Hitler's Vikings Page 15

  I was wounded in January 1943 at the battle for Mga, this was hard fighting, my 75mm PAK [PanzerAbwherKanone – anti-tank gun] destroyed the first T-34 in the battle. I was wounded when a Katyusha rocket hit a load of Tellermines that exploded. I was flung several metres up in the air and my friends had to dig me out. I came to, lying wounded, and was transferred to a first aid post behind the lines. At the end of this battle there were so few survivors from the Company that the PAK cannons were given to the Dutch. I later found out that my cannon was given to Gerardus Mooyman, who destroyed so many tanks at Mga with this cannon that he became the first foreigner to be awarded the Knight’s Cross.

  Mooyman was only 19 years old at the time but that didn’t stop him from knocking out 13 Soviet tanks on 13 February alone.

  Somehow though, the defenders hung on, and the Norwegians of 14th Anti-tank Company in particular were singled out for praise by grateful German commanders. Three members of the DNL – SS-Hauptscharführer Arne W. Nilsen and SS-Unterscharführers Per Meidell and Nils Lande – received the Iron Cross 1st Class for bravery during the fighting.

  The DNL’s swansong

  The Ladoga fighting turned out to the last for the DNL. Even with fresh drafts of men coming in over the winter, the Legion was still only some 700 men strong, and was withdrawn back to Krasnoye Selo in late February as the two-year terms of its original enlisters came to an end. The grind of trench warfare had slowly eaten away at the fabric of the unit, and although it suffered the fewest casualties of all the legions (some 158 Norwegian legionnaires were killed in action during its lifetime), the DNL ‘felt’ battered and bruised. Thus the decision was taken in Berlin to withdraw the unit back to Norway and decide from there what to do next. The ex-policemen of Lie’s Company led the way and left for home on 1 March, to be followed a few days later by the rest of their comrades. Given two weeks welcome home leave, the DNL then reformed in Oslo and held one last parade through the city to the Slotts Palace. There, at an official ceremony, the Den Norske Legion was disbanded and its members released from service in the Waffen-SS. Most would never wear the uniform again, and one of those was Bjørn Østring:

  After my leave in Norway I was retained there at home by Quisling for Party service, i.e. as head of his 150-strong Førergarden personal bodyguard at his residence ‘Gimle’, and that was where I was when the war ended. I had an awkward feeling of ‘letting down’ my comrades out East, but orders are orders. That then was the end of my front service. I had been wounded, but so slightly that I made no fuss about it. It wasn’t until many years later that I began to feel ‘uneasy’ in my neck, a doctor gave me a local and removed a ‘wandering’ shell fragment.

  Many other volunteers felt they had ‘done their bit’ out East, and either went back to civilian life or, like Bjørn, served instead within NS party functions or paramilitary bodies. But not all followed this path. Some would sign on again, and they would join their Danish, Swedish and Finnish brethren in a whole new venture.

  The Demyansk Pocket

  The siege of Leningrad was not the only battle Army Group North was fighting in 1942. In the swamps and forests around the Lovat River to the south, some 95,000 of its men were cut off and fighting for their very lives in the Demyansk Pocket.

  As elsewhere along the Russian Front that winter, the Red Army had launched itself at the invaders on the Lovat, determined to deal them a shattering blow. South of Lake Ilmen, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, arguably the Red Army’s finest commander of the war, had sent three entire armies crashing into just two German infantry divisions on the night of 7 January 1942. The poor German landsers (German equivalent to ‘Tommy’) were all but wiped out. The resulting crisis cost von Leeb his job as he was replaced by Eighteenth Army’s commander, Georg von Küchler. But sacking von Leeb did not stop the Soviet tanks rolling and linking up west of Demyansk a few days later. In the pocket were no less than five German infantry divisions and Theodor Eicke’s 3rd SS-Totenkopf Division. In temperatures that often plunged to minus 30 degrees C, and in snow three feet deep, the encircled Germans fought like demons to avoid disaster. Thousands died, despite the Luftwaffe successfully delivering the required 200 tonnes of supplies a day the troops needed, and evacuating some 35,000 wounded men.

  Eicke especially was incandescent with rage that his treasured division was being bled to death in the wastes of Demyansk, and demanded reinforcements to keep it alive. Few were forthcoming, but OKW was on the lookout.

  The Danish Waffen-SS arrives

  Meanwhile back in Posen-Treskau, the charismatic Christian von Schalburg had transformed the Danish Frikorps from a fledgling organisation riven by internal dissention, into a solid, well-drilled, reinforced infantry battalion. He had integrated 10 experienced German officer instructors into key posts to help stiffen the unit, and had led it through a tough training régime. The Danmark now had three infantry companies, and one heavy weapons company with two platoons of 75mm infantry cannons, one platoon of 50mm anti-tank guns, and a combat engineer platoon, all at full-strength. That were still only a paltry seven heavy calibre weapons, but at least it was something. Many of its men were untried and untested, but at its core was a strong cadre of professional officers, NCOs and men, most of whom had some sort of battle experience, either in the Winter War, with the SS-Wiking, or indeed against the Germans themselves.

  When the Frikorps was finally declared combat-ready in May 1942, the German High Command made a momentous decision regarding its future. Up until then the volunteer legions had almost uniformly been viewed as second-rate in comparison to German formations, and unsuited to anything more than static warfare, hence their concentration around Leningrad and in anti-partisan fighting (the French of the LVF were an example of the latter). Now, this situation was to change dramatically as the order went out to send the Danes into Demyansk. A land corridor to the beleaguered defenders had finally been established on 22 April after 73 days of brutal combat, but the fighting was far from over, and the Frikorps was actually flown into the Pocket, from Heiligenbeil near Köngisberg, to fight alongside the battling Totenkopf veterans.

  Per Sörensen – a well-regarded pre-war Danish Army officer, Per Sörensen led the Frikorps Danmark’s 1st Company at Demyansk before transferring to the Nordland Division. He would eventually command the whole Danmark Regiment before being killed in action in Berlin in April 1945.

  From left, Per Sörensen, the only ever Danish commander of the Danmark Regiment, Rudolf Ternedde, the highly decorated German officer who ended up commanding the remnants of both the Norge and Danmark Regiments in the ashes of Berlin, and finally the Danish volunteer Alfred Jonstrup. Jonstrup recovered von Schalburg’s body after his death in the Demyansk Pocket and was awarded the Honour Roll Clasp for bravery during the Courland battles of 1944.

  Even in the spring sunshine, Demyansk, as already described, was definitely not for the faint-hearted. This was not a period of brief skirmishes and light patrolling, but a vicious and brutal battle for survival. The Soviets were still determined to crush the defenders and register a historic Red Army victory, and were throwing all they could muster into it. They had already devastated the area, dropping incendiary bombs on every building in the winter to deny shelter to the Germans and their own civilians. Massed artillery regularly worked the ground over and waves of tanks and infantry were constantly trying to stave in the sides of the Pocket and stir up panic among the defenders.

  Von Schalburg confers with men from his Frikorps Danmark in the Demyansk Pocket, 1942

  The German Frikorps Danmark officer, Obersturmführer Hennecke, talks to his men during the Demyansk fighting. As with its sister formation the Norwegian DNL, the majority of the Frikorps commanders were actually Scandinavians and not Germans.

  Death of the commanders

  From day one the Danes were thrown into the fighting. Taking up positions on the River Robja, the Frikorps was given the task of stopping the Red Army from expanding their bridgehead in the area of Ssuto
ki. The Soviets were on the far bank and had managed to get some troops over to the German-held side. If they could get across in any numbers, and bring tanks, they could expand it out until they had a solid base from which to launch a full-scale attack. This would spell real trouble for the hard-pressed defenders. Von Schalburg knew the Soviet toehold had to be destroyed and ordered the Winter War veteran Johannes-Just Nielsen to carry out an the assault on the night of 27/28 May. Nielsen was one of the Frikorps’s real characters. Young, engaging, and immensely popular with his soldiers, he was also one of the Frikorps’s best platoon commanders. After planning the attack, Nielsen divided his men into two groups and led them silently through the darkness towards the bridgehead. Sneaking up unnoticed on the Soviets, Nielsen threw a hand-grenade into the enemy to signal the attack. From both sides his men rushed forward and machine-gunned the Russians. Those that survived jumped into the river and swam to safety. The operation was a complete success. Then disaster struck. Dawn arrived and Nielsen ordered his men to withdraw back to the defence line, but they were hit by an artillery barrage and Nielsen was killed. Caught full on by a shell blast his body was blown into the river and disappeared. His men took cover in the abandoned Red Army trenches and waited out the barrage. When it finally stopped they withdrew under the leadership of Oberscharführers Kern and Jens ‘Lightning’ Nielsen.

  Nielsen’s death at Ssutoki presaged an even bigger blow for the Frikorps, when just a few days later the Red Army lunged across the river yet again to re-establish a bridgehead at exactly the same place. Another attack was needed to repeat Nielsen’s success, so on 2 June the Danish SS once again were assaulted at Ssutoki. The Soviets knew what was coming and showered the Danes with artillery, trying to blow the attack away before it really got going. Von Schalburg went forward himself to encourage his men, but was badly wounded when he stepped on a mine. With one of his legs shattered in the explosion, he needed to be carried to safety, but as his men grabbed him they were hit by a salvo of Russian mortar shells. Von Schalburg and two others were killed instantly. Another Winter War veteran, Alfred Jonstrup, managed to retrieve von Schalburg’s body for burial, but the shock of his death caused the attack on the bridgehead to fizzle out. The Frikorps lost 21 men killed and 58 wounded on that day, and the Soviets still had their bridgehead.

  A portrait of the Danish Frikorps commander Knud Börge Martinsen while undergoing officer training at Bad Tölz. After service on the Russian Front he would go on to found the paramilitary Schalburg Corps back home in Denmark in homage to his dead friend, before himself being executed after the war for the murder of a fellow Danish SS officer whom he accused of having an affair with his wife.

  Danish SS officer Count Christian von Schalburg with his son Alex.

  A close friend of von Schalburg’s from Finnish War days, SS-Obersturmbannführer Knud Börge Martinsen, immediately took command and stabilised the situation over the next few days, while the Frikorps waited for a new leader to be appointed. Within a week this new man had arrived, the SS-Wiking veteran, middle-aged aristocrat Hans Albert von Lettow-Vorbeck. Von Lettow-Vorbeck was a nephew of the famous World War One East African hero, and had been appointed to command the SS-Legion Flandern, after Michael Lippert’s loss through injury. However, with von Schalburg’s death, the Danmark was deemed a higher priority and he was re-routed to Demyansk. At the same time, parts of the SS-Totenkopf were preparing to launch Operation Danebrog to recapture the area up to the Pola River and re-establish a defensible line. The Frikorps was slated to play its part in the attack by taking the important local town of Bolschoje Dubowizy. Von Lettow-Vorbeck arrived on 10 June, was briefed by his officers on the situation, and as dawn lit the sky the Danes made a frontal assault on the town. German artillery fired on the Russians to the city’s north, as the Danes struggled through swamps and flooded meadows before bursting into Dubowizy and starting to clear it house by house. In the face of bitter resistance the advance stalled, and the Red Army counter-attacked, killing two of the Frikorps’ company commanders – Untersturmführers Boy Hansen and Alfred Nielsen. By 11 o’clock the Russians were on the verge of surrounding 27-year-old Per Sörensen’s 1st Company and cutting it off. Von Lettow-Vorbeck was on his way forward to personally order Sörensen to withdraw, when a Soviet machine-gun cut him down. His death took the steam out of the Danish attack and by the end of the day Dubowizy was still in Russian hands. The Frikorps lost 25 men that day. All were buried in the cemetery at Biakowo. Yet again, Martinsen had to take over. The Danmark had now lost two commanders in just over a week, as well as over a hundred men killed and wounded in the Ssutoki and Pola River fighting. With von Lettow-Vorbeck dead, Berlin made no more attempts to ‘import’ officers, and Martinsen was confirmed as the Frikorps’ leader for the rest of its existence.

  Back in Denmark, von Schalburg was given a hero’s send-off and buried with full military honours. He became a martyr for the Danish Nazis, and his example encouraged a fresh wave of volunteers to come forward. The Frikorps would come to need this new draft, as the Demyansk battles ground on over the summer.

  A month after von Schalburg’s death, the Danes were defending an overly-long line between Biakowo and Vassilievschtshina. Everything was quiet and the men were waiting for hot food to be brought up from the field-kitchens about a kilometre behind them, when all hell broke loose. For more than an hour the volunteers were lashed by artillery fire, after which the Red infantry flooded forward. The dazed Danes fought back, but it was not long before they had lost contact with the German unit on their right flank and were in danger of being overrun.

  Every man who could hold a rifle – cooks, clerks, signallers – was sent forward to try and hold off the attack. The Luftwaffe was called in to provide support with its ‘flying artillery’, the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive-bombers. Just as at Dubowizy, Per Sörensen’s 1st Company was involved in the fiercest fighting and was soon down to just 40 men from its earlier complement of 200. Sörensen himself was another pre-war professional Danish Army officer, having been Adjutant of the Viborg Battalion, when handpicked by Kryssing to come over to the Frikorps as one of the original officer cadre. Selected for training at Bad Tölz, the SS recruiting office in Copenhagen described the tall and slender Dane as ‘a competent and reliable officer. Lieutenant-Colonel Kryssing is very interested in his accession and posting as an SS-Obersturmführer. Sörensen is an officer of exceptionally good appearance. He disposes of a sure and deliberate bearing.’

  After graduation, he took command of the 1st Company at Demyansk and would eventually rise to lead the whole Danish Waffen-SS, before dying in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. But back on the afternoon of 16 July 1942 that fate was a world away, as he and his men desperately tried to hold out against the Russian attack. He telephoned Martinsen and told him he might not be able to beat off another Soviet assault, but no matter what, his men would not abandon their positions. The fighting went on through the night, right in the heart of the Frikorps defensive position. An entire Red Army infantry battalion, with tank support, crashed into Sörensen and his remaining men. They were in the Danish trenches in a moment; and so began several hours of hand-to-hand fighting as Danes and Russians killed each other with knives, grenades and entrenching tools. Just after midnight the Soviets had had enough, suddenly they were breaking and running. Miraculously, 1st Company had held. The battle was not over though, as the Soviets threw in reinforcements, as did the Germans with the arrival in the early hours of Silesian 28th Jäger Battalion, along with a battalion from the 38th Jäger Regiment. These fresh German units attacked along the road to try and link up with their comrades to the east of Vassilievschtshina but were repulsed with heavy losses. The next day waves of Red Army infantrymen charged forward yet again, supported by clusters of T-34 tanks and with fighter-bombers roaring in overhead. As with their Norwegian comrades, the Danes had no armour or anti-aircraft guns of their own, and could only reply with their three anti-tank guns and four infantry cannon. They just ha
d to crouch and bear it as casualties mounted. Nevertheless, the Danes and the Jägers managed to see the Russians off and stabilise the line over the next few days. By the 21st the crisis was over. That fight was typical of combat in the Pocket. Unsurprisingly, casualties under these circumstances were high – over 300 Danes were dead by early August and only 150 or so of the original Frikorps remained in the line. In effect, the unit was no more. Down to a couple of weak companies, the decision was taken to withdraw the Frikorps for a rest and a refit.

  Their sacrifice had not gone unnoticed though, and the Pocket Commander, General of Infantry Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, wrote to them thanking them for their bravery:

  Since the 8th of May the Danmark Legion has been positioned in the fortress. True to your oath, and mindful of the heroic death of your first commander, SS-Sturmbannführer Christian von Schalburg, you, the officers and men of the Legion, have always shown the greatest bravery and readiness to make sacrifices, as well as exhibiting exemplary toughness and endurance.

  Your comrades of the Army and Waffen-SS are proud of being able to fight shoulder to shoulder with you in the truest armed brotherhood. I thank you for your loyalty and bravery.