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  But finally, after almost three weeks of the bitterest fighting, salvation was close. Battling through horrendous conditions and massed opposition, the armoured might of Army Group South was at last approaching the Pocket. The same Auntie Ju’s supplying the Pocket were also flying just feet off the ground near the relief columns and literally pushing 50 gallon drums of fuel out the doors to fall into the snow and mud to keep the panzers rolling.

  Inside the Pocket all was action, as the divisions were moved and assembled in preparation to head west. Stemmermann placed the Wiking, as his only armoured force, in the vanguard of the break-out, and on 16 February, with von Manstein’s panzers less than five kilometres away, he gave the order to attack. But first he gave the order every commander dreaded – ‘leave the wounded.’ It had to be done, yet every soldier railed against it – after all it could be them, and those men were their friends. Every member of the Ostheer feared what would happen to them if they fell into Soviet hands, and especially if they were wounded, such an order was seen as tantamount to a death sentence. Most units disregarded it, including the Wiking, whose Chief Medical Officer, Dr Thon, put more than 130 seriously wounded men onto panje carts (local Russian sleds usually pulled by steppe ponies) for the trek west.

  Between the beleaguered grenadiers and their would-be saviours was a dominating feature, a prominent hill with long gently sloping sides and called by its spot height, Hill 239. Control of the hill was vital. With it, the trapped Group Stemmermann could withdraw in relative safety to Lysyanka and its vital bridge. Without it, everybody would have to try and escape through a wall of Soviet fire. Unfortunately, after capturing it in a daring assault, it had had to be given up by Captain Walter Scherff’s small battlegroup from the 1st Panzer Division. His few remaining Tigers and grenadiers weren’t strong enough to hold the feature against the massing Soviets. The end result for Stemmermann’s men would be slaughter.

  On being given the command, ‘Password Freedom’, the Wiking’s remaining panzers and assault guns thrust southeast out of Shanderovka to establish the escape corridor. Having succeeded in smashing a hole through the Russians, in an act of inconceivable bravery, Köller then turned his men round and headed back into the Pocket to cover the withdrawal. Not a single panzer would make it back to German lines. Léon Degrelle, who himself would be awarded the Knight’s Cross for his actions at Cherkassy, witnessed the about-turn:

  The faces of those young tankers were admirable. Clothed in short black jackets with silver trim, their heads and shoulders protruding from their turrets, they knew they were going to die. Several proudly wore the tricolour ribbon and the large black and silver Knight’s Cross around their necks, a glittering target for the enemy as they ploughed up the snow with their treads and departed through the tangle of our retreating army.

  In unforgettable scenes, close on 45,000 Army and SS men almost stampeded the few kilometeres to Lysyanka and safety. The Soviets realised their prey might elude them and flooded the area with tanks, cavalry, artillery and infantry. In a little over 24 hours thousands of men were butchered in an area of less than four square kilometres. Soviet tanks ran amok over anything they saw, crushing the wounded in ambulances and carts, and the Germans had almost nothing to stop them with. Red Army horsemen from the 5th Guards Cavalry Corps joined in the carnage, hunting down groups of stragglers desperate to reach the river. Chaos reigned and command broke down. It was something no one who saw it, like Degrelle, would ever forget:

  A wave of Soviet tanks overtook the first vehicles and caught more than half the convoy. The wave advanced through the carts, breaking them under our eyes, one by one like boxes of matches, crushing the wounded and the dying horses … We had a moment’s respite when the tanks got jammed in the procession and were trying to get clear of the tangle of hundreds of vehicles beneath their tracks.

  Dr Thon and the Wiking wounded were part of this convoy; a bare dozen survived the slaughter. Even the Russians were awed by the sheer scale of the horror. One of Koniev’s own staff, Major Kampov wrote of that day:

  Hundreds and hundreds of cavalry were hacking at them with their sabres, and massacred the Fritzies as no one had ever been massacred by cavalry before. There was no time to take prisoners. It was the kind of carnage that nothing could stop till it was over. I had been at Stalingrad, but never had I seen such concentrated slaughter as in the fields and ravines of that small bit of country.

  Some of Stemmermann’s force made it to Lysyanka and its bridge, but most did not, and found themselves on the wrong side of a very fast flowing, icy cold, eight-metre-wide river – the Gniloy Tikich. Gille, leading some 4,500 Wiking soldiers and a host of other troops, was among those who did not reach the bridge. In an attempt to cross over he ordered an armoured personnel carrier driven into the river to form a breakwater, but it was swept away by the current. Undeterred, he organised human chains as well as using any horses that could be found. Striding up and down the river bank in his fur jacket with walking stick in hand, he and his staff organised and encouraged the men and somehow got the vast majority to safety on the western bank.

  Aftermath

  As the survivors from the Pocket streamed into Lysyanka they were met by the welcoming arms of their comrades from the 1st Panzer and the Leibstandarte. However, there was no immediate rest as they were sent plodding on farther westwards in their sodden uniforms, which were rapidly freezing to their starved bodies. The bridgehead was too weak, and all too soon the relief column would have to withdraw. Having thought their ordeal was over, the sense of disappointment among survivors was palpable. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of men had indeed cheated death and capture. Of the 56,000 soldiers encircled at the beginning of the battle just over 40,000 had gotten out, either in the Ju’s or on foot. Their commander, the monocled Wilhelm Stemmermann, was not among them. In the break-out he had commandeered a Wiking staff car driven by SS-Rottenführer Klenne, which had then been hit by Soviet anti-tank fire. He was lacerated by shrapnel and killed instantly. When his corpse was found by the Soviets they described him as ‘a little old man with grey hair’.

  The Danish Knight’s Cross winner Sören Kam celebrating his award with a drink. Kam was a veteran of the Winter War and the Frikorps Danmark before joining the Wiking. He won the Knight’s Cross in 1945 for bravery during the Wiking’s battles in Poland’s ‘Wet Triangle’ in front of Warsaw. (James Macleod)

  As for his command, Graf von Rittberg’s Bavarian/Austrian 88th Infantry Division was reduced to just 3,280 troopers, while Kurt Kruse’s Hessian 389th Infantry Division suffered even worse and could only muster 1,932 men. As for the Wiking, its roll call had been almost halved to 8,278 after all the wounded were evacuated. This total included the remnants of the Wallonien, but not its commander Lucien Lippert, who had died after being shot in the stomach by a Soviet sniper in the fighting at the village of Novo Buda on the 13th. As for the Scandinavians, three Norwegian NCOs – the Germania’s Alf Fjeld and Helge Tollefsen, and the Westland’s Inge Martin Bakken – were all awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class for their part in the battle. Several Danes also distinguished themselves including the Winter War veteran Robert Hansen, who would become a company commander after the battle, and the Danish NCO, Sören Kam, who went on to become one of the three Danes to win the Knight’s Cross during the war.

  The battle of the Cherkassy Pocket was now over. The Ostheer had avoided a mini-Stalingrad, but had suffered thousands of casualties and lost huge amounts of equipment. Army Group South had been pushed back even farther west, and more importantly its entire panzer force had been bled white. Von Mainstein’s panzer-arm had not yet recovered from the defeat at Kursk the previous summer, and had now lost more than 300 precious tanks lying wrecked and abandoned around Korsun, Shanderovka and Lysyanka. The battle was almost Erich von Manstein’s last hurrah. He gave one last masterclass by saving Hube’s First Panzer Army from annihilation following its encirclement in March at Kamenets-Podolsk; and then Hitler had had enoug
h of a man who stubbornly failed to agree with his every idiocy. The architect of Germany’s victory on the Meuse in 1940, the conqueror of Sevastopol in 1942, the magician who performed the ‘miracle on the Donets’ in 1943 and now the saviour of Cherkassy and Kamenets-Podolsk, was told a few weeks later by his commander-in-chief that his services were no longer required. He would play no further part in World War II.

  No rest at Kovel

  The same could not be said for the Scandinavians of the Wiking. Unlike their German comrades they were allowed some home leave following their escape from Cherkassy, an exception which did not go down well in the division. However the situation at the Front was so grave, the shattered Wiking could not be sent to the West to reform. Instead it was mustered to the north in Lublin, in Poland near the Soviet border, and then sent straight back east to the Russian city of Kovel in the Pripet Marshes to try and hold it against the still-advancing Red Army. Most of Wiking’s panzer regiment, and two armoured infantry battalions, had missed Cherkassy as they were away being refitted, they now hurried eastwards to rejoin their comrades. In the meantime, Gille led his remaining emaciated grenadier battalions to the endangered city. Gille himself had been awarded the Swords (the Schwerter) to his Knight’s Cross following Cherkassy, and would soon become only the 27th man in the entire Wehrmacht to be awarded the Diamonds (the Brillanten) as a further honour. The only other recipient in the Waffen-SS of this coveted decoration was the black guard’s most senior commander of the entire war, Sepp Dietrich himself.

  Gille’s plan at Kovel was to defend the city through a defensive blockade out to the east, trading space for time to allow Wiking’s heavy troops to catch up. But he had no such luck. The Red Army was advancing too quickly, and the Wiking arrived to find itself being surrounded once more. One of his staff officers, SS-Hauptsturmführer Westphal who had witnessed Stemmermann’s death in the Pocket and had ended up swimming the Gniloy Tikich to escape, observed the unfolding situation: ‘As evening fell we gradually realised that we were sitting in a city which was slowly but surely being surrounded on all sides by enemy forces.’

  Belatedly the panzers arrived, and SS-Obersturmführer Karl Nicolussi-Leck led his brand-new Panther company on a drive to reach the besieged city on 30 March. Despite being ordered to turn back owing to ferocious resistance, Nicolussi-Leck pressed on and reached his beleaguered comrades. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross for his leadership and courage. It was to no avail though, the city was still cut off and once again the Wiking was having to be re-supplied by air.

  The calm and the storm

  Along with elements of the 4th and 5th Panzer Divisions and the 131st Infantry Division, the Wiking stubbornly held the city against its Red Army attackers for the best part of the next three months. The Soviet’s Ukrainian offensive had driven a huge wedge into the Ostheer’s front, and Hitler feared the salient would be used as a launch-pad for the inevitable Russian summer assault. Such an attack could drive north to the Baltic and cut off both Army Group Centre and Army Group North in the biggest encirclement in history. If this happened, the war really would be over by Christmas and Nazi Germany defeated. Kovel stood at the northern hinge of the bulge, and OKW was determined to hold it so any Soviet assault could then be hit in its vulnerable flank. Desperately needed equipment was shipped to the Wiking to ready it for the anticipated offensive, and almost all of the Ostheer’s precious panzers were concentrated nearby in preparation. But the Germans got it wrong. The blow came not in the south in the Ukraine, but in Belorussia against a weakened Army Group Centre. The Wiking could initially do nothing but watch, horrified, as the Red Army juggernaut tore a full quarter of the Third Reich’s total military strength to shreds to their north. As the full scale of STAVKA’s Operation Bagration became clear, the OKW transferred units from Army Group North Ukraine (AGNU) to try and stem the tide. (Army Group South had been split into Army Group North Ukraine under Walther Model and its southern neighbour Army Group A under Ferdinand Schörner.) In so doing they weakened the North Ukraine just as Koniev launched his enormously powerful 1st Ukrainian Front onto the offensive. With 1,600 tanks, supported by 15,000 artillery pieces and 2,800 aircraft, the Soviets crashed into the Wiking and its compatriots, who could only muster around half the Red Army force.

  Maciejov and Ulf-Ola Olin

  Right on the frontline, an armada of Soviet tanks pressed westwards from Kovel towards the Polish border. Reaching the tiny village of Maciejov on the Bug River, the Russians followed their doctrine and carried out a reconnaissance in force, sending a number of T-34 tanks forward to sniff out any lurking Germans. They were right to be watchful. Ahead of them lay a company of Wiking Panthers commanded by one of the last Finns serving in the Waffen-SS, SS-Obersturmführer Ulf-Ola Olin. Getting his panzers into protected hull-down positions with barely their turrets showing, the Panthers long-barrelled, 75mm high-velocity guns had a panoramic view of the ground in front of them. Hours of training on the tank firing ranges would now pay off, as Olin ordered his crews to let the recce tanks past and tempt the main body out of the village and into the killing ground in front of the Wiking guns. Reassured that all was well, the mass of T-34s streamed out of Maciejov to continue their headlong advance northwest. Olin gave the order ‘FIRE!’ and the Panthers’ guns barked. Tank after tank was hit, turrets were blown off, ammunition exploded, burning crewmen ran screaming from their wrecked vehicles to die horribly in the oil-slicked grass. The Soviet tanks were not equipped with radios, all messages were relayed by commanders using flags just like in old-fashioned warships, and so were unable to respond effectively to the hail of armour-piercing rounds slamming into them. Olin’s company was joined by other panzers from the 4th and 5th Panzer Divisions, and together they mercilessly pounded the Russians. The Wiking’s artillery was called in to add to the carnage and cut off any Soviet retreat, and in a few hours of battle the attackers were cut to ribbons. A few T-34s managed to escape back east, but the majority lay burning on the plain at Maciejov, victims of the Germans’ superlative gunnery. The best part of an entire Red Army tank corps, 103 tanks in all, had fallen to Olin and his men. They were not alone. All in all some 295 Russian tanks fell to German guns as they tried to cross the River Bug. But the cruel truth was that actions like this were less than sideshows that summer.

  By now the Wiking could barely muster a hundred Scandinavians in its ranks, Olin being one. Some more would return from convalescence, others from specialist courses or leave, and even a tiny number of new recruits would arrive, but overall the Wiking was no longer a heartland for the Nordic Waffen-SS. However, it would fight on to the bitter end, as would the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Finns in its ranks. The focus was now firmly on the Nordland and the epic summer campaign about to start.

  The celebrated Finnish SS volunteer and hugely successful Wiking panzer commander, Ulf-Ola Olin.

  North on the Narva – Egon Christophersen

  For the Nordland and its men, far to the north, spring had brought a welcome respite. The Red Army was content to sit on the Narva’s eastern bank carrying out patrolling and the occasional snap artillery shoot, and nothing more. The Danmark and Nederland maintained their toehold in Russia at the far end of the bridgehead, while the Corps worked feverishly to strengthen the defences for the next Soviet offensive. The two sides also continued to probe each other, search out potential weak spots, take prisoners for interrogation, and all in all make life difficult for each other.

  Danmark had built a strongpoint, Outpost Sunshine, at the far south-eastern end of their positions to facilitate just that. An extensive earthwork fortified with logs and firing points, the regiment’s whole 7th Company garrisoned it. The Russians launched a surprise attack on 12 June that overwhelmed the position, killed most of the defenders and sent the remainder tumbling back to the main line. One of the survivors was the Danish ex-Wiking NCO, SS-Unterscharführer Egon Christophersen, who rallied a handful of men and immediately counter-attacked. Such was the feroc
ity of the assault the Russians upped and fled leaving Sunshine back in Danish hands. Christophersen was commended for his bravery and leadership and on 11 July 1944 became the first ever Scandinavian winner of that most coveted award, the Knight’s Cross. Only two other Scandinavian SS men, both Danes like Christophersen, would join him in that exclusive club of Knight’s Cross winners (the Ritterkreuzträgers who have a members association all of their own) by the end of the war.

  Men like Christophersen could hold for now, but having already lost the river as a defensible barrier, a new line had to be established about 20 kilometres back linking the Gulf of Finland all the way down south to Lake Peipus. Historic features, such as the aptly-named eighteenth-century fortification the Swedish Wall, were incorporated into the fortifications dubbed the ‘Tannenberg Line’. Part of the Tannenberg Line were three hills of the Estonian Blue Mountain range; from east to west they were Orphanage Hill (so-called because of the deserted orphanage on its summit), Grenadier Hill, and lastly, Hill 69.9, named after its spot height and sometimes also called Love’s Hill (in German – Kinderheim-Höhe, Grenadier-Höhe, and 69.9-Höhe or Liebes-Höhe). These hills, with their gentle slopes and wooded tops, would be the key battleground in the coming struggle. They dominated the main Narva-Reval road network, as well as the railroad, as they emerged from the woods near the river. To the north was the Swedish Wall and to the south, swamps. Both would greatly hinder the movement of armour. If the Red Army could achieve a breakthrough on the road, they could get behind the whole Corps and cut off large parts of Army Group North from any retreat. The Russians could see it and so of course could Felix Steiner. The Norge’s two battalions held the sector from the far south, where they linked in with the Army’s veteran 58th Infantry Division, up to and including Grenadier Hill which it jointly garrisoned with the Danmark. The Danmark, and Estonian SS men from the 20th SS-Division, also defended Hill 69.9. To hold Orphanage Hill, as well as provide extra muscle for Grenadier Hill, Steiner asked for reinforcements and was sent a 500-man battlegroup (Kampfgruppe Rehmann) from the reforming Flemish SS-Assault Brigade Langemarck equipped with three 75mm anti-tank guns.