I
A new man, the storm trooper, the élite of central Europe. A completely new race, cunning, strong, and packed with purpose … battle proven, merciless to himself and others.
Ernst Jünger, winner of Imperial Germany’s highest bravery award, the Pour le Mérite (the ‘Blue Max’) at the age of 23 in the First World War and author of Storm of Steel.
The Waffen-SS
In the near-anarchy of Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1930s it was commonplace at political meetings for fights to break out and speakers to be physically attacked by thugs from opposing parties. This was especially true for Communist and Nazi events, and the parties organised their supporters into paramilitary groups to both protect themselves and attack opponents. The Nazis enshrined this activity in the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (the SA – Storm Troop), but as the size of the SA ballooned it became harder to control. Under the increasingly strident leadership of the flamboyant ex-soldier Ernst Röhm, the SA began to demand revolutionary social change in Germany that was unacceptable both to Hitler and his backers in the German Army (the Reichswehr) and big business. Hitler needed a counter-balance to the SA and he found it in the concept of a small, élite, political police force answerable only to him – the SS.
Originally a tiny 20-man group of toughs recruited to protect Hitler personally as Nazi Party leader, the pre-war Schützstaffel (the SS – Protection Squad) was the brainchild of one of his subordinates, the bespectacled and unprepossessing Heinrich Himmler. Hitler bestowed upon him the rather grandiose title of Reichsführer-SS and encouraged a rivalry with the SA. Himmler was loyal but also possessed of vaulting ambition, and he used his talents as a ruthless political intriguer and administrator to take Hitler’s original idea and, in less than a decade, create nothing less than a state within a state, and a multi-faceted organisation whose malign power and influence spread across Germany and all the occupied lands.
As the SS gradually became a byword for every aspect of Nazi activity, Himmler did not forget its original purpose; indeed it was central to his plans for the future. Sitting in his headquarters, in a former art school on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin, or in the restored Gothic grandeur of the Schloss Wewelsburg in Westphalia, the strict vegetarian and one-time chicken farmer dreamed of an SS empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals. That empire was to be created and safeguarded by a new force, not the existing German Army, but by a ‘second army of the state’, utterly loyal and dedicated to the ideology of National Socialism – the ‘Armed’ or Waffen-SS.
Political soldiers
For the new Waffen-SS, Himmler translated Hitler’s vague concept into a fully-fledged programme encompassing everything from unbelievably strict entrance criteria, to exacting training standards, to views on religion and morality, even down to the minutiae of uniforms. As ever with Himmler the key was ‘detail’. All nations’ armed forces have entry standards, usually physical, educational and moral ones. Recruits must have the physical fitness and level of education that enables them to perform their duties, while being of good character and not a convicted felon. For the Waffen-SS these baseline requirements were taken to a hitherto unheard of extreme. Recruits had to be aged between 17 and 22, and a minimum of 5’9” tall (168cm – above the average for the time and also Himmler’s height). They had to be physically fit and at least of secondary education standard, although university graduates were quite rare, unlike in the Army.
While these standards weren’t unduly strict in themselves, they were overlaid with a ‘racial and political’ element that was exacting to say the least. From 1935 onwards Himmler instituted the requirement for every would-be SS recruit to prove their ‘pure’ Aryan genealogy, dating back to 1800 for enlisted men and 1750 for officer candidates –great-grandparents and beyond. Having to produce a family tree to enlist was unheard of in the rest of the Wehrmacht, and in any other army in the world for that matter. It was then, and remains still, a peculiarity of the Waffen-SS. But it wasn’t even enough to be Aryan; you had to look Aryan. The Reichsführer himself used to boast of examining the photo of every prospective Waffen-SS officer to ensure they exhibited the required level of ‘Nordic features’, with blond hair and blue eyes being top of the list. But it didn’t stop there; as the Waffen-SS was as much about the mind as the body, so applicants also had to demonstrate the requisite level of ideological commitment as outlined in ‘The Soldiers’ Friend’ (Der Soldatenfreund – a handbook issued to every member of the armed forces):
Every pure-blooded German in good health [can] become a member. He must be of excellent character, have no criminal record, and be an ardent adherent to all National Socialist doctrines. Members of the Hitler Youth will be given preference because their aptitudes and schooling are indicative that they have become acquainted with the ideology of the SS.
Even in supposedly ‘Aryan’ Germany these phenomenally high standards meant the rejection of a staggering 85 per cent of all applicants, and the rate was even higher for Hitler’s personal bodyguard regiment, the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LSSAH – the SS Bodyguard Adolf Hitler), where a single dental filling was grounds for rejection. For those lucky few who passed selection, the terms of service were a minimum of four years for rankers, 12 years for NCOs (corporals and sergeants) and 25 years for officers. In contrast, soldiers of all ranks in the modern British Army sign up for a maximum of three years.
The Leibstandarte, Verfügungstruppen and the Totenkopfverbände
Once signed up, a recruit joined one of the three original premier Waffen-SS formations: a minority went into the Leibstandarte, commanded by Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, based at the old Prussian Cadet School in the Lichterfelde Barracks in Berlin. There they were a law unto themselves, even amongst the Waffen-SS, with much more emphasis on ceremonial and parade ground duties than was good for their future military effectiveness. While this military neglect was true for the semi-independent Leibstandarte, it was most definitely not true for the men who joined the real cradle of Waffen-SS military excellence, the Verfügungstruppen (SS-VT – ‘Special Purpose Troops’). Later famous as the Das Reich Division, the SS-VT was initially composed of two regiments, the Deutschland and Germania, who were then joined by a third, the Austrian-manned Der Führer, after the annexation of Austria in 1938 (the Anschluss). Unlike its sister formation the Leibstandarte, the SS-VT focused exclusively on becoming a first-rate military unit, and men from these three pre-war regiments would come to dominate the short-lived history of the Waffen-SS. If a recruit did not join Dietrich’s men or the SS-VT, he ended up in the aptly named Totenkopfverbände (‘Death’s Head Units’), under the brutal leadership of Theodor Eicke. Organised on a regional basis with regiments (Standarten) in each major city in Germany their duties revolved around guarding Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. While professional military training was not their forte, the Totenkopf regiments in effect became a major reserve pool for the Waffen-SS as it grew after the outbreak of war.
A new type of training
Initially military training in the Waffen-SS was pretty basic, but this changed dramatically after Himmler managed to persuade a number of professional ex-Army officers to join the new force. Lured with promises of rapid promotion and a blank page on which to make their mark, two men in particular joined up who would forge the Waffen-SS into the élite it would become – Paul Hausser and Felix Steiner. Both were decorated veterans from the First World War, had gone on to serve in the post-war fighting in eastern Germany against local Communists, Poles and Balts, and were also that rarest of beasts in any nation’s military – original thinkers.
Felix Martin Julius Steiner, born in 1896 in East Prussia, served as an infantryman during the First World War, fighting at the Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in the east, and Flanders and Cambrai in the west. Appalled by the mass slaughter of huge conscript armies in the trenches, he became a strong advocate of using small, highly motivated, highly trained and well-equipped assault units. Much of the training programme the Waffen-SS came to use was written by this fairly short, slightly overweight figure, who seemed to have a smile and cheery word for everyone who served under him.
Paul ‘Papa’ Hausser was 16 years older than Felix Steiner, and also an eastern German, hailing from Brandenburg. Every inch the military patrician, Hausser was of slim build, with grey-white hair and a prominent, aquiline nose. Having retired from the army in 1932 as a Lieutenant-General after a distinguished career, he was personally invited to join the Waffen-SS in 1934 by Himmler himself. Made responsible for ‘professionalising’ the Waffen-SS, and ensuring it was a modern military force in every sense, he started his transformation at the two SS officer schools at Bad Tölz in Bavaria and Braunschweig in Lower Saxony. After turning them into premier military academies, he went on to become the overall inspector of the SS-VT.
Young Finnish Waffen-SS volunteers take cover in a trench during training.
Between them these two quite extraordinary men created something entirely new in the German armed forces. Training in the German Army was very effective but also very formal, with an emphasis on building teamwork through parade ground discipline and a strict adherence to the hierarchy of rank. Hausser and Steiner swept this approach away, with their priorities being threefold: firstly, supreme physical fitness and comradeship built particularly through sport; secondly excellent combat skills including the repeated use of exercises with live ammunition, and lastly, skill-at-arms focusing on superior marksmanship. SS recruits were taught how best to operate in small groups, the eight-man section and the 30-man platoon (Gruppe and Zug – see Appendix B for further description), the value of aggression and attack in defeating an enemy and keeping down casualties, and the benefits of a close and easy relationship between men, NCOs and officers. All officer candidates had to serve time in the ranks, they trained and ate with their men, and promotion was seen to be on merit rather than class and education. Off-duty Waffen-SS men even addressed each other as ‘Comrade’ (Kamerad) rather than by their formal ranks. Such things were unheard of in any European army of the time. The Waffen-SS wore different uniforms as well, in the field they were the first force to wear camouflage combat clothing, and in barracks they often wore an all-black uniform, giving rise to their nickname, ‘the black guards’. Their entire theory of battle, their ‘doctrine’, was also different, insisting enthusiastically on an all-arms battle relying heavily on firepower and movement with tanks, artillery, aircraft and infantry all working together. These things are now standard practice in modern armies across the globe, but at the time they were ridiculed by the far more conservative German Army.
First Blood – the Night of the Long Knives
Despite its growing professionalism, the Waffen-SS was still viewed in 1934 as a political police force ‘playing at soldiers’. The SA was by far the dominant force in Nazi politics with its three-million-strong membership swaggering across Germany loudly shouting for a ‘brown revolution’ that would sweep away the old conservative institutions like the army, and remove power from the big industrialists to usher in a new ‘socialist’ state (Reich). Needless to say Hitler was horrified by these ideas and decided to destroy the monster he had created, and the instrument of that destruction was to be none other than the armed soldiers of the SS.
On 30 June 1934, SS formations left their barracks to break the power of the SA once and for all in the infamous ‘Night of the Long Knives’. The Leibstandarte was in the vanguard, and drove all the way south to the Bavarian spa resort town of Bad Wiessee, where Röhm had gathered many of his fellow SA leaders for a conference. The SS were given clear orders – round up the SA men and shoot them immediately. Röhm himself was arrested, put in a cell in Munich’s nearby Stahlhelm prison, and offered the opportunity to blow his own brains out. In total shock at the situation he refused, and was instead shot dead by his erstwhile comrade and Totenkopf leader, Theodor Eicke. Most of the senior SA leadership nationwide were murdered, many of them shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ as they faced the firing squads, believing they were actually victims of an SS plot to overthrow their beloved Führer. At a stroke the SA was decapitated and removed as a threat. Hitler was jubilant. His faith in the soldiers of the SS was vindicated, and as a direct result a grateful Führer elevated them into an independent arm of the Nazi Party, no longer subject to the control of the SA as they had been up until then.
Two months later in a state decree, Hitler outlined the main task of the newly-independent force. Trained on military lines, it was to stand ready to battle internal opponents of the Nazi regime should the need arise. Only ‘in the event of general war’ would it be employed outside Germany’s borders for military operations, in which case only Hitler could decide how and when it would be used. The Army was not happy with the situation, but the Defence Minister, Field Marshal Blomberg, foolishly let himself be convinced by Hitler that the intention was to create an armed police force and not another army. This reassurance, like so many of Hitler’s, proved entirely false.
Recruitment of ‘foreigners’ into the Waffen-SS before the war
Both Hitler and Himmler originally conceived the Waffen-SS as a purely German force. The belief was in a small, ‘racially and ideologically pure’ élite. However even from the very beginning a tiny number of recruits joined up who began to stretch the definition of ‘German’, and over time established a direction for the Waffen-SS that would lead to the multi-national army of 1945.
Back in 1919, the Versailles Treaty had not only emasculated Germany militarily, but had also annexed territory with ethnically German populations and handed it over to neighbouring states. The mixed Franco-German region of Alsace-Lorraine was given back to France (the future SS-Wiking panzer regiment commander Johannes-Rudolf ‘Hans’ Mühlenkamp was actually born a German in Lorraine, but ‘became’ French when he was nine), the 65,000 ethnic Germans in the Eupen area were handed over to Belgium, and Denmark got the 25,000 Germans living in agriculturally-rich north Schleswig-Holstein (called South Jutland by the Danes). Over in the east the creation of the Polish Corridor to the Baltic Sea had split Germany from its East Prussian province and left thousands of native Germans in newly-created Poland, where eventually of course they would become the casus belli for the Second World War.
As far as Hitler was concerned, all of these people were actually ‘Germans’ no matter what their passports said, and so from the start they were allowed to join the Waffen-SS. When they enlisted they were not officially recorded as Danish, Polish or whatever, but as native Germans and so their number is impossible to calculate accurately, but it was in the hundreds. Two such volunteers were Johann Thorius and Georg Erichsen, both ethnic Germans from Danish north Schleswig-Holstein. Thorius volunteered for the SS-VT in 1939 and served in the Germania Regiment. Recommended for a commission, he passed out from Bad Tölz and went on to command the 12th Company of SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment 24 Danmark as an SS-Obersturmführer. Never classed as a Dane by the Waffen-SS, Thorius’s war ended in 1944 when he lost an arm in combat in Estonia. Erichsen was another ‘non-Dane’ in SS eyes. Like Thorius he was recommended for a commission, and actually passed out as top student of Tölz’s 9th Shortened Wartime Course, beating the Finnish volunteer Tauno Manni to the prize. Erichsen’s reward was an instant promotion to SS-Untersturmführer, and appointment as Rudolf Saalbach’s adjutant in the famed SS-Armoured Reconnaisance Battalion 11 (SS-Aufklärungs Abteilung 11). Retreating into Courland with his battalion in late 1944, he took part in vicious defensive fighting and was recommended for the prestigious Honour Roll Clasp bravery award during the Fourth Battle of Courland. He was killed in action in late January 1945 before the award was confirmed.
Muddying the waters further were the large and diverse ethnic German populations scattered all over eastern and south-eastern Europe, stretching right into the very heart of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The blanket term used for these German-speaking peoples was ‘volksdeutsche’ (ethnic Germans) – as opposed to ‘reichsdeutsche’ which described those born within the 1939 frontiers of the Third Reich. The volksdeutsche were primarily a Hapsburg phenomenon, as the Austrian monarchy had encouraged a process of German migration into their ever-growing empire over the course of centuries, often to solidify their control of newly-acquired and distant provinces. So by the advent of Hitler’s Reich hundreds of thousands of these volksdeutsche lived in German ‘colonies’ in Yugoslavia, Rumania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. As for Russia, her volksdeutsche even had their own autonomous republic within the Union – the German Republic of Podvol’zhya, centred on the steppe lands of the Volga River region, with its capital the wholly German town of Engels. The two million or so Volga Germans, as they were known, were descendants of settlers invited by the Tsarina Catherine the Great after the end of the Seven Years War to colonise the under-populated area. Ironically, given later events in 1942, there were 24,656 of these volksdeustche living peaceably in Stalingrad of all places. Following the Wehrmacht invasion though, their centuries-old loyalty to Russia did not save them, and on Stalin’s orders the Republic was liquidated in September 1941 and the entire population deported en masse to inhospitable zones of far-off Kazakhstan. Hundreds of thousands died of hunger and disease, and their community disappeared from the pages of history forever.
Back in the 1930s members of these volksdeutsche communities were not directly targeted by the Waffen-SS, but some made their way across Europe to Germany to join up. Erwin Bartmann, who served as an SS-Unterscharführer in the Leibstandarte from early 1941, remembers just such a volksdeutsche from Rumania in his own unit. This volunteer spoke excellent German, unlike many of his brethren, and had been in the Leibstandarte for several years before Bartmann enlisted prior to Barbarossa. Before the war they were just a trickle, a curiosity, but in time the recruiting restrictions placed on the Waffen-SS by the Wehrmacht authorities hugely increased the importance of the volksdeutsche to Himmler’s dream of a new SS army.
However, outside of the ‘lost’ Germans of 1919 and the volksdeutsche, it was a third potential pool of recruits for the Waffen-SS that was to lead directly to the much-vaunted idea of the Waffen-SS as a ‘European army’ – the so-called ‘Germanics’. The Germanics were not in any way German, but were peoples that the Nazis considered to be their ethnic cousins, part of the Nazi legend of the greater ‘Aryan’ people of pre-history that had spread out over north-western Europe. Included on the list of ‘acceptable’ populations and ethnic groups were the Dutch, the Flemish Belgians (initially the Walloon Belgians were seen as ethnically beyond the Pale), the Anglo-Saxon English (but not the Celtic Scots, Welsh or Irish), the Swiss, and the Nordics of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Even Americans of northern European descent were seen by Himmler as potential future recruits. Bruno Friesen, born in Canada to German-speaking Mennonite Ukrainians, was in this category; he ended up serving as a tank gunner in the Army’s Panzer Regiment 25. Again, as with the volksdeutsche, there was no concerted recruitment effort to attract Germanics before the war started, but individuals were allowed to join. They were given no special dispensation by the Waffen-SS authorities, and had to pass the normal selection criteria and training programmes. By the invasion of Poland there were more than a hundred of these Germanics in the Waffen-SS.
This meant that by the summer of 1939 the Waffen-SS consisted of a handful of units, with no more than a small percentage of men who were not born within Germany’s existing frontiers. This only changed as a result of a direct clash between Himmler’s mounting ambition for his new force and traditional Wehrmacht manpower policy. From the perspective of the Scandinavians and the other Germanics, what changed was that cherished policeman’s phrase – motive and opportunity.
Five years after the SA was crushed, Himmler presided over a military arm consisting of four élite regiments –a German regiment was usually of 2–3,000 men, roughly equivalent to a British brigade – of the Leibstandarte, Deutschland, Germania and Der Führer, along with a further four of Totenkopf (Oberbayern, Brandenburg, Thüringen and Ostmark), and another couple of thousand men in various training, depot and administrative roles. Impressive as this was, Himmler was hungry for more. While Hitler was still convinced the Waffen-SS should remain small, his loyal lieutenant was increasingly thinking of huge legions of racially defined supermen. To achieve this Himmler needed far more than the 25–28,000 men he already possessed. Standing in his way was official Wehrmacht policy.
In 1940 the German Armed Forces High Command (the OberKommando der Wehrmacht – OKW for short) decreed a manpower ratio split of each year’s available draft at 66 per cent for the Army, 25 per cent for the Luftwaffe and just 9 per cent for the Kriegsmarine – Nazi Germany always saw itself as a land-based power. The Waffen-SS had no quota, and even if a recruit expressed the desire to join the black guards he was rarely allowed to, as the Wehrmacht usually just took the recruit’s wish ‘under advisement’. Begrudgingly, to accommodate Hitler’s wishes, a framework was put in place that allowed the Waffen-SS to take in men on a formation by formation basis only. Therefore Himmler could enlist men into the Germania Regiment for instance, but when it was full it was full, and no further volunteers could be put on the books.
Under such a system the SS-Main Office (SS-Hauptamt responsible for recruitment) forecast that at best they would get two per cent of the available draft in any given year. That was 12,000 men per annum, when the existing units alone needed 3–4,000 men a year just to stay at full strength. At that rate of growth Himmler would need the Reich to last its vaunted ‘Thousand Years’ in order to achieve the size he saw as essential to fulfilling his dream of a Germanic empire.
Ingenuity, administrative flair and a certain amount of deviousness were required given the situation, and as the Reichsführer-SS pondered his dilemma, the solution came from a 44-year-old ex-gymnastics instructor from Swabia with iron-grey hair and a bristling moustache – SS-Gruppenführer Gottlob Berger. Berger was a fanatic, whose life had been shaped by war. One of four brothers, he was the only one to have survived the horrors of the First World War. Two died in the trenches and the third was executed in the US as a spy. An early convert to Nazism, he joined the SS and rose through the ranks. Not one of Himmler’s favourites, he nevertheless headed up the SS main office. A practically-minded administrator, he had little time for Himmler’s more wild flights of racial fantasy, but regarding existing Waffen-SS recruitment he saw a large-scale solution to the manpower problem. For some time he had been investigating the enlistment potential of what the SS called, ‘similarly-related lands (artverwandten Ländern), such as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Flanders, as well as the volksdeutsche communities. Berger had even gone as far as becoming the chairman of both the German-Croatian Society (die Deutsch-Kroatischen Gesellschaft), and the German-Flemish Studies Group (die Deutsch-Flämischen Studiengruppe) in order to build relationships with ethnic German groups and pro-Nazis abroad. So the plan he took to Himmler was a simple one; in essence it was to bypass the OKW rules and recruit from abroad. Himmler was delighted with the idea and backed it wholeheartedly; there would be thousands more like Johann Thorius in the future ranks of the Waffen-SS.
The Far Right in Scandinavia
In Italy, back in 1922, the march of the Right had swept Mussolini into power to become Europe’s first fascist dictator, and eleven years later the convulsions emanating from the Great Depression helped propel Hitler’s National Socialists into government in Germany. In the 1930s all four Nordic countries – Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland – were functioning multi-party democracies, and all except Finland were also constitutional monarchies. Politically, Social Democrats of various persuasions formed the mainstream of political life across them all, but they were not immune to the rise of the extreme Right. At first inspired by Italian fascists, and then increasingly by Hitler’s Nazis, a plethora of extremist parties mushroomed all over Scandinavia and the wider Continent. In Norway there were two such parties, in Sweden another two, but in Denmark there were no less than 21 separate Far Right parties. None commanded widespread popular support, or success, at the ballot box, but all were to play a prominent role in the future history of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS.
Norway and Quisling
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling was born in 1887 in the small village of Fyresdal in southwest Norway, and into solid respectability as the son of a Lutheran pastor. He would go on to found and lead the largest pro-Nazi party in Norway and achieve immortality, his surname becoming synonymous with treachery and collaboration. His adult life started brightly. He joined the Norwegian Army and attained the highest ever marks achieved by an officer cadet, and he then went on to rise rapidly through the ranks doing various high profile jobs including stints as the Military Attaché in both Leningrad and Helsinki. Asked for by name by the famous Norwegian explorer and then League of Nations European Famine Relief Director, Fridtjof Nansen, Quisling helped save thousands of Ukrainians from starvation in the early 1920s by distributing food aid to the stricken populace. Returning to Norway in triumph, Quisling was next sent to Moscow as Secretary to the Norwegian Legation, where he also represented Great Britain’s interests and earned himself a CBE from His Majesty’s Government for his trouble. Well-known and respected, the 44 year-old Major Quisling was asked in May 1931 by Prime Minister Kolstad to join his Cabinet as Norway’s Defence Minister. Quisling looked destined for the role. A tall, powerful man, he was used to wearing a uniform and being obeyed, and was very much at home in the conservative upper echelons of Norwegian society. A future as a powerful politician beckoned. He then proceeded to make a total pig’s ear of the whole thing. Often haughty and arrogant before, becoming a minister hugely increased Quisling’s feelings of self-importance. Within months he was making enemies of everyone and friends of no-one. He alienated industrial workers and the Socialists by calling them ‘communist lackeys’ (this was based on documentary evidence of Moscow secretly funding the Socialists), while at the same time being incredibly thin-skinned and unable to take any criticism at all. Becoming increasingly rightwing, he was drawn towards Mussolini and, closer to home, the neo-fascist Norwegian Greyshirts under their leader, Terje Ballsrud. After two painful years, Kolstad’s government was voted out, and with it went Quisling with his reputation in tatters.
The head of the SS (Heinrich Himmler fourth from left with raised right arm) and the Norwegian collaborationist leader Vidkun Quisling (bareheaded to the right of Himmler) at a recruiting rally in Oslo. Despite all the extravagant effort, recruiting among Norwegians was always a hard task and there was never huge popular support for either Quisling’s NS Party or the Norwegian SS. (Erik Wiborg)
Recruiting rally for the NS and the Waffen-SS at the Oslo hippodrome. (Erik Wiborg)
Desperate to salvage something from the wreckage of his career, and still insistent on his own brilliance, Quisling formed his own party, National Unity (Nasjonal Samling, the NS) on 17 May 1933, Norway’s National Day. Based on an appeal to nationalist, conservative Norwegians the NS deliberately tried to ape the recent success of the German Nazis by having its own SA-type paramilitary body the Hird (named after the ancient household troops of Viking kings), and even calling Quisling the ‘Leader’ (Fører). A youth wing was also established, designed partly to emulate the German Hitler Youth. The NS Youth Front (NS Ungdomsfylking – NSUF) would be a major source of future Waffen-SS volunteers and was under the leadership of the young Bjørn Østring.
Born in Gjøvik in 1917, the young Bjørn went to live with his grandparents after his father died and his mother remarried. There, like many of his friends, he became interested in nationalist politics and the NS. He joined the new party, met Quisling himself and formed an attachment to him that would last his entire adult life. The two men became close friends, and Østring would go on to become one of the leading NS figures. He cut an imposing figure, being of a slim but muscular build and just under six feet tall with dark blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Like many of Quisling’s most fervent supporters, Østring was a serving soldier, carrying out his national service as a private in The King’s Guard Regiment in 1940. He was, and is, strongly nationalist and anti-communist rather than pro-German, and along with many other NS members he would end up fighting against the Germans during their subsequent invasion.
Bjørn and Bergljot Østring’s wedding in Oslo. Quisling is sitting on the far right. (Erik Wiborg)
Finnish War veteran and Danish Waffen-SS officer, the aristocratic Christian von Schalburg, surrounded by local peasant women while serving in the Ukraine with the Wiking in 1941.
Back in 1933 initial support for the NS was small but vociferous, and it was clear that although not possessing a common touch, Quisling did inspire total devotion in his 15,000 or so party members. He drew up a 30-point political programme outlining his plans for an authoritarian government, and took it to the country in the October General Election. After only being in existence for six months, the NS polled a low but respectable 27,847 votes (about 2% of the votes cast), not enough for a seat in parliament. Quisling was at least consoled by knowing he resoundingly beat the only other neo-fascist Norwegian party, the Norwegian National Socialist Workers Party (the Norges Nasjonal-Socialistiske Arbeiderparti – NNSAP). But three years later at the next General Election, after masses of work and propaganda and with high hopes, the NS’s vote actually fell slightly to 26,577 and the party was consigned to electoral obscurity.
Undeterred, Quisling sought to build alliances abroad, and the NS joined the Italian-sponsored, pan-European Action Committees for Rome Universality (Comitati d’azione per l’Univeralita di Roma – CAUR). Here he met and mingled with other fascist leaders such as France’s Marcel Bucard, the Irish General Eoin O’Duffy and Frits Clausen, leader of Denmark’s own National-Socialist Workers Party (Danmarks National-Socialistiske Arbejder Parti – DNSAP).
Denmark and Clausen
Clausen himself was actually born a German citizen in disputed Schleswig-Holstein. He served in the Imperial German Army in World War One, went to Heidelberg University and qualified as a doctor before turning to Danish Far-Right politics. Joining the DNSAP in 1931, he became its leader in 1933, adopting the same title as his Norwegian counterpart, Fører, and founding a Hird-type militia, the Storm Troopers (Storm Afdelinger – SA), as well as a youth wing, the National-Socialist Youth (National-Socialistiske Ungdom – NSU) led by the aristocratic Count Christian Fredrik von Schalburg. The DNSAP and its youth wing were strongest in Clausen’s home province of Schleswig-Holstein, and they would prove fertile ground for future Waffen-SS recruitment. In many ways the polar opposite of his fellow Scandinavian fascist leader, Clausen was a loud-mouthed heavy drinker running to fat; Quisling was a fastidious intellectual who neither drank nor smoked. But Clausen made a far better fist of democracy than Quisling did, increasing his party’s polling from a tiny 757 votes in 1932, to 16,257 in 1935 and a very respectable 31,032 in 1939, a total which gave his party three seats in the Danish parliament. While succeeding in making the DNSAP acceptable to at least a proportion of the electorate, he signally failed to unite all of Denmark’s neo-Nazis under his leadership. Among the almost two dozen fascist parties were large outfits such as Wilfred Petersen’s Danish Socialist Party (Dansk Socialistisk Parti – DSP) and tiny ones like K. Wendelin’s National Cooperation (Nationalt Samvirke). Hosts of groups formed, splintered, disbanded and then reappeared under another guise, many of them with a membership that would fit into a room.
Sweden and Lindholm
In its pre-war, neo-Nazi politics, Sweden resembled Denmark more than Norway, with no overarching movement like Quisling’s NS. Instead there were many minor parties that enjoyed moderate, small-scale, electoral success. The tall, blond ex-Swedish Army Sergeant, Sven-Olov Lindholm, was the most influential neo-fascist leader in the country, first establishing the Swedish Fascist People’s Party (Sveriges Fascistiska Folkparti – SFF) with Konrad Hallgren, before moving on to form his own movement, the Swedish Socialist Union (Svensk Socialistisk Samling – SSS) in 1938. Membership peaked at about 5,000, and the high water mark was the 6% of voters who plumped for Lindholm in the 1932 Gothenburg municipal poll. Thereafter, as with Quisling’s NS, support bumped around at the 2% mark. The SSS party-faithful would prove the mainstay of the Swedish contribution to the Scandinavian Waffen-SS.
Finland
The Finns are racially distinct from their Nordic cousins and had been part of the Russian Tsarist Empire for over a century, only achieving independence (with German help) after the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Unlike so many other breakaway parts of the former Russian Empire, such as the Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan and so on, the Finns managed to hold on to their freedom after Russia’s Civil War, and by the 1930s were an accepted member of the international community. Finland had emerged from its War of Independence from Russia with a functioning democracy solidly embedded in the mainstream, but as one might expect some quite powerful extremes on both the political Left and Right. The Finnish Communist Party was an active force, supported by Moscow, but banned by the state. At the other end of the scale was the Patriotic People’s Party (the IKL), which, although not neo-Nazi was still in the fascist camp. Much to the chagrin of the Finnish Communists, the IKL was legal, and it held 14 seats out of the 200 in the national parliament giving it a fairly influential voice in the political life of the country. Having said that, the IKL did not become a major recruiting source for the Waffen-SS.
The Far-Right parties supplied many clues to what a future Scandinavian Waffen-SS would look like, and the biggest clue was about numbers. It was clear that neo-Nazism and fascist ideology was very much a minority interest in Scandinavia.
The Winter War
As the storm clouds gathered over the Continent in the 1930s and the international League of Nations faltered, all four Nordic countries sought to remain aloof from the looming conflict. The United States’ President Roosevelt urged them all to come to terms with Nazi Germany to safeguard their freedom, but in the end only Denmark did so, signing a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler on 31 May 1939. In the end it was not Nazi Germany that struck the first blow but that other brutal dictatorship, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was the signal for many of Tsarist Russia’s minorities to break away and claim independence. True to Russian tradition, the revolutionary Communist government that seized power did not accept these erstwhile cries of freedom and set out to crush the infant states and reincorporate them into the new Soviet empire by force. This determination meant the 1920s were to be some of the bloodiest years in Russian history as the Civil War raged and Red armies brutally snuffed out all opposition.
Finland was one of those nations that reached for its independence in the chaos of 1917. Led by a six-foot-two aristocrat and former Tsarist general, Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, the Finns fought for their freedom and won it. A civil war swiftly followed as home-grown Finnish communists sought to take over the country, but after several horrendous years the fighting finally ended and an independent, democratic Finland began to rebuild. What followed was almost two decades of extraordinary national effort, so by the summer of 1939 the country had somehow managed to repay most of its crippling foreign debt, broken up and redistributed the giant, old landed estates to 300,000 small holding farmers and was preparing to host the 1940 Olympic Games in Helsinki – the stadium was almost finished! Unfortunately, down in the Kremlin the decision had been taken to invade Finland and make it part of the Russian empire once again.
After the usual propaganda assault, diplomatic strong-arming and political double-dealing so characteristic of both Stalin and Hitler’s approach to foreign affairs, the Red Army’s tanks rolled across the border on 30 November 1939 – the Winter War had begun. Expecting little resistance (and even the support of a pro-Soviet workers uprising) the Red Army drove into Finnish Karelia. Simultaneously more Soviet troops attempted to cut the country in two by invading much farther north along the incredibly long 800-mile border between the two states. What followed has become military legend, a series of events reminiscent of the Spartans at Thermopylae, as the massively outnumbered, poorly-equipped but superbly led and motivated Finnish Army not only stopped the Soviet behemoth, but came within an ace of defeating it outright.
The Red Army was reeling from Stalin’s Purges at the time, robbed of the majority of its experienced officer corps as they were marched to the firing squad or the gulag, and astoundingly unprepared for a war in the snowy wastes of Finland. The result was thousands of Soviet soldiers herded onto the Finnish defence lines and mowed down in heaps. As one Red Army officer wrote:
Of the more than 100 men of my company who went into the first attack, only 38 returned after the second one had failed … The rest I remember through a fog. One of the wounded, among whom we advanced, grabbed at my leg and I pushed him away. When I noticed I was ahead of my men, I lay down in the snow and waited for the line to catch up with me. There was no fear … this time the Finns let us approach to within 100 feet of their positions before opening fire.
Forced by circumstance to improvise, the Finns invented the ‘Molotov cocktail’ to take on Russian tanks, silently skiing through the wintry forests to ambush the road-bound Soviet infantry. As the world watched in amazement, the vaunted Red Army was beaten again and again with whole divisions being swallowed up in the dark, primeval Nordic landscape.
Fighting for her survival, Finland appealed for help, but no national government was prepared to come to her aid. People themselves were very sympathetic, and across Scandinavia in particular, feelings were running high at what was viewed as naked Communist aggression. Official aid might not have been forthcoming, but on an individual level an avalanche of intrepid volunteers, many of them serving soldiers in their own armies, made their way to Finland and took up arms against the invader. One thousand two hundred Danes came together to serve as a complete battalion under the command of two regular Danish Army officers, Paul Rantzau-Engelhardt and V. Tretow-Loof. From Norway came 727 volunteers, and they joined up with no less than 8,260 Swedes. All had answered the recruiting call of ‘For the honour of Sweden and the freedom of the North’, to form the Swedish Volunteer Corps as it became known (the Svenska Friviligkoren). A further 500 Swedes enlisted directly into the Finnish Army. Welcome though these reinforcements were, they were not going to be enough to change the outcome. The chastened Soviets regrouped, massively reinforced their troops, changed their tactics and commanders, and launched a second huge offensive in the New Year. The exhausted Finns and their Scandinavian allies fought them every inch of the way, but the result was a foregone conclusion. In March 1940 the Finns sued for peace having lost 25,000 men killed and many more injured. Exact Soviet casualties are unknown, but it is reasonable to assume that at least 200,000 Red Army soldiers died in the snows of Finland. The resulting peace settlement stripped Finland of 11% of its land and 30% of its economic base, but none of its population. In an amazing migration every single Finn who found themselves in newly-acquired Soviet territory abandoned his or her home and trekked over the new border to Finland proper.
The effect of the war on many in Europe, especially parts of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish populations, was to radicalise them and reinforce their existing view of the threat posed by Soviet communism. Just as the invasions of Afghanistan in 1979 by the Soviets and of Iraq in 2003 by the Coalition acted as recruiting sergeants for radical Islam, so did the Winter War act as a future recruiter for the Waffen-SS’s fight against communism. The Dutch SS-Wiking volunteer, Jan Munk, said of the attack on Finland: ‘I thought it foul, it just strengthened my anti-communist thoughts. I was also very surprised that no country went to Finland’s aid.’
Most of the Scandinavian volunteers agreed with this view, and disgust at the Soviet invasion of their close neighbour was probably the Waffen-SS’s best recruiting asset. The Norwegian Nasjonal Samling members like Bjørn Østring definitely thought so: ‘I was already an anti-communist, but the Soviet attack on Finland strengthened my existing political convictions. Without doubt I feared a Soviet takeover of Europe and I volunteered at the very start to stand side by side with the Finns.’ Bjarne Dramstad agreed:
This is the key point of why I ended up in the Waffen-SS. My elder brother Rolf served as a volunteer in a Swedish company in the Winter War, and he was awarded a medal for bravery for saving his wounded company commander. I wanted to go to, but I didn’t because of my mother who already had one son away in the war. My elder brother Rolf was my idol from my childhood. I mean we had our own problems in Norway in the 30s before the war, with the communists and the Labour Party creating ‘red guards’ at the factories, and I can’t remember if I was impressed by Germany at that point, but I was definitely afraid of the communist threat from the Soviet Union, especially after the attack on Finland, and I wanted revenge. I also wanted to participate in crushing the terrible system they had over there.
The young Dutch volunteer Jan Munk’s platoon from the Wiking’s SS-Westland Regiment just before it was sent to the Russian Front. Munk is kneeling in the front rank on the extreme right wearing glasses. All the grenadiers were foreign volunteers with only the platoon’s NCOs being Germans. Almost none survived the war. (Jan Munk)
Danes served in many Waffen-SS units. This is a gun crew from the Germania Regiment’s 13th Company in Russia during Barbarossa, on the far right with the glasses is the Danish volunteer Henry Doose Nielsen. (Jens Post)
The amateur boxer and Swedish Army soldier, Erik ‘Jerka’ Wallin. Like many of his fellow Swedish Waffen-SS volunteers Wallin was a pre-war member of Sven-Olov Lindholm’s neo-Nazi SSS Party.
The very shortness of the war meant that many of the Scandinavian volunteers were still in training when hostilities ended, but dozens were still killed in the fighting. Those that survived went back home fired with a determination to combat communism whenever they could, and spread the word to anyone who would listen. Many of them rejoined their own armies and, though few in number, would become some of the hard wood of the future Scandinavian Waffen-SS. Among them were Danes, such as the handsome and debonair Christian von Schalburg and the youthful and idealistic Johannes-Just Nielsen; and Swedes like the tall amateur boxer Erik ‘Jerka’ Wallin and the intelligent and charismatic Gösta Borg.
Invasion!
Finland was not the first European state to suffer an attack from a totalitarian dictatorship. Poland had that unfortunate honour. Back in September 1939 the Wehrmacht had swept over the border and annihilated the Polish armed forces using a new kind of warfare – blitzkrieg. Final defeat for Poland was assured when the Red Army joined in and invaded the eastern half of the country, as agreed under the secret terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. That invasion had begun the Second World War, as France and Great Britain honoured their treaty with Poland and declared war on Hitler’s Germany, although not with the Soviet Union as it happened. The next seven months became known in the West as the ‘sitzkrieg’, as neither the Germans nor the French and British did anything much other than scowl at each other over the border. None of the Nordic countries had mutual assistance treaties with Poland and so none had declared war on either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Denmark, of course, already had its Non-Aggression Pact with Germany. They all went about their everyday business much as before and studiously ignored the warring sides. Militarily they posed no threat to Germany, with their armies being mainly made up of poorly-equipped conscripts and reservists around cadres of professionals, with little modern airpower or equipment to speak of. In the end that would not matter.
On the morning of 9 April 1940 Denmark became the first country in history to be attacked by parachute. Operation Weser Exercise (Unternehmen Weserübung) began with a small unit of Danish-speaking Brandenburger commandos (in Danish Army uniforms) capturing the Padborg bridge in a daring attack, to allow German ground troops to flood north. Airfields and strategic locations were seized and it was all over by breakfast. It had been so quick that King Christian X and the Danish government had no time to flee to safety. The Wehrmacht had lost two planes shot down and a few armoured cars damaged. Thirteen members of the Royal Danish forces were killed and 23 wounded.
Norway, attacked on the same day, was an altogether different scenario. The German cruiser Blücher appeared in Oslo fjord carrying most of the German command staff and called on the garrison to surrender. On hearing of the invasion, Quisling sent out an instruction to all his supporters telling them not to resist. The Norwegian Army officer in charge of Oslo’s shore batteries at Oscarsborg, Lieutenant August Bonsak, was an NS member but without a moment’s hesitation he ordered his guns to open fire and sent the Blücher and its surprised crew to the bottom of the sea. The future Waffen-SS volunteer Bjarne Dramstad recalled the invasion:
My elder brother [Rolf, the Winter War veteran] participated in the fighting and the shameful retreat of the Norwegian Army in Østfold. He had just returned from Finland and ended up manning a machine-gun at the fighting for Sørmoen bridge. When the Germans attacked the bridge he was left alone with his machine-gun firing at the Germans, as his friends had deserted, taking with them all of Rolf’s personal belongings. Somehow Rolf managed to escape German captivity.
Unable to help Denmark, the French and British were determined to go to Norway’s aid and sent a joint Expeditionary Force to land in the north at Narvik to try and throw the Germans out. What should have been a lightning campaign almost became Nazi Germany’s first ever military defeat. Edouard Dietl’s élite mountain troops (the famed Austro-German gebirgsjäger) facing the Anglo-French force were so close to destruction they were given permission by Hitler to march into internment across the Swedish border if necessary. In the end they fought it out and hung on. Fighting was still going on when the Germans launched their invasion of France and the Low Countries in May, and only then was the Allied Expeditionary Force hurriedly withdrawn on 8 June to continue the battle in France. In the meantime, King Haakon VII, a relation of the British Royal Family, had escaped to London along with his government. They joined the Poles as the second government-in-exile resident in London. When the fighting finally ceased in Norway on 10 June the campaign had lasted 62 days (the Battle of France would last only 46) and both the Wehrmacht and the defenders had suffered about 5,000 casualties each, with 527 Norwegian soldiers and about 300 civilians killed. The Kriegsmarine was badly mauled, losing the Blücher and no less than 10 destroyers to the Royal Navy.
Unlike Norway and Denmark, Sweden’s neutrality was observed and no German troops landed on her shores. As long as Swedish iron ore, so important for Germany’s industries, kept flowing south, then Berlin was happy to leave the Swedes well alone.
Occupation
Heavy-handed occupations were not the German intent following their invasions. In Denmark the existing state institutions were left in place; the police, the judiciary, the monarchy and even the armed forces. No attempt was made either to foist Danish neo-Nazi parties on the government, much to Clausen’s chagrin. There was no Reich’s Commissar or Military Governor imposed, the senior Nazi official in the country was still the Ambassador, Cecil von Renthe-Fink acting as a Plenipotentiary (a Reichsbewollmachtiger). General Kurt Lüdtke was appointed as commander of the occupying forces, but had no role in the administration of the country. The elected Prime Minister, Thorvald Stauning, was pretty much pro-German anyway, as was his Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius, who signed Denmark up to Hitler’s Anti-Comintern Pact.
While Denmark became a model occupation in many ways, Norway was a different kettle of fish all together. Quisling seized his chance and appointed himself as the head of a new government, broadcasting to the nation his assumption of power. Everyone was taken aback. The Nazis had no forewarning and neither did any of Quisling’s NS colleagues. It became clear in no time at all that there was no popular support for Quisling, and his pretensions to leadership were actually hurting Germany’s cause in the country. After just six days he was removed from office by Hitler himself, and the bespectacled Josef Terboven was appointed as Reich’s Commissar for Norway. Terboven and Quisling took an instant dislike to each other and the struggle between the two of them was to blight the German occupation for the next five years.
Away from the salons of power in Oslo, the occupation on the whole mirrored Denmark’s in its focus on establishing good relations with the local people. By a matter of months Bjarne Dramstad had missed out on doing his national service alongside Bjørn Østring in The Kings Guard Regiment, and thus facing the Germans in uniform, and instead was limited to lending his bicycle to an older friend to enable him to reach his mobilisation point on time. Dramstad was angry at the invasion, and resented the Germans, but said of their occupation: ‘The Germans were very correct in their behaviour, they treated the Norwegian POWs well, and were friendly towards us civilians. If they had behaved worse then maybe I wouldn’t have joined, but my war and motivation were for Finland in any case and not for Germany.’
Bjørn Østring served in his regiment during the invasion, had been captured during the fighting and was then quickly released. He thought the Germans behaved extremely well and that this influenced his decision to join-up: ‘My home town had about 5,000 inhabitants and the German General Engelbrecht quartered as many soldiers there. Relations between them and the population were correct and friendly. Most of my friends held the same views as I did.’
The Scandinavian Waffen-SS is born
Just 11 days after German paras spilled out over Denmark, and the Blücher was sent to the bottom of Oslo harbour, the order went out from Berlin to establish a new Scandinavian SS regiment, the SS-Nordland. No longer were foreigners to be just an adjunct to Waffen-SS expansion, this was the very first direct attempt to appeal to, recruit, train and arm a specific formation of volunteers from outside the borders of the Third Reich. Nothing like it had been done before and it set a clear precedent. The SS-Nordland was nothing less than a revolution, and the first step on a path that would lead to an armed SS in 1945 that was mostly non-native German, and where Scandinavians, Frenchmen and Latvians would be among the last and most dogged defenders of Hitler’s burning capital.
The regiment itself was to be composed of volunteers from all over Scandinavia, and it needed a lot – the best part of 2,000 men all up. Despite the optimism of the SS authorities, recruitment was frustratingly slow. By the end of June only about 200 Norwegians, 112 Danes and a handful of Swedes had come forward. One of the earliest was Dane Paul Vilhelm Hveger, a 22-year-old from Nyborg. Hveger had watched his sister Ragnild win a silver medal for swimming at the 1936 Berlin Olympics before he joined the army as a Royal Life Guard. Demobilised after the invasion, he was deeply impressed by German military power and efficiency: ‘I volunteered for the Nordland Regiment in 1940. After some initial training that spring, me and the others were sent home. Called back in the summer, I first went to Klagenfurt, then Vienna and finally Heuberg, where I joined the 7th Company as a rifleman.’
The Danish SS-Nordland Regiment volunteer, Paul Vilhelm Hveger. Hveger was an ex-Danish Army Royal Life Guard before joining the Nordland’s 7th Company as a grenadier. (Jens Post)
Denmark was still adjusting to the shock of occupation, fighting was still going on in Norway, and with no war against the Soviet Union, anti-communism wasn’t a driver for recruitment either. Little wonder that few men were willing to step forward. Politics played its part as well, with many would-be volunteers seeing the new regiment as lacking a Scandinavian character. The Norwegian Bjarne Dramstad definitely though so: ‘The Nordland Regiment didn’t appeal to me, it was too “German” in my eyes.’
In contrast farther south the Waffen-SS had more luck in the Low Countries following their invasion in May. The SS-Westland Regiment, established on 15 June as the Dutch/Flemish equivalent of the Scandinavian Nordland, attracted more than a thousand volunteers in its first two months of existence.
Undeterred, the indefatigable Gottlob Berger officially opened recruiting offices in Oslo and Copenhagen and Himmler persuaded Hitler to sanction the establishment of a new, fifth, Waffen-SS division to serve alongside the Leibstandarte (a brigade at the time), the Verfügungs, Totenkopf and SS-Polizei. The SS-Polizei Division had been established in 1940 and was composed, as the name suggests, of ex-policemen transferred to the SS.
The new formation was to be named the SS-Division Germania. Field-Marshal Keitel, Chief of the OKW, sent the following order to establish the new formation: ‘The Führer and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht has ordered the establishment within the framework of the Army, of a new SS division which shall utilise the manpower becoming available from those countries inhabited by people of related stock (Norway, Denmark, Holland).’
Hans Jüttner’s SS-Leadership Main Office (SS-Führungshauptamt – responsible for training, equipping and organising Waffen-SS field units) sprang into action, and on 3 December 1940 the veteran SS-Germania Regiment from the SS-VT became the cadre unit of the new division (the Verfügungs Division was given a Totenkopf unit, SS Infantry Regiment 11, as a replacement). The SS-Nordland and SS-Westland were brought in as the centrepiece, and a new German-manned artillery regiment added as the last piece of the puzzle. Confusion reigned, with the division having the same name as one of its own regiments, so by the end of the month Berlin had decided to change the divisions title to ‘Wiking,’ to reflect its intended Nordic make-up, as it began to form at the Heuberg training ground in southern Germany.
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 soldiers 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 good 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:
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)