Hitler's Vikings Page 17

  The end of the road for the Finns

  Things then proceeded to get worse. Collani’s battalion, universally recognised as being first rate, was coming to the end of its two-year enlistment period. Himmler wanted to use it as the cadre for a new unit, the SS-Motorcycle Regiment Kalevala (named for the Finnish saga). But Helsinki had other ideas. The Finnish government was watching the ominous Red Army build-up on its northern border with real trepidation, and it wanted every trained man back home to face it. They also had real doubts about Nazi Germany’s ability to win the war, and wanted to plough their own furrow. Himmler argued his case, but in the end Hitler himself stepped in and agreed to send the Finns home. Pulled from the frontline in early May, the battalion first went to Grafenwöhr, then Ruhpolding in Bavaria, before entraining for Reval (modern-day Tallinn) in Estonia on 28 May. Shipped across the Gulf of Finland to Hanko (liberated from the Red Army in 1941 and the name of the all-Swedish battalion fighting with the Finns – in Swedish Hangø), the unit was officially disbanded at a parade on 11 July 1943. Hans Collani walked down each rank, personally shaking hands with every single man, and thanking them on Germany’s behalf for their bravery and service. In a gesture loaded with symbolism, the volunteers then changed into Finnish Army uniforms. Their combat fatigues with the SS runes were thrown in a heap, and with that the official Finnish Waffen-SS was no more.

  Their place in Wiking’s Order of Battle, as the Nordland’s third battalion, was taken by a new formation of Estonian volunteers; the SS-Volunteer Battalion Narva (Estnisches SS-Freiwilligen Bataillon Narwa), commanded by the veteran German officer, SS-Sturmbannführer Georg Eberhardt.

  The Finnish SS Battalion arrive home in Helsinki, 1943, prior to disbandment.

  The Wiking’s Finnish Battalion parades for the very last time in Ruhpolding before being officially disbanded, 11 July 1943. (James Macleod)

  Two hundred and twenty-two Finnish volunteers had been killed in action and 557 wounded during the unit’s brief lifetime. Some 230 Iron Crosses (both classes) were awarded to the volunteers, and 42 Finns attended Bad Tölz (21 graduated, most of the rest were in training when the battalion was disbanded and so were sent home before the course finished). Several individual volunteers stayed on – notable among them SS-Obersturmführer Ulf-Ola Olin and Lars-Erik Ekroth – and continued to serve across the Waffen-SS in the Wiking, the Nordland and in the Kurt Eggers War Reporters Regiment. As for Collani, he went on to command the Dutch SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 49 De Ruyter, and was posthumously awarded the Knight’s Cross after being killed in action in the Narva fighting the following year.

  As to the rank-and-file volunteers, when Finland later switched sides in 1944, at least six of the battalion’s veterans were killed fighting against their former German allies.

  The Germanic Corps

  Back in Berlin, Himmler’s grand vision for 1943 was nothing less than a massively-expanded Waffen-SS with a whole series of Corps-strength formations – each Corps totalling roughly 30–40,000 men split into two or three divisions. In the Balkans there would be two mountain corps made up of local Yugoslav volksdeutsche and Bosnian and Albanian Muslims (see Hitler’s Jihadis). The wholly German (Reich and volksdeutsche) armoured might of the Waffen-SS would be concentrated in two panzer corps, with two further corps on the Russian Front comprising one made up of the SS cavalry divisions (Brörup’s Florian Geyer plus another new volksdeutsche division, the Maria Theresia) and another of assorted SS grenadier divisions.

  Additionally, Felix Steiner and Dr Franz Riedweg (Berger’s influential Swiss-German Chief of the Germanic Directorate), also advocated concentrating all the Nordics into one single division and using it as the basis of a ‘Germanic Corps’ under Steiner’s command. Himmler enthusiastically accepted the idea, and so was born the III SS-Germanic Armoured Corps (the III. (Germanische) SS-Panzerkorps). This Corps was to become famous, both for its fighting prowess and its multi-national composition. No other formation symbolised the foreign nature of the Waffen-SS quite like it, and although there was always a large number of Germans in it from the start, there were also contingents from almost every country in Europe – Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Spaniards (‘unofficial’ ones anyway), Latvians, Estonians, Dutch, Flemish, Walloons, Swiss and even Britons. All would pass through the Corps and leave their mark on its unique history. The Corps was envisaged as two divisions; the tried and newly-upgraded 5th SS-Panzer Division Wiking, and a new division, the 11th SS-Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland (in German the 11th SS Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadier Division Nordland) formally established on 22 March 1943, and commanded initially by the experienced Austrian Waffen-SS officer, Franz Augsberger.

  The Swiss-German Dr Franz Riedweg, who along with Felix Steiner convinced Himmler to establish a new division for the Scandinavian Waffen-SS – the SS-Nordland Division. He later became the Chief Medical Officer for Steiner’s 3rd Germanic SS-Panzer Corps. (James Macleod)

  The 11th SS-Panzergrenadier Division Nordland

  Originally named the ‘Waräger’ by Himmler (‘Varangian’ in English – after the ancient Viking bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperors), the intention was to bring together all of the Scandinavian and Dutch Waffen-SS into one division. Hitler liked the idea, but disliked the name, thinking it far too obscure even for his taste. Casting around for something simpler, he settled on one already in use – Nordland. This made sense as the cadre unit (the Stamm Einheit) for the new formation was, understandably enough, to be the Wiking’s veteran SS-Nordland Regiment. As was usual practice, the veterans would then be split amongst the division’s sub-units, filling key command appointments and providing backbone to the ranks. New recruits would then be grouped around these experienced men to learn the ropes. The ‘new’ Nordland’s order of battle would comprise three infantry regiments of three battalions each, a panzer regiment of three battalions, an armoured reconnaissance battalion, an artillery regiment, an assault gun battalion and the usual assortment of other battalion-sized divisional troops such as anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns and combat engineers. The main sub-units were given national rather than German names, as proof of ‘Germanic’ identity, and were designated as the following:

  The DNL veteran Olaf Lindvig leads a company of volunteers from the Norwegian SS (the GSSN) on a parade through Oslo on 16 April 1943. This company was raised as a response to the establishment of the Nordland Division and would go on to form the Norge Regiment’s 1st Company. Lindvig became an outspoken figure after the war before passing away in 2007. (James Macleod)

  SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 23 Norge

  Comprising Norwegian volunteers, commanded initially by Wolfgang Joerchel, who then went to command the Dutch SS General Seyffardt Regiment, and was replaced by the highly experienced Regiment Nordland officer Arnold Stoffers. The three grenadier battalions, 1–3, were commanded respectively by the Norwegian Finn Finson (succeeded by Fritz Vogt) and the Germans Albrecht Krügel and Hans-Heinrich Lohmann.

  SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 24 Danmark

  Comprising Danish volunteers, commanded by another German, the aristocratic Graf Hermenegild von Westphalen. The 1st and 3rd Battalions were led by the old Frikorps commanders Knud Börge Martinsen, lured back from the Schalburg Corps, and Per Neergard-Jacobsen respectively. The latter was succeeded in due course by Kryssing’s former protégé Per Sörensen, another Frikorps veteran of course. Martinsen’s tenure didn’t last long. A political fanatic with a volatile temper, he felt snubbed at not being given command of the regiment as a whole, so headed home and left the Waffen-SS all together. Back in Copenhagen he devoted his considerable energies to combating the Danish resistance and converting his fellow-countrymen to the National Socialist cause he revered so much. His place as battalion commander was eventually taken by Siegfried Scheibe. The 2nd Battalion was led by Kurt Walther. Both of these latter officers were German.

  SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 25 Nederland

  Comprising Dutch volunteers, s
ee below.

  SS-Panzer Regiment 11 Hermann von Salza

  Named after the legendary thirteenth-century Grand Master of the crusading Order of Teutonic Knights, commanded by the German ex-Wiking artillery officer Paul-Albert Kausch. Having a three-battalion panzer regiment would, in effect, have made the Nordland a panzer division, but this turned out to be a pipe dream, and the division’s armoured component was scaled down to a single battalion.

  The Norge and Danmark

  This all looked great on paper, however, from the start the new division struggled for manpower and equipment. The Dutch were the first hurdle, with Holland’s collaborationist leader, Anton Mussert, protesting that they deserved an all-Dutch SS division. No other nation in western Europe contributed more volunteers to the Waffen-SS than Holland, and so, given that fact, Himmler gave way. There would be no Nederland Regiment in the Nordland. Instead, the surviving 2,500 Dutch Legion veterans were combined with a fresh draft of 3,000 volunteers to form the 4th SS-Volunteer Panzergrenadier Brigade Nederland.

  With no third grenadier regiment, it was doubly important that the Norge and Danmark were full-strength units, and that meant finding around 6,000 men ready and willing to fill them. But the entire Scandinavian Waffen-SS was only half that total, and they were spread across a number of formations, mainly the Wiking and the disbanding Legions.

  Berlin’s first step to address this issue was to appeal to the existing volunteers to sign on again. This policy was only partially successful. Of the 2,296 Norwegians and 1,896 Danes who had enlisted in the lifetime of the DNL and Frikorps, 824 Norwegians (36%) and 311 Danes (16%) asked to be discharged at the end of their enlistments. Of the rest, over 600 Danes re-enlisted, but only around 300 Norwegians did the same, with many joining the new Norwegian SS-Ski Battalion instead (see below for this unit’s history). One Dane who did transfer over to the Nordland was the 16 year-old Vagner Kristensen:

  Having been born in 1927 I was too young to volunteer before 1943, but I became a member of the NSU and was eventually allowed to enlist in the Frikorps Danmark only to see it disbanded. We were told about the new Danmark Regiment and transferred over, we didn’t even see it as a choice really, we just did as we were told.

  Secondly, Berlin made it official policy to combine all the existing Scandinavian Waffen-SS volunteers into the new division. The Legions were already in the process of disappearing of course, but the biggest effect of this decision would be to bring to an end the Scandinavian presence in the division that bore their ancient name – the Wiking. Most of them were in the Nordland Regiment anyway and came over as cadre, but others were combed out of the divisional sub-units to transfer across. This resulted in several hundred Danes, and over 250 Norwegians, joining their fellow-countrymen in the Norge and Danmark. In truth, not all Scandinavians transferred over, some stayed due to the vagaries of the system and individual choice. So by the summer of 1944 the Wiking officer Peter Strassner noted that there were still 177 Danes, 47 Norwegians, 5 Swedes and 2 Finns serving in the Wiking; but by and large the vast majority of Nordics would, from now on, fight in the Nordland. The symbolism was potent, with the ‘baton’ of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS being passed on from the old to the new. Scandinavians in the Wiking, always a relative minority, would now become a pretty rare species.

  The transfers from the Wiking and the Legions were a start, but the Norge and Danmark were still desperately short of manpower, which meant a new impetus was put into recruiting fresh volunteers. In Norway, Quisling called for no fewer than 3,000 NS men to step forward, but he was hardly knocked down in the stampede. In the end, only about 100 new recruits came forward from the Party. A greater number of recruits did come, unsurprisingly, from among the ranks of the GSSN. When Olaf Lindvig was wounded at Urizk, he was sent home to convalesce and took up the post of acting Chief-of-Staff of the Norwegian SS. A big man in every sense, Lindvig was incredibly keen to get back to the Front, and on 11 March called for other GSSN members to join him once more in the struggle out East. Some 160 put their hands up and were paraded through Oslo in front of Quisling on 16 August, prior to joining the new division. There they would become the mainstay of the Norge’s 1st Company under Lindvig’s command. The picture was much the same in Denmark, and welcome though all these men were, numbers were still in the low hundreds and not the thousands the Norge and Danmark needed. Nils Per Immerslund was clear as to the reasons for this poor response:

  Norwegians had volunteered to fight for Norway on a contract basis, not to fight for Germany throughout the war’s duration. Norwegian volunteers had been spread too thinly in German units, and most would fight better if they could stand alone as Norwegians and just go where the Germans indicated.

  Unrest and resistance back home

  One factor that greatly affected recruitment was the growing domestic turmoil in Denmark and Norway. In Denmark, dissatisfaction and resentment of Nazi Germany was escalating with frequent strikes and increasingly overt protests. The Danish Waffen-SS veteran Paul Hveger, now serving back home after being invalided out after the Caucasus, was caught up in the troubles: ‘After leaving hospital I went to Copenhagen and served under Standartenführer Boysen as a driver in the Germanic Liaison Office. Things were fine at first, but trouble really started in 1943, I myself was involved in violent rows in the street with civilians.’

  Some 5,000 Danes had even crossed to neutral Sweden and, with an official blind eye turned, had formed the so-called Danske Brigade ready to intervene back home once the Germans had left. Alongside them were some 15,000 Norwegians training to do exactly the same thing in their own homeland, although as it turned out neither force ever actually saw any combat. For those who stayed, the level of resistance to German occupation started to step up. The Norwegian underground tried to avoid killing collaborators so as not to incite reprisals, but things were different in Denmark where an increasingly vicious campaign of tit-for-tat killings between the Resistance and pro-Nazi groups, such as Martinsen’s Schalburg Corps, began to spiral. The Germans began to lose patience with their ‘model occupation’ and resorted to oppression. Firstly they disbanded the Danish armed forces in March 1943, partly because they hoped this would spark a rush of recruits into the Waffen-SS. That did not happen. Next, a State of Emergency was declared in August, and the decision was taken in Berlin to round up Denmark’s 7,500 Jews and send them to the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp prior to their murder. A locally based German maritime attaché, Georg F. Duckwitz, warned the Danes just days before the deportations were due to start on 1 October. The Danish response was magnificent. With the direct collusion of the police, the civil service and the coastguard, Denmark’s Jews were smuggled en masse to safety in Sweden. The German squads swept through the streets and found their quarry had escaped them. In all over 7,000 Jews were saved and only 472 were arrested, of whom 52 died in Theresienstadt. The Nazi reaction was to disband the elected government and rule through an unofficial board of civil servant technocrats headed by Niels Svenningsen.

  Simultaneously over in Norway the German defeat at Stalingrad was having a marked impact on the population, as related by Ornulf Bjornstad:

  At the start of the war we made it clear to everyone we were fighting with the Germans because they offered the best chance of defeating communism. I had a lot of encouragement from my family and friends, but when the war started going against Germany their attitude changed to hostility against the whole German cause. This change of attitude dated from the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 and the subsequent retreat.

  The resistance grew bolder and scored a massive success when it destroyed Nazi Germany’s stocks of heavy water in Telemark (an act made famous by the film The Heroes of Telemark).

  This action effectively prevented the nightmare of a Nazi atomic bomb. Unsurprisingly, any sign of defiance was treated extremely harshly after that, and some 40,000 Norwegians (including Norway’s tiny Jewish population) were either imprisoned in the nation’s jails or deported to conc
entration camps. Two thousand of these unfortunates would die in captivity, of whom 700 were Norwegian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Another 500 Norwegians were either executed as resistance or died in direct clashes with the Germans during the occupation.

  Speer and the labour pool

  As Berger cast around for more men for the Nordland that spring, two further policy changes were made by the Berlin authorities, one which helped the recruitment effort, and one which hindered it. Firstly, there were vast pools of foreigners in the Reich at the time working in every conceivable industry from farming through to armaments production, often living in desperately harsh conditions. Those from the East tended to have been press-ganged and were virtually slave labour. But many from the West had been enticed with the promise of better wages and conditions. There were, for example, some 100,000 Danes working in Germany in the spring of 1943, and up until now their work had taken precedence and they were off-limits to recruiters. Indeed, Albert Speer (the architect turned Armaments Minister) guarded them jealously. However, with the disasters at Stalingrad and Tunisia wiping two entire field armies from the Wehrmacht’s establishment, this position was no longer tenable. As a result, recruitment among Germany’s foreign workers was allowed from April onwards, and Berger’s men went at it with gusto.