Hitler's Vikings Page 16

  With this endorsement ringing in their ears, the Danes were withdrawn to Latvia at the beginning of August, before heading home to Denmark for a homecoming parade through Copenhagen and three weeks well earned leave. The Frikorps had been in combat for three months straight, and in that time had lost two commanders, a host of junior officers and NCOs, and hundreds of men. Having flown into Demyansk with a fighting strength of 24 officers, 80 NCOs and 598 men back in May, only 10 officers, 28 NCOs and 171 men took part in the Copenhagen parade. Many were wounded rather than dead of course, so some would return to the unit in time, but there was no getting away from the fact that Demyansk had decimated the Frikorps. They’d given as good as they got, for sure. The SS-Totenkopf’s Order of the Day on 3 August credited them with killing 1,376 Soviets and capturing 103 others, along with over 600 heavy weapons. Gratifying though this recognition was, the fact that some of the crowd watching them parade in Copenhagen jeered them did little to lift the spirits of the surviving volunteers.

  One Dane who did not take part in the parade, indeed he had not served with the Frikorps since before Demyansk, was Erik Brörup. The ex-cavalry officer had initially worked with Kryssing and his team during the training in Hamburg Langenhorn, and had then had his place confirmed at Bad Tölz. Along with Per Sörensen and several other European volunteers, Brörup spent the first half of 1942 at the academy, before graduating on 8 May. Given his love of his old arm, he had applied not to return to the Frikorps but instead to be sent to the Waffen-SS’s own cavalry formation, the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer. This new division was being built around the existing SS Cavalry Brigade, augmented by the addition of more than 9,000 volksdeutsche from Hungary. On formation it was allocated to Army Group Centre, as part of the Ninth Army. Brörup joined the 4th Squadron of SS Cavalry Regiment Nr. 3 as a troop commander, before being transferred to a new posting during the fighting at Orele:

  With the onset of winter in November 1942 I was transferred to Reconnaissance Battalion 8 [Aufklärungs Abteilung 8] as a platoon commander. The recce battalion was now a ski-troop outfit and an interesting form of warfare began for us. It was similar in content to the way the Finnish ski-troops operated. Fighting in trees is a little different from a traditional battle, where you usually have all kinds of fireworks – artillery, mortars, rockets, machine-guns – and all kinds of other hardware to back you up. In the trees you are on your own. The weapons we used for forest fighting were just rifles, machine pistols and grenades. It is also very sneaky. You work in circles around each other in a kind of deadly ‘hide and seek’.

  I got the Iron Cross 2nd Class on 1 December 1942 for a raid into a forest when we ran into a Russian battalion. My job was to establish how far the Russians had penetrated into the forest. We killed some of them, lost one man, and brought back six prisoners, two of them NCOs.

  Return to Russia

  While Erik Brörup was fighting in the vast forests of central Russia, his old Frikorps comrades finished their post-Demyansk leave and reassembled at the Citadel garrison in Copenhagen. From there, they were sent to the Mitau (now Jelgava) training area in Latvia to reform and prepare for another stint at the Front. The Danes spent two months absorbing new volunteers and welcoming back many men returning from convalescence. Unbelievably, owing to the efficiency of the Wehrmacht’s medical services as well as the SS recruiters, the Frikorps was back up to a strength of over 1,000 men by the beginning of December and the first serious snows of the winter. Whilst there, they were visited by the ‘grocer from Slagelse’ – a nickname for the popular pre-war DNSAP politician, Einar Jörgensen. When Denmark was invaded in spring 1940, Jörgensen and a handful of fellow Danish Nazis had attempted to take over the Danish parliament building. In a somewhat comical scene they were quickly arrested, given a telling-off – and then sent home. Now a cheerleader for the Frikorps, he addressed the men on the Potential NCO’s Course and their Danish commander, SS-Untersturmführer Egil Poulsen:

  When I first arrived in Berlin at the SS-Main Office to get permission to follow you up here, we all forgot one thing. What uniform should I wear and what rank should I have? It was clear I couldn’t go to Russia in my brown DNSAP uniform or as a civilian either. They had to give me some kind of a uniform, but what rank do you give to an older member of the Danish parliament? [By this time he had been elected to the same parliament he had tried to overthrow two years earlier.] Surely not the rank of private. Someone suggested a senior NCO rank, an Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer, but then someone reminded us that people would expect some sort of military experience from those ranks. Then I was appointed an officer as an Untersturmführer.

  I guess they don’t expect any military knowledge from that rank!

  As a standard junior officer wisecrack, the men loved it. A few short weeks later the Frikorps was deemed fit for action again, and Martinsen led his men to the River Lovat, at the junction of Army Groups’ North and Centre. In the nearby city of Velikiye Luki some 5,000 men from the German LIX Corps had been cut off since late November, and were still holding out for relief. Even as fighting for the city raged, all eyes were on the unfolding cataclysm of Stalingrad far to the south.

  Unlike the experience of Sixth Army and the men of the LIX Corps, frontline life for the Danish SS was relatively quiet with only a few sporadic firefights and normal patrolling activity. The situation altered dramatically on Christmas Day when an élite NKVD division, fresh to the line, launched a full-scale assault that drove the Frikorps out of most of its trenches. Taken by surprise, the Danes rallied and counter-attacked the next day. They retook their old positions in close combat, and were then used to restore the line further north at Taidy. Casualties among the volunteers were heavy. But by now the Frikorps’s sector was, officially at least, a backwater on the Eastern Front.

  To the south von Kleist was abandoning the Caucasus and the Wiking was retreating north, whilst von Manstein and Hoth were desperately trying to rescue the beleaguered Sixth Army on the Volga. To the north the increasingly powerful Red Army was carrying out yet another offensive on the Volkhov, with the intent, as ever, to break the siege of Leningrad and destroy Army Group North – and the DNL of course. Everywhere resources were stretched to breaking point. The Volkhov attack alone was launched by 296,000 Soviet soldiers, with more than four times that number involved in the southern fighting. The result in the Danish sector was that there was no relief for Velikiye Luki and the city finally fell on 15 January after a last relief attempt failed. Only 180 men of the trapped 5,000 made it back to their own lines.

  In a savage postscript to the battle, the stubbornness of the defenders had so enraged the Soviets that when the war finally ended they rounded up the survivors from the POW camps and sent them back to the ruined city. Once there, one man of each rank who had fought there – so one general, one colonel, one lieutenant-colonel, one major, one captain, one lieutenant, one warrant officer (senior sergeant), one sergeant, one senior corporal, one junior corporal and one private soldier – were selected at random, ‘tried’ and sentenced to death. They were publicly hanged in Velikiye Luki’s Lenin Square in front of their comrades on 29 January 1946. Victors’ justice indeed.

  It all made the fate of a few hundred Danes on the Lovat River seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Needless to say it was not insignificant for the men themselves, who continued to man their bunkers and trenches and watch out for snipers and mortar salvoes. As dangerous as ever, life at the Front was also relatively quiet during this period, so Martinsen took the opportunity to go back to Denmark to form a Danish branch of the Germanic SS (as the Norwegians had done with the GSSN).

  He named the new formation the ‘Schalburg Corps’ in honour of his old friend and fallen leader. The Corps would become the most important paramilitary organisation in the country, very much along the lines of the Norwegian Hird, and would provide a steady stream of volunteers to the Waffen-SS throughout its brief life. In Martinsen’s place, another ex-
Danish Army officer took charge of the Frikorps, SS-Hauptsturmführer Per Neergard-Jacobsen.

  After a few more weeks of rather desultory activity on the Lovat, Berlin made the decision to wind the Frikorps down. As with their Norwegian counterparts, the initial two-year enlistment period of the volunteers was coming to an end and there was widespread recognition in the Waffen-SS hierarchy that the Legions had had their day. Neergard-Jacobsen took his men out of the line and the unit went by train to the Grafenwöhr training area in Bavaria at the end of March 1943. There, in a final ceremony, the Frikorps Danmark was officially disbanded on 20 May 1943 after just under two years of life. The Danes had lost a total of nine officers, 17 NCOs and 133 men killed in action during that time, along with hundreds of wounded. Amongst their dead was their most inspirational leader; but they had gained invaluable experience in Demyansk, fighting in some of the hardest defensive battles of 1942. A good number had been decorated for bravery with the Iron Cross, including Martinsen himself, SS-Untersturmführer Hans-Olsen Muller (as a platoon and company commander), SS-Unterscharführer Adam Andersen, and SS troopers Erik-Herlöv Nielsen and Andreas Mortensen, the former as a Russian speaker dealing with prisoners and the latter as a foot messenger.

  A Norwegian DNL rifleman in the winter 1941/42.

  One of the DNL’s 14th Anti-tank Company gun crews during the Volkhov fighting in 1942.

  A Norwegian DNL mortar crew go into action.

  The horrors of army dentistry – Russian Front-style!

  Norwegian DNL volunteers sit on a destroyed Russian tank, winter 1941.

  A Norwegian DNL volunteer leans against a destroyed Soviet light tank.

  Norwegian SS machine-gun crew prepares to fire on fixed lines.

  Norwegian DNL grenadier guards dazed Soviet prisoners taken in the fighting around Leningrad, 1942. (All Erik Wiborg)

  Back home in Copenhagen, Frits Clausen, as head of Denmark’s Nazis, complained loudly to Himmler about the disbandment of the Frikorps and asked for the resurrection of a purely Danish SS unit. The Reichsführer made a rather tart response: ‘It depends on him when the Grenadier Regiment Danmark becomes a Danmark Division!’ Clausen was firmly put in his place, and proceeded to sink further into the alcoholism that was rapidly killing him.

  Attrition and mobility

  The Danes, Norwegians, Finns and Swedes of the Wiking had endured a bloody and ultimately unsuccessful 1942. Some places where their boots had trodden no other members of the Wehrmacht would ever reach again (except as POWs). They had proved conclusively that although their numbers were few, they could stand shoulder to shoulder with the very best the Germans had to offer. The green, inexperienced volunteers of 1941 had come of age. Thousands of miles away in Berlin the powers-that-be took note.

  The time of the Legions, though, was at an end. They were too small and too lightly armed to remain effective for any length of time in the cauldron of the Russian Front. In the attritional warfare of the Eastern Front it was impossible to keep the Legions at full strength and relatively quickly, losses in key personnel especially eroded the combat effectiveness of the units. The Frikorps Danmark was a perfect example. It lost over 75% of its original strength in less than three months fighting at Demyansk. It wasn’t then combat-ready again for another three months, and losing that amount of precious time was something the Wehrmacht could ill afford. The overall usefulness of static infantry like the Legions was decreasing too, as the Red Army became ever more mechanised. With resources stretched to the limit in the frontline, it was increasingly vital to be mobile to cover the ground and concentrate scarce forces quickly. Delivering that mobility was a production race, and it was a race being won by the Soviets. Stalin’s factories, mostly situated far from possible German air attack, produced a staggering 24,446 tanks in 1942, as well as 30,400 other motor vehicles. That’s eight times more than the Wehrmacht had when it invaded the country the previous year. In reply, Nazi Germany made just 6,180 panzers that same year. The Third Reich was beginning to be overwhelmed, and all the Wehrmacht’s old advantages were fast disappearing.

  The disbanding of the Legions made the volunteers reassess their options. Many decided enough was enough, hung up their weapons and headed home. Some did so only to join other paramilitary organisations such as Martinsen’s Schalburg Corps. However, for most it was the end of their wartime career. Others wanted to stay in the conflict and felt that fighting alongside their Finnish cousins was the best thing to do, and so went north and put on yet another uniform. The majority of those that did stay on in the Waffen-SS would go on to form the core of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS for the remainder of the war.

  IV

  1943: The End of the Legions,

  the SS-Nordland is Born

  War is cruelty and cannot be refined.

  General Sherman to the Mayor of Atlanta on burning the city to the ground in 1864.

  In 1942 the Scandinavians of the SS-Wiking had spearheaded the main offensive effort of the Wehrmacht in southern Russia. Months of fighting had whittled away at their numbers, but the division had kept its cohesion and it was still a formidable fighting force at the end of the year. It was not the same story for the national Legions. The Norwegians of the DNL had fought well in the trenches around Leningrad, as had the Danes of the Frikorps at Demyansk and Velikiye Luki. Now there would be a new chapter for the Scandinavian Waffen-SS.

  1943 would turn out to be a watershed year for the Waffen-SS in general and its foreign members in particular. As a fighting force the black guards had come of age, and were now about to undergo a massive programme of expansion, along with a root and branch reorganisation. The élite divisions, the Das Reich, Leibstandarte and the Wiking, along with three new ones (the SS-Hohenstaufen, SS-Frundsberg and the SS-Hitler Jugend), would be converted to mighty panzer divisions boasting hundreds of tanks and assault guns. Just down the pecking order there would be a tier of new, partly-armoured, panzer grenadier divisions, and finally the floodgates would be opened for foreign volunteers to establish large numbers of new formations, both divisions and assault brigades – the so-called SS-Sturmbrigaden.

  However, if the new divisions and brigades were to become a reality, something was going to have to be done to improve foreign recruitment and leadership. Not only were there not enough volunteers overall to fill the ranks, but even more acute was the lack of trained NCOs and officers. Even with the likes of native, ex-regular army officers like the Brörups, von Schalburgs, Sörensens, Østrings and so on, across the Wiking and the national Legions it was Germans who had too often commanded Germanic soldiers; (as an extreme example, when the Flemish Legion went into action it had only one Flemish NCO and 80 German ones). As for administration, Jüttner still had not sorted out issues such as retention of rank, liaison with home, and even mail. The gap between the recruiters’ promises and the reality was then widened when the volunteer arrived in the SS training establishments, which were not exactly bending over backwards to accommodate the young foreign entrants. The result was dissatisfaction and resentment and the flow of recruits slowing to a trickle, just when the Reich needed them most.

  The Germanske SS Norge (Norwegian SS) parade through Oslo in 1943 on the official ‘SS Day’ – which was also Norway’s National Day. (James Macleod)

  Two Norwegian SS men (GSSN) put the finishing touches to their uniforms before joining the same parade through Oslo in the spring of 1943. (James Macleod)

  Gottlob Berger understood exactly what the problem was and he knew how to solve it. He made a detailed report to Himmler recommending a sea-change in the way foreign volunteers were treated from the moment they were recruited and all the way through their training, with national differences being acknowledged and given due regard. The weight of evidence in the report was crushing and Himmler accepted all the recommendations in full. In a personal directive, the Reichsführer clearly set out how the fortunes of the foreign Waffen-SS were going to be revived. The ‘Instruction and Care’ orders (Erzieh
ung und Umsorgung) set out a range of changes which were to be enacted immediately:

  • All Germans officers and NCOs scheduled to serve with foreign volunteers would now be given two full weeks induction training on handling foreign volunteers

  • All instruction on the superiority of Germany and the Germans was to be dropped immediately

  • Legionary status, seen as second-best by volunteers, was abandoned and volunteers were to be treated as having full SS membership with all of its benefits for them and their families

  • A major drive was to be launched to select, train and rapidly promote non-German junior leaders. So by February 1943 there were 47 officers and 172 cadets from Norway, Denmark, Sweden (some 20 Swedes passed through Bad Tölz during the war with two of them graduating top of their class), Finland, Flanders and Holland training at Bad Tölz on the standard six-month course, with special courses designed specifically for foreign volunteers ordered to begin in May of that year.

  From then on officer promotion for foreigners was made strictly dependent on attending and passing Tölz, and while this made the Waffen-SS foreign officer corps extremely professional, it also meant that demand for leaders always outstripped supply by a huge margin. The new leaders were excellent but were killed at the Front far quicker than new ones were trained.

  Himmler’s instructions were all well and good, but the new crop of Scandinavian Waffen-SS leaders coming out of Tölz would need men to lead, and they were scarce. When the SS-Wiking had gone into the assault at Rostov back in the summer of 1942, it had counted 947 Norwegians, 630 Danes, 421 Finns and a handful of Swedes in its ranks. The DNL had taken 1,218 men to Leningrad, and the Frikorps Danmark 1,164 to Demyansk. Close on 4,400 Nordics all told. But half a year of pitched battles like the Ssutoki bridgehead, Killing Hill and Urizk, had haemorrhaged the Scandinavian Waffen-SS. So, despite fresh drafts of volunteers arriving throughout 1942, by 6 February 1943 there were just 612 Norwegians and 633 Danes in SS-Wiking, with around the same number of Finns and a couple of dozen Swedes. There were just over 600 DNL veterans in Oslo parading to be disbanded, and another 650 Frikorps Danmark men in Bavaria awaiting the same fate. The Scandinavian Waffen-SS could now just about muster 3,000 men – in Wehrmacht terms a single regiment. More men were desperately needed.