Hitler's Vikings Page 7

  I wasn’t personally subjected to any form of demeaning or degrading treatment because I was a Dane. I went through officers’ school where there was respect for every individual, not like the usual senseless bullshit you normally find – the US Military Academy at West Point being a case in point … An absolute no-no was to curse or call anyone by insulting names and the like. The honour and dignity of any man, officer or other rank, was not to be violated. This had a lot to do with the great sense of comradeship which was instilled into the Waffen-SS. A mutual respect existed. Many commanders radiated a certain charisma and their troops would follow them to hell and back.

  While the overall picture seems to be mixed, perhaps maltreatment can sometimes be in the eye of the beholder. According to Bjarne Dramstad it was not always Germans who were the guilty parties:

  I was in Fallingbostel near Hamburg, we had instructors from the Braunschweig Officer School, but it was the Norwegian NCOs we had who were real bullies. I remember a couple of brothers in my Company who became Unterscharführers and thus instructors. These two clowns tried to be harder than their German masters all the time, giving us punishments for just about everything. The training was hard and I really learned to hate the German military mentality at that point. One time I opposed an unfair treatment of my friend and ended up having to clean all the toilets in the barracks. When any NCO came along I had to salute him and report; ‘Schütze Dramstad, the biggest idiot in 14 Company at your service.’ Many of us hoped these idiots would show up at the Front so we could settle the score with them. The language of command may have been German but we spoke Norwegian, a lot of us didn’t learn to speak German well at all.

  Brörup never lost his love of horses and spent part of his Waffen-SS service in the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer. (Erik Brörup)

  Erik Brörup poses for a photo in his officer’s uniform. (James Macleod)

  II

  1941: First Blood – the Den Norske Legion,

  the Frikorps Danmark and the Wiking in Barbarossa

  In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria, and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these signs; and a little after that in the same year in January the harrying of the heathen Northmen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.

  The Vikings raid on Lindisfarne in AD 793 – The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  On 18 December 1940 Adolf Hitler issued the following directive for Number 21 Case Barbarossa, named after the medieval German Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa: ‘The German Armed Forces must be prepared, even before the conclusion of the war against England, to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign … Preparations will be concluded by 15 May 1941.’

  With that pronouncement the wheels were set in motion for what would become the biggest ever conflict between two enemies – the Russo-German war of 1941-1945. In its scale and scope it would come to dwarf every struggle before or since, its savagery would plumb the depths of infamy, its human cost almost defy belief and its aftermath would shape the history of the world for more than half a century after it ended. It would also define the armed SS. For the remainder of its short life the vast part of its combat strength would be deployed in the East, only one of its final 38 divisions never served there. Ideologically it became a totem against Soviet Communism, and increasingly it drew its manpower from the Soviet Union as well. Come the end in 1945, no less than six Waffen-SS divisions were manned for the most part by Slavic easterners and thousands more were officially and unofficially serving in the other divisions as so-called ‘Willing Helpers’ (Hilfswillige – Hiwis for short).

  A very rare photograph of the SS-Nordland grenadier Sverri Djurhuus, one of the only positively identified volunteers from the remote Scandinavian Faroe Islands. (James Macleod)

  The SS-Wiking prepares for battle

  From its inauguration in late December 1940, the SS-Wiking had just six months to prepare for the invasion of Soviet Russia. With Steiner’s appointment, the command structure and divisional elements began to come into being. The SS-Germania was, of course, a veteran unit and the new SS Artillery Regiment 5 was being assembled quickly (initially almost totally German-manned, the composition would change in the future as Scandinavians joined this highly technical arm). But it was the formation and training of the two new infantry regiments – SS-Nordland and SS-Westland – that was proving problematic. With Scandinavian volunteers in particular coming in their hundreds rather than the thousands, it became necessary to draft in large numbers of native Germans to bring the infantry companies up to strength. This was less than ideal but meant by early June, on the very eve of Barbarossa, the SS-Wiking stood at an impressive total of 19,377 men; however, less than 10 per cent of that complement were ‘Germanics’. Of the 1,564 foreign volunteers only 932 were Nordics; 421 Finns, 294 Norwegians, 216 Danes and 1 Swede (this was the Winter War veteran Gösta Borg who was serving in the Westland). The rest were mainly Dutchmen, with a small number of Flemings and Swiss. Overwhelmingly, the Scandinavians were pooled in the infantry companies under German NCOs and officers, very few were either in technical arms or command positions. The largest Nordic contingent was then Finnish, and – as you would expect – their story was different from everyone else’s.

  Finns in the Wiking

  Nazi Germany had not supported Finland in the Winter War, but as Hitler moved inexorably towards conflict with Stalin’s Soviet Union, both countries instinctively drew closer together against a common enemy. The Finns were never going to be a particularly powerful ally though, given their still-small army and lack of modern military equipment. They had also lost a large number of their best troops in the fighting in 1939–1940. Those that were left were experienced, highly skilled soldiers, but they were few. Nevertheless, the Nordland was opened up to Finnish volunteers on 13 February 1941 and the first 116, all combat veterans, arrived in Germany in the second week of May and were sent straight to the Wiking. A further three hundred or so arrived in the next couple of months, so that by June there were seven officers and 200 men in the Nordland, five officers and 76 men in the Westland, nine officers in the Germania, and the remainder of the contingent was spread around the rest of the division.

  The Germans were so pleased with them that they planned to recruit as many as possible, preferably another whole battalion. The Finnish Government, informed in late January of the impending invasion of the Soviet Union, made two stipulations about Germany’s recruiting ambitions; firstly that ethnic Swedes (who comprised about 15 per cent of the total Finnish population) should not predominate in the unit, and secondly that the new intake had to be organised into a separate battalion within the division with Finnish officers and NCOs using their native language to command. German liaison was welcome but in effect this was to be a national Finnish unit, which was why Helsinki was keen for ethnic Finns to form the bulk of recruits. Berger, desperate for more Nordic recruits, agreed, and thus was born the SS-Volunteer Battalion Nordost. However the Nordost name was quickly dropped, and the battalion rechristened the Finnish Volunteer Battalion of the Waffen-SS (die Finnisches Freiwilligen Bataillon der Waffen-SS). Berger may have been happy to go along with most of the Finnish government’s conditions but he also had one of his own, which was was that the overall battalion commander be a German. The man he chose for this extremely delicate task was Hans Collani. Prior to joining the Waffen-SS, Collani had been a merchant seaman plying his trade in the Baltic, and as such, had had frequent dealings with all manner of Scandinavians before giving up the sea and joining the Leibstandarte back in 1933. He was a conciliatory character and no German supremacist, this made him an ideal choice and his Finnish troops took to him well. The men themselves arrived in two separate batches and were sent south to train near Vienna. In a matter of weeks the battalion was up to its full strength of just over 800 men, and hard at it under its
SS instructors. But it would not take its place in the Nordland Regiment until early 1942 as unlike the Finns already in the division, many of these new recruits had no prior military experience. The Wiking would have to go into action in Barbarossa without them.

  An SS-Leibstandarte ball in 1939. The Leibstandarte’s commander Sepp Dietrich is on the left and he is laughing with his then-Adjutant, Hans Collani. Collani would go on to command the Finnish SS for its entire lifetime before dying in action at the Narva in 1944. Badly wounded and surrounded, Collani shot himself rather than be captured by the Soviets.

  Excellent news as this infusion of new blood was for the SS authorities, it did little to hide the fact that the concept of the Nordland as a mainly Scandinavian-manned regiment had failed. Even a state-wide radio broadcast in Norway on 12 January by Quisling himself, for the first time publicly supporting the Nordland and calling for thousands of volunteers, only elicited a few hundred new recruits, and they would still be in training come invasion day. Naturally, the overall number of Scandinavian volunteers in the division would fluctuate over time, but the reality was that for the whole of its brief but glorious life the Wiking would always be manned mostly by Germans rather than non-Germans.

  The most powerful force the world had ever seen

  The Wiking was also in a race against time to be ready for the fateful day. Barbarossa was not going to be delayed because a brand new SS division with less than two thousand foreigners in its ranks was still in training. This was planned to be nothing less than the military event of the millennium, a demonstration of sheer brute force that in Hitler’s own words would ‘make the world hold its breath’. And truly the statistics of Barbarossa were mind-boggling. The Wehrmacht invasion force totalled 3,400,000 men grouped in 11 separate Armies, of which four were hugely powerful Panzer Groups (Panzergruppe 1–4) equipped with 3,332 tanks and armoured vehicles. A further 600,000 vehicles and 600,000 horses would provide the transport. Overhead the Luftwaffe, still fighting in North Africa and across the English Channel, readied three entire Airfleets (Luftflotten) of 2,770 modern aircraft.

  The plan was to invade the Soviet Union with three sharp prongs, designated C in the north, B in the centre and A in the south.

  Army Group C (Heeresgruppe C) in the north was commanded by the aristocratic Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb. His forces were ordered to advance from East Prussia, take the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and capture Russia’s second city of Leningrad, while finally linking up with the Finns. This was not the primary axis of the invasion so Leeb’s forces were the weakest of the three groups, comprising the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies and Panzer Group 4 (under Hoeppner) totalling 26 divisions – three of them motorised, three of them panzer and the rest being infantry on foot.

  To the south, set to strike out from German-occupied Poland, was Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B. Later renamed Army Group Centre (as C was renamed North and A changed to South), this formation was to be the fulcrum of the entire German war effort in the East throughout the war. When it succeeded Nazi Germany succeeded, and vice versa, so its utter annihilation in the summer of 1944 would herald the end of the state that created it. Von Bock’s punch was the strongest of the three, comprising the Fourth and Ninth Armies and Panzer Groups 2 and 3 (under Guderian and Hoth respectively) with 35 infantry divisions, three security divisions, one cavalry division, five motorised divisions and nine panzer divisions, plus the premier motorised regiment in the Army, the Grossdeutschland. Its objectives were the destruction of the main Red Army formations in Belarus. The capture of Moscow was not explicitly stated.

  On von Bock’s right flank, and stretching down through Germany’s allies in the Balkans, Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria, lay Army Group A under the venerable Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt. His German force of the Sixth, Eleventh and Seventeenth Armies and Panzer Group 1 (under von Kleist) totalled 22 infantry divisions, six mountain divisions, three security divisions, four motorised divisions and five panzer divisions. It was augmented by a further 15 Romanian divisions (their Third and Fourth Armies), two Hungarian divisions and two Italian divisions. Von Runstedt’s objectives for Barbarossa were to cut off and destroy the Red Army west of the River Dnieper, take Kiev as the capital of the Ukraine, Kharkov (Kharkiv in Ukrainian) as Russia’s fourth largest city, occupy the Crimea (including the massive Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and then push east to the River Volga and the city of Stalingrad. Just in case they got bored they were then to wheel south, invade the Caucasus and take its oilfields intact.

  The invasion was to be faced by 12,000,000 Red Army soldiers grouped in 230 divisions, equipped with 20,000 tanks and 8,000 aircraft. Weakened though they were by Stalin’s Purges, this was still a formidable force.

  The Waffen-SS formations were spread over the three Army Groups, with the Wiking and Leibstandarte serving together as part of General Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 down in the south in Army Group A. Opposing the Scandinavians of the Wiking were the 69 infantry, 28 armoured and 11 cavalry divisions of Colonel-General Mikhail Kirponos’s Southwest Front. At the time the overall strength of the Wiking (19,377) made it the most powerful formation in the armed SS, with the renamed Das Reich (formerly the Verfügungs) having 19,021 men, the Totenkopf 18,754, the SS-Polizei 17,347, the Leibstandarte (still in effect a very large brigade rather than a division) at 10,796 and the new Battlegroup Nord (Kampfgruppe) just 10,573, which was formed in 1941 from two Totenkopf regiments and would serve in Finland.

  The Eastern Front opens

  As the Wiking continued to form up back in Germany, the Wehrmacht moved its war machine to its jumping-off points in the east. The invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring forced a delay to Barbarossa, but finally the date was set and preparations completed. In the summer haze millions of men anxiously waited in the suddenly-crowded forests and meadows of Poland, east Germany and Rumania for the order to advance. At precisely a quarter past three on the morning of 22 June 1941 the massed ranks of German artillery opened fire, and it began. After a short barrage, and with armadas of aircraft flying overhead to destroy the Red air force on the ground, the armoured fists of Nazi Germany started their engines and roared towards their first objectives. Behind them, seemingly endless lines of dust-covered German infantrymen slogged along the roads and tracks trying to keep contact with their compatriots in the vanguard. Despite endless warnings, the Red Army was totally unprepared for the avalanche of steel and high explosive that engulfed its forward lines. The lack of preparedness was entirely down to Stalin personally, and his utter refusal to countenance a German invasion. The reasoning behind this has mystified historians ever since, and will probably never be completely explained, but it does seem that the Soviet dictator’s overwhelming paranoia led him to believe that the only real threat to his rule was from inside the Soviet Union and not from without – how wrong he was.

  The Wiking did not go into action on invasion day, but instead was rushed forward to join in the fighting as Army Group A’s panzer troops pushed eastwards against the surprised Red Army troopers. Taking up position on the northern wing of the Army Group, the Wiking fired its first shots in anger on 29 June 1941, led by the SS-Westland Regiment, in what became known as ‘the Battle of the Frontiers’. Along with the rest of von Runstedt’s forces it was heading southeast across the Ukraine from its start point, pushing over the Dniester and Bug Rivers, through Zhitomir, Kiev and Uman, aiming to hit the mighty Dnieper River at Cherkassy. The intent was then to carry on to the Donets River at Izyum, and the Don and the Sea of Azov at Rostov. But first it crossed the former demarcation line between the German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland, and advanced into battle at the Galician border city of Lvov. Called ‘Lemberg’ in the old Austro-Hungarian days and ‘Lviv’ by the regions Ukrainians, Lvov was a metropolis with a past rich in history and dispute. The advancing Wiking barged straight into the defending Soviet 32nd Infantry Division and was held in vicious fight
ing until the armoured vehicles of the division’s reconnaissance battalion arrived and swung the battle. Pressing on, the Westland’s 1st Battalion, led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Hajo von Hadeln, forced a crossing by night of the steep-banked River Slucz at Husyantin, and prepared to break through the fortified Stalin Line in front of Zhitomir. The fighting was fierce and confused. A six-man reconnaissance patrol from the 17th Company, commanded by the German officer candidate SS-Oberjunker Vogel, was returning to its own lines when it found itself in the middle of a Soviet attack. Vogel did not hesitate and led his men into action to help their hard-pressed comrades. In the hand-to-hand fighting that followed the entire patrol was killed; three were Germans, two were Dutchmen and one was Danish. This man was the first ethnic Dane to be killed in action in the Wiking, his name was Gunnar Christiansen. He would be the first of many.

  Fritz Ihle, a member of the Nordland’s Recce Battalion, was one of many Danish North Schleswig ethnic German volunteers in the Waffen-SS. (James Macleod)

  Here also, just two days after the Westland went into combat for the very first time, its inaugural commander was killed in action. Wäckerle had stopped his staff car to look over an abandoned Soviet tank, and was promptly shot dead by a surviving crewman hiding in the wreckage. He was immediately replaced by the Rumanian ethnic German, Artur Martin Phleps, who would go on to form and lead the 7th SS-Mountain Division Prinz Eugen before being killed in action himself in late 1944.