Hitler's Vikings Read online

  This was a momentous day for the Scandinavian Waffen-SS. The Wiking was to become the forerunner and torch-bearer of all the SS foreign volunteer formations, and especially the Scandinavians. Over time the new division would become an acknowledged élite, able to stand comparison with the very best of its Waffen-SS and Army brethren, and a powerful totem for all foreign volunteers.

  SS-Wiking and SS-Nordland first commanders

  With so much riding on the success of the Wiking, the choice of divisional commander and other key leadership appointments was crucial. And here Himmler had a moment of true inspiration. After working hand in glove with Paul Hausser to turn the SS-VT into a mould breaking force, Felix Steiner had been rewarded with the field command of the SS-Deutschland Regiment (SS Regiment Number 1 no less). He had led it well in the invasions of Poland, the Low Countries and France, and earned the Knight’s Cross in August for its performance. He was now further rewarded by being given his own division – the Wiking. From day one Steiner completely understood the nature of his assignment and its difficulty. He did not seek to impose German norms on the foreign volunteers, nor did he mollycoddle them, but instead sought to foster an ésprit de corps that would pay off handsomely at the front and lead to four years of martial glory and an enviable military reputation.

  For regimental commanders, Steiner had the Bavarian, Carl Ritter von Oberkamp, in charge of the experienced Germania (von Oberkamp had just succeeded his fellow Bavarian Carl-Maria Demelhuber in the role), and the Dutch/Flemish Westland was to be led by Hilmar Wäckerle. As for the Scandinavians of the Nordland the choice fell on the son of an Austro-Hungarian artillery general – Friedrich Max Karl von Scholz – always known simply as ‘Fritz’ von Scholz. Von Scholz was no ‘Aryan superman’, that’s for sure. Of slight build and medium height he was almost bald at only 44 years old. He didn’t have Steiner’s charisma or Hausser’s presence, but he was an attentive and experienced commander and a perfect choice for the fledgling unit. He had already commanded a battalion of the Der Führer Regiment during the campaign in the West in 1940, and had been awarded both classes of the Iron Cross. His promotion to head the Nordland was the beginning of a three-and-a-half year relationship with Nordic volunteers that would see him earn their respect and admiration as well as the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, and would only end with his death in combat on the banks of the River Narva in Estonia. All three Nordland battalions were commanded by Germans; Harry Polewacz, Arnold Stoffers and Walter Plöw. Both Polewacz and Stoffers would win the Knight’s Cross and the German Cross in Gold while serving in the Wiking.

  The Nordland Division’s first and most influential commander, the Austro-Hungarian aristocrat Friedrich Max Karl von Scholz, affectionately known by all as ‘Fritz’ von Scholz. He would lead the division until his death in action at the Narva in 1944.

  The Wiking itself was organised as a standard Waffen-SS infantry division of the time, with its three infantry regiments having three battalions each, and its heavy weapons concentrated in an artillery regiment of four battalions. Three of these latter battalions were equipped with 10.5cm light field howitzers, and one with the far bigger 15cm heavy howitzers capable of hitting targets 13 kilometres away. There was also a single light armoured car company of SdKfz 222s, each armed with a machine-gun and a 20mm cannon. The entire division, including its all-important artillery, was motorised with trucks, motorcycles and Kubelwagen – the German version of the American Jeep and British Land Rover – for the infantry and supporting elements, and prime mover vehicles for the artillery. At a time when the vast majority of the Wehrmacht was no more motorised than in the First World War, this was a huge advantage and set the division apart as a spearhead formation.

  Why did Danes and Norwegians join the Wiking?

  Unsurprisingly this is the most common question about the volunteers. Was it unemployment, the lure of money and higher living standards? Were they all fanatical Nazis and anti-Semites? Was the Waffen-SS somehow ‘attractive’, or were they just bored young men looking for adventure? The Dutch psychologist, Dr A.F.G. van Hoesel, carried out the first study of its kind in 1948 of fellow-countrymen convicted of political crimes, of whom some 264 were former SS volunteers. He came to few conclusions other than that a lot of them had been unemployed at the time, and many had few skills. A far more useful piece of work, on the background and situation of the volunteers, was carried out by the Danish sociologist K.O. Christiansen in 1955. Of the 13,000 or so Danes who were sentenced for collaboration after the war, he studied 3,718 who were former members of the Waffen-SS or Luftwaffe anti-aircraft troops, and interviewed no less than 654 of them. The resulting profile revealed that the majority were from cities and larger towns, and unlike van Hoesel’s study, indicated that many were pretty well-educated and from the middle class. Naturally enough, a high percentage were also members of neo-Nazi parties and were strongly anti-communist.

  Ex-SS-Sturmbannführer Oluf von Krabbe, a Danish veteran and latterly commander of the 1st Battalion SS-Grenadier Regiment 68 of the SS-Langemarck Division, echoed the same view as Christiansen in a similar study a few years later.

  One thing that was abundantly clear from all the different investigations was that whatever the Scandinavians joined for, it seemed pay and reward were not a major factor. One of the earliest Danish volunteers was the serving army officer Erik Brörup. Born in 1917 into a solid Copenhagen middle-class background (his father was in the furniture business), young Erik was one of three children, well-educated and with good prospects. Despite all of this young Erik was a rebel at heart. A fit young man with light brown hair and blue-eyes he was passionate about outdoor pursuits, enjoying horse riding and cross-country skiing especially. Never willing to toe the line, he would later have an enormously varied career in the Waffen-SS, serving in no less than three different divisions, the Wiking, the Florian Geyer (an SS cavalry division) and the Nordland, as well as the Frikorps Danmark and the specialist SS Para Battalion 500. His reasons for joining up seem to speak for many of his countrymen at the time:

  At school in Denmark in 1934, I served in a militia unit named the Konigens Livjäger Korps, which roughly translated would be something like King’s Own Rifles. It had been raised in 1801 to fight the English! [The Royal Navy bombarded Brörup’s hometown of Copenhagen during the Napoleonic Wars.] When I was called up for national service I chose the cavalry, after seeing the movie The Bengal Lancers. I started recruit training as an officer-candidate on 22 October 1937 in the Gardehusar Regiment. They were household cavalry and a real bunch of snobs. I must have pissed them off somewhat, because at the outbreak of war in September 1939 I didn’t get the usual automatic promotion to Second Lieutenant. This was despite my coming fifth out of 35 candidates in military proficiency tests. They said it was because I had ‘fascist sympathies’ and was therefore ‘politically unreliable’.

  Then my service was cut short by the arrival of the Germans in April 1940. Our Captain and old tactics instructor explained to us just exactly what the SS-Verfügungstruppe and Waffen-SS were, and what they did in the West in 1940. [As an exemplar of Waffen-SS combat behaviour the instructor read out the Knight’s Cross-winning exploits of Fritz Vogt who Brörup would later serve under on the Eastern Front.]

  I also learned there was a sub-office of the recruiting department of the Waffen-SS in Copenhagen; and they were hiring soldiers for the SS-Regiment Nordland. Having done nothing but soldiering I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask, so I went in Sam Browne belt and spurs. They checked me out, found out that I wasn’t such a bad soldier after all and offered me, for starters, my equivalent rank – SS-Standartenjunker – and a chance to join the next officers’ training course at the SS Officers School at Bad Tölz in Bavaria due to start on the 15th of July 1941. I had to get permission from the Danish government to enlist, which I did, and by the 25th of April 1941 I had signed my contract.

  So much for motivation. Basically I went to Germany because they treated sol
diers right. I was a professional soldier and I am damned proud of the fact that as a foreigner I became an officer in one of the best divisions ever, and I have never rued or regretted what I did.

  The influence of family and friends was also hugely important to these impressionable young men. Another Danish volunteer, Emil Staal, had joined Clausen’s DNSAP as a 16-year-old in 1937, three years later when several of his friends from the Party enlisted in the Nordland, so did he, at the tender age of 19. While Bent Lemboe was encouraged to join by his father, a member of the DNSAP since 1933. Both young men felt supported by their family and friends in volunteering. They were also strongly anti-communist and thought war between Germany and the Soviet Union was inevitable. When that war did come, they fought with the Wiking in Russia. Both survived, although Staal was invalided out in 1942 after being seriously wounded in the Caucasus when just 22 years old.

  Over in Norway, Bjørn Østring’s decision to enlist was heartily endorsed by his grandparents. It was not the same for Bjarne Dramstad:

  The Danish Waffen-SS officer volunteer Erik Brörup. His amazing career in the Waffen-SS would see him serve in the Frikorps Danmark, three separate SS divisions and the élite SS Parachute Battalion 500. (Erik Brörup)

  Before the war Brörup served in the aristocratic Danish Gardehusar Cavalry Regiment. (Erik Brörup)

  I didn’t tell anyone except my brother Rolf, some in my family were quite negative about the Germans, and after all I had two brothers on the other side; one in the US Army’s 99th Battalion [the 99th was almost entirely recruited from Norwegian Americans] and one sailing convoys with the Allies who was sunk by German U-Boats and later joined the Norwegian Navy in Canada.

  The post-war Norwegian Army officer, Svein Blindheim – later the author of Vi sloss for Norge (We fought for Norway) with Bjørn Østring – came to the same conclusions as his Danish contemporaries when he studied former Norwegian volunteers. He found NS party membership and volunteering tended to run in families, so making signing up a positive thing to do for the young men involved, but at the same time severely limiting the pool of potential recruits. Anti-communism and sympathy for the Finns were strong motivators too. The two Norwegian Nordland volunteers, Ole Brunaes and Leif Kristiansen, were shocked at Norway’s easy defeat in 1940 and felt that only Germany could protect Norway against the Soviet Union:

  I [Leif Kristiansen] didn’t know what Quisling stood for and what he thought, but I could see the British plot developing: provoke German occupation of Scandinavia in order to produce a German-Russian War.

  Though I [Ole Brunaes] doubted we would come into action in time – England, Germany’s only opponent left, was nearly beaten – we accepted the aim of Norwegian independence, later on from 22 June 1941 the motivation of volunteers was plain enough: to fight the Soviet communism threatening Europe and thereby Norway.

  There was a huge range of reasons for joining up. The Dutch SS-Westland volunteer, Jan Munk, was typical of many of these young men and his rationale could have as easily come from a Dane or a Norwegian.

  There was a lot of friction at home with my very anti-Nazi father, one year we went by car into Germany to a favourite restaurant for a delicious trout dish. In the town there was a festival or celebration or something. There were flags flying, garlands everywhere and I saw groups of Hitler Jugend boys and girls marching and singing and they looked so happy and I thought it was wonderful, my father said ‘Look at all those Nazi children, isn’t it terrible, they will all grow up to be no good.’ I just couldn’t understand this, that was the moment that I think I became pro-Nazi. I also spent a lot of time talking politics with an aunt, my mother’s sister, and uncle who were active members of the NSB [Anton Mussert’s Dutch pro-Nazi party] and very pro-Nazi. My grandmother was also pro-German by the way. These political discussions carried over into my final year at the HBS [secondary school] when one day someone said; ‘If you admire them so much why don’t you join them?’ Well that was it, and that is really how I joined.

  Jan Munk in front of his section hut at Ellwangen. Wounded in action on the Russian Front he would end the war leading Hitler Youth teenagers against the advancing Americans. Unwilling to sacrifice their lives for a hopeless cause, Munk sent the boys home. (Jan Munk)

  Training and equipment

  Recruits were not the only thing the Waffen-SS struggled to squeeze out of the Wehrmacht High Command, the other was land. To train properly, a soldier needs an enormous amount of the stuff, he and his comrades need it to practise on, march and drive over, and most importantly to fire their weapons in. In 1940 a tank round could travel a mile before exploding, a bullet from a rifle two miles or more, while an artillery round could go more than ten. Add in safety distances so you don’t end up killing and maiming your own men, plus the need to manoeuvre, and you’re talking about a good-sized training area for a single battalion being 20 square miles. The SS-Wiking Division had more than fifteen battalions. Naturally not all an army’s divisions are in the training areas at the same time, but overall the availability of suitable ground is a key pinch point in preparing a field force for war. The British Army has always been short of this vital commodity, hence training is carried out today in countries such as Germany, Canada, Poland and Kenya. In the Third Reich the German Army was unwilling, and unable, to release adequate training zones to the SS. The advent of war radically altered this situation as newly-conquered countries were exploited, and that is why almost all Waffen-SS training took place outside the borders of pre-war Germany. For example, in Poland the old cavalry barracks at Debica was seized and the surrounding countryside forcibly emptied of civilians, and voilà, an SS depot was created. For the Danish and Norwegian volunteers, the former French Army camp at Sennheim in Alsace (following the fall of France the region was annexed by Germany) became their destination as recruits and also the de facto home of the western European SS.

  All military training is hard. War is such a frightening and incredibly violent environment that preparation for it must be immensely tough and uncompromising. For a civilian it is a culture shock of epic proportions. My own time at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst was hard enough, and I had spent five years in the Cadet Force and three years in the Territorials in my University Officer Training Corps beforehand. Most of my intake had done the same, but for the minority who had not, the Sandhurst experience was of an altogether different magnitude. How some of them stuck with it I will never know. The same in essence went for the Scandinavian volunteers, those with prior service tended to adapt quickly, while complete novices struggled. Having already been a soldier for several years, Erik Brörup, settled in well:

  How hard was it? I can state quite categorically that the training I went through in the Danish cavalry was tougher than anything I later encountered in the Waffen-SS. Manoeuvres were very realistic, with live ammunition being used on certain exercises, but not before every man knew his weapon and how to take cover. By the way, similar ‘shoots’ were also used in the Danish forces.

  Others found it more difficult, such as Ole Brunaes.

  The training was, of course, no Sunday school. Our German instructors were no real deep psychologists, but, like us, ordinary healthy German youth, from all parts of the people and from all professions. They had self-confidence, were well-skilled with a dynamic efficiency and were remarkably proud of their famous German military traditions. We Norwegians, coming from a country where national defence had been neglected, the military professions ridiculed and any tradition nearly ruined, had a lesson to learn with regard to accuracy, toughness, discipline and cleanliness – physically as well as morally – fingernails being examined before eating, the locking of wardrobes strictly forbidden, thefts from comrades punished hard.

  The Danes and Norwegians seemed to be similar in many ways, but there were differences according to German Wiking officer SS-Obersturmführer Peter Strassner:

  The Danes were more robust and less sensitive than the Norwegians, loved goo
d food and drink, but now and then were obstinate and tended to be strongly critical. The Norwegians, on the other hand, worked harder and were more serious and contemplative … In their military achievements they developed an almost totally instinctive awareness which led them to be somewhat careless with regard to their own safety.

  As for the Swedes, the tall and hook-nosed Erik Wallin described their natural approach to training as ‘mostly our Swedish style, a little bit slow and not too strenuous, not like the double-quick speed of the Waffen-SS.’ Bjørn Østring echoed this view. ‘The training was hard, and our German instructors used their own language. Some of them we liked, others not. My company commander said: “When you go into action it will be easier than being here”; and he was right!’

  Official reports to Berlin from Sennheim confirmed the Scandinavian volunteers as ‘independently minded and strongly inclined to criticism’. This was not what the Waffen-SS was used to.

  Mistreatment of the volunteers

  Himmler, Berger and Steiner may have seen the Scandinavians and other foreign volunteers as brothers-in-arms, but most of the German Waffen-SS training apparatus either did not care about the nationality of its recent recruits, or far worse, thought them inferior to native Germans. This problem festered within the foreign Waffen-SS right up to the end of 1942, by which time the dissatisfaction in the ranks had reduced the flow of volunteers to a trickle. The Reichsführer himself was then forced to act or see his dream of a pan-Nordic SS turn to dust. Back at Sennheim in 1940 that did not necessarily mean Scandinavian recruits were discriminated against. Erik Brörup said of his time: