Hitler's Vikings Page 18
By mid-August the SS had recruited 8,105 foreign labourers, of whom 3,154 passed Waffen-SS selection, but there were only 119 Danes and just two Norwegians among this draft. Part of the problem was that it was not just the Waffen-SS who were allowed to recruit, it was everyone else too, and service in other arms usually carried far less risk and the same level of reward. Thus many Scandinavians joined the Kriegsmarine or the Luftwaffe (there were even two Norwegian Luftwaffe pilots, one of whom was the decorated SS-Wiking veteran Alf Lie) and its anti-aircraft units. More than a few Norwegians opted for the SS-Ski Battalion Norge.
The volksdeutsche arrive
In the end, the Danmark could field 1,280 Danes, and the Norge just 810 Norwegians. Senior command down to regimental level was filled by Germans. Below that about half of all battalion and company level posts were filled by Scandinavians. For instance, the Danmark had 16 German officers and 16 Danish officers giving it a much-needed Nordic ‘feel’. But there was no hiding the fact that the concept of wholly-national Scandinavian regiments had failed. The SS had no choice but to look elsewhere for thousands of men to fill the ranks. Their first port of call was German nationals, with 4,131 brought in to make up a full third of the division. However the biggest contingent by far were Rumanian volksdeutsche from the Siebenbürgen region, the so-called Transylvanian Saxons. Many of these men had previously served in the Rumanian Army, and were transferred over according to an agreement between the Bucharest and Berlin, while others had been recruited direct from their home towns and villages. In the end almost half the division, 5,895 men, would be volksdeutsche. The effect was felt across the Nordland – for example, alongside the Danes in the Danmark Regiment were 1,120 volksdeustche and 800 German nationals. The proportions in the Norge were even more heavily skewed towards the volksdeutsche. There were some Nordics in divisional posts, but overall the division contained just 2,491 Scandinavians out of an establishment of over 12,000.
The rest of the Corps had the same problem. The Nederland struggled to recruit and was majority non-Dutch, with 40 per cent volksdeustche and 20 per cent German nationals, and only 181 members of the 900-odd non-divisional Corps troops were Germanics. The reality of the situation was that it was ethnic Germans, and not Germanics, that were the mainstay of the Corps from the very start, and then, as now, controversy surrounds them and their role in the Waffen-SS. Many saw them as second-rate soldiers who couldn’t even speak German properly. The language of command in the Nordland was German, as usual, and this gave the volksdeutsche as many problems as it did the Scandinavians. They only really started to appear in the Waffen-SS in large numbers from 1943 onwards, and unsurprisingly the first waves of recruits seemed to be of a higher quality than those that came after. From veterans’ testimonies it would seem the Nordland and the Wiking received some of the best. The Wiking’s Jan Munk fought with them:
It was July 1943 and we were near the Donets, at that time I had an MG34, a beautiful machine-gun, very reliable and accurate. My Number 2 was a Rumanian farmer’s son. His German was not too good but his willingness to help was enormous, and so was his strength. So I had an excellent machine-gun, a first-class Number 2, plenty to shoot at but poor quality ammunition [by 1943 most German bullets had steel rather than brass casing due to shortages and they tended to jam the barrel]. I heard a noise to my right and saw that my Number 2 had fallen back in the trench, just as he was lifting a full ammunition box. He had been hit in the left temple and killed instantly.
Over in the Nordland one of the new draftees was Hans Hedrich:
I was born in 1924 in Mediasch, Siebenbürgen, and volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1943. I believed I had to make my contribution to the German people’s fight for existence – that was how the war was portrayed to us at that time. There was also a moral pressure from the ‘German People’s Group of Rumania’ and from friends and family.
Assigned to the SS Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion Nordland, I was trained in Grafenwöhr. I found the training to be excessively hard. Despite all the chicanery in the training, it seems to have been strictly forbidden for the native German trainers to use denigrating expressions that hinted at the origins of the ethnic Germans. Generally there were no problems between the native Germans, us ethnic Germans, and the Scandinavians.
This view was echoed by the Norwegian volunteer John Sandstad:
After the DNL was disbanded I was sent to the SS Armoured Grenadier Training and Replacement Battalion 11 in Graz. There I took NCO training along with nine other Norwegians. After a home furlough and several weeks as an instructor in an ethnic German recruit company in Graz, I was sent to SS Armoured Grenadier Regiment 23 Norge in Croatia on November 2nd, 1943. Many of the Norwegian volunteers were disappointed because there was no exclusively Norwegian unit like the Legion or the Norwegian SS-Ski Battalion in Finland. The ethnic Germans came in a group in August and made up about 50% of the unit’s strength. Basically we got on well with them.
The Swedish ‘specialists’
Away from the volksdeutsche issue, the establishment of the Nordland made a huge difference to the smallest of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS contingents – the Swedes. Overall, Waffen-SS attempts to recruit Swedes were a disaster. Official Swedish government hostility to the idea and a preference among volunteers to serve with the Finns, were the main reasons why only about 180 native Swedes enlisted in the Waffen-SS during the war. They were joined by some 50 ethnic Swedes from Estonia, and around 100 others from the Swedish Ukrainian community, bringing the grand total to almost 350. Another 15 or so went into other branches of the Wehrmacht including the Swedish Army officer, Nils Rosen, who served for two years as a panzer commander with the Army’s Panzer Regiment 6.
The Swede Sten Eriksson was a journalist before the war and served in the SS’s own regiment of war reporters, the Kurt Eggers. (James Macleod)
Of those that did join the Waffen-SS, more than 80 per cent were members of Far Right parties or had family connections to Germany. On enlistment they tended to be spread across a wide range of units with no real ‘home’ unit. Berger wanted to form a purely Swedish battalion, the Tre Kronor – the ‘Three Crowns’ after Sweden’s royal emblem – but the plan was abandoned due to an obvious lack of manpower. Ten Swedes served as war reporters in the Kurt Eggers – among them were Carl Svensson (ex-Swedish Navy and anti-aircraft gunnery specialist and one of only six pre-war professional officers who joined the Waffen-SS), Gösta Borg (ex-SSS leader, friend of Sven-Olov Lindholm and Winter War veteran), Thorolf Hillblad, Hans-Caspar Krüger, and Thorkel Tillman (who was killed in action in July 1944 while serving with the Hitler Jugend in Normandy). Svensson and Borg were also two of the almost twenty Swedes who graduated from Bad Tölz, one of whom, Wolfgang Eld-Albitz, came top of his class. Two other Swedes, Robert Bengtsson and Lars Blom (the latter held dual Swedish-German nationality) served with the Leibstandarte, while one Swede, SS-Oberscharführer Sven-Erik Olsson, even served throughout the war as Heinz Harmel’s (the Frundsberg’s divisional commander) personal radio operator, and ended up winning the German Cross in Gold as well as both classes of Iron Cross. The advent of the Nordland changed all of this and ushered in a very different era.
The designated flag bearer for the Swedish Waffen-SS was to be none other than the Nordland’s Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion. A handful served in the Hermann von Salza panzer battalion itself; the Adjutant, Bad Tölz luminary and Iron Cross 1st Class winner, Per-Sigurd Baeckland being one, but the majority served under Rudi Saalbach and his Adjutant Georg Erichsen. Erichsen, of course, was one of 1,292 ethnic Germans from Danish North Schleswig serving in the Waffen-SS at the time. Within the Recce Battalion the Swedes were then concentrated in the 3rd Company. Their influence was such that it was nicknamed the Schwedenzug, even though most of the men were actually Rumanian volksdeutsche – a fact not universally popular with all of the Swedes, as Erik Wallin recounted:
‘Old’ Ragnar Johansson was among us [an ex-Swedish Army sergeant from
the Skövde-based Skaraborgs Regiment]. He was an extremely strong Swede, in front of whom the whole company shivered. Under the influence of strong drink and with a wild look in his eyes, he would go looking for Mussulmen, as he called the ethnic Germans from Rumania and whom even in a sober state he found it hard to accept.
The 3rd was one of five companies in the battalion; two of which were equipped with half-track armoured personnel carriers (the ubiquitous SPW), one with wheeled armoured cars, one with half-track armoured cars, and the last with anti-tank and infantry guns as well as flame-throwers. The Schwedenzug was 160 men strong and one of the two SPW companies. It had four platoons, the first three composed of volksdeutsche grenadiers, and the fourth comprising SPW’s armed with heavy weapons, manned by 5 Swedish NCOs, about 35 Swedish rankers and some 20 ethnic Estonian-Swedes. The prevailing thinking in the Waffen-SS was that Swedes were heavy weapons experts. The Swede Walter Nilsson led the platoon and there were four other Swedish officers in the Company; Rune Ahlgren, Gunnar-Erik Eklöf (who would go on to serve in the SS-Main Office in Berlin before becoming a member of Otto Skorzeny’s special forces unit the SS-Jagdverband Nordwest in 1945), Hans-Gösta Pehrsson, and the Germania Regiment veteran Heino Meyer. Meyer was twice declared officially dead during the war, before turning up on both occasions wounded but alive in field hospitals. The Swedes were overwhelmingly Wiking old-boys, and even though they were the minority they dominated the Company. It was the closest the Swedes ever came to having their own ‘national’ unit in the Scandinavian Waffen-SS.
The unit flag of the Norwegian SS-Police Company. (Erik Wiborg)
The Norwegian 1st SS-Police Company drawn up in three ranks and ready to be inspected on 17 May 1942. (Erik Wiborg)
The SS-Ski Battalion Norge and the SS Police Companies
Where were the Norwegians? The Norge was intended as their regiment, Quisling was fully behind the project, and the Norwegians of the DNL and the Wiking were a ready-made cadre. Despite this, recruitment was slow and there were always far more Danes in the Nordland than Norwegians. Granted, just as with ex-Frikorps members, there was a number of DNL legionnaires who felt they had done their bit and would not sign on again, and overall the recruiting pool at home was getting shallower as time and combat emptied it out. But even so, new Norwegian volunteers coming forward for the Nordland were far thinner on the ground than in Denmark; was there another reason? The answer was Finland.
Back in 1939 the Winter War had shocked Scandinavia and cast the Soviet Union in the role of bogeyman. Many would-be volunteers felt the attack on Finland was an attack on them all, and that by fighting alongside the Finns they would be directly protecting their own homelands. This was powerful motivation indeed. Most of those who signed on thought that they would be fighting the Red Army on the Finnish front, and when this did not happen it caused widespread resentment, Bjarne Dramstad testified to that. But the Norwegians did not forget Finland and when a generation of units were established in the spring of 1943 that satisfied this need, they drained recruits away from the Nordland. These new units were the SS-Ski Battalion Norge and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th SS-Police Companies (the SS-og-Polit Kompanies).
The 1st SS-Police Company had been formed and led by Jonas Lie, and served alongside the DNL of course, and the concept had proved its worth. Further companies were then either planned or raised over the next two years. When it was confirmed that these units would serve in Finland, and not with the Nordland, they proved very popular. The 2nd Company was the first to be formed, and was led by the ex-Norwegian Army engineer captain, SS-Hauptsturmführer Reidar-Egil Hoel. Its 160 men were sent to Finland to serve alongside the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 6th SS-Mountain Division Nord. Aage-Henry Berg, quite an unpopular ‘parade ground’ officer even though he was ex-DNL, was given the task of raising a 3rd SS-Police Company to join them in the summer of 1944, but by then the situation at the Front would have changed dramatically. As it was, some 11 ex-DNL and Wiking veterans did sign on for the 3rd Company, including the ex-French Foreign legionnaire August Amundsen, and the veteran DNL anti-tank gunner Bjarne Dramstad:
After I came back from the Front the first time, I joined the Germanske SS Norge [this made Bjarne one of only two GSSN men in the anti-tank company], the Norwegian version of the Allgemeine-SS. I participated in a three-week course at Kongsvinger, and was then given a black uniform to keep at home, that was about it really.
After the Legion was disbanded I stayed home until I signed up again for the 3rd SS Police Company. This unit was supposed to serve as an independent reconnaissance company directly under the 6th SS-Mountain Division Nord in Finland. This was in March 1944. Even though I had seen the war, the bad leadership, and was sick and tired of it all, it was better to be among comrades than in my village where there were a lot of people with sympathy for the other side. And this unit was guaranteed to go to Finland, which was my motivation in the first place. Besides, I felt that the war wasn’t over yet and I had to do my share.
Three of the Norwegian Waffen-SS’s most influential commanders, from left, the middle-aged former police officer Oscar-Olsen Rustand, Frode Halle, and Verre Lyngstad. (Erik Wiborg)
Recruits were hard to come by in Norway, the exception was for the SS-Ski Battalion Norge, which in this picture is parading through Oslo. (Erik Wiborg)
In August, Bjarne and their 148 comrades would arrive in Finland only to find themselves retreating back towards Norway, along with the rest of the Wehrmacht’s forces in the Arctic circle. Eventually the Company would end up holding the unique record in the Norwegian Waffen-SS of never losing a man in combat.
Before the Company was deployed, Berg was replaced by Oscar-Olsen Rustand, an elderly ex-Norwegian Army NCO and police officer. However, veterans always describe their German Company Sergeant-Major Otto Kuhnle as the ‘real’ company commander during the withdrawal, and once back on home soil Rustand formally departed to try and recruit a 4th Company to carry on the fight. That plan came to nothing as the war ended before the new force was ready to join the fight. But the numbers tell their own story, overall more than 400 volunteers, who would have significantly strengthened Norge’s Norwegian roster, chose instead to fight as SS policemen in Finland.
As it was these men were joined in the frozen north by an even larger body of Norwegian Waffen-SS men led by a Danish-born skiing expert and Professor of Physical Education – Gust Jonassen’s SS-Police Ski Company, which would become in time the SS-Ski Battalion Norge (SS-Schijäger-Bataillon Norwegen in German). Jonassen, the NSUF’s Sports Leader, was a subordinate and close friend of Bjørn Østring, but rather than join the DNL he proposed instead to form and lead a group of ski specialists to fight in the trackless forests of Finnish Karelia. The intent was for a purely Norwegian unit that would be engaged in long range patrolling, deliberate ambushes (i.e. planned long term ambushes perhaps lasting for days), and behind-the-lines attacks. The Germans acquiesced to the plan to smooth ruffled Norwegian feathers after the DNL was sent to Leningrad and not Finland, and in no time at all some 120 eager volunteers were training at Sennheim in the Alsace. Many of these men, mostly idealistic young NS members, would doubtless have ended up in the Nordland. As it was, Jonassen himself was packed off to Bad Tölz to earn his rank of SS-Obersturmführer, while his men ended up being put through their paces by a team of instructors led by the Finn, Jouko Itälä, an ex-Wiking artillery officer. Itälä ignored the order to go home and would serve in the Waffen-SS until the very end. Even more exotic was the addition to the company of the Italian SS volunteer Giovanni ‘Nino’ Niquille, who was assigned from the Nord as the new unit’s war correspondent.
Like Jonas Lie’s men, Jonassen’s were officially classed as SS-Police rather than full Waffen-SS members, and so after Sennheim they finished off their training in Hallerau near Dresden at the German Police Instructional School. Highly rated by the powers-that-be, the Company joined the SS-Nord division in Karelia during March of 1943, where they quickly gained a
n enviable reputation for combat effectiveness. Organised into three platoons of three sections each, they travelled on foot, or on skis when there was snow. They were armed with a lot of automatic weapons including one machine-gun per section and with every other man having a submachine-gun. They had a section of mortars as ‘mobile artillery’ and uniquely there were two snipers in each section.
The war in Karelia was not one marked by cataclysmic battles between competing tank armadas, rather by vicious small-unit combats and almost individual duelling, as men silently hunted each other through vast acres of hushed pines. In this wilderness, air and artillery support was minimal, fields of fire were measured in metres, and dominating features like hills were few. The rarity of high ground made it hugely important and would lead the SS ski troopers to their defining battles in the summer of the following year. That was yet to come. As it was, the Company was in action for less than three months before it suffered the same fate as the Frikorps Danmark and lost its inspirational commander in action. Whilst out on patrol with his men on 26 May, Gust Jonassen stepped on a mine and was blown to pieces. Although replaced immediately by Otto-Andreas Holmen – a popular former member of the Norwegian Royal Guard, graduate of Bad Tölz and NS member – the Company went into shock, and was sent home on leave in July to recover. The furlough also signalled the end of the majority of the volunteers’ enlistments, which had only been for one year. The Company had been a success though, and the SS authorities committed to reconstituting the unit if enough volunteers could be found. Timing turned out to be bad, as the call went out at almost exactly the same time as the Nordland was desperately trying to fill the Norge regiment.