Das Reich (3 page)

Hitler’s
Führerdirectiv
No.51 of November 1943 gave first priority
to strengthening the western defences against the Allied invasion. Yet in reality the East continued to consume the overwhelming proportion of men and resources. Divisions sent to France had either been ruined in Russia, were untrained or medically inferior. Special battalions were formed from the deaf and diseased. The ranks were filled with Russian, Hungarian and Romanian subjects of Hitler’s empire – even some defectors from POWs of the Indian Army. Von Rundstedt had demanded seventy full-strength divisions to defend the West. By 6 June 1944, he had only fifty-nine woefully under-strength ones – 850,000 men and 1,552 tanks. By contrast, there were 156 German divisions in Russia and twenty-seven in Italy. ‘Often I would be informed that a new division was to arrive in France direct from Russia, or Norway, or central Germany,’ Rundstedt wrote acidly. ‘When it finally made its appearance in the West, it would consist, in all, of a divisional commander, a medical officer, and five bakers.’

The 2nd SS Das Reich Armoured Division was not quite such a shadow when it arrived in Bordeaux from the East, but it was nothing like the superb all-volunteer force that had swept into Russia with the Wehrmacht in June 1941. The High Command in the East had ruthlessly stripped its surviving ‘teeth’ formations to strengthen the sagging line on the Dnieper. Only a few thousand support personnel had been sent to France, to wait re-equipment with every kind of weapon and vehicle. To fill the ranks, 9,000 replacements flooded into the division’s barracks and lagers: untrained boys, almost all seventeen or eighteen, many of them
Volksdeutsche
– Hungarians, Romanians and a large contingent of Alsatians, twelve nationalities in all. Three months before they were plunged into one of the great battles of history, in the woods and fields of south-western France, the raw recruits were firing their Mauser K98s for the first time, practising the naming of parts on the MG42, and receiving their introduction to the Pak 75 anti-tank gun.

In April, they moved south-eastwards to a rendezvous with the survivors of the division’s battle group, at last released to join
them from the East. They formed one of the three armoured, one motorized and thirteen infantry divisions of General Von Blaskowitz’s Army Group G, responsible for the defence of southern France. The point on the map that Hitler’s forefinger had stabbed on 6 April was the town of Montauban, just north of Toulouse. There, his staff suggested, the Das Reich could not only prepare for battle in a quiet area, but stand poised to intervene on the north or south coasts of France, when the Allies landed. If the disturbing terrorist situation in central France which was already irritating Von Rundstedt continued to worsen, the Das Reich could guarantee communication between Army Groups G and B.

Throughout the last two years of the war, the deployment of the SS divisions consumed countless hours at Hitler’s Führer conferences. His faith and pride in their power were unshakable. Again and again throughout the war in the East, SS units had defied his generals’ predictions of the possible, broken through the unbreakable, or held the untenable. The Das Reich had fought with distinction through the great summer battles of 1943, above all in the slow fight back to the Dnieper in August. In November, the SS Leibstandarte Division spearheaded the counter-attack that smashed the Russian armoured corps after its breakthrough near Kiev. In April 1944, it was the SS Panzer Corps under Hausser that launched a brilliant flank attack to save the 1st Panzer Army from certain destruction in the Cherkassy pocket.

The SS had become the fire brigade of Hitler’s empire, rushed to every crisis. In the last two years of the war, the Leibstandarte Division moved seven times between the Eastern and Western Fronts. Himmler exaggerated only a little when he said in January 1944: ‘So far, the Waffen SS has never under any circumstances caused disappointment, and it will not – even under the most severe hardships yet to come – disappoint in the future.’ Since October 1943, seven crack Panzergrenadier units, including the Das Reich, had been redesignated as Panzer divisions. With an establishment of over 20,000 men and 200 tanks, each was almost twice the strength of a Wehrmacht Panzer division. These seven
units, together with another five or six SS divisions of slightly lesser quality, were at the forefront of Hitler’s operational plans until the end of the war. It is a measure of his strategic priorities that, until June 1944, only one SS division was engaged with the Western Allies, in Italy. The remainder of this vast personal army – thirty-eight divisions and 600,000 men at its zenith – was committed in Russia or refitting.

Of the ten Panzer divisions in France on D-Day, three were SS. The only unit in a position to provide immediate support for the weak static infantry divisions defending the Normandy beaches was 21 Pz. Rommel had already protested repeatedly to Hitler against the policy of holding the bulk of the armour at least fifty, in some cases 150 miles behind the coast. When the Allies landed, it was evident to every senior German commander that their air power would create immense difficulties for German reinforcements seeking to move forward. The Das Reich Division at Montauban, like 9 Pz further east on the Rhône, was some 450 miles from the north coast.

But whatever the difficulties in the forward areas, it seemed reasonable to expect that it would be possible to move an armoured division from southern France at least as far north as the Loire before encountering serious enemy interference. Even the British, with their huge programme of transport bombing, assumed that the Das Reich would be available for a German counter-thrust against the beachhead within a few days of 5 June: ‘2nd SS Panzer Division will . . . be concentrating in a forward area by D+3,’ argued a British Intelligence assessment of German armoured capability, drawn up three weeks before Overlord. The Allies expected, and indeed greatly feared, that the 2nd SS and its 209 tanks and assault guns – one-tenth of the entire German armoured strength in the West – would be playing a prominent role in the Normandy battle by 9 or 10 June. Most of the officers of the Das Reich Division were of the same opinion.

In this fifth year of the war, Hitler deceived himself when he spoke of the Das Reich as ‘an old division’. The ranks of the units training around Montauban were overwhelmingly filled by conscripts of a kind the ‘old’ SS of 1939 would never have glanced at. A veteran NCO laughed scornfully when Sadi Schneid, a young Alsatian recruit who joined them at Bordeaux in February, complained of toothache and appeared on his first parade with his front tooth missing, after a visit to the dentist. The old Waffen SS, the legion of pre-war National Socialist supermen, rejected every recruit with the slightest physical imperfection, even a single dental filling.

Schneid himself was a boy of seventeen whose mother, a fervent Nazi, had caused his father to be sent to an internment camp by denouncing him as a former Alsatian autonomist. His elder brother had already joined the SS as an alternative to ten years’ forced labour for black marketeering. It is a measure of the confusion of Alsatian loyalties that one of his younger brothers later joined the French Resistance, and one of his sisters broke off her engagement to a German tank officer because of his ardent Nazi sympathies. An officer of the Das Reich wrote later: ‘It was a terrible mistake to send men from Alsace to fight in the West when they had such strong links with France . . . The effects were not only military. There was a rapid increase in crime requiring severe punishment.’ From the moment that they arrived in Bordeaux, the young Alsatians were incited by local French people to desert. On his second day in camp Schneid was offered an escape route to the
maquis
by a French girl dental assistant. He did not take it, but, to the fierce bewilderment of SS officers who had never encountered such a problem before, others did.

Even the German soldiers lacked the passionate fervour of four years earlier. A Panzergrenadier officer named Major
¹
Otto Weidinger wrote:

Yet despite the diminished quality of recruits and major shortages of fuel, transport and equipment that hampered training through the spring of 1944, the Das Reich was still a formidable fighting force. Whatever the ghastly record of the SS and of Hitler’s Germany, nothing can diminish their military achievements. Unit for unit – above all in the last years, 1943–5 – the German army proved itself the greatest fighting force of World War II. Neither the British nor the American nor even the Russian Army could have matched its performance outnumbered, starved of fuel and supplies, faced by overwhelming air power. Even in 1944–5, diluted by the
Volksdeutsche
recruits, the SS divisions performed miracles. ‘The military significance of the Waffen SS is to be found not so much in its accomplishments during the years of German victory, as in its victories during the years of German defeat,’ the most objective post-war historian of the SS has written. Germany’s methods of manning her armies in 1944–5 were little worse than those by which the Roman Empire filled its legions. According to veterans, among the officers and NCOs of the Das Reich at Montauban in May 1944 10 or even 20 per cent were obviously inadequate to their task. But so were an equal or greater proportion of junior
leaders in most Allied units. The overwhelming majority of the Das Reich’s regimental officers and NCOs were experienced, battle-hardened veterans who would fight to the end.

To understand the officers of the SS, and some of the things that were done by the Das Reich Division in June 1944, it is essential to realize what Hitler’s Germany had given them. Almost all were of lower middle-class or working-class origins, men whom the old German Army would never have considered commissioning. Fritz Langangke, a tank lieutenant, was a miner’s son. Major Gunther-Eberhardt Wisliceny, commanding the Deutschland Panzergrenadier regiment, looked the image of a tall, stiff Prussian
Junker
. Yet in reality he had served for three years as a miner in Upper Silesia before joining the army. His family had lost everything in 1918, when his grandfather’s estates near Posen (Poznan) became part of Poland. Major Weidinger’s father was a post office worker. He himself was rejected by both the army and the police before being accepted by the SS. This tough, impressionable young man embraced his new life passionately, above all the emphasis on athletics. When he was commissioned, he and his fellow-officers loved the gentlemanly rituals of the mess, to which men of their class could never have aspired in the Wehrmacht. Weidinger met his wife Annelise, a pharmacist’s daughter, at a regimental drag hunt ball in November 1938. He would end the war with a brigade command at the age of thirty – scarcely an officer in the Das Reich Division was over thirty-two years old in 1944. Major Heinrich Wulf, commanding the reconnaissance battalion, was the thirty-year-old son of a North German worker who died as a conscript in Flanders in 1917. His mother became a waitress in a cavalry mess at Lüneburg, He himself left school at sixteen, was rejected by the army, and became a clerk. In 1934 he joined the SS – as a ranker, like every recruit – and was commissioned four years later.

Those pre-war years had been a glorious time for all of them: the comradeship, the discipline and supreme shared physical fitness of the training camps; officer school and the affectations
of the mess with full-dress uniform and the adulation of so many girls. Then came the triumphal sweep into Poland, the exhilaration of discovering that they could crush the best that the enemy could send against them. Wulf was on his honeymoon when he heard that the attack on France was to begin: he raced to his unit still in full-dress uniform with his ceremonial dagger at his hip, terrified that he might miss the battle. After France, Wulf remained an instructor at the famous SS officer school at Bad Tolz in Bavaria until July 1943, because of his wife’s persistence in producing daughters. As the only male in his family, SS rules decreed that he could not return to the front until he had a son. In October 1943, this duty accomplished, he took command of the Das Reich reconnaissance battalion in Russia.

It remains a common delusion among the people of Britain and America that World War II was fought in conditions far less terrible than those of World War I, and indeed from their own point of view this is perfectly true. But the huge, primeval struggle waged for four years between the German and Russian armies exceeded in scale and horror the worst of the 1914–18 battles for France. New standards of brutality in warfare were achieved by both sides. To understand how the officers of the Das Reich Division behaved in June 1944, it is essential to remember what they had spent three years learning in Russia. Each man who emerged from that campaign to fight again in the West counted his survival a miracle of odds.

The conditions of war in the East defied description. In winter weapons, vehicle bearings, engines, horses and men were relentlessly destroyed by the cold. Soldiers trudged through the snow with their boots wrapped in straw, their bodies lined with straw and newspapers beneath their greencoats, their faces almost invisible lest some chink in their armour allow frostbite to attack. The cold, the lice, malaria, frostbite, fever, hunger and partisan attack all took their toll of health and morale. Fritz Langangke once stood shivering beside a railway siding as a Panzer unit’s train drew up and a contingent of young tankers jumped down, fresh
from France: ‘They laughed at our rags. We shouted to them to cover their noses, their ears. They just joked and laughed and chattered. Then the tips of their noses and ears began to turn white before our eyes . . .’