III

1942: Nazi Germany’s High Water Mark – Leningrad, Demyansk and the Caucasus

The violent cursed host came rushing through, threatening cruel perils, and after slaying with mad savagery the rest of the brothers they approached the holy father to compel him to give up the shrine, but the saint remained with unarmed hand and was torn limb from limb.

The Viking raid on St Columba’s shrine on Iona in ad 825. A.O. Anderson, Early Sources of Scottish History 1922.

Scandinavians across the Waffen-SS

The failure of Typhoon at the very gates of Moscow signalled a series of Red Army winter counter-offensives that left tens of thousands of men dead in the snow. The majority were Soviet, but enough were German to leave the Wehrmacht chastened and weakened as 1942’s spring thaw arrived. At that time the Wehrmacht drew up a secret report, for OKW-eyes only, that stated that of their 162 combat divisions on the Russian Front, only eight were capable of offensive operations, and that the total armoured might of the German Army’s 16 panzer divisions was a miserable 140 tanks out of the original 3,332. The Red Army had also taken an unimaginable bludgeoning in the previous eight months or so, and had effectively lost its entire pre-war strength with more than 4,500,000 men either dead, wounded or in German Prisoner-of-War camps slowly starving to death. The Soviet Supreme Command, the STAVKA, had responded energetically and millions of men were called to the colours, but it would take time to equip and train them to face the Wehrmacht. Time was a problem for the Soviets but a killer for the Germans now that the United States and its awesome military potential was in the war. So OKW drew up plans to launch yet another massive strike in the summer and finish off the Soviets for good.

A signpost put up by DNL members to remind themselves just how very far they are from home as they besiege Leningrad. (Erik Wiborg)

The Scandinavian Waffen-SS would play their part in the coming campaign at both ends of the extraorinarily long Eastern Front. In the north, the now combat-ready Norwegian DNL, 1,218 men strong, was moving up to the trench lines surrounding Leningrad, while the 1,164 Danes of the Frikorps Danmark were nearing their baptism of fire in the inferno of the Demyansk Pocket hundreds of miles to the south. Farther south still, the SS-Wiking Division was licking its wounds from the winter fighting on the Mius River, while absorbing fresh intakes from the training depots. Having proved itself the previous year, the Wiking was to have a starring role in the coming German offensive.

Recruitment disaster

Not all was well with the Scandinavian Waffen-SS however, far from it. The advent of Barbarossa had indeed swelled the ranks of volunteers, but mainly in the two new national legions. Straight recruitment into the Wiking in particular was hard going. The SS authorities had hoped that a wave of anti-communist feeling in Scandinavia would see this number rocket and these fresh drafts would then swell the ranks of the Wiking over the winter. In reality, the numbers were relatively modest, so that by the beginning of February 1942 there were still only 947 Norwegians and 630 Danes in the ranks of the Wiking, while the 39 Swedes who had volunteered were spread across almost half a dozen Waffen-SS divisions (there was also one Swede in the Army’s 3rd Panzer Division and another in the Luftwaffe’s 8th Field Division). Unsurprisingly, the Swedish government was far happier to see their citizens enlist in the Finnish Army, so much so that the Finns formed an all-Swede unit, the Hangö Battalion, as part of the Finnish 13th Infantry Regiment that fought the Red Army on the Svir Front.

You did not have to look far to find the reasons why recruitment was so meagre. Gottlob Berger made the point crystal clear in a letter he wrote to Himmler on 9 February 1942. Berger outlined the problem, emphasising just how bad the situation was, and then laid the blame squarely at the feet of his rival, SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner. Berger pointed out that while his recruiters were responsible for drumming up the volunteers in the occupied lands, as soon as they signed on the dotted line they became the responsibility of Jüttner’s massive SS-Leadership Office (SS-FHA – 45,000 men strong no less). Jüttner would then train and equip them and allocate them to field units to maintain manning. This division of responsibility was, according to Berger, the root of the problem. While his staff made arrangements with volunteers around retention of any rank they had previously held, preference of unit to serve in, and other basic terms and conditions, all of this was blown out of the water by the heavy-handed methods and lack of sensitivity displayed by Jüttner’s organisation. The Swedish Army, for instance, was interested in seconding a number of officers to serve with the Germans to gain valuable frontline experience but despite Berger’s enthusiasm for the project, it came to nothing. Berger outlined the action of the SS-FHA that caused the venture to fail in a personal letter to Himmler: ‘The unceremonious discharge of one [Swedish] officer resulted in the closing off to us of the previously friendly Swedish officer corps and the destruction of a new and promising recruiting effort.’

The situation was even worse in Denmark after an incredible foul-up. In one disastrous incident, nine young Danish volunteers were sent to Das Reich after receiving only four weeks basic training and were all killed in action within days. Back in Denmark the news spread like wildfire and caused outrage. Recruitment fell like a stone as disgust mounted at what Danes saw as a lack of care and a breach of faith by the Waffen-SS. It also left Gottlob Berger privately ranting against what he rightly viewed as gross incompetence by the office of his arch-rival.

The result was widespread disillusionment among those willing to come forward. If he wanted to, Berger could also have quoted other examples from reports sent to him from the field, including the views of the controversial pre-war Norwegian writer, Winter War veteran, and now Waffen-SS DNL volunteer, Nils Per Immerslund:

Every tie, every connection, between Germany and Norway is lacking. The Germans think the volunteers will accept whatever treatment is meted out, and that Germany is hugely superior, but this was before they knew it for what it really is and by now even the old Norwegian Nazis could no longer deny it.

This was an important opinion given how high profile Immerslund was, both back home in Norway and within the Scandinavian Waffen-SS as a whole. The 31-year-old had already made a name for himself before the war through both his writing and his fighting, which saw him serve in Röhm’s SA in Germany and Franco’s Falange during the Spanish Civil War. His blond hair, blue eyes, film star looks and extreme views led him to be nicknamed ‘the Aryan idol’ (‘det ariske idol’ in Norwegian) in his homeland, but his self-loathing triggered by his homosexuality led him to seek out danger and take terrible risks. He ended up leaving the DNL, and became a correspondent in the SS’s own regiment of war reporters, the Kurt Eggers. Serving with the SS-Nord in Finland he was wounded in action and died on 7 December 1943 in an Oslo hospital.

The anger of many of the volunteers at the treatment they received did not only manifest itself in words. In time-honoured military fashion some voted with their feet. Volunteers went home on leave and then fled to Sweden to avoid having to go back to their units, and on 12 March 1942 Felix Steiner reported back to SS headquarters in Berlin that, for the very first time in the war, the Waffen-SS had suffered from desertion at the front. Two Scandinavian privates serving in the SS-Nordland Regiment’s 1st Company had gone over to the Russians from their advanced outpost in the frontline. The resulting uproar was loud. Himmler wrote to Berger on 14 April about the incident:

The Missing in Action report from SS Division Wiking on Privates Asbjørn Beckstrøm and Ludwig Kuta, a Norwegian and a Dane who both shamefully deserted, once again reinforces my opinion that the ideological and military training of Germanic volunteers must be increased to obtain real success or our earlier efforts will be jeopardised.

In the Reichsführer’s mind, the application of National Socialist principles may have been the key to success, but the problems he was trying to address were often of great personal significance. Himmler himself admitted that up to a third of volunteers had been disowned by their families as a result of their enlistment, and some wives had even left their husbands over the issue. The Norwegian volunteer, Leo Larsen, expressed the problem succinctly when he wrote from the Front to a friend in 1942: ‘My father has very little sympathy with my political beliefs. So little, that when I tried to visit him on Christmas Eve while on leave (I hadn’t seen him for 7–8 months) he threw me out.’

A group of Finnish SS officers conferring in the endless spaces of Russia, autumn 1942. (Olli Wikberg)

The newly-formed Finnish SS Battalion parades in front of Colonel Horn (officer saluting), the Finnish Military Attaché to Germany, and their new commander Hans Collani (far right) at Gross-Born on 15 October 1941. Horn presented the Battalion with a new unit flag at this ceremony. The flag was lost during the retreats of spring 1943. (Olli Wikberg)

This quote was included in an SS censor’s report sent direct to Himmler. Larsen was not alone, the Dutch Westland volunteer Jan Munk said of his own family’s reaction to his decision to volunteer: ‘I became the “black sheep” of my family. The great majority of Dutch people were strongly ant-Nazi. Certainly my parents were, my younger brother joined the Resistance, as did my elder sister’s husband.’ But Munk was also one of the lucky ones: ‘My parents never let me down though. My mother kept writing to me regularly as did my brother and two sisters. Fortunately mother kept all the letters that I sent to her and also photos and items that I left with her when on leave.’

The Finnish Waffen-SS Volunteer Battalion

What of the Finns? Well over a thousand had volunteered during 1941, and more than four hundred (those with combat experience) had spent the year fighting in the ranks of the Wiking. Eighty-one were killed in action in Barbarossa, with many more wounded, having fought the Red Army before they knew what to expect. The second tranche of 800 or so had spent all of summer and autumn being put through their paces on the training grounds of Vienna, Stralsund and Gross-Born. Apart from their battalion commander, Hans Collani, German involvement was not stifling, and to all intents and purposes the unit was an extension of the Finnish Army that just happened to wear Waffen-SS uniform. Receiving their Finnish-style battle standard in a ceremony on 15 October from Colonel Horn, the Finnish Military Attaché, the battalion was declared combat-ready on 3 December and dispatched east to join the Wiking in southern Russia in the New Year. It would prove a very welcome reinforcement to the depleted ranks of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS.

The SS-Wiking – there and back again to the Caucasus

1942 was set by both sides to be the decisive year of the war in the East. Hitler was determined finally to crush the Bolshevik threat, while Stalin was equally determined to see the Wehrmacht thrown out of Russia altogether. From the opening days of Barbarossa the previous summer, the Soviets had viewed Army Group Centre as the very fulcrum of the German war effort, and they assumed that the Germans shared this opinion. Accordingly STAVKA’s expectation was for an offensive under Field Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge – in a play on the German word for ‘clever’, klug, he was known as ‘clever Hans’ – who had replaced the ill von Bock on 19 December, in the centre, aimed at capturing Moscow. They were to be mistaken. While taking the capital of the Soviet Union and destroying the huge array of forces grouped around it might have seemed an obvious target, the Soviets had misread Hitler’s growing obsession with raw materials and the economics of war. The clue had been given the previous summer when, instead of thrusting forward and taking the capital in the autumn, Army Group Centre’s precious panzers had been diverted south for the encirclement battles in the Ukraine. Hitler ranted on about taking the Soviet Union’s ‘breadbasket’ and its industrial heartland in the Donets basin, and come 1942 he had the opportunity again to follow his own compulsion.

A group of Nordland Regiment grenadiers during the Wiking’s advance into the Caucasus in the summer of 1942. It is a lull in the fighting, hence they are wearing caps and not helmets.

Hitler was clear to his generals; the main offensive would be launched by Army Group South and not Centre, and its objectives were the capture and securing of the oilfields in the Caucasus. With the Red Army growing stronger every day, and with Moscow and Leningrad still free, Nazi Germany’s military might would be aimed at one of the most mountainous and turbulent regions in all of the Soviet Union, with few major cities and no strategic significance. Ultimately, this momentous decision would lead to the turning point of the whole war, when the most powerful field army the Wehrmacht possessed died in the snow and rubble of Stalingrad.

Case Blue (Fall Blau) was the codename given to the Wehrmacht’s southern offensive in 1942. Outlined in Führer Directive No. 21, of 5 April, the situation was described thus:

The winter battle in Russia is drawing to its close. The enemy has suffered very heavy losses in men and materiel. In his anxiety to exploit what seemed like initial successes he has spent, during this winter, the bulk of his reserves earmarked for later operations … The aim is to destroy what manpower the Soviets have left for resistance and to deprive them as far as possible of their vital military-economic potential.

This was strategic planning in cloud cuckoo land. Not only was the Red Army mobilising millions more men from its unconquered Russian heartland, but more than 1,500 factories, dismantled in 1941 and shipped eastwards, were now in full production and pumping equipment through the Soviet system. The scale of munitions production alone had quadrupled from the 1940 level of 63 million tonnes to over 250 million tonnes in the spring of 1942. On top of this, vast reservoirs of vital supplies from Britain and the USA were pouring through the port of Murmansk in the far north, as the Germans were punished for their inability to take the city that winter. On board those Allied convoys were boots, coats, tanks and aircraft, and thousands of sturdy American-made trucks, which were slowly but steadily transforming the Red Army from a foot and horse-borne force to an army superior in mechanisation to its supposedly more advanced German enemy. Time was running out for the Reich, but it had another chance to win that spring.

Fedor von Bock, recovered from his illness, was once again put in charge of an Army Group, this time South – its previous commander von Reichenau had taken over from von Runstedt, suffered a heart attack and then died when the plane flying him to hospital had crashed. He was pitted against some of the rising stars of the reborn Red Army; men like Konstantin Rokossovsky, Nikolai Vatutin and Andrei Yeremenko. Together these three men commanded some 20 Soviet Armies spread in a huge arc from the Taman peninsula in the west, through the recaptured ruins of Rostov and up to the industrial city of Voronezh. Against them von Bock had two newly-reorganised mini-Army Groups; B in the north commanded by the bespectacled aristocrat and magnificently named General Maximilian Maria Joseph Karl Gabriel Lamoral Reichsfreiherr von Weichs zu Glon, comprising Friedrich von Paulus’s enormous Sixth Army and Hoth’s excellent Fourth Panzer Army (the renamed Panzer Group 3), along with the Rumanian Third and Fourth Armies and the Italian Eighth Army. Army Group A in the south was led by Field Marshal Wilhelm List and had the wholly-German Eleventh and Seventeenth Armies, and Ewald von Kleist’s First Panzer Army (the old Panzer Group 1). In principle, the plan was simple. Drive east, and annihilate the Soviet armies between the Don and Donets rivers in a huge pincer movement, then turn south and capture the Caucasus. While it looked straightforward Case Blue was built on a foundation of sand. The distances that had to be covered were vast and casualties had been so enormous the previous year that massive responsibility was being placed on the ill-equipped, poorly-led and undermanned armies of Germany’s allies (the Hungarian Second Army would also be involved later on). The old campaigner Field Marshal von Runstedt described the force as an ‘absolute League of Nations army’, in which the Rumanian officers and NCOs were ‘beyond description’, the Italians ‘terrible people’ and the Hungarians ‘only wanted to get home quickly’. Regardless, the Wehrmacht was committed, and preparations went ahead for the attack.

The SS-Wiking upgraded

Along with all the other Waffen-SS field formations, the Wiking had been fully motorised since its inception. This already marked it out amongst the largely horse-drawn German Army, but the decision was taken in 1942 to upgrade the division further to ‘panzer grenadier’ status. Before the war this designation meant nothing in terms of extra equipment or capability, it was more of an honorary title. However, from 1941 onwards it became accepted practice to equip panzer grenadier units with an armoured battalion of their own. This utterly transformed their effectiveness. For the Wiking this meant the addition of three entire companies of Panzer IIIs with long-barrelled 50mm guns, some 66 tanks in all, along with one company (20 vehicles) of Marder IIs (the powerful 75mm anti-tank gun mounted on an old Panzer II chassis). Some of the Wiking’s artillery was made self-propelled as well. In effect, the division now had an armoured punch of close on a hundred vehicles.

The Wiking did not only receive a boost in its equipment table, but also among its ranks – the Finns had arrived in force. Supplied with French trucks from captured war stocks when they detrained at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, Collani had led his men east during the winter months to join up with the Wiking in its defensive positions on the River Mius. The journey was truly awful, with more than 60 per cent of the trucks breaking down on the way, unsuited as they were to the rigours of a Russian winter. With no transport the majority of the Finns had had to march hundreds of kilometres through the snow and so did not arrive until early January – but at least they were there and in one piece. The division itself was reorganising and the Finns arrival meant that Fritz von Scholz could bring his Nordland Regiment back up to strength by disbanding his old third battalion, by distributing the men to the remaining two and making the newly-arrived Finns his new third battalion. This was not all done safely in the rear but in the frontline, with the Finns taking up positions facing the Red Army’s 31st Guards Rifle Division. The ‘Guards’ designation indicated an exemplary unit and had been resurrected from Tsarist days to help motivate the men and it meant the Finns were facing a top notch outfit. In terms of bald numbers, a Red Army division was roughly equivalent to a Wehrmacht regiment – so the Finns were outnumbered almost three to one from the start. A few days after moving into the line, a Guards sniper shot dead the Finnish volunteer Onni Martkainen on 23 January 1942. He was the battalion’s first fatality of the war. Back up to complement, and with all the new kit, the SS-Wiking was earmarked as a spearhead unit in Kleist’s assault force.

The offensive would take the 2000 and more Scandinavian Waffen-SS men in the Wiking’s ranks to places few outsiders had ever seen. They would begin in the steppes of southern Russia, before sweeping south through more Cossack country, until finally reaching the snow-capped fastnesses of the high Caucasus mountains and the fiercely independent Muslim tribes that lived there. Where they reached would become the high water mark of the Third Reich’s empire, before they were sent tumbling back north in what the troops involved would disparagingly come to call the ‘Caucasus there and back offensive’ (Kaukasus hin und zurück).

The SS-Wiking drives to the south

Case Blue opened on 28 June, with von Weichs’s Army Group striking at the city of Voronezh, several hundred miles north of Rostov and east of Kursk. Two days later, Paulus’s Sixth Army initiated the next phase and thrust eastwards towards the far-off Volga River at Stalingrad. The Soviet response was to trade space for time and Timoshenko’s forces retreated east to avoid destruction. All of this though was a precursor to the main event, when on 13 July the long-awaited Wehrmacht offensive began in earnest with the 73rd, 125th and 298th Infantry Divisions crashing into their opposite numbers on the Rostov front. The STAVKA was caught off-guard, as it still believed that the main German effort would come from Army Group Centre. Unwilling to accept they had got it wrong, the southern Red Army formations were left unreinforced and at the mercy of the assaulting German divisions.

Backed up by strong artillery, the experienced German infantry soon began to tear holes in the Russian lines through which the armoured and motorised formations could pour. Through one such gap charged the Wiking’s panzer grenadiers along with the Slovak Fast Division, plus the 13th and 22nd Panzer Divisions. Riding hard, they entered Rostov itself on 23 July and surged towards the river. The Wiking’s new panzer battalion overran the city’s airfield, while the panzer grenadiers did the dirty work of street and house clearing. The fighting in the city was brutal, especially around the headquarters of the Soviet secret police, the dreaded NKVD, who were in Rostov in strength. The centre of the city had been turned into a deadly assault course, with strongpoints, mines, booby-traps, hidden bunkers and firing points. It took several days of savage hand-to-hand fighting to clear the city centre. Then a daring coup de main by a troop from the specially-trained Brandenburg Regiment secured the all-important road bridge over the Don to Bataysk. It cost the majority of the Brandenburgers their lives, but the way to the Caucasus was now open.

In recognition of the Wiking panzer battalion’s outstanding performance and his own bravery during the assault on the city, their 34-year-old Lorrainian commander Hans Mühlenkamp (already a German Cross in Gold holder from his time in the Das Reich) was awarded the Knight’s Cross on Felix Steiner’s personal recommendation. His citation read:

SS-Sturmbannführer Mühlenkamp, commander of SS-Panzer Battalion 5, as leader of an advanced detachment of the Division on July 22-23 1942, overran in a bold sudden attack after a hard fight, three lines of anti-tank ditches before Rostov. By 1430 hrs on July 23, he had broken into the western part of the city of Rostov. He cleared and occupied it, then pushed forward in a wide front up to the bank of the River Don. In the course of these battles Mühlenkamp destroyed 19 enemy cannons, 12 anti-tank guns and captured a large number of prisoners.

Through his daring and prudent handling of the unit he has contributed decisively to the breaching of the west and northwest fronts of the deeply-set anti-tank ditch positions before Rostov, forcing our enemy to flee in confusion back across the Don. With that he has freed the way to Rostov and the Don for the infantry divisions advancing from the north and northwest. He has taken a decisive part in the capture of Rostov and created the conditions necessary for the crossing of the Don by the pursuing 73rd and 125th Infantry Divisions.

Oil, mountains and the Kuban steppe

With the crossing of the Don the Scandinavians of the SS-Wiking entered territory unlike any other in Europe. Before them stretched over 300 miles of the Kuban and Kalmyk steppes, criss-crossed by innumerable minor water courses, as well as the wide and deep Manych River. Beyond the plains were the Caucasus mountains themselves, the largest peaks in Europe, crowned by the eternally snow-covered summit of the 18,480-foot Mount Elbrus. The region was dirt poor but rich in oil; from Maikop in the west to Grozny in the east, the black gold flowed to Stalin’s war machine. Maikop alone produced two and a half million tons of oil annually (the Wehrmacht consumed 7,305,000 tons in 1942). If captured intact, the Caucasus fields would feed Hitler’s fuel-hungry armies all across Europe. The other major feature of the region was its military highways. The warlike hill peoples who inhabited the area, the Chechens, Ossetians, Dagestanis and others, had only been conquered by the Tsars in the previous century and had resented Russian rule ever since. The Russians had built two huge roads through the mountain passes so troops could move quickly to snuff out any trouble: the Ossetian Military Highway in the west from Kutaisi to Pyatigorsk in the north, and the Georgian Military Highway in the east shadowing the Caspian Sea from Grozny all the way south to Tiflis. These roads would be vital in the summer’s fighting.

Under the baking Caucasus sun, the Wiking forged ahead with the rest of von Kleist’s panzer force. It was the Berliners of General Breith’s 3rd Panzer Division who first got across the Manych River on 1 August, and in their wake came the Wiking. Striking ever south, Maikop fell to Major-General Herr’s 13th Panzer Division on 13 August, but they found the huge oil storage tanks ablaze and the oilfields themselves stripped of equipment and the wells capped with tonnes of concrete. Accompanying them down the western Caucasus, the grenadiers of the SS-Nordland took the railway junction of Kropotkin and surged across the Kuban River to establish a bridgehead on the southern side. They then turned southwest to try and take Tuapse on the Black Sea coast.

As impressive as the endless advance seemed, it was failing to achieve its objectives. Hitler had expressly set out in his Directive for Case Blue that the offensive wasn’t only about capturing the Caucasus and its oilfields, but crucially it also had to encircle and annihilate the large Red Army formations facing it. The Führer wanted another Kiev. The only problem was that the Soviets were learning. Stalin’s ‘hold and fight’ dogma of the previous year had been abandoned for the madness it clearly was. The STAVKA was now using Russia’s age-old strategy of trading space for time, luring an invader ever deeper into its endless interior and then, when they were at the very end of their supply lines, hit them hard. It was working. German infantry divisions were marching 30–40 miles a day, with the panzers doing even more, but the horizon was never reached. The Soviets would simply sit on a river line, force the Wehrmacht to deploy and carry out an attack. As soon as the pressure got too much, the Russians would just disengage and drive away, leaving the Germans and their allies to punch into thin air. Cities, towns and villages were not fought over; Krasnodar the Kuban Cossack capital with its 200,000 inhabitants fell on 11 August, followed the next day by the Kalmyk’s major town, Elista. But nowhere did the Wehrmacht fulfil its task and surround vast numbers of Soviet troops. They were always there, withdrawing in front of the Germans and heading ever closer to the mountains.

Elbrus ‘conquered’, but no more

Two months into the campaign though, and victory seemed in sight. If the Germans could sweep down the coast and take the ports of the Black Sea Fleet, they would turn the Sea into a ‘German lake’. Turkey would almost certainly come into the war on Nazi Germany’s side and could threaten the whole Middle East. Rommel, standing at El Alamein, could regroup and charge forward again as the British would be faced with a battle in their rear as well as to their front. In the East, if the Germans took the fabled city of Astrakhan on the shores of the Caspian Sea, they would cut off all Red Army forces in the Caucasus. They could be supplied by boat of course, but the reality would be half a dozen Soviet Armies stranded in the high mountains. But these were big ‘ifs’. The Wehrmacht’s soldiers had already covered almost 500 miles, men and machines were weary and battered, and the under-strength invasion force was dangerously spread out.

They were not finished yet though, and as if to prove it, on 21 August a party of alpine jägers from the 1st and 4th Mountain Divisions, led by Captains’ Groth and Gämmerler, planted the swastika on the summit of Mount Elbrus. The Wehrmacht had conquered the highest peak in all of Europe. It was an incredible feat of mountaineering.

The steam was running out of Case Blue. Everywhere the Germans lacked the strength to reach their final objectives. They were 30 miles from Tuapse, 25 miles from the coast at Klydzh, and only 12 miles from Sukhumi, but it might as well have been the far side of the moon. The Red Army was fighting hard everywhere now, and the Wehrmacht had simply run out of aircraft, panzers, guns and men.

The SS-Wiking in the eastern Caucasus

As ever, Hitler blamed his generals and not himself for the failure. Field Marshal Wilhelm List was relieved of command at the beginning of September, as was Franz Halder, the Chief of the General Staff. From his headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the fighting, an exasperated Führer ordered the offensive to be renewed and Grozny taken. By now it was late September and autumn had arrived, but obedient as ever the First Panzer Army gathered its strength and attacked south. The SS-Wiking was shifted to the east to assist the offensive, and along with the 23rd Panzer Division and the 111th Infantry Division, the SS grenadiers advanced on the Georgian Military Highway. Von Scholz’s Nordland actually reached the road itself and cut it north of Grozny, but were overlooked by a feature denoted on German maps as Hill 711, near the village of Malgobek.

As long as the Russians held the high ground they could pour fire down on the hapless SS men. There was nothing for it, Hill 711 had to be captured. The Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Germans of the Nordland attacked again and again, leaving piles of their dead on the hillside, but were unable to take it. Finally, on 16 October it was the turn of the Nordland’s 3rd Battalion to go into the assault – it was time for Hans Collani’s Finns. When the rest of SS-Wiking went into action at Rostov back in July, the Finns had been rested at Mokryj Jelantschick until the first week of August. Only then had they rejoined their comrades in the Nordland and fought in the western Caucasus. Now they took up positions in their line of departure (usually in dead ground away from direct fire where troops could get themselves ready for an assault), and at H-Hour leapt forward into the teeth of the Soviet fire. In small knots, the three Finnish infantry companies leapfrogged upwards, covered by the heavy weapons of their 4th Company. In desperate fighting the Finns took the summit and sent the Russians tumbling backwards. There was no time for congratulations, as the Soviets counter-attacked immediately. This time it was the turn of the Waffen-SS to hold the high ground against an advancing enemy. Assault after assault was broken up by concentrated Finnish fire. Come nightfall, Hill 711 was still in the hands of Collani’s Finnish SS men, and Soviet resistance was broken. The toll was heavy. Hill 711 was rechristened ‘Killing Hill’ by its Finnish conquerors, with the battalion losing 88 killed and 346 wounded on its rocky slopes. With a further 80 men already in hospital, the battalion was almost wiped out. The arrival a month later of some 200 new volunteers, all combat veterans from the Winter War, was a great shot in the arm for the Nordland’s Finnish contingent. These new men would go straight into action, as the battalion fought alongside its Nordic cousins to hold off growing Red Army attacks across the entire divisional front. Indeed, on 4 December two of them, Kalevi Könönen and Yrjö Pyyhtiä, held their machine-gun position unsupported for eight hours against furious Soviet assault. They were both awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and the prestigious Honour Roll Clasp for their bravery.

The end of the line

With Killing Hill in Finnish hands, the rest of III Panzer Corps broke across the Terek River, smashed four Red Army divisions, took 7,000 prisoners, captured Alagir and by 5 November had cut the Ossetian Military Highway. Victory was so very close. The advancing Germans were feted by the local Muslim peoples as liberators from the atheist communist yoke. Nalchik, the capital of the mainly Muslim Kabardo-Balkiar region, fell in early November and there were public celebrations in the streets. But this was where the advance stopped. The armoured divisions had barely a handful of panzers still operational, and those they had were running on fumes. Even worse, ammunition was desperately short. The men were exhausted, their boots were worn out, and as the temperature began to drop they had little warm clothing, it was just like the last winter.

Ornulf Bjornstadt, a Norwegian volunteer in the Germania, was in the line on a stretch of high ground near Grozny:

When I settled down for the night in my foxhole which was on a hillock, it was raining hard. The temperature dropped and the water trapped in the foxhole iced over while I slept. When I awoke it was iron hard and I was literally frozen to one wall. I couldn’t move at all and my left side was totally paralysed. There was a bunker not far away where earlier there had been an attack by mortars which did plenty of damage, killing our company commander and wounding a lot of our men. Because of that there were doctors around and one managed to get to me after he heard me yelling. The only way to get me down the hillock was astride a motorcycle combination and I was bumped along until we reached a small town which had a hospital and spa baths originally used by senior Communist officials and now occupied by us.

It was luxury to be between clean white sheets and the treatment was marvellous. There was even Norwegian staff, including nurses! I was in high fever when I arrived and then I became crippled with rheumatism, and it was a full month before I was able to be sent back to my unit, which was now in sight of a small Georgian village near the town of Osnokitsa. This was wooded country. The Elbrus, the highest mountain in the region and also all of Europe, towered above us. We set up a bunker in an abandoned house, establishing our mortar positions with infantry support, mine was near a creek – ideal because beyond was flat land leading to the village and it was good for observation.

I was not on night duty at that time, which was lucky. One night there was a Russian scout patrol right in the path of my mortar position. Our men opened up. Next morning I discovered the body of a Russian officer slumped across my bunker. He had been caught in a burst of machine-gun fire.

The enemy was very active, striking out from the village again and again, mostly by day. The latest mortar grenades we were issued were very effective against them. They would land on the flat ground and then bounce up into the air before exploding with a deadly cascade of shrapnel splinters.

When we took Red Army prisoners we put them to good use, mostly digging trenches. I remember one wretched lad who was quivering with fear when we took him. He looked desperate and told me he wanted to be my friend. I took pity on him and put him to work as the company’s cook. He had that job for about three months before I turned him loose to go back to his own lines. What happened to him after that I don’t know.

What Bjornstadt didn’t know at the time was that if the local Red Army commander had followed STAVKA’s express orders the young cook would have been tried for cowardice, found guilty and shot. In Stalin’s eyes there was no excuse for being captured.

Bjornstadt was not the only volunteer to be struck down by the terrible conditions in the Caucasus. Over in the Nordland’s 7th Company the young Dane, Paul Hveger, was also suffering: ‘I’d served in all the fighting in 1941 and 1942 right up to the Caucasus and never been wounded; but then I contracted jaundice and was sent home. That was the end of my service with the Nordland.’

With the Wehrmacht at the very end of its thousands of miles of supply lines, the increasingly bold Soviet forces launched attack after attack against their worn-out enemy. Bjornstadt and the rest of the Wiking’s grenadiers had to cut their way through to the suddenly trapped 13th Panzer Division and pull them out to safety. All along the Front, the Wehrmacht began to pull back, and the withdrawal became official on 11 December. Army Group A was heading back north.

Stalingrad

The reason for the retreat was simple. Up north on the Volga River, the entire German Sixth Army was dying in Stalingard’s choking ruins. The majority of Nazi Germany’s allied armies – two Rumanian, and one each of Hungarians and Italians – had also been shattered in the encirclement battle that trapped von Paulus’s men. In desperation, Hermann Hoth was leading his Fourth Panzer Army in Operation Winter Storm to try and cut a way through to their starving brethren. His panzers formed a wedge in front of a massive fleet of 800 trucks piled high with over 3,000 tons of supplies intended to revitalise the Sixth Army. All effort was thus focused on Stalingrad, and the cupboard for the Caucasus was literally bare. Now the threat was of destruction. If the Red Army could strike southwest from Stalingrad and take Rostov, then the whole of Army Group A would be cut-off in the Caucasus. One million men could be lost. For the Ostheer, the German Army in the East, it would be the end. There was no option, the Wiking’s Scandinavians would have to retrace their steps all the way back to the Don. Case Blue had failed.

The cold reality of that summer’s defeat demonstrated that Nazi Germany simply did not possess the resources or strategic focus to deliver a killing blow to the Soviet Union. They lacked what the great post-war German historian Paul Carrell christened ‘the last battalion’ that could make all the difference and bring final victory.

Away from the far south, 1942 was also the ‘year of the legions’; the Norwegians at Leningrad, and the Danes at Demyansk and Velikiye Luki.

Leningrad – the DNL in the 2nd SS Motorised Infantry Brigade

Built on reclaimed swamp land at the cost of thousands of labourers’ lives, Leningrad (the renamed St Petersburg), was an architectural jewel. The Neva River and its tributaries, then as now, flowed gently through picturesque canals and waterways, while the banks were lined with the imposing residences of Russia’s pre-Revolutionary Tsarist élite. Romanov palaces jostled with gothic-style opera houses and world-class museums, while Leningraders strolled through beautifully laid out parks and squares. Like every Russian city, Leningrad also had its enormous factory complexes belching out smoke, but unlike Moscow, there was very little that was grim or grey about the place proud to call itself the ‘Venice of the north’. When Barbarossa was launched, the citizens of the city felt they had little to fear given that the frontline was initially hundreds of miles to the west, but the huge German victories in the border battles and the loss of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had come as a great shock to the city, as the might of the Wehrmacht drew ever closer. A vengeful Finland had then launched its own offensive to the north of the city, recapturing all the ground it had been forced to cede to Russia after the Winter War. The Finns, though, did not press home their advantage, and were content to sit on the Svir River line and portray their advance as little more than the righting of a terrible wrong. The breathing space gave the Soviets the time and opportunity to turn their full attention on von Leeb’s Army Group North and its three armies: the Sixteenth, Eighteenth and Panzer Group 4.

DNL legionnaires relax in the sun outside their bunker near Leningrad, 1942. (Erik Wiborg)

Dominated by foot-marching infantry, and having an area of operations unsuited for fast, mobile troops, the northern prong of the German invasion force was the weakest and least important in the Barbarossa plans. Priority for men and equipment went to the far more glamorous sectors to the south, as the likes of Guderian, Hoth and von Manstein raced through Belarus, the Ukraine and across the Dnieper. The commanders of von Leeb’s infantry Armies, Ernst Busch and Georg von Küchler, were steady, professional soldiers, but not men to set the world alight. Erich Höppner, Panzer Group 4’s tall, aggressive commander, was a different proposition entirely, driving his men relentlessly onwards and even being somewhat reckless on occasions. With the Baltic States captured, and the Germans at the very gates of Leningrad, von Leeb did not have the strength to capture the city outright, and so settled into an uninspired siege of the city hoping to bring about its surrender by bombardment and starvation. Tens of miles of trenches were dug, as the German infantry began a front life their forefathers in the last war on the Western Front would have recognised. Legion Hauptscharführer Bjørn Østring said of the conditions:

With temperatures below -30C it was terrible. The positions that we inherited from the attack units [elements of the 58th Infantry Division and the Leibstandarte] were established in a rush just after the cold weather started and after the Army were ordered out of the conquered parts of the city. An order from Hitler said that we would not take responsibility for the civilians of the city throughout the winter. The bunkers were virtually snow caves since the ground was frozen solid and was impossible to dig into. One of my units had it so low under the ‘ceiling’ of their bunker that our biggest soldier could not turn around at night as his hip was too wide! The soot from our improvised cod oil lamps made us look like Africans, but with white skin around the eyes where the back of our hand sometimes would wipe the moisture away.

Bjørn Østring surveys the enemy in front of his trench near to Leningrad. (Erik Wiborg)

Norwegian DNL legionnaires dig in around Leningrad, winter 1942. (Erik Wiborg)

Making things worse was the fact that the already depleted formations of Army Group North had to besiege not one place but three. To the west of the city the Germans had been unable to take the huge naval base of Kronstadt and its environs on the Gulf of Finland, this was the so-called ‘Oranienbaum Pocket’ and was defended by the Soviet Coastal Army. To the east of the city the town of Schlüsselburg, on the shores of Lake Ladoga, held out. Both had to be invested, as well as Leningrad itself, and with the Red Army determined to break the siege from their lines on the Volkhov River to the east, von Leeb’s weary divisions were stretched very thin indeed. With the majority of OKW’s Strategic Reserve committed, and the lion’s share of reinforcements going to the southern and central fronts, a series of scratch formations were hastily put together to try and hold the lines in the north. One such unit was the 2nd SS Motorised Infantry Brigade (2. SS-Infanterie-Brigade (mot.) in German). Along with its sister formation, the 1st SS Motorised Infantry Brigade, this unit was to have one of the most controversial records in the history of the Waffen-SS.

Originally formed from ‘spare’ Totenkopf regiments not required for the frontline divisions, the two brigades began life as anti-partisan security formations. They quickly established a reputation for brutality and ruthlessness. The cadre unit for the 2nd Brigade was Totenkopf Regiment 4, and a taste of its record can be found in its After Action Report for 26 October 1941. The report stated that after the radio interception of Soviet communications, the Brigade was put on readiness for an anticipated assault through the Skajadub Novka Bridgehead on the night of 25/26 October. The Soviets duly attacked, but had lost all surprise and were repulsed, with no SS losses, but ‘15 suspected terrorists and saboteurs from Tossno were sentenced to death and shot.’

Over time, the Brigades were to become heavily manned by foreign volunteers with several thousand Latvians on the books, along with the Flemings of SS-Legion Flandern and the Norwegians of the DNL. In fact, the arrival of the DNL instituted a reorganisation of the 2nd Brigade with the splitting off of several units to form Battlegroup Jeckeln (Kampfgruppe Jeckeln) on 17 February 1942. Alongside the Norwegians were a mixture of SS and Army units including elements from the departing 58th Infantry Division (Reconnaissance Battalion 158, Anti-tank Battalion 158, two batteries of Artillery Regiment 158 and seven infantry gun platoons), the 212th Infantry Division’s 320th Infantry Regiment, four infantry gun platoons and the Artillery Regiment from the SS-Polizei Division, and last but not least, no fewer than five battalions of Order Police (Ordnungspolizei 56, 121, 305, 306 and 310). This curious mix of frontline and rear area units was commanded by a man who had already steeped himself in blood in southern Russia – SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln. Jeckeln was a vicious anti-Semite who, following behind Army Group South the previous year as Higher SS and Police Leader for South Russia, had ordered and led mass executions of Jews and Communists across the Ukraine. He butchered 23,600 Jews at Kamenets-Podolsk in August 1941. Less than a month after the SS-Wiking took the town of Dnepropetrovsk and its massive dam, Jeckeln was there, slaughtering 15,000 of its inhabitants (almost all Jews) in October the same year.

Fortunately for the Norwegians, their contact with Jeckeln was strictly limited, and they were used in the frontline rather than in the infamous ‘mopping up operations’ behind the lines. Their first stop was the outer Leningrad suburb of Pushkin, right at the very end of the southern tramline out of the city. They were there only for a few days before being moved 13 kilometres to the west to Krasnoye Selo, the home of the old Tsarist summer palace. Here they dug in close by to the German artillery lines.

The DNL itself was organised in five companies; three of line infantry, and one each of heavy weapons and anti-tank guns, all commanded by Norwegians with minimal German liaison staff. Olaf Lindvig commanded the 1st Company, Karsten Sveen the 2nd, Jørgen Braset the 3rd, and Ragnar Berg the heavy weapons company. Finn Finson commanded the vital anti-tank gun company, curiously numbered as the 14th.

Each infantry section (and this was a battle for infantry and gunners, not dashing tankers) lived in a bunker deep underground, which they tried in every way possible to make liveable. Photos of sweethearts, family and friends were hung on the walls and the earthen floor was covered with boards or sacking. A stove, usually in the centre of the bunker, was kept going throughout the winter months in a desperate attempt to stay warm. Everybody then had their own bunk, hung with their kit and a few meagre personal possessions, woe betide any man who disturbed that. On a rota basis, the men would climb the stairs out of the bunker into the communication trench that connected all the bunkers together. There they would take turns to stand guard, the infamous ‘stagging on’, watching for any movement from the Soviet lines often built no more than a few hundred metres away across no-man’s land. On occasions, each section would also go forward and take up position in a forward trench or outpost. Here they would be constantly ready to repel a Soviet attack or report back on any enemy movements. The exposed nature of these assignments meant they were very unpopular and the troops looked forward to their relief and a few hours rest back in the darkness of their underground home.

Jonas Lie presents a medal to Olaf Lindvig. Lie was a part-time detective novelist before the war. He would go on to serve for several spells at the Front before dying in mysterious circumstances at Skallum at the end of the war. (James Macleod)

Trench life is a claustrophobic existence, where life is dominated by the most basic human needs and above all else, the weather. When it’s cold, you freeze, when it’s hot you swelter and no matter what, you are always wet and filthy. Everything stinks and everything rots, as the world shrinks around you to your own small piece of dirt. For the Norwegian volunteers of the DNL, the dirt around Leningrad was to be the backdrop to their war.

The Norwegians and the Siege of Leningrad

The siege of Leningrad, the longest in history, was an odyssey of human misery and endurance. The Germans lacked the strength to take the city and the Soviets the strength to free it. The result was a messy, vicious campaign, dominated by high explosive and hunger. German artillery and aircraft routinely bombarded the city, flattening buildings and killing civilians. With no food coming in and limited stocks, rationing soon became incredibly harsh. By late December 1941 Red Army soldiers in the line were receiving just 500 grammes (17.6 ounces) of bread per day, essential workers got 350 grammes (12.2 ounces) and everyone else a tiny 200 grammes, that’s just four slices of a modern loaf of bread to hold together body and soul during a Russian winter. It just wasn’t enough, and by January 1942 some 3,500–4,000 people were dying of disease and starvation every single day. The Leningrader, Valentina Fedorovna Kozlova, just 18 years old at the start of the blockade, said:

Bjørn Østring’s bunker at Urizk in 1942. On the left is Bjørn himself, then his Company’s German liaison officer Dieter Radbruch with the glasses, and on the right is Bjørn’s second-in-command Henrik-Skaar Pedersen. Leningrad harbour is just visible through the window – Quisling’s photo is on the wall above Radbruch. (Bjørn Østring)

The DNL gunner is manning an ex-French Army Hotchkiss machine-gun, indicating that the Legion was often armed with inferior weapons from captured stocks rather than the very latest modern German weapons.

A friend tends the grave of the DNL officer Charles Westberg. Westberg served in the Norwegian Army and was a member of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling before joining the Norwegian SS. An experienced and well-liked officer he was killed by a direct artillery hit to his command bunker on the Leningrad front on 19 March 1942.

Conditions in the Leningrad siege lines were primitive but there was always time for a smile with your comrades when the sun came out.

The low-lying land of the Urizk plain was prone to flooding so every trench was always half-filled with water.

Three volunteers come out of their subterranean bunker to take in some much-welcome fresh air (above) and Bjørn Østring and his section commanders from the DNL’s 1st Platoon of the 1st Company, (below) in the moonscape terrain around Urizk; from left; the platoon second-in-command Henrik-Skaar Pedersen, Bjørn Østring himself, Einar Gill Fasting Jr and finally Per Bradley. (All Eric Wiborg)

A Norwegian DNL gunner with his MG34 in the lines around Leningrad. Conditions resemble the very worst of World War One trench fighting.

A Norwegian DNL volunteer uses a net to try and keep the swarming mosquitoes off his head, Leningrad 1942. (Erik Wiborg)

First and foremost the blockade meant hunger. I suffered from a state of extreme malnutrition. My pre-war weight of 60 kilos (132 pounds) fell to 39 kilos (86 pounds) by July 1942. There was no running water or sewer system. Hunger dominated, and the winter of 1941–1942 was intensely cold. German bombers raided frequently. Buildings burned and collapsed and people perished.

One constantly wanted to eat. I often dreamed on the way to work of suddenly finding a box of fat or an entire horse lying around.

It wasn’t just Leningrad’s desperate inhabitants who were obsessed by food in early 1942. Outside the city in the mud and squalor of the trenches, the besiegers felt hunger too, though nothing like what was happening on the Soviet side. The very drudgery of static warfare also increases the importance of food to alleviate boredom and break up the monotony. A good day in the trench was one where you had plenty to eat and it tasted of something more than the usual ‘giddy-up-soup’ (horsemeat goulash made from the supply of dead draught animals). This, at least, was an aspect of front life that the Scandinavians excelled at. Their homelands were not subject to extensive rationing or Allied bombing raids and food was still relatively plentiful. The result was a steady flow of parcels from friends and relatives packed with delicious goodies. Cheese, butter, pickled fish and jams were all sent to the ever-hungry volunteers, but this situation did not suit everyone. Jan Munk only half-jokingly said:

I liked the Norwegians a lot, good soldiers and nice to know as were the few Swedes I knew [there was one Swede, one Norwegian and two Danes in Munk’s nine-man recruit squad in Sennheim training camp]. The Finns had a great reputation as fighters, the Danes were good soldiers too, but I didn’t like them much personally as they used to get wonderful food parcels from home but didn’t share them with us!

The DNL and the Battle of Urizk

Away from the food, there was no glory to be had in the trenches at Krasnoye Selo. No sweeping charges with massed tanks and aircraft, no grand pincer movements leading to prisoner bags in the tens of thousands. Combat was through shadowy night patrols, or the sudden launch of a brutal trench raid. Snipers abounded, as did artillery observers, ever waiting to unleash a salvo of rounds onto the unsuspecting. Bjarne Dramstad recalled his first experiences at the Front:

The Norwegian volunteer Bjarne Dramstad’s identification picture from his official Wehrmacht papers, his Soldbuch. (Knut Thoresen)

The DNL’s Olaf Lindvig in Russia posing with his MP40 sub-machine gun. (James Macleod)

First I did guard duty at an ammunition storage dump for a few weeks and then I was ‘loaned out’ as an infantryman to 2nd Company. My new platoon commander showed me my post in the trench and then I started my frontline service. This was around mid-March. I can remember a good friend of mine, Olav, was shot in the head – in the middle of his nose. The bullet came right out of his neck and there was a lot of blood.

It all started with the Russian sniper that killed Ola Strand [a volunteer and friend of Dramstad’s]. Olav, who was one of the best snipers in the Legion, tried to spot the sniper but the Russian was expecting him, and shot him. Olav survived the war, and we actually served together later in Finland, but the Russian bullet gave him brain damage. He ended up living alone in a cabin on the Swedish border until he died in 1980.

But what I remember most from my first time at the Front was the grotesque sight of the dead Russians in front of our trenches. Their rotting bodies showed up as the snow melted, and blackbirds crawled into their chests to eat, it was horrible.

As always, infantrymen like Bjarne lived by the motto of ‘keep your head down, dig fast and dig deep.’ But being careful in war just isn’t enough, and it was not long before the DNL started to suffer. In just over a week in the line, five Norwegians (including Ola Strand of course) were dead, and then on 19 March a well-directed artillery strike hit the command bunker of the 4th Company’s 3rd Platoon. The ex-Norwegian Army officer, GSSN and NS luminary Charles Westberg was killed along with three of his men. It was a nasty shock to the still-acclimatising Norwegians, and the event bore a striking resemblance to the death of the Flemish volunteer leader, Reimond Tollenaere, killed just two months earlier less than eighty miles away on the Volkhov.

After Westberg’s loss, the Front was relatively quiet for the next fortnight, with only sporadic shelling and the odd patrol. 1st Company’s Commander, Olaf Lindvig said of these patrols:

The orders were not to attack from the front, but to send out recce and fighting patrols which would be backed by infantry support as necessary. The strength of the patrols, which were organised by the company commanders, could range from eight to ten men, or in some cases be of platoon strength. Many of those who volunteered for the patrols used to be hunting enthusiasts back home, and they were undoubtedly among the best we had.

There were occasional full-on attacks as well, the first of which Bjarne Dramstad remembers vividly:

Our closest point to the Russian lines was only about 75 metres away and that’s where they attacked from. First we were hit by mortars, and after that came the infantry. We managed to stop them and lost no-one killed or wounded in that attack. It is possible someone was wounded behind us but I can’t remember. The Russians lost several men. They were left behind lying in front of us. I was scared of course, but managed to do my job. Sometimes when the Russians started their bombardments of our positions, to soften us up, I sank down in the mud onto my knees praying to God. It was hell, sometimes I just thought of my mother, but when the attack came I always reacted like a machine, I acted without thinking.

The beginning of April wrought a change in position and in fortune for the DNL. The town of Urizk (also called Uritsk) was a small place, built at the junction where the main tramline going east from Leningrad to Oranienbaum splits and branches off south to Krasnoye Selo. It does not exist today. Utterly destroyed in the siege it was not rebuilt after the war. Its remnants were absorbed into the still-existent town of Staro Panovo, which stands looking out across the flat, reclaimed land of the area. The Urizk plain is relatively featureless, and criss-crossed with small waterways and drainage ditches. There is little cover and its very nature means a defender has excellent fields of fire. In the late summer of 1941 it was the western anchor of the main Russian defensive line built to protect Leningrad. An average daily total of 125,000 Leningraders expended a staggering 8,757,600 man-days building that line of fortifications, the majority of which fell to the advancing Germans in the autumn. So Urizk was in German hands, or more specifically from the beginning of April 1942, in the hands of 1,200 Norwegian Waffen-SS men. Bjørn Østring was now a Hauptsharführer commanding the 1st Platoon of the DNL’s 1st Company under Olaf Lindvig. He said of the move:

It was heavenly to get to our new positions at Urizk, with a bunker we could actually stand up in and feel safe at the same time as it had an apparently thick roof. But as the spring progressed and the snow melted, we quickly realized that it was only some boards with snow on top, and that the walls rapidly crumbled because they were made with dirt mixed with ice and snow. What’s more, everything that melted filled the trenches with genuine, wet, Russian mud. Our positions were at the top of a small hill, and so had some drainage. But for more than a kilometre around were wet trenches, from which flowed a continuous stream of muddy water. The result was that we were wet all the time. Often when going out to our positions, we had to wade through water up to our waists, and then stand guard for three to five hours while soaking wet. We then had to walk back to our bunker through the same water, which had then developed a thin layer of ice that we had to break. To rest, we had to climb a tall bank made to keep the water out. But after a while we couldn’t keep all the water out, and sleeping during the day could only be done on the topmost bunk or on boards fastened to the ceiling. We never took our boots off, because our feet were blistered and swollen and we would never have been able to put them back on.

Under these ‘drowned cat’ conditions we wanted the winter back just to ‘bind the water together’. Interestingly enough nobody became sick during these weeks. But we still had many men wounded or killed. It was very tempting to run along the top of the trench and stay dry, but with the closest snipers only 30 metres away this was the end for many of our men.

Østvig’s company commander, Olaf Lindvig, agreed with him:

The Russians had set up a network of outposts and listening posts and seemed to have limitless numbers of troopers. They also seemed to have plenty of snipers whose aim was spot on. They would lie still for hours, observing through their binoculars. They were so sharp that they could knock a man’s head off the moment he put it above the trench. The easiest targets were young Norwegian reservists, green and wet behind the ears. Some of whom were so trigger happy that they would sit on the edge of a trench and blast off their weapons. They didn’t last long. The Russians would also send half-a-dozen or so bombers over at any time to attack our rear areas. The best occasion was when two Luftwaffe fighters shot down these nuisances and we were able to capture the crews after they baled out.

Such conditions have been the bane of soldiers through the ages. Both men would have recognised a description written 230 years earlier by the great British general the Duke of Marlborough, talking about his own men’s experiences in Flanders during the War of the Spanish Succession: ‘… the continual rains, our poor men are up to their knees in mud and water, which is a most grievous sight, and will definitely occasion great sickness.’

Some things in the army never change. Another one of which is the necessity for any incoming unit, in this case the DNL, to familiarise itself with the lie of the land, and the enemy facing them. Patrolling is the standard method of accomplishing this, as well as beginning the process of dominating no-man’s land and winning the initiative. It was no different for the DNL, so on the night of 15 April, Ragnar Berg led 18 men of his 4th Heavy Weapons Company on a trench raid against their opposite numbers in the Red Army’s 56th Rifle Division. Berg was an experienced officer and the raid was well-planned, but it ended in disaster. In the nightmare ground conditions Østring described above, the assault troop inadvertently wandered into an uncharted Soviet minefield. A volunteer trod on a mine, and the blast alerted the Russians who plastered them with artillery firing on pre-set lines, so-called DFs (Defensive Fires). The Norwegians didn’t have a chance, almost every man was hit and eight were killed outright including Berg himself, although the real miracle was that any survived at all. Under fire, the surviving wounded were brought out of the minefield by volunteers and sent to the rear for treatment. The survivors of Berg’s Company were taken over by another Norwegian officer, Njaal Reppen. The DNL had now lost a company commander, a platoon commander and two dozen men in less than two months; and it would not be long before the entire Legion faced its stiffest test of the war so far.

To the southeast the Red Army spring offensive on the Volkhov had seen Andrei Vlasov’s 2nd Shock Army crash through the German lines and flood west. In a scrambling defence, Army Group North had halted the advance and pinched off the assault. Every available unit was rushed east including the bulk of the 2nd SS Motorised Infantry Brigade (including by this time the SS-Legion Flandern – see Hitler’s Flemish Lions). This left the siege lines around Leningrad badly stretched. The Russians took their chance to strike.

With all eyes on the Volkhov, the Leningrad Command thought a swift thrust along the coast through Urizk would enable a link up with the Oranienbaum Pocket. Plans were laid for an assault beginning on 21 April. By then the Norwegians had made some improvements to their positions. According to Bjørn Østring

… the conditions got somewhat better, which enabled us to improve many of our positions while the sun started to dry everything up. The guard duties were changed and everyone – even the commanders – was able to get some sleep almost every night. But as soon as an attack was imminent we all worked every minute. We worked between flares at night, where we were like ants that took cover and froze once another flare erupted above us in the sky.

For machine-gun and single soldier positions, new spring enforcements were built into the existing trenches, while ‘Spanish riders’ were moved forward to strengthen the sparse barbed wire fences. This job was extremely dangerous, as the Bolsheviks and us were working on our various projects almost shoulder to shoulder and just metres apart.

A company of Latvian volunteers helped us out during this time. Their eagerness to work was great, but their hate towards the Russians was so enormous it scared us. They were not like us Norwegians, individuals with independent responsibilities, they did everything as a group. They always needed to have a leader in charge. From this point onwards this was the way we pictured our enemy as well, and we learned who we should go after first when the attack eventually came.

Bjarne Dramstad agreed with his fellow legionnaire on the quality of these Baltic soldiers; ‘The Baltic nationals were very well regarded as soldiers, good fighters and highly motivated.’ Bjørn Østring fought in the Urizk battle in late April 1942, and while it did not grab the headlines like the bloody mass slaughter going on in the primeval Volkhov swamps at the same time, it was typical of the vicious, intense, small-unit combats that characterised the DNL’s record in Russia. As such it is worth recounting Bjørn’s extraordinarily vivid story of the fight in full:

Already in the week before the attack we started seeing the first defectors coming across the frontline. We also noticed that the enemy aimed their artillery very differently than they previously had done. Very seldom more than two or three rounds against a given target, and the rounds were fired more often and with much more precision than before.

During the daytime we also noticed significantly more activity in the open area between us and the city of Leningrad, and during the night new sounds we hadn’t heard before came out of the darkness. Of course the sun and warmer weather could be the reason for some of this. But the number of defectors increased, they seemed much better fed and were obviously new at the front. Their main reason to defect was obvious – the ever-present desire to survive! This was evident. An attack was clearly imminent and their thoughts must have been – ‘If I cross over the mines will still be there and I will also be shot at. If we don’t succeed with the attack, I will also have to withdraw over the same field. Then the NKVD will be in place to fire at the withdrawing troops and I will be shot regardless!’

And so they came, one or two at a time. They especially used the low ditches, which gave their own people a poor view of their escape across to our side. We started to call these ditches, the ‘Defectors Ditches’. It appeared the Russian soldiers were thinking the same way we did, believing that only the Germans would win in the end.

The Company was organised with Ole Hjalmar Jacobsen’s platoon on the right as seen from the enemy (Jacobsen was from Vestfold). In the middle was the platoon of Per Wang from Oslo, he had a theology education. My platoon was on the left, and then there was a small open area to the 2nd Company commanded by Karsten Sveen from Biri. The closest platoon to me on that side was led by Sophus Kars from Bergen.

The positions of our Company had an angular shape, with the right leg defended by the other two platoons. The terrain between them and the Russian trenches about 200 metres in front was relatively flat. The point of the triangle was at the ‘Red Ruin’, and my leg was on the hill with the road between Oranienbaum and Leningrad about 250 metres to our front. The road ran parallel to our frontline and went through the swampy lowlands stretching into town. Ivan’s [Wehrmacht slang for the Red Army] trenches followed Ufer Street’s other side. From my vantage point, at the point of the triangle, I had one trench stretching straight forward towards the enemy positions. From this position we had a backward view straight into the area of Red Ruin. In this area Henrik-Skaar Pedersen and his section had their bunker, which was one of many that we maintained. He was so exposed to the enemy in this position that we twice noticed enemy footprints on the roof of the bunker. At the end of the trench we had a machine-gun position manned by Arnold Schee from Oslo. Just before this machine-gun nest, a separate trench was dug northward on our side parallel to Ufer Street. Every night we placed a listening post here. There was also a period when Ivan controlled this trench during daytime. Because the trench going to Schee’s machine-gun nest was pointing straight towards the enemy, we had it covered with snow throughout the winter. But now during spring and summer it was just covered with boards and twigs etc, which gave us some sort of secure feeling.

The second-in-command of my platoon, Naval Cadet Arne-Wilhelm Nilsen from Østfold, was a very capable leader and soldier. He had a good sense of humour and was always calm. The three section leaders were: engineering student Einar-Gill Fasting Jr of Hamar, world traveller Per Bradley from Bergen who had an exceptionally beautiful voice and had held church concerts throughout Norway, and Henrik Skaar-Pedersen from Egersund who used to study at Kotpus. The mortar section was headed by Olaf Hilde, a farmer from Stokke in Vestfold. All of them were top notch soldiers and all very proud to be a part of our platoon as well as being Norwegian soldiers. We were the very first recruits to show up at Bjølsen School, and subsequently formed the 1st platoon in the 1st Company in the first battalion to be set up! This became Viken Battalion of Den Norske Legion. We all knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but seen from the Germans’ point of view we were probably no parade-ground soldiers. We had all volunteered and were of the opinion that everyone in the Battalion was making an effort to stop the communists taking over Europe. We were also past the stage where we were afraid of becoming casualties of the war, for us this wasn’t about ‘fields of honour’ but only bitter reality. Everyone was either going to be lucky, or unlucky. What we feared most was losing an arm or a leg, or becoming blind. But when the battle rolled on at its worst, we were all thinking ‘and you volunteered for this?’

The night before the 21st of April we heard the Russian tanks crawling around. During the briefing I had with the Company Commander that morning, I received orders to gather a group of soldiers with Pioneer [assault engineer training that included destroying tanks] training and go out on a hunt over Ufer Street to damage any tanks getting ready to attack us from the road. Straight behind us was a building we called ‘The Dairy’, and our 14th Company (Finn Finnson’s anti-tank company) had an anti-tank cannon nearby which now had to change position. Earlier I had gotten hold of explosives and fuses, which were now put to good use. We also agreed that as soon as the attack started we would get the men as close as possible to the enemy. This was thought to be the best option under the circumstances [to help nullify the effect of the Russian artillery]. I crawled over to 2nd Company’s positions and agreed with Sophus Kars how his men and machine-gun could cover the area in front of us as we were going to move forward. During our conversation an intense bombardment began, which lasted several hours. I had to get back at some point, but this was incredibly difficult as shells were landing all around us. I thought at that time that no matter what I did it would be very dangerous. I was forced to take chances that morning that normally I wouldn’t let any of my men take.

It went quiet just before dark fell, and Radbruch gave orders to move forward as planned. While we moved forward towards the enemy, Arne Nilsen was to take responsibility for our vacated position. It took us a long time to carry all the explosives forward without the enemy noticing, but we did put some charges and Teller mines [anti-tank mines] in place. We were so close we could hear the enemy talk, it was a pity none of us spoke Russian. The enemy trenches were heavily manned, but they seemed nervous and it was clear that the soldiers were conscripts fresh out of training.

Just before we reached our own positions I heard someone calling quietly for me, it was my assistant Erik Bratlien from Nannestad, who had been asked by the Company Commander to get hold of me and call him up on the field telephone. This I did and told him that everyone was in position as agreed. Just as I climbed back into the trench a bombardment started that was so intense I have a hard time describing it. It was estimated later that about 10,000 shells landed on the small area covered by the 1st and 2nd Companies. This must be true, it was so strong that our bunker actually sank lower into the ground because of the force of the explosions. All this while I was lying down at the bunker entrance with the phone held to my ear. We’d established the password ‘Kochloffel’ [’cooking spoon’, or ‘ladle’] that night for the three of us on the same phone line. Per Wang came on the line and told us that the first enemy soldiers were already crawling towards Red Ruin, and that his comrade Per Olav Fredriksen from Fredrikstad was taking over the phone in his place. He then disappeared outside and just a couple of minutes later Fredriksen yelled on the phone: ‘Wang has gone down!’ Soon after that the phone line took a direct hit and the connection was broken. My second-in-command, Nilsen, had responsibility for Ufer Street and held it against the enemy, with fire support from 2nd Company. This all happened while I was crawling towards Red Ruin to take over command. At this point I wasn’t even sure if it had already been taken by the enemy. But I had the feeling that everything was moving around me. The noise was intense, and the shockwaves from the explosions constantly threw me off balance. Taking cover had no effect and there was no safe place to hide.

All of a sudden everything went completely quiet, and I thought I could be the only survivor as surely no-one else could have lived through a bombardment like that. Our trenches and positions were all completely gone. Where the platoon’s sole machine-gun should have been was just a patch of splintered wood. Then, like a miracle, from a pile of rubble I suddenly heard Fasting’s voice ‘All OK!’ I then had to take charge of the trench leading to Ufer Street because of how important that lone machine-gun was. The enemy now had a perfect view into the trench and fired shots directly into it from below. The trench was completely exposed with no cover at all, and I suddenly became aware of shots being fired along it towards me, so I took cover in a spare firing hole we had dug earlier. Here I was completely covered in dirt from the next two shell bursts which luckily didn’t hit me. With me were two German ‘office soldiers’, Bauer and Wieland, who had requested frontline experience. I had put them down here with cases of hand grenades and with a view directly down into Red Ruin from the rear. Red Ruin was now infested with Russians who had orders to keep on going forward. From our position all we could see was a forest of bayonets, which the two Germans were busy throwing grenades into. Throughout this, Schee somehow kept on firing his machine-gun.

The other side of the barbed wire, as well as the open ground between me and Red Ruin, seemed like some sort of ‘moving carpet’ consisting of dead and wounded Russian soldiers. The air was filled with screams, and it was impossible to hear any orders or commands from anyone. Throughout this our closest machine-gun was continuously firing accurate bursts into the advancing enemy. This machine-gun was the most important in our whole line, but then I suddenly noticed a change in its rate of fire – it was a jam! I sent a soldier to go and fetch Saxlund’s machine-gun, while I ran to the position of the jammed gun. When I got there the gunner had already taken it apart and was cleaning it as if at a relaxing day at the ranges! I blessed the hard SS training we’d received, which caused us to behave automatically in situations like this. Jacob Kynningsrund from Østfold had crawled up onto the bunker roof where he was being passed grenades by Stener Ulven from Valdres. Stener took the pins out before handing them to Jacob, who in turn would coolly throw them directly into the enemy at the points of greatest danger. The third member of the machine-gun team was using his K98 rifle and firing without stopping. In no time at all the machine-gun was operational again, and we had to order Kynningsund down to man it, even though he felt he was doing more damage to the enemy by throwing hand-grenades at them, and that Ulven could replace him in case he was hit.

I made a quick visit to Per Wang’s bunker while he was still alive. He seemed very proud when I told him that his men were fighting bravely and holding their positions. Two days before he had managed to get hold of a couple of fresh eggs from behind the frontlines. Our bunker had got one of them on condition I promised to read him his last rites if he fell in battle. Somehow he ‘knew’ he wasn’t going to survive so I granted him his wish.

Immediately afterwards, while making an inspection of Per’s platoon, I passed another Norwegian soldier sitting across one of his fallen comrades filling machine-gun belts – his friend’s back was the only dry spot he could find. He carried on with tears flowing down his cheeks.

Per’s second-in-command, William Andersen from Moss, who previously had responsibility for the right flank, now took over full command. Radbruch moved forward but four members of his staff stayed behind to help us cover the area. Per Wang’s body was carried past us to the rear.

There were no more Russian cheers to hear when I went forward again through the trenches, only horrible screams. Hilde was constantly firing mortar rounds over my head, which flew in a low trajectory before exploding alongside rounds from 14th Company’s anti-tank gun positioned at The Dairy. Now even heavier firing was coming down as Arnfinn Vik’s infantry guns also hit the enemy. With surgical accuracy, and only yards away from us, they protected Red Ruin as well as the area immediately behind where our men were taking cover. The effect of the bombardment must have been enormous, and we could clearly see the endless streams of Russian soldiers withdrawing before coming up against the machine-guns of their own ‘political officers’. These politicals, greatly feared by all, had the power to slaughter their own troops in case of retreat. The poor enemy soldiers were utterly massacred.

When I reached Schee’s machine-gun nest, I met my assistant Erik Bratlien, who was wading through waist-deep water in a trench we no longer used as spring flood water had submerged it. With several packs of cigarettes in one hand and half a bottle of cognac in the other, he blurted out; ‘Sir, shouldn’t our reserves be used before they get a direct hit?’ I decided to hand out shots of alcohol to everyone, including those who were banned from drinking. Schee, still manning his machine-gun, put a cigarette in his mouth just as two Russians popped up in front of him. He knew they would throw hand-grenades at him unless he could get them first. As he burned off a series of rounds at them he yelled; ‘Sir, can you give me a light please?’ It wasn’t just the training that made good soldiers, being Norwegian was equally important.

Looking forward over the front it looked extremely dangerous. There were so many Russian soldiers hanging over the barbed wire that you could have literally walked over it. But there were no further enemy attacks, only the medics who we tried to help as best we could. The Russian artillery eventually started firing again, but the shells landed way behind us. We were sure they believed they had wiped us out and that any survivors were running away. Even though exhausted, we grabbed our shovels and set to, to improve our positions again.

A heavy-set Russian officer was hanging dead over the barbed wire with a map or document case around his neck. We needed the case for our intelligence and agreed to drag him in once darkness fell. But after a short while Per Wang’s man, Per-Olav Fredriksen, handed it to me. He had crawled out there himself and cut it loose from the body. The documents were sent to the rear immediately.

So what had happened? There were perhaps 50 of us altogether from Per’s platoon and my own plus some panzer-grenadiers, defending against the main attack launched at the Red Ruin. But we only had three dead including Per. The Russians must have sent more than a thousand soldiers against us, but since the assaulting troops weren’t the men we normally faced in the line they seemed totally unaware of our positions and any weaknesses we may have had. To throw your own soldiers across the frontline in this fashion should be considered a criminal act. The fact that we had stockpiled ammo, especially hand-grenades and mortar rounds, during the week before the attack, helped us tremendously.

It was relatively quiet for about three weeks after that before a smaller attack came in along Ufer Street, at the point where our 2nd Company’s positions crossed the road. The attack was thrown back. During the ensuing counter-attack we even destroyed several of their bunkers. Afterwards when we searched these bunkers we discovered a large quantity of American canned foods. This came as a real shock to me at the time, the United States was actually helping communism! After the counter-attack I was given a radio receiver, which later on saved my life when it shielded my head from grenade shrapnel.

A few days later I was promoted to become an officer. The promotion was solely given me for my accomplishments on the battlefield. I was at that time, and still am today, very proud of what happened during those days on the Leningrad front.

For me personally, Urizk was the battle that stood out as the fiercest and most violent that I fought during World War II. For some of my closest friends, as well as many enemy Russian soldiers, the battle of Urizk would be their last. They paid the ultimate price.

In the aftermath of Urizk some 12 Norwegians were awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class, including Østring, his second-in-command Arne Nilsen and the grenade thrower Stener Ulven. Quisling also made a visit to the DNL at the time, and met both Qvist and Østring (whom he knew well personally anyway of course) along with some of the other volunteers.

The DNL then mounted an attack of their own with Østring’s company commander, 25-year-old Olaf Lindvig, taking a leading role. Lindvig had been a platoon commander in the Royal Norwegian Infantry Regiment No.5 before the war, he had then fought the Germans during their invasion in 1940 and was a hugely experienced officer:

Following the Urizk battle, Quisling himself (centre in the black uniform with cap and no helmet) came to see the DNL and present awards. Bjørn Østring (talking to Quisling) organised an honour guard, much to Qvist’s annoyance, who is helmeted just to the left of Quisling. (Erik Wiborg)

Quisling uses the opportunity of his post-Urizk visit to the DNL to catch up with his friend and devoted follower, Bjørn Østring. (Erik Wiborg)

Co-ordination for the attack was textbook. The leader of our assault troops fired a flare pistol which was the signal for the grenade launchers to start. The time was 1300hrs on 2 May. Our troops on the ground then opened up with MG34s (machine-guns type 34), submachine-guns, rifles and hand grenades. For these we had previously concocted a crude device in which we attached five hand grenades in a single bundle. This was tossed into the enemy’s bunkers and trenches. One of our volunteers was half Russian and half Norwegian, and soon he was shouting to the Russians in their own language to put their hands up and come out. The heavy machine-guns were emptied into those that didn’t surrender as they broke out of their trenches and ran back towards the city. It was sheer slaughter, a horrific massacre.

I remember five of them who surrendered. They were miserable specimens. One was a commissar who had the Communist hammer and sickle on his helmet. I remember that he ripped these off and stamped on them in a blind rage. There were two others with a single Norwegian guard in charge. At one point our man took out some tobacco to roll himself a cigarette. The Russians stared at the tobacco hungrily since they didn’t have any. But in their pouches they had some butter so a gentlemanly swap was agreed. The prisoners were also persuaded to part with their waterproof rubber boots.

I was anxious to have a look at the captured trenches, but as I made my way towards them, an explosion sent me flying. I had stumbled either on a small mine or bomb which could have been dropped from an aircraft.

With Lindvig out of action and sent to the rear, Østring continued: ‘All the commanders in the Company requested that our German advisor, SS-Hauptscharführer Dieter Radbruch, take over from Lindvig. Radbruch was educated in England and was eventually recognised by us as “Norwegian”.’

Post-Urizk: Arnfinn Vik and his anti-tank gunners

After the Urizk battles, the DNL was detached from the 2nd SS Motorised Infantry Brigade, and transferred to its sister formation almost next door, the 1st SS Motorised Infantry Brigade, before being pulled out of the line to rest near the town of Konstantinovka (modern-day Golorowo) just north of Krasnoye Selo. After several weeks of well-earned rest the DNL went back into the line in June. The usual state of play with patrols and random artillery salvoes resumed until 20 July, when the neighbouring Latvian SS battalion was hit by a major Soviet assault. One of Finn Finson’s teams, a two-gun troop led by SS-Oberscharführer Arnfinn Vik, was close by, and when Vik saw the danger he and his men dragged their obsolete 37mm guns almost a kilometre to a blocking position near Novo Panovo. From their new position the Norwegian gunners poured fire into the advancing Soviet infantry, and continued to do so even after one gun was knocked out. Eventually a German police battalion counter-attacked, along with the remaining Latvians, and restored the line.

As the line stabilised, the Germans were finalising plans for Operation Northern Lights (Unternehmen Nordlicht), the capture of Leningrad. Having successfully assaulted the Black Sea fortress of Sevastopol, Manstein and his entire Eleventh Army were slated to travel north and repeat their feat against Russia’s second city. September 14 was chosen as the start date for the offensive, but the operation was thrown into disarray when the Red Army beat the Germans to the punch and launched their own attack to relieve Leningrad on 24 August. Army Group North struggled to repulse the Soviet assault, and the resources carefully husbanded for Northern Lights were expended in bitter defensive fighting. The DNL’s neighbouring Corps, the Army’s XXVI Corps, was the Soviet point of main effort and suffered badly. The Norwegians were caught up in the fighting and took heavy losses as well. Although Manstein managed to pinch off the Soviet breakthrough, just as with Vlasov’s earlier Volkhov offensive, and destroy seven Red Army divisions and six brigades into the bargain, the attack fatally delayed Northern Lights. As Case Blue began to stall and the nightmare of Stalingrad unfold, the capture of Leningrad fell down the Wehrmacht priority list. Troops began to be pulled out of the region to shore up other fronts and soon the siege lines were stretched thin indeed. Although Leningrad was still surrounded, the Ostheer would never seriously threaten to take the city again.

Jonas Lie and the 1st SS Police Company

As the September fighting died down, the DNL received some welcome reinforcements from a rather unexpected source. Back in Norway, members of the police were encouraged to volunteer for service with the DNL in a company all their own, to be led by the Minister for Police himself – ex-Leibstandarte war correspondent and Iron Cross 2nd Class holder, SS-Sturmbannführer Jonas Lie. Some 160 came forward, were formed into the 1st SS Police Company (1. SS- und Polizei-Kompanie, also called the 1. SS-og-Polit Kompanie), and were dispatched east to join their comrades in the trenches. They ended up fighting through the whole autumn and winter. Lie received the Iron Cross 1st Class for their endeavours, as did Artur Qvist for the DNL as a whole.

Two months after the Norwegian policemen arrived in the line, a worn-down DNL was thrown into the fighting near Krasny Bor on 4 December, where the Dutch volunteers of the SS-Legion Niederland were receiving a pounding. The Norwegians’ 3rd and 4th Companies counter-attacked in support of the Dutch, and once again the Front was restored. As usual it was to be only a temporary respite, and by now the DNL was down to 20 officers and 678 other ranks from the original roster of over 1,200 volunteers.

A quiet Christmas was followed by a vicious new year, as the Red Army once again tried to reach Mga near the Volkhov and lift the siege of Leningrad. Army Group North was equally determined to stop them doing just that. In what became known as the Second battle of Lake Ladoga, Finson’s men went to the aid of the Spaniards of the 250th Infantry Division (the Blue Division) who were struggling to stop wave after wave of Soviet tanks. The Norwegians old 37mm peashooters had been replaced by far more powerful 75mm guns (38/97 models based on First World War French Army gun barrels) which were big enough to blow the Russian T-34 tanks to pieces. As the Soviets came on, tank after tank fell to the Norwegian gunners, but the odds were hugely against and an entire battery had to be spiked and abandoned when it was encircled. The men only just got out alive. By this time Bjarne Dramstad had left 2nd Company and was back as an anti-tank gunner in the 14th Company:

I was wounded in January 1943 at the battle for Mga, this was hard fighting, my 75mm PAK [PanzerAbwherKanone – anti-tank gun] destroyed the first T-34 in the battle. I was wounded when a Katyusha rocket hit a load of Tellermines that exploded. I was flung several metres up in the air and my friends had to dig me out. I came to, lying wounded, and was transferred to a first aid post behind the lines. At the end of this battle there were so few survivors from the Company that the PAK cannons were given to the Dutch. I later found out that my cannon was given to Gerardus Mooyman, who destroyed so many tanks at Mga with this cannon that he became the first foreigner to be awarded the Knight’s Cross.

Mooyman was only 19 years old at the time but that didn’t stop him from knocking out 13 Soviet tanks on 13 February alone.

Somehow though, the defenders hung on, and the Norwegians of 14th Anti-tank Company in particular were singled out for praise by grateful German commanders. Three members of the DNL – SS-Hauptscharführer Arne W. Nilsen and SS-Unterscharführers Per Meidell and Nils Lande – received the Iron Cross 1st Class for bravery during the fighting.

The DNL’s swansong

The Ladoga fighting turned out to the last for the DNL. Even with fresh drafts of men coming in over the winter, the Legion was still only some 700 men strong, and was withdrawn back to Krasnoye Selo in late February as the two-year terms of its original enlisters came to an end. The grind of trench warfare had slowly eaten away at the fabric of the unit, and although it suffered the fewest casualties of all the legions (some 158 Norwegian legionnaires were killed in action during its lifetime), the DNL ‘felt’ battered and bruised. Thus the decision was taken in Berlin to withdraw the unit back to Norway and decide from there what to do next. The ex-policemen of Lie’s Company led the way and left for home on 1 March, to be followed a few days later by the rest of their comrades. Given two weeks welcome home leave, the DNL then reformed in Oslo and held one last parade through the city to the Slotts Palace. There, at an official ceremony, the Den Norske Legion was disbanded and its members released from service in the Waffen-SS. Most would never wear the uniform again, and one of those was Bjørn Østring:

After my leave in Norway I was retained there at home by Quisling for Party service, i.e. as head of his 150-strong Førergarden personal bodyguard at his residence ‘Gimle’, and that was where I was when the war ended. I had an awkward feeling of ‘letting down’ my comrades out East, but orders are orders. That then was the end of my front service. I had been wounded, but so slightly that I made no fuss about it. It wasn’t until many years later that I began to feel ‘uneasy’ in my neck, a doctor gave me a local and removed a ‘wandering’ shell fragment.

Many other volunteers felt they had ‘done their bit’ out East, and either went back to civilian life or, like Bjørn, served instead within NS party functions or paramilitary bodies. But not all followed this path. Some would sign on again, and they would join their Danish, Swedish and Finnish brethren in a whole new venture.

The Demyansk Pocket

The siege of Leningrad was not the only battle Army Group North was fighting in 1942. In the swamps and forests around the Lovat River to the south, some 95,000 of its men were cut off and fighting for their very lives in the Demyansk Pocket.

As elsewhere along the Russian Front that winter, the Red Army had launched itself at the invaders on the Lovat, determined to deal them a shattering blow. South of Lake Ilmen, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, arguably the Red Army’s finest commander of the war, had sent three entire armies crashing into just two German infantry divisions on the night of 7 January 1942. The poor German landsers (German equivalent to ‘Tommy’) were all but wiped out. The resulting crisis cost von Leeb his job as he was replaced by Eighteenth Army’s commander, Georg von Küchler. But sacking von Leeb did not stop the Soviet tanks rolling and linking up west of Demyansk a few days later. In the pocket were no less than five German infantry divisions and Theodor Eicke’s 3rd SS-Totenkopf Division. In temperatures that often plunged to minus 30 degrees C, and in snow three feet deep, the encircled Germans fought like demons to avoid disaster. Thousands died, despite the Luftwaffe successfully delivering the required 200 tonnes of supplies a day the troops needed, and evacuating some 35,000 wounded men.

Eicke especially was incandescent with rage that his treasured division was being bled to death in the wastes of Demyansk, and demanded reinforcements to keep it alive. Few were forthcoming, but OKW was on the lookout.

The Danish Waffen-SS arrives

Meanwhile back in Posen-Treskau, the charismatic Christian von Schalburg had transformed the Danish Frikorps from a fledgling organisation riven by internal dissention, into a solid, well-drilled, reinforced infantry battalion. He had integrated 10 experienced German officer instructors into key posts to help stiffen the unit, and had led it through a tough training régime. The Danmark now had three infantry companies, and one heavy weapons company with two platoons of 75mm infantry cannons, one platoon of 50mm anti-tank guns, and a combat engineer platoon, all at full-strength. That were still only a paltry seven heavy calibre weapons, but at least it was something. Many of its men were untried and untested, but at its core was a strong cadre of professional officers, NCOs and men, most of whom had some sort of battle experience, either in the Winter War, with the SS-Wiking, or indeed against the Germans themselves.

When the Frikorps was finally declared combat-ready in May 1942, the German High Command made a momentous decision regarding its future. Up until then the volunteer legions had almost uniformly been viewed as second-rate in comparison to German formations, and unsuited to anything more than static warfare, hence their concentration around Leningrad and in anti-partisan fighting (the French of the LVF were an example of the latter). Now, this situation was to change dramatically as the order went out to send the Danes into Demyansk. A land corridor to the beleaguered defenders had finally been established on 22 April after 73 days of brutal combat, but the fighting was far from over, and the Frikorps was actually flown into the Pocket, from Heiligenbeil near Köngisberg, to fight alongside the battling Totenkopf veterans.

Per Sörensen – a well-regarded pre-war Danish Army officer, Per Sörensen led the Frikorps Danmark’s 1st Company at Demyansk before transferring to the Nordland Division. He would eventually command the whole Danmark Regiment before being killed in action in Berlin in April 1945.

From left, Per Sörensen, the only ever Danish commander of the Danmark Regiment, Rudolf Ternedde, the highly decorated German officer who ended up commanding the remnants of both the Norge and Danmark Regiments in the ashes of Berlin, and finally the Danish volunteer Alfred Jonstrup. Jonstrup recovered von Schalburg’s body after his death in the Demyansk Pocket and was awarded the Honour Roll Clasp for bravery during the Courland battles of 1944.

Even in the spring sunshine, Demyansk, as already described, was definitely not for the faint-hearted. This was not a period of brief skirmishes and light patrolling, but a vicious and brutal battle for survival. The Soviets were still determined to crush the defenders and register a historic Red Army victory, and were throwing all they could muster into it. They had already devastated the area, dropping incendiary bombs on every building in the winter to deny shelter to the Germans and their own civilians. Massed artillery regularly worked the ground over and waves of tanks and infantry were constantly trying to stave in the sides of the Pocket and stir up panic among the defenders.

Von Schalburg confers with men from his Frikorps Danmark in the Demyansk Pocket, 1942

The German Frikorps Danmark officer, Obersturmführer Hennecke, talks to his men during the Demyansk fighting. As with its sister formation the Norwegian DNL, the majority of the Frikorps commanders were actually Scandinavians and not Germans.

Death of the commanders

From day one the Danes were thrown into the fighting. Taking up positions on the River Robja, the Frikorps was given the task of stopping the Red Army from expanding their bridgehead in the area of Ssutoki. The Soviets were on the far bank and had managed to get some troops over to the German-held side. If they could get across in any numbers, and bring tanks, they could expand it out until they had a solid base from which to launch a full-scale attack. This would spell real trouble for the hard-pressed defenders. Von Schalburg knew the Soviet toehold had to be destroyed and ordered the Winter War veteran Johannes-Just Nielsen to carry out an the assault on the night of 27/28 May. Nielsen was one of the Frikorps’s real characters. Young, engaging, and immensely popular with his soldiers, he was also one of the Frikorps’s best platoon commanders. After planning the attack, Nielsen divided his men into two groups and led them silently through the darkness towards the bridgehead. Sneaking up unnoticed on the Soviets, Nielsen threw a hand-grenade into the enemy to signal the attack. From both sides his men rushed forward and machine-gunned the Russians. Those that survived jumped into the river and swam to safety. The operation was a complete success. Then disaster struck. Dawn arrived and Nielsen ordered his men to withdraw back to the defence line, but they were hit by an artillery barrage and Nielsen was killed. Caught full on by a shell blast his body was blown into the river and disappeared. His men took cover in the abandoned Red Army trenches and waited out the barrage. When it finally stopped they withdrew under the leadership of Oberscharführers Kern and Jens ‘Lightning’ Nielsen.

Nielsen’s death at Ssutoki presaged an even bigger blow for the Frikorps, when just a few days later the Red Army lunged across the river yet again to re-establish a bridgehead at exactly the same place. Another attack was needed to repeat Nielsen’s success, so on 2 June the Danish SS once again were assaulted at Ssutoki. The Soviets knew what was coming and showered the Danes with artillery, trying to blow the attack away before it really got going. Von Schalburg went forward himself to encourage his men, but was badly wounded when he stepped on a mine. With one of his legs shattered in the explosion, he needed to be carried to safety, but as his men grabbed him they were hit by a salvo of Russian mortar shells. Von Schalburg and two others were killed instantly. Another Winter War veteran, Alfred Jonstrup, managed to retrieve von Schalburg’s body for burial, but the shock of his death caused the attack on the bridgehead to fizzle out. The Frikorps lost 21 men killed and 58 wounded on that day, and the Soviets still had their bridgehead.

A portrait of the Danish Frikorps commander Knud Börge Martinsen while undergoing officer training at Bad Tölz. After service on the Russian Front he would go on to found the paramilitary Schalburg Corps back home in Denmark in homage to his dead friend, before himself being executed after the war for the murder of a fellow Danish SS officer whom he accused of having an affair with his wife.

Danish SS officer Count Christian von Schalburg with his son Alex.

A close friend of von Schalburg’s from Finnish War days, SS-Obersturmbannführer Knud Börge Martinsen, immediately took command and stabilised the situation over the next few days, while the Frikorps waited for a new leader to be appointed. Within a week this new man had arrived, the SS-Wiking veteran, middle-aged aristocrat Hans Albert von Lettow-Vorbeck. Von Lettow-Vorbeck was a nephew of the famous World War One East African hero, and had been appointed to command the SS-Legion Flandern, after Michael Lippert’s loss through injury. However, with von Schalburg’s death, the Danmark was deemed a higher priority and he was re-routed to Demyansk. At the same time, parts of the SS-Totenkopf were preparing to launch Operation Danebrog to recapture the area up to the Pola River and re-establish a defensible line. The Frikorps was slated to play its part in the attack by taking the important local town of Bolschoje Dubowizy. Von Lettow-Vorbeck arrived on 10 June, was briefed by his officers on the situation, and as dawn lit the sky the Danes made a frontal assault on the town. German artillery fired on the Russians to the city’s north, as the Danes struggled through swamps and flooded meadows before bursting into Dubowizy and starting to clear it house by house. In the face of bitter resistance the advance stalled, and the Red Army counter-attacked, killing two of the Frikorps’ company commanders – Untersturmführers Boy Hansen and Alfred Nielsen. By 11 o’clock the Russians were on the verge of surrounding 27-year-old Per Sörensen’s 1st Company and cutting it off. Von Lettow-Vorbeck was on his way forward to personally order Sörensen to withdraw, when a Soviet machine-gun cut him down. His death took the steam out of the Danish attack and by the end of the day Dubowizy was still in Russian hands. The Frikorps lost 25 men that day. All were buried in the cemetery at Biakowo. Yet again, Martinsen had to take over. The Danmark had now lost two commanders in just over a week, as well as over a hundred men killed and wounded in the Ssutoki and Pola River fighting. With von Lettow-Vorbeck dead, Berlin made no more attempts to ‘import’ officers, and Martinsen was confirmed as the Frikorps’ leader for the rest of its existence.

Back in Denmark, von Schalburg was given a hero’s send-off and buried with full military honours. He became a martyr for the Danish Nazis, and his example encouraged a fresh wave of volunteers to come forward. The Frikorps would come to need this new draft, as the Demyansk battles ground on over the summer.

A month after von Schalburg’s death, the Danes were defending an overly-long line between Biakowo and Vassilievschtshina. Everything was quiet and the men were waiting for hot food to be brought up from the field-kitchens about a kilometre behind them, when all hell broke loose. For more than an hour the volunteers were lashed by artillery fire, after which the Red infantry flooded forward. The dazed Danes fought back, but it was not long before they had lost contact with the German unit on their right flank and were in danger of being overrun.

Every man who could hold a rifle – cooks, clerks, signallers – was sent forward to try and hold off the attack. The Luftwaffe was called in to provide support with its ‘flying artillery’, the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive-bombers. Just as at Dubowizy, Per Sörensen’s 1st Company was involved in the fiercest fighting and was soon down to just 40 men from its earlier complement of 200. Sörensen himself was another pre-war professional Danish Army officer, having been Adjutant of the Viborg Battalion, when handpicked by Kryssing to come over to the Frikorps as one of the original officer cadre. Selected for training at Bad Tölz, the SS recruiting office in Copenhagen described the tall and slender Dane as ‘a competent and reliable officer. Lieutenant-Colonel Kryssing is very interested in his accession and posting as an SS-Obersturmführer. Sörensen is an officer of exceptionally good appearance. He disposes of a sure and deliberate bearing.’

After graduation, he took command of the 1st Company at Demyansk and would eventually rise to lead the whole Danish Waffen-SS, before dying in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. But back on the afternoon of 16 July 1942 that fate was a world away, as he and his men desperately tried to hold out against the Russian attack. He telephoned Martinsen and told him he might not be able to beat off another Soviet assault, but no matter what, his men would not abandon their positions. The fighting went on through the night, right in the heart of the Frikorps defensive position. An entire Red Army infantry battalion, with tank support, crashed into Sörensen and his remaining men. They were in the Danish trenches in a moment; and so began several hours of hand-to-hand fighting as Danes and Russians killed each other with knives, grenades and entrenching tools. Just after midnight the Soviets had had enough, suddenly they were breaking and running. Miraculously, 1st Company had held. The battle was not over though, as the Soviets threw in reinforcements, as did the Germans with the arrival in the early hours of Silesian 28th Jäger Battalion, along with a battalion from the 38th Jäger Regiment. These fresh German units attacked along the road to try and link up with their comrades to the east of Vassilievschtshina but were repulsed with heavy losses. The next day waves of Red Army infantrymen charged forward yet again, supported by clusters of T-34 tanks and with fighter-bombers roaring in overhead. As with their Norwegian comrades, the Danes had no armour or anti-aircraft guns of their own, and could only reply with their three anti-tank guns and four infantry cannon. They just had to crouch and bear it as casualties mounted. Nevertheless, the Danes and the Jägers managed to see the Russians off and stabilise the line over the next few days. By the 21st the crisis was over. That fight was typical of combat in the Pocket. Unsurprisingly, casualties under these circumstances were high – over 300 Danes were dead by early August and only 150 or so of the original Frikorps remained in the line. In effect, the unit was no more. Down to a couple of weak companies, the decision was taken to withdraw the Frikorps for a rest and a refit.

Their sacrifice had not gone unnoticed though, and the Pocket Commander, General of Infantry Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, wrote to them thanking them for their bravery:

Since the 8th of May the Danmark Legion has been positioned in the fortress. True to your oath, and mindful of the heroic death of your first commander, SS-Sturmbannführer Christian von Schalburg, you, the officers and men of the Legion, have always shown the greatest bravery and readiness to make sacrifices, as well as exhibiting exemplary toughness and endurance.

Your comrades of the Army and Waffen-SS are proud of being able to fight shoulder to shoulder with you in the truest armed brotherhood. I thank you for your loyalty and bravery.

With this endorsement ringing in their ears, the Danes were withdrawn to Latvia at the beginning of August, before heading home to Denmark for a homecoming parade through Copenhagen and three weeks well earned leave. The Frikorps had been in combat for three months straight, and in that time had lost two commanders, a host of junior officers and NCOs, and hundreds of men. Having flown into Demyansk with a fighting strength of 24 officers, 80 NCOs and 598 men back in May, only 10 officers, 28 NCOs and 171 men took part in the Copenhagen parade. Many were wounded rather than dead of course, so some would return to the unit in time, but there was no getting away from the fact that Demyansk had decimated the Frikorps. They’d given as good as they got, for sure. The SS-Totenkopf’s Order of the Day on 3 August credited them with killing 1,376 Soviets and capturing 103 others, along with over 600 heavy weapons. Gratifying though this recognition was, the fact that some of the crowd watching them parade in Copenhagen jeered them did little to lift the spirits of the surviving volunteers.

One Dane who did not take part in the parade, indeed he had not served with the Frikorps since before Demyansk, was Erik Brörup. The ex-cavalry officer had initially worked with Kryssing and his team during the training in Hamburg Langenhorn, and had then had his place confirmed at Bad Tölz. Along with Per Sörensen and several other European volunteers, Brörup spent the first half of 1942 at the academy, before graduating on 8 May. Given his love of his old arm, he had applied not to return to the Frikorps but instead to be sent to the Waffen-SS’s own cavalry formation, the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer. This new division was being built around the existing SS Cavalry Brigade, augmented by the addition of more than 9,000 volksdeutsche from Hungary. On formation it was allocated to Army Group Centre, as part of the Ninth Army. Brörup joined the 4th Squadron of SS Cavalry Regiment Nr. 3 as a troop commander, before being transferred to a new posting during the fighting at Orele:

With the onset of winter in November 1942 I was transferred to Reconnaissance Battalion 8 [Aufklärungs Abteilung 8] as a platoon commander. The recce battalion was now a ski-troop outfit and an interesting form of warfare began for us. It was similar in content to the way the Finnish ski-troops operated. Fighting in trees is a little different from a traditional battle, where you usually have all kinds of fireworks – artillery, mortars, rockets, machine-guns – and all kinds of other hardware to back you up. In the trees you are on your own. The weapons we used for forest fighting were just rifles, machine pistols and grenades. It is also very sneaky. You work in circles around each other in a kind of deadly ‘hide and seek’.

I got the Iron Cross 2nd Class on 1 December 1942 for a raid into a forest when we ran into a Russian battalion. My job was to establish how far the Russians had penetrated into the forest. We killed some of them, lost one man, and brought back six prisoners, two of them NCOs.

Return to Russia

While Erik Brörup was fighting in the vast forests of central Russia, his old Frikorps comrades finished their post-Demyansk leave and reassembled at the Citadel garrison in Copenhagen. From there, they were sent to the Mitau (now Jelgava) training area in Latvia to reform and prepare for another stint at the Front. The Danes spent two months absorbing new volunteers and welcoming back many men returning from convalescence. Unbelievably, owing to the efficiency of the Wehrmacht’s medical services as well as the SS recruiters, the Frikorps was back up to a strength of over 1,000 men by the beginning of December and the first serious snows of the winter. Whilst there, they were visited by the ‘grocer from Slagelse’ – a nickname for the popular pre-war DNSAP politician, Einar Jörgensen. When Denmark was invaded in spring 1940, Jörgensen and a handful of fellow Danish Nazis had attempted to take over the Danish parliament building. In a somewhat comical scene they were quickly arrested, given a telling-off – and then sent home. Now a cheerleader for the Frikorps, he addressed the men on the Potential NCO’s Course and their Danish commander, SS-Untersturmführer Egil Poulsen:

When I first arrived in Berlin at the SS-Main Office to get permission to follow you up here, we all forgot one thing. What uniform should I wear and what rank should I have? It was clear I couldn’t go to Russia in my brown DNSAP uniform or as a civilian either. They had to give me some kind of a uniform, but what rank do you give to an older member of the Danish parliament? [By this time he had been elected to the same parliament he had tried to overthrow two years earlier.] Surely not the rank of private. Someone suggested a senior NCO rank, an Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer, but then someone reminded us that people would expect some sort of military experience from those ranks. Then I was appointed an officer as an Untersturmführer.

I guess they don’t expect any military knowledge from that rank!

As a standard junior officer wisecrack, the men loved it. A few short weeks later the Frikorps was deemed fit for action again, and Martinsen led his men to the River Lovat, at the junction of Army Groups’ North and Centre. In the nearby city of Velikiye Luki some 5,000 men from the German LIX Corps had been cut off since late November, and were still holding out for relief. Even as fighting for the city raged, all eyes were on the unfolding cataclysm of Stalingrad far to the south.

Unlike the experience of Sixth Army and the men of the LIX Corps, frontline life for the Danish SS was relatively quiet with only a few sporadic firefights and normal patrolling activity. The situation altered dramatically on Christmas Day when an élite NKVD division, fresh to the line, launched a full-scale assault that drove the Frikorps out of most of its trenches. Taken by surprise, the Danes rallied and counter-attacked the next day. They retook their old positions in close combat, and were then used to restore the line further north at Taidy. Casualties among the volunteers were heavy. But by now the Frikorps’s sector was, officially at least, a backwater on the Eastern Front.

To the south von Kleist was abandoning the Caucasus and the Wiking was retreating north, whilst von Manstein and Hoth were desperately trying to rescue the beleaguered Sixth Army on the Volga. To the north the increasingly powerful Red Army was carrying out yet another offensive on the Volkhov, with the intent, as ever, to break the siege of Leningrad and destroy Army Group North – and the DNL of course. Everywhere resources were stretched to breaking point. The Volkhov attack alone was launched by 296,000 Soviet soldiers, with more than four times that number involved in the southern fighting. The result in the Danish sector was that there was no relief for Velikiye Luki and the city finally fell on 15 January after a last relief attempt failed. Only 180 men of the trapped 5,000 made it back to their own lines.

In a savage postscript to the battle, the stubbornness of the defenders had so enraged the Soviets that when the war finally ended they rounded up the survivors from the POW camps and sent them back to the ruined city. Once there, one man of each rank who had fought there – so one general, one colonel, one lieutenant-colonel, one major, one captain, one lieutenant, one warrant officer (senior sergeant), one sergeant, one senior corporal, one junior corporal and one private soldier – were selected at random, ‘tried’ and sentenced to death. They were publicly hanged in Velikiye Luki’s Lenin Square in front of their comrades on 29 January 1946. Victors’ justice indeed.

It all made the fate of a few hundred Danes on the Lovat River seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Needless to say it was not insignificant for the men themselves, who continued to man their bunkers and trenches and watch out for snipers and mortar salvoes. As dangerous as ever, life at the Front was also relatively quiet during this period, so Martinsen took the opportunity to go back to Denmark to form a Danish branch of the Germanic SS (as the Norwegians had done with the GSSN).

He named the new formation the ‘Schalburg Corps’ in honour of his old friend and fallen leader. The Corps would become the most important paramilitary organisation in the country, very much along the lines of the Norwegian Hird, and would provide a steady stream of volunteers to the Waffen-SS throughout its brief life. In Martinsen’s place, another ex-Danish Army officer took charge of the Frikorps, SS-Hauptsturmführer Per Neergard-Jacobsen.

After a few more weeks of rather desultory activity on the Lovat, Berlin made the decision to wind the Frikorps down. As with their Norwegian counterparts, the initial two-year enlistment period of the volunteers was coming to an end and there was widespread recognition in the Waffen-SS hierarchy that the Legions had had their day. Neergard-Jacobsen took his men out of the line and the unit went by train to the Grafenwöhr training area in Bavaria at the end of March 1943. There, in a final ceremony, the Frikorps Danmark was officially disbanded on 20 May 1943 after just under two years of life. The Danes had lost a total of nine officers, 17 NCOs and 133 men killed in action during that time, along with hundreds of wounded. Amongst their dead was their most inspirational leader; but they had gained invaluable experience in Demyansk, fighting in some of the hardest defensive battles of 1942. A good number had been decorated for bravery with the Iron Cross, including Martinsen himself, SS-Untersturmführer Hans-Olsen Muller (as a platoon and company commander), SS-Unterscharführer Adam Andersen, and SS troopers Erik-Herlöv Nielsen and Andreas Mortensen, the former as a Russian speaker dealing with prisoners and the latter as a foot messenger.

A Norwegian DNL rifleman in the winter 1941/42.

One of the DNL’s 14th Anti-tank Company gun crews during the Volkhov fighting in 1942.

A Norwegian DNL mortar crew go into action.

The horrors of army dentistry – Russian Front-style!

Norwegian DNL volunteers sit on a destroyed Russian tank, winter 1941.

A Norwegian DNL volunteer leans against a destroyed Soviet light tank.

Norwegian SS machine-gun crew prepares to fire on fixed lines.

Norwegian DNL grenadier guards dazed Soviet prisoners taken in the fighting around Leningrad, 1942. (All Erik Wiborg)

Back home in Copenhagen, Frits Clausen, as head of Denmark’s Nazis, complained loudly to Himmler about the disbandment of the Frikorps and asked for the resurrection of a purely Danish SS unit. The Reichsführer made a rather tart response: ‘It depends on him when the Grenadier Regiment Danmark becomes a Danmark Division!’ Clausen was firmly put in his place, and proceeded to sink further into the alcoholism that was rapidly killing him.

Attrition and mobility

The Danes, Norwegians, Finns and Swedes of the Wiking had endured a bloody and ultimately unsuccessful 1942. Some places where their boots had trodden no other members of the Wehrmacht would ever reach again (except as POWs). They had proved conclusively that although their numbers were few, they could stand shoulder to shoulder with the very best the Germans had to offer. The green, inexperienced volunteers of 1941 had come of age. Thousands of miles away in Berlin the powers-that-be took note.

The time of the Legions, though, was at an end. They were too small and too lightly armed to remain effective for any length of time in the cauldron of the Russian Front. In the attritional warfare of the Eastern Front it was impossible to keep the Legions at full strength and relatively quickly, losses in key personnel especially eroded the combat effectiveness of the units. The Frikorps Danmark was a perfect example. It lost over 75% of its original strength in less than three months fighting at Demyansk. It wasn’t then combat-ready again for another three months, and losing that amount of precious time was something the Wehrmacht could ill afford. The overall usefulness of static infantry like the Legions was decreasing too, as the Red Army became ever more mechanised. With resources stretched to the limit in the frontline, it was increasingly vital to be mobile to cover the ground and concentrate scarce forces quickly. Delivering that mobility was a production race, and it was a race being won by the Soviets. Stalin’s factories, mostly situated far from possible German air attack, produced a staggering 24,446 tanks in 1942, as well as 30,400 other motor vehicles. That’s eight times more than the Wehrmacht had when it invaded the country the previous year. In reply, Nazi Germany made just 6,180 panzers that same year. The Third Reich was beginning to be overwhelmed, and all the Wehrmacht’s old advantages were fast disappearing.

The disbanding of the Legions made the volunteers reassess their options. Many decided enough was enough, hung up their weapons and headed home. Some did so only to join other paramilitary organisations such as Martinsen’s Schalburg Corps. However, for most it was the end of their wartime career. Others wanted to stay in the conflict and felt that fighting alongside their Finnish cousins was the best thing to do, and so went north and put on yet another uniform. The majority of those that did stay on in the Waffen-SS would go on to form the core of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS for the remainder of the war.