commanded by a man who had already steeped himself in blood in southern Russia – SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln. Jeckeln was a vicious anti-Semite who, following behind Army Group South the previous year as Higher SS and Police Leader for South Russia, had ordered and led mass executions of Jews and Communists across the Ukraine. He butchered 23,600 Jews at Kamenets-Podolsk in August 1941. Less than a month after the SS-Wiking took the town of Dnepropetrovsk and its massive dam, Jeckeln was there, slaughtering 15,000 of its inhabitants (almost all Jews) in October the same year.

  Fortunately for the Norwegians, their contact with Jeckeln was strictly limited, and they were used in the frontline rather than in the infamous ‘mopping up operations’ behind the lines. Their first stop was the outer Leningrad suburb of Pushkin, right at the very end of the southern tramline out of the city. They were there only for a few days before being moved 13 kilometres to the west to Krasnoye Selo, the home of the old Tsarist summer palace. Here they dug in close by to the German artillery lines.

  The DNL itself was organised in five companies; three of line infantry, and one each of heavy weapons and anti-tank guns, all commanded by Norwegians with minimal German liaison staff. Olaf Lindvig commanded the 1st Company, Karsten Sveen the 2nd, Jørgen Braset the 3rd, and Ragnar Berg the heavy weapons company. Finn Finson commanded the vital anti-tank gun company, curiously numbered as the 14th.

  Each infantry section (and this was a battle for infantry and gunners, not dashing tankers) lived in a bunker deep underground, which they tried in every way possible to make liveable. Photos of sweethearts, family and friends were hung on the walls and the earthen floor was covered with boards or sacking. A stove, usually in the centre of the bunker, was kept going throughout the winter months in a desperate attempt to stay warm. Everybody then had their own bunk, hung with their kit and a few meagre personal possessions, woe betide any man who disturbed that. On a rota basis, the men would climb the stairs out of the bunker into the communication trench that connected all the bunkers together. There they would take turns to stand guard, the infamous ‘stagging on’, watching for any movement from the Soviet lines often built no more than a few hundred metres away across no-man’s land. On occasions, each section would also go forward and take up position in a forward trench or outpost. Here they would be constantly ready to repel a Soviet attack or report back on any enemy movements. The exposed nature of these assignments meant they were very unpopular and the troops looked forward to their relief and a few hours rest back in the darkness of their underground home.

  Jonas Lie presents a medal to Olaf Lindvig. Lie was a part-time detective novelist before the war. He would go on to serve for several spells at the Front before dying in mysterious circumstances at Skallum at the end of the war. (James Macleod)

  Trench life is a claustrophobic existence, where life is dominated by the most basic human needs and above all else, the weather. When it’s cold, you freeze, when it’s hot you swelter and no matter what, you are always wet and filthy. Everything stinks and everything rots, as the world shrinks around you to your own small piece of dirt. For the Norwegian volunteers of the DNL, the dirt around Leningrad was to be the backdrop to their war.

  The Norwegians and the Siege of Leningrad

  The siege of Leningrad, the longest in history, was an odyssey of human misery and endurance. The Germans lacked the strength to take the city and the Soviets the strength to free it. The result was a messy, vicious campaign, dominated by high explosive and hunger. German artillery and aircraft routinely bombarded the city, flattening buildings and killing civilians. With no food coming in and limited stocks, rationing soon became incredibly harsh. By late December 1941 Red Army soldiers in the line were receiving just 500 grammes (17.6 ounces) of bread per day, essential workers got 350 grammes (12.2 ounces) and everyone else a tiny 200 grammes, that’s just four slices of a modern loaf of bread to hold together body and soul during a Russian winter. It just wasn’t enough, and by January 1942 some 3,500–4,000 people were dying of disease and starvation every single day. The Leningrader, Valentina Fedorovna Kozlova, just 18 years old at the start of the blockade, said:

  Bjørn Østring’s bunker at Urizk in 1942. On the left is Bjørn himself, then his Company’s German liaison officer Dieter Radbruch with the glasses, and on the right is Bjørn’s second-in-command Henrik-Skaar Pedersen. Leningrad harbour is just visible through the window – Quisling’s photo is on the wall above Radbruch. (Bjørn Østring)

  The DNL gunner is manning an ex-French Army Hotchkiss machine-gun, indicating that the Legion was often armed with inferior weapons from captured stocks rather than the very latest modern German weapons.

  A f
riend tends the grave of the DNL officer Charles Westberg. Westberg served in the Norwegian Army and was a member of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling before joining the Norwegian SS. An experienced and well-liked officer he was killed by a direct artillery hit to his command bunker on the Leningrad front on 19 March 1942.

  Conditions in the Leningrad siege lines were primitive but there was always time for a smile with your comrades when the sun came out.

  The low-lying land of the Urizk plain was prone to flooding so every trench was always half-filled with water.

  Three volunteers come out of their subterranean bunker to take in some much-welcome fresh air (above) and Bjørn Østring and his section commanders from the DNL’s 1st Platoon of the 1st Company, (below) in the moonscape terrain around Urizk; from left; the platoon second-in-command Henrik-Skaar Pedersen, Bjørn Østring himself, Einar Gill Fasting Jr and finally Per Bradley. (All Eric Wiborg)

  A Norwegian DNL gunner with his MG34 in the lines around Leningrad. Conditions resemble the very worst of World War One trench fighting.

  A Norwegian DNL volunteer uses a net to try and keep the swarming mosquitoes off his head, Leningrad 1942. (Erik Wiborg)

  First and foremost the blockade meant hunger. I suffered from a state of extreme malnutrition. My pre-war weight of 60 kilos (132 pounds) fell to 39 kilos (86 pounds) by July 1942. There was no running water or sewer system. Hunger dominated, and the winter of 1941–1942 was intensely cold. German bombers raided frequently. Buildings burned and collapsed and people perished.