Hitler's Commanders (50 page)

Many German generals were sickened and outraged by the excesses of the SSTV and SD, and at least three lodged formal protests. These were quickly hidden by Colonel General Walter von Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief of the army, who lacked the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Adolf Hitler. Instead of punishing Eicke and company, Hitler acted on the advice of Heinrich Himmler and decided to create a Totenkopf motorized infantry division! Naturally, Theodor Eicke was selected to command it. By mid-October he was back at Dachau, organizing his new command, which soon had a strength of more than 15,000 men.

The
SS Totenkopfdivision
(SSTK) consisted of three motorized infantry regiments, an artillery regiment, signals, engineer, anti-tank and reconnaissance battalions, and all the administrative and support units found in an army motorized division. The motorized infantry regiments came from the old concentration camp guard units Oberbayern, Brandenburg, and Thuringen, while the artillerymen came mainly from SS Heimwehr Danzig (the Danzig Home Guard). The other units were manned by new recruits and men from the
Verfuegungstruppen
(Special Purpose SS), the General SS, the Order Police (i.e., civilian policemen), and the new SSTV that were still forming in 1939. These new units, which included more than half the men in the division, were all poorly trained, badly equipped, and, by Eicke’s standards, inadequately disciplined.

Eicke showed true talent in equipping his division and became known as the greatest “scrounger” in the SS. Discipline he handled in the usual manner. Men who committed the slightest violation were transferred back to the concentration camps as guards. One former guard, dissatisfied with the rigorous training, requested a transfer back to his former camp. Eicke quickly approved the request—but sent the man back to the concentration camp as an inmate instead of as a guard! Equally significant, the man was given an indefinite sentence. There were no further requests for transfer.
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The new men had little choice but to try to adapt to their situation and apply themselves to their training. By the time Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and France on May 10, 1940, the men of the SSTK were ready.

Their officers, however, were not. Few had military training or experience appropriate to their assignments, and there was not one properly trained General Staff officer in the entire division. In fact, the only really competent officer on the divisional staff at this time was the Ia (operations officer and senior divisional staff officer), SS-Standartenfuehrer Baron Cassius von Montigny—until he collapsed due to exhaustion and overwork.
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Due to poor logistical management, traffic jams in the divisional rear were so monumental that the combat units were out of supply for at least three days and had to rely on food taken from the French or borrowed from Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, which was then advancing in the neighboring sector. Nowhere, however, was the lack of adequate officer training more evident than in the case of the divisional commander. Eicke, more often than not, acted on fragmentary and insufficient information rather than letting the situation develop properly. He tended to fly into rages in crisis situations, issuing now one order, countermanding it 15 minutes later and giving another, diametrically opposing order, and then giving a third, contradictory order, without retracting the second. The confusion that radiated from divisional headquarters definitely had a negative effect on the division’s performance in the Western campaign of 1940. Fortunately for Eicke, the fanatical bravery of his troops, coupled with their superb physical conditioning and fierce hatred for anyone who opposed the Fuehrer’s will, won the division victories that his own tactical ineptitude put in jeopardy. Casualties were nevertheless higher than they should have been. In justice to Eicke, however, it must be noted that he had trained these fanatically brave (though pitiless) men and that his own performance as a divisional commander improved remarkably after the French campaign, indicating that he learned a great deal from his mistakes. Even so, the battlefield is not the proper place for a divisional commander to receive on-the-job training.

As the German panzer spearhead drove on the English Channel, SSTK was used to prevent the escape of units from the Dunkirk Pocket to the main French armies south of the Somme. On May 21, SSTK and Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division met and, in the vicinity of Arras, turned back the main Allied counterattack of the entire campaign. During this battle the SS anti-tank battalion alone knocked out 22 British tanks—most of them at point-blank range. The division’s assault on the La Bassee Canal line the following day was less successful, largely because of Eicke’s ham-fisted conduct of the battle. He attacked across the canal with one unsupported infantry battalion, without reconnaissance or artillery preparation, and ran into an unexpectedly strong British force, which drove the SS back across the canal with heavy losses. Eicke launched a second unsuccessful attack on May 24, which was again mishandled. After this check his corps commander, General of Panzer Troops Erich Hoepner, bitterly reprimanded Eicke, calling him a “butcher” to his face in front of his divisional staff and accusing him of caring nothing about the lives of his men.
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Even Himmler was angry at Eicke because of the high casualties.

After the reduction of the Dunkirk Pocket, both Eicke and the SSTK had an easier time, pursuing the disintegrating French armies all the way to Orleans. After the French surrendered at Compiègne on June 22, the Totenkopf was sent to Hosten, a village 25 miles southwest of Bordeaux, for occupation duties. Later it was transferred to Avallon, then to Biarritz, and finally to Bordeaux, from which it boarded trains in early June 1941 for transport to East Prussia. It crossed into the Soviet Union on June 24, 1941, two days after Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, had begun. As part of Field Marshal Ritter Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North, the Death’s Head Division crossed the Dvina at Dvinsk, overran bitter resistance in central Lithuania, penetrated the Stalin Line, and earned the enthusiastic praise of General Erich von Manstein, the commander of the LVI Panzer Corps and one of Germany’s greatest military brains.
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Eicke was not with the division throughout all these actions, however. On July 6, while the battles of the Stalin Line were still in progress, he was returning to his command post after a day at the front with his men. Near the CP his vehicle hit a Soviet mine. His right foot was shattered and his leg was badly mutilated. After emergency surgery he was evacuated back to Berlin, where it took him three months to recover—and even then not completely. As late as mid-1942, he still limped and had to walk with the aid of a cane.

Had Eicke now rested on his laurels and taken a staff appointment, no one in the government, army, or the SS would have said a single negative word about it. Indeed, a less fanatical man would not have wanted to go back to the Russian Front. Eicke rushed back to it even though he had not fully recuperated from his wounds. He resumed command of the SSTK on September 21, 1941.
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As part of Manstein’s corps, he turned back repeated human-wave attacks near Lushno, south of Lake Ilmen, from September 24 through 27. The battle continued until the 29th, with less intensity. Through the fanatical resistance of its men, Totenkopf alone smashed three Soviet divisions. For his own personal bravery in preventing a Soviet breakthrough, Eicke was recommended for the Knight’s Cross.
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By now, however, the Death’s Head had lost 6,600 men since the campaign began but had received only 2,500 replacements. Even though it was in serious need of more soldiers, rest, new equipment, and time for maintenance, Totenkopf remained in the forefront of the advance. Its situation was not much worse than that of most German divisions in Russia. By the end of November, it had suffered its 9,000th casualty since June 22 and was at about 60 percent of its original strength.

On December 6, 1941, Stalin launched a massive winter offensive on all sectors of the Eastern Front. Although the SS men held their lines, the Soviets achieved penetrations elsewhere on the front and gradually worked their way around the city of Demyansk. Field Marshal von Leeb urgently requested permission to fall back, but Hitler refused to allow a retreat. On February 8, 1942, the Russians finally succeeded in encircling Demyansk. Inside the pocket were six divisions—103,000 Germans, including the SS Totenkopf Division—all under the overall direction of Army General of Infantry Count Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, the commander of the II Corps.

Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt positioned Eicke’s motorized division on the critical western edge of the perimeter, where the Soviet 34th Army threatened to break through and collapse the pocket. The winter fighting was bitter and desperate as the two ruthless ideologies struggled to the death in the snow and swamps west of Demyansk. At one point Eicke had to lead the walking wounded back into combat, but despite odds heavily stacked against him, he turned back every Soviet attack and virtually annihilated the elite Soviet 7th Guards Division. Losses in Totenkopf had not been light, however: the division lost more than 6,000 men by April 1942, and now had fewer than 10,000 soldiers. This figure would dwindle to 6,700 in the weeks ahead, and a third of these would be exhausted and unfit for duty after months of combat. SSTK had started Barbarossa with more than 17,000 men. Nevertheless, it was the Totenkopf Division that broke the Soviet encirclement and linked up with the army’s relief force in May 1942, establishing a tenuous link between Demyansk and the rest of the German Wehrmacht. Still, II Corps was boxed in on three sides, and the veteran SS division was desperately needed to keep the supply corridor open. Totenkopf beat back several fresh attacks, but by the end of July, fewer than 3,000 SS men remained.

To Theodor Eicke, there was only one real crime: physical cowardice. Not even Eicke’s fiercest detractors ever questioned his physical courage. During the Demyansk battles, Eicke suffered every privation his men suffered. He camped in the snow, wore soggy clothes for days on end, repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire, and subsisted on poor and meager rations. (For six months, all supplies had to be airlifted into the pocket.) As a reward for his outstanding services at Demyansk, Eicke was decorated with the Knight’s Cross on December 26, 1941. He was promoted to
SS-Gruppenfuehrer und General der Waffen-SS
(equivalent to lieutenant general, U.S. Army) and was awarded the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross on April 20, 1942—Hitler’s birthday. These gestures of confidence did not placate the former concentration camp commander, however. He was very unhappy over the loss of so many men he had trained, was furious about what he regarded as the army’s indifference to the fate of his division, and raged about its willingness to fight to the last SS man. Eicke had earlier charged that Brockdorff was deliberately sacrificing his division by committing it to all the critical situations, while sparing army units from heavy combat whenever possible. As the weeks wore on and the situation did not change, Eicke’s criticisms became more and more outspoken.

It seems quite likely that Eicke was right. Count von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt had been a part of the anti-Hitler conspiracy since before the war and certainly wasted no love on the SS.
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Eicke also railed at Himmler, demanding that the remnants of his elite division be withdrawn from the Russian Front. He even secured a private audience with Adolf Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair (his headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia) on June 26, 1942, and bluntly described the situation to him. The Fuehrer promised Eicke that he would withdraw the division in August if the situation south of Lake Ilmen remained stable. He also promised to send it to France, where it would be rebuilt to its pre-Barbarossa strength. Not until August 26, however, did Hitler even authorize the withdrawal of the SSTK from the Russian Front—and by then it had suffered even more casualties. Then the tactical situation at Demyansk made immediate withdrawal impossible. Theodor Eicke became more and more critical of SS headquarters in Berlin for not sending him enough replacements. This Himmler was unwilling to do, since he had already started assembling men for the new (i.e., rebuilt) Totenkopf Division, and his manpower reserves were not unlimited at this stage of the war. Eicke’s demands became so outspoken and persistent that Himmler sent him on indefinite convalescent leave. It seems likely that Eicke was suffering from combat fatigue. In any event, in the last battles in the Demyansk salient, the SSTK was commanded by its senior regimental commander, Oberfuehrer Max Simon. When he finally brought the remnants out of the salient in October, it had repulsed several more major Soviet attacks. All its noncombat units had been dissolved and their men incorporated into the infantry. Fewer than 2,000 men remained.
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In the winter of 1942–1943, the SSTK was completely rebuilt as a panzer grenadier division. It took part in the occupation of Vichy France in November 1942, and then remained in the Angouleme area in the south of France, where it went through its paces. A refreshed Eicke, as usual, relentlessly and ruthlessly trained his new men in accordance with his own ideas. During this period Hitler decided to enlarge Eicke’s panzer battalion into a regiment, and the Totenkopf became, in effect, a panzer division, although it retained the official designation
SS-Panzergrenadier-Division “Totenkopf.”
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The rebuilt Death’s Head Division was hurried back to the Russian Front after the fall of Stalingrad and in February 1943, joined Obergruppenfuehrer Paul Hausser’s SS Panzer Corps, which was retreating from the Second Battle of Kharkov. The SSTK then took part in Field Marshal von Manstein’s brilliant counteroffensive, which led to the recapture of that Ukrainian city, and the division distinguished itself in this fast-moving armored operation. Theodor Eicke did not live to see the end of it, however. On the afternoon of February 26, 1943, he became alarmed when he could not make radio contact with his panzer regiment, so he boarded a Fieseler Storch (a single-engine light reconnaissance airplane) to see if he could find out what was happening from the air. Eicke and his pilot spotted an SS tank company near the village of Michailovka but could not tell from the air that the adjoining village of Artelnoye—less than half a mile away—was still in Soviet hands. As the Storch dropped to an altitude of 300 feet, it began a slow turn directly over the well-camouflaged Red Army positions. As it did so, the Soviets opened up with a hail of machinegun, rifle, and anti-aircraft fire, instantly destroying the small airplane. It crashed and burned between the two villages.