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  Army Group North cut-off

  Such was the strength of the Red Army in 1944, and the weakness of the Ostheer, that the STAVKA could resource constant attacks along the entire frontline from Narva in the north to the Crimea in the south, which the Germans could do little to stop. The destruction of Army Group Centre was the key, as with no available reserves it forced the OKW to draw troops from every other army group, so creating weak points. The Wiking may have helped halt the flood in front of Warsaw, and the Nordland had stopped the advance on the Narva dead in its tracks, but in the huge expanses of the Russian Front élite units, like those containing the Scandinavian Waffen-SS, were few and far between and the Red Army was everywhere. To Steiner’s south, the Soviet 2nd Guards, 6th Guards and 51st Armies found just such a weak point and punched west taking Daugavpils, Panavezys and finally Siauliai before turning north where Colonel Kremer led his 8th Guards Rifle Brigade to the shores of the Baltic itself at Klapkalnice, to the west of Riga, at the end of July. The III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps had only just beaten the Russians at Narva (and won a staggering total of 29 Knight’s Crosses doing so), and now found itself cut off in a giant pocket. That pocket was all of Estonia and most of Latvia, and in it were the 27 divisions and 500,000 men of two whole German armies – the Sixteenth and Eighteenth – basically Army Group North in its entirety. Without delay, the Germans had to push west to avoid disaster.

  Estonia is abandoned

  In the way that only Adolf Hitler could, a decision to order Army Group North to leave Estonia and rejoin the German frontline was delayed seemingly endlessly. Without doubt there was a moral dimension in leaving Estonia to its fate, for the Waffen-SS that would visibly manifest itself in its 20th Estonian Division, an excellent formation that would now effectively lose its raison d’être. But it was clear that the immorality of abandoning Estonia to Soviet brutality was not even on Hitler’s short list. Absurdly, it was his old cry of ‘to the last man and the last round’, that had already cost Germany so dear, which framed his thinking. Only a personal plea from Schörner as the Army Group’s commander could save it. Schörner told Hitler:

  The Front is undoubtedly broken at several places. The Estonians have run away again. They’re simply going home, we have now lost two-thirds of the infantry force and we are deceiving ourselves it we think we are just going to depend on the courage of the troops to take care of everything again. That cannot happen time after time! We are talking about the fate of an entire Army Group here!

  It worked and Hitler relented. The go-ahead was given for Operation Aster, the break out from Estonia and withdrawal west into Latvia.

  Carrying out a fighting retreat the III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps ‘crabbed’ south-westwards, elements went by sea from Pernau, but most of the men crammed onto any vehicle they could find and drove to freedom – albeit temporary. The Red Army desperately tried to take Riga, Latvia’s capital, and cut off the retreat but in the end the corridor was held open for most of September and the Army Group survived. A new defence line was now set up in Latvia stretching from the base of the Courland peninsula south-west to Memel (now Klaipeda) and to the borders of the Reich itself. In the teeth of heavy Russian attacks, during which the ex-DNL veteran Peter Thomas Sandborg was killed commanding Norge’s 11th Company, the Red Army reached the Baltic yet again and Army Group North was isolated once more: this time in the Courland peninsula.

  The Courland Pocket

  Courland, called Kurland in German and Kurzeme in Latvian, is Latvia’s westernmost province and sticks out in a bulge into the Baltic Sea. A prosperous, fertile area, its traditional ‘capital’ was the city and port of Liepaja (Libau in German) at its south-western corner, with its other major town being Ventspils (Windau in German) to the north at the mouth of the Venta River. Like much of the Baltic coastline it had been conquered by the Teutonic Knights, a medieval Germanic crusading order. The conquest had been followed by migration, and ethnic Germans dominated the local land-owning classes. Now this area would become the scene of no less than six separate battles, which would only stop with the surrender of the surviving 180,000 German troops on 8 May 1945.

  Six Swedish Waffen-SS officers at Mummasaara, Estonia, April 1944. From left: the war correspondents Untersturmführer Gösta Borg and Untersturmführer Hans-Caspar Krüger, the Nordland men Obersturmführer Hans-Gösta Pehrsson and Untersturmführer Gunnar-Erik Eklöf, and the war correspondents Untersturmführer Carl Svensson and StandartenOberjunker Thorkel Tillman. Tillman held joint German/Swedish nationality and would be killed in action in July of that year while serving with the Hitler Jugend Division in Normandy. (Lennart Westberg)

  Finland had now made peace with the Russians and was out of the war, so the Red Army in the north could concentrate all of its offensive power on the hapless men of Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies. As the leaves fell across the Courland forests in October, the Germans and Scandinavians of the Nordland withdrew across the Daugava River, blowing its bridges and taking up position in the east of the peninsula, basing their defence on the villages of Bunkas and Jaunpils. Riga fell on the 15th as the Soviets instigated what became known as the First Battle of Courland. The 1st Shock, 6th Guards and 51st Armies pushed west from Riga, capturing Kemeri, and were then halted by determined resistance. The Nordland’s own line was threatened on 27 October at Trekni, when the assaulting Soviets overran a nearby hill that dominated the surrounding landscape. Ziegler called on Pehrsson and his re-equipped Schwedenzug to re-take the hill immediately and secure the defence. Charging forward in their SPWs with all guns blazing, the Swedes and volksdeutsche roared into the assault. Soon the fighting became hand-to-hand as the SS grenadiers cleared the trenches of Red Army men. The charge was successful, but the Soviets counter-attacked time after time to take it back. The attacks were repelled for four days, but on the fifth day the Swedes were forced to retreat. Pehrsson’s headquarters bunker was only a hundred metres behind the Front, and when he saw that the line had broken he grabbed every man he could find and charged. There were just 12 of them. The Soviets were dumbstruck, and retreated in confusion. Pehrsson and his men took more than a hundred prisoners that day. For his bravery and example the young Swede was awarded the much-sought after Roll of Honour Clasp of the German Army (the Ehrenblattspange des deutschen Heeres). But the price was high – half of all the Company’s Swedish speakers were either killed or wounded in the fight. From now on the Swedish Waffen-SS numbered some 20 men all told. Pehrsson was not the only Scandinavian Waffen-SS man to distinguish himself during the first two battles of what became the Courland odyssey. The two Danes, Alfred Jonstrup and Per Sörensen, also earned the Roll of Honour Clasp for their bravery during a counter-attack. It cost the ex-Frikorps man Jonstrup half his jaw.

  Overall, during the autumn fighting, casualties were very heavy on both sides. During September and October the four Red Army Fronts, (each roughly equivalent to a German Army in size) facing Army Group North’s two armies, lost a total of 56,800 men killed and 202,500 wounded. Broken down, the Leningrad Front lost 6,000 killed and 22,500 wounded, the 1st Baltic 24,000 killed and 79,000 wounded, the 2nd Baltic 15,000 killed and 58,000 wounded and the 3rd Baltic 11,800 killed and 43,000 wounded. German casualties were not on that scale, but tens of thousands had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner, and unlike the Soviets, their losses could not be replaced.

  In late October and mid-November the Red Army launched further attacks on the trapped Germans, the Second and Third Battles of Courland. The fighting was intense, with the Nordland’s ever fewer panzers, armoured cars and half-tracks shuttled around the Pocket sealing off breakthrough after breakthrough. A German volunteer, SS-Rottenführer Albert Sudhoff, described some of the fighting:

  When I walked around a shed I was suddenly standing in front of a T-34 that was pointing its gun at me. Frightened, I fired my panzerfaust and rushed into a shed. Outside there was a tremendous noise and I landed in the midst of some guys. At first I couldn’t see clearly b
ut then I felt a sword-belt and a sidearm. I groped further and felt a sticky mess on my hands. It was a short while before I realised that comrades had gone into hiding before me and had not survived a direct hit … two Russians appeared at the door and I threw myself beside my comrades and played dead. The Ivans shot blindly into the heap and disappeared. A shot had struck me in the upper thigh, and my leg went its own way and shook around.

  Then suddenly two SPW and a Sanka [German military ambulance] were outside … I was unnoticed and crawled out of the shed as best I could. The Sanka was filled to the roof with wounded men, and about 100 metres away from me – then it took a direct hit and I saw with horror how the bodies flew through the air.

  Another German volunteer, SS-Unterscharführer Eduard ‘Edi’ Janke, recalled the Third Battle of Courland especially. Janke was a platoon commander in the 4th Company of the Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion and knew Pehrsson and his Schwedenzug well. He was a combat veteran and already held the Infantry Assault Badge, the Wound Badge and the Close Combat Clasp:

  One day in December 1944 a heavy snowstorm began. I informed the whole platoon that the Russians would come in white camouflage and they should all be especially watchful. In the evening I lay down but was awakened by the shout of one of the machine-gunners; ‘Unterscharführer, the Russians are here!’ As I fired a white flare some 30 Red Army men stiffened at once. Immediately I shot off a second flare, then the machine-gunner on my right swung his gun round and fired a whole belt into them. When I fired my third flare we could see the Russians running away. Afterwards we found one wounded and nine dead Russians who had broken through our wire and had just planted a mine in front of us. I made a report and the company commander gave the alert gunner his own Iron Cross 1st Class. The name of the gunner was SS-Sturmmann Konrad.

  The German Nordland Recce Battalion veteran, Eduard ‘Edi’ Janke. (James Macleod)

  Even as the fighting went on, civilians, the wounded and some designated units were taken out of the Pocket and back to Germany by sea. The latter included most of the Nordland’s remaining armoured complement, who left their panzers to other units and headed back to Germany to be re-equipped. This, and combat attrition, reduced the Army Group’s strength down to 250,000 men by year end. The Ostheer desperately needed those men to defend eastern Germany, but the Nazi dictator would not countenance withdrawing them, despite pleas from his own Chief of the General Staff, the panzer legend Heinz Guderian. In Hitler’s own fevered imaginings, Schörner’s men not only tied down huge numbers of Soviet troops that could be better used elsewhere, but also safeguarded Swedish iron ore imports, enabled the Kriegsmarine to test new designs of U-Boats in the Baltic, and held out the prospect of launching a future grand offensive. This was beyond self-delusion, it was a kind of madness.

  The Scandinavian Waffen-SS in 1944

  1944 had been a seminal year for the Wiking and the Nordland, with vital roles in two of the bloodiest battles of the Russo-German war – Cherkassy and the Narva. Transfers and casualties had eaten away at the Germanic character of the Wiking so that by year end it was essentially a German SS division. Men like Ulf-Ola Olin continued to fly the flag for the Scandinavian Waffen-SS in their former ‘home’ formation, but to all intents and purposes the Nordland was now the heart of the Nordic SS. That division had been tempered in the fire of Estonia and Latvia, and had proved itself a worthy successor. Both of these units were emblematic of the Norwegians, Danes, Finns and Swedes in the ranks of the black guards, but they were not the whole story. Far away in the frozen north there were hundreds of Norwegians wearing the double sig runes and fighting the Red Army, and they were part of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS as well.

  Norwegians in the Nordland may have been pretty thin on the ground, but there was no such problem in manning the ranks to fight in Finland, as a member of either the SS-Ski Battalion Norge or the SS-Police Companies, which were designed to serve alongside the SS-Nord division. The end of 1943 had seen the old SS-Ski Company Norge reorganised and strengthened into a roughly 450-man battalion commanded by the decorated German SS officer, Richard Benner. Benner led his men through their work-up training in Oulu, Finland and organised them into an upgraded version of the original unit, with three infantry companies and a headquarters company that included platoons of combat engineers, signallers, supply troops and medics. What they did not have, unlike the other battalions in the SS-Nord, was a heavy weapons company as it was not considered necessary for their stated role of mobile warfare and long-range patrolling.

  They were joined in Oulu by the 160 volunteers of Hoel’s 2nd SS-Police Company, although Hoel soon handed over command to another ex-Norwegian Army officer, Lothar Lislegard. All too soon both units were sent north, to Karelia in north-eastern Finland, where they took up position on the Nord division’s left flank near Lake Tiiksjarvi in January 1944. They were now part of Germany’s 85,000 strong Twentieth Mountain Army (XX Gebirgsarmee) led by the victor of Narvik, Edouard Dietl. Alongside them were the Finnish Army numbering barely 180,000 frontline soldiers – the lines were thin indeed. Opposing them was the Finns’ old enemy from the Winter War, General Kirill Afanasievich Meretskov, and his Karelian Front comprising the Soviet 14th and 19th Armies, and farther south the much larger Leningrad Front. What became clear to the Norwegians very quickly was that this was not the Winter War anymore; the Red Army had changed and was now better led, better equipped and better trained. What had not changed was the Soviets’ ability to field massive forces. Facing the Finns, Germans and their Norwegian allies were 450,000 men, 11,000 artillery pieces (including 1,000 of the dreaded Katyusha rockets), 530 aircraft and 800 tanks. The Germans lacked any and all of these resources. It was going to be a long, hard spring and summer in the far north of Europe.

  Back with the SS-Police and the Norge, the men began to settle into their new positions and role, and their expertise on skis and natural affinity with both the few locals and the terrain, made them a very welcome addition to Lothar Debes’s division. In the forested vastness of the landscape the Norwegians played an endless game of cat and mouse with their Red Army counterparts as both sides aggressively patrolled against each other. The men were quartered in huts and tents and even in wooden bunkers, but spent most of their time silently gliding through the forests on their skis looking for any Red Army troops bold enough to probe their positions.

  Struggle at Schapk-Osero

  The few pieces of high ground in the whole region were overwhelmingly in the hands of the Wehrmacht and Debes used them as a string of strongpoints to group his troops around and so dominate the surrounding countryside. This was probably the best tactic in the circumstances, but it did mean that there was the potential to be isolated, cut-off and annihilated. Heavy weapons and strong reserves could insure against this but the Germans lacked both. As it was, the SS-Police were grouped around a major strongpoint on the top of a hill called Schapk-Osero, with a single platoon semi-detached to the north on yet another hill, the Medevara. Like everybody else, the Company was almost alone in the wilderness, and found itself facing an enemy who was determined to attack across a broad front, seize the hills and control the area. After two months of stand-off and relative quiet, the Red Army threw an entire regiment against Schapk-Osero, outnumbering the defending Norwegians by 10 to 1. But Lislegard’s men had not been idle and had used their time to cut down every tree for several hundred yards, giving them deadly fields of fire. As their Finnish cousins had done some three years previously, the Norwegian SS men let the assaulting Soviets get to within a few metres of their positions before unleashing a devastating wall of automatic fire. The result was carnage. Soviet dead were piled waist high on the slopes and the attack disintegrated in a welter of blood. Having failed in their initial aim, the Red Army had to settle for repeated probing and heavy use of artillery, gradually thinning the Norwegian ranks. Over the next few weeks casualties mounted, which included two of the four Norwegian platoon commanders, SS-Untersturmführers Erl
ing Markvik and Øystein Bech, both killed in action. Relieved from Schapk-Osero at the end of March, the remains of the Company were sent to the strongpoint at Sennosero, where they were merged with their countrymen of the SS-Ski Battalion Norge’s 1st Company under Willi Amundsen.

  The Norge had not been idle either, and had already joined with a battlegroup from the SS-Nord in destroying a growing concentration of Soviet troops in front of the divisional line in the same month. The attack itself was intended as a short, sharp, shock action, but quickly developed into a major engagement as the Soviets brought heavy artillery to bear and rushed reinforcements forward. Although outnumbered, the SS troopers continued their attack until the Soviets abandoned their positions.

  Kaprolat and Hasselmann Hills – the Norwegian SS fights for its life

  Following the fighting in March the decision was taken by the SS authorities that a Norwegian should lead the SS-Ski Battalion, so Benner was replaced by the 38-year-old SS-Hauptsturmführer Frode Halle, flown up from the Narva front at the beginning of April. Halle was ex-Norwegian Army, who had then served in the DNL before transferring across to the SS-Nordland’s Norge Regiment. A professional, dedicated officer, he was an ideal choice to lead the battalion.

  On arrival he found his new command holding an extremely long section of the line on the Nord’s northern flank. The main anchors were two hills; Kaprolat and Hasselmann, which were protected by log-trunk bunkers and trenches covered in thick protective snow. Fritz Grondt’s 3rd Company held Kaprolat, while SS-Obersturmführer Tor Holmesland Vik’s 2nd Company was based on Hasselmann (Vik had replaced Martin Skjefstad). Grondt was the only German company commander in the battalion and when he was wounded he was replaced by none other than Bjarne Dramstad’s old anti-tank commander from the DNL, Arnfinn Vik. Getting wounded in April cut Vik’s tenure short, and his place was taken by another Norwegian, SS-Untersturmführer Axel Steen, an ex-Norwegian Army officer and GSSN member. Constant patrolling had worn down the ranks, but the addition of Lislegard’s SS policemen had helped keep the unit in some sort of shape. However, within a couple of months everything had changed as the SS-Police finished their term of enlistment and were sent home and SS-Obersturmführer Sophus Kahrs’s 1st Company (Kahrs was ex-DNL and had taken over from Willi Amundsen) were detached to shore up the line elsewhere.