IV
War is cruelty and cannot be refined.
General Sherman to the Mayor of Atlanta on burning the city to the ground in 1864.
In 1942 the Scandinavians of the SS-Wiking had spearheaded the main offensive effort of the Wehrmacht in southern Russia. Months of fighting had whittled away at their numbers, but the division had kept its cohesion and it was still a formidable fighting force at the end of the year. It was not the same story for the national Legions. The Norwegians of the DNL had fought well in the trenches around Leningrad, as had the Danes of the Frikorps at Demyansk and Velikiye Luki. Now there would be a new chapter for the Scandinavian Waffen-SS.
1943 would turn out to be a watershed year for the Waffen-SS in general and its foreign members in particular. As a fighting force the black guards had come of age, and were now about to undergo a massive programme of expansion, along with a root and branch reorganisation. The élite divisions, the Das Reich, Leibstandarte and the Wiking, along with three new ones (the SS-Hohenstaufen, SS-Frundsberg and the SS-Hitler Jugend), would be converted to mighty panzer divisions boasting hundreds of tanks and assault guns. Just down the pecking order there would be a tier of new, partly-armoured, panzer grenadier divisions, and finally the floodgates would be opened for foreign volunteers to establish large numbers of new formations, both divisions and assault brigades – the so-called SS-Sturmbrigaden.
However, if the new divisions and brigades were to become a reality, something was going to have to be done to improve foreign recruitment and leadership. Not only were there not enough volunteers overall to fill the ranks, but even more acute was the lack of trained NCOs and officers. Even with the likes of native, ex-regular army officers like the Brörups, von Schalburgs, Sörensens, Østrings and so on, across the Wiking and the national Legions it was Germans who had too often commanded Germanic soldiers; (as an extreme example, when the Flemish Legion went into action it had only one Flemish NCO and 80 German ones). As for administration, Jüttner still had not sorted out issues such as retention of rank, liaison with home, and even mail. The gap between the recruiters’ promises and the reality was then widened when the volunteer arrived in the SS training establishments, which were not exactly bending over backwards to accommodate the young foreign entrants. The result was dissatisfaction and resentment and the flow of recruits slowing to a trickle, just when the Reich needed them most.
The Germanske SS Norge (Norwegian SS) parade through Oslo in 1943 on the official ‘SS Day’ – which was also Norway’s National Day. (James Macleod)
Two Norwegian SS men (GSSN) put the finishing touches to their uniforms before joining the same parade through Oslo in the spring of 1943. (James Macleod)
Gottlob Berger understood exactly what the problem was and he knew how to solve it. He made a detailed report to Himmler recommending a sea-change in the way foreign volunteers were treated from the moment they were recruited and all the way through their training, with national differences being acknowledged and given due regard. The weight of evidence in the report was crushing and Himmler accepted all the recommendations in full. In a personal directive, the Reichsführer clearly set out how the fortunes of the foreign Waffen-SS were going to be revived. The ‘Instruction and Care’ orders (Erziehung und Umsorgung) set out a range of changes which were to be enacted immediately:
• All Germans officers and NCOs scheduled to serve with foreign volunteers would now be given two full weeks induction training on handling foreign volunteers
• All instruction on the superiority of Germany and the Germans was to be dropped immediately
• Legionary status, seen as second-best by volunteers, was abandoned and volunteers were to be treated as having full SS membership with all of its benefits for them and their families
• A major drive was to be launched to select, train and rapidly promote non-German junior leaders. So by February 1943 there were 47 officers and 172 cadets from Norway, Denmark, Sweden (some 20 Swedes passed through Bad Tölz during the war with two of them graduating top of their class), Finland, Flanders and Holland training at Bad Tölz on the standard six-month course, with special courses designed specifically for foreign volunteers ordered to begin in May of that year.
From then on officer promotion for foreigners was made strictly dependent on attending and passing Tölz, and while this made the Waffen-SS foreign officer corps extremely professional, it also meant that demand for leaders always outstripped supply by a huge margin. The new leaders were excellent but were killed at the Front far quicker than new ones were trained.
Himmler’s instructions were all well and good, but the new crop of Scandinavian Waffen-SS leaders coming out of Tölz would need men to lead, and they were scarce. When the SS-Wiking had gone into the assault at Rostov back in the summer of 1942, it had counted 947 Norwegians, 630 Danes, 421 Finns and a handful of Swedes in its ranks. The DNL had taken 1,218 men to Leningrad, and the Frikorps Danmark 1,164 to Demyansk. Close on 4,400 Nordics all told. But half a year of pitched battles like the Ssutoki bridgehead, Killing Hill and Urizk, had haemorrhaged the Scandinavian Waffen-SS. So, despite fresh drafts of volunteers arriving throughout 1942, by 6 February 1943 there were just 612 Norwegians and 633 Danes in SS-Wiking, with around the same number of Finns and a couple of dozen Swedes. There were just over 600 DNL veterans in Oslo parading to be disbanded, and another 650 Frikorps Danmark men in Bavaria awaiting the same fate. The Scandinavian Waffen-SS could now just about muster 3,000 men – in Wehrmacht terms a single regiment. More men were desperately needed.
The end of the road for the Finns
Things then proceeded to get worse. Collani’s battalion, universally recognised as being first rate, was coming to the end of its two-year enlistment period. Himmler wanted to use it as the cadre for a new unit, the SS-Motorcycle Regiment Kalevala (named for the Finnish saga). But Helsinki had other ideas. The Finnish government was watching the ominous Red Army build-up on its northern border with real trepidation, and it wanted every trained man back home to face it. They also had real doubts about Nazi Germany’s ability to win the war, and wanted to plough their own furrow. Himmler argued his case, but in the end Hitler himself stepped in and agreed to send the Finns home. Pulled from the frontline in early May, the battalion first went to Grafenwöhr, then Ruhpolding in Bavaria, before entraining for Reval (modern-day Tallinn) in Estonia on 28 May. Shipped across the Gulf of Finland to Hanko (liberated from the Red Army in 1941 and the name of the all-Swedish battalion fighting with the Finns – in Swedish Hangø), the unit was officially disbanded at a parade on 11 July 1943. Hans Collani walked down each rank, personally shaking hands with every single man, and thanking them on Germany’s behalf for their bravery and service. In a gesture loaded with symbolism, the volunteers then changed into Finnish Army uniforms. Their combat fatigues with the SS runes were thrown in a heap, and with that the official Finnish Waffen-SS was no more.
Their place in Wiking’s Order of Battle, as the Nordland’s third battalion, was taken by a new formation of Estonian volunteers; the SS-Volunteer Battalion Narva (Estnisches SS-Freiwilligen Bataillon Narwa), commanded by the veteran German officer, SS-Sturmbannführer Georg Eberhardt.
The Finnish SS Battalion arrive home in Helsinki, 1943, prior to disbandment.
The Wiking’s Finnish Battalion parades for the very last time in Ruhpolding before being officially disbanded, 11 July 1943. (James Macleod)
Two hundred and twenty-two Finnish volunteers had been killed in action and 557 wounded during the unit’s brief lifetime. Some 230 Iron Crosses (both classes) were awarded to the volunteers, and 42 Finns attended Bad Tölz (21 graduated, most of the rest were in training when the battalion was disbanded and so were sent home before the course finished). Several individual volunteers stayed on – notable among them SS-Obersturmführer Ulf-Ola Olin and Lars-Erik Ekroth – and continued to serve across the Waffen-SS in the Wiking, the Nordland and in the Kurt Eggers War Reporters Regiment. As for Collani, he went on to command the Dutch SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 49 De Ruyter, and was posthumously awarded the Knight’s Cross after being killed in action in the Narva fighting the following year.
As to the rank-and-file volunteers, when Finland later switched sides in 1944, at least six of the battalion’s veterans were killed fighting against their former German allies.
The Germanic Corps
Back in Berlin, Himmler’s grand vision for 1943 was nothing less than a massively-expanded Waffen-SS with a whole series of Corps-strength formations – each Corps totalling roughly 30–40,000 men split into two or three divisions. In the Balkans there would be two mountain corps made up of local Yugoslav volksdeutsche and Bosnian and Albanian Muslims (see Hitler’s Jihadis). The wholly German (Reich and volksdeutsche) armoured might of the Waffen-SS would be concentrated in two panzer corps, with two further corps on the Russian Front comprising one made up of the SS cavalry divisions (Brörup’s Florian Geyer plus another new volksdeutsche division, the Maria Theresia) and another of assorted SS grenadier divisions.
Additionally, Felix Steiner and Dr Franz Riedweg (Berger’s influential Swiss-German Chief of the Germanic Directorate), also advocated concentrating all the Nordics into one single division and using it as the basis of a ‘Germanic Corps’ under Steiner’s command. Himmler enthusiastically accepted the idea, and so was born the III SS-Germanic Armoured Corps (the III. (Germanische) SS-Panzerkorps). This Corps was to become famous, both for its fighting prowess and its multi-national composition. No other formation symbolised the foreign nature of the Waffen-SS quite like it, and although there was always a large number of Germans in it from the start, there were also contingents from almost every country in Europe – Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Spaniards (‘unofficial’ ones anyway), Latvians, Estonians, Dutch, Flemish, Walloons, Swiss and even Britons. All would pass through the Corps and leave their mark on its unique history. The Corps was envisaged as two divisions; the tried and newly-upgraded 5th SS-Panzer Division Wiking, and a new division, the 11th SS-Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland (in German the 11th SS Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadier Division Nordland) formally established on 22 March 1943, and commanded initially by the experienced Austrian Waffen-SS officer, Franz Augsberger.
The Swiss-German Dr Franz Riedweg, who along with Felix Steiner convinced Himmler to establish a new division for the Scandinavian Waffen-SS – the SS-Nordland Division. He later became the Chief Medical Officer for Steiner’s 3rd Germanic SS-Panzer Corps. (James Macleod)
The 11th SS-Panzergrenadier Division Nordland
Originally named the ‘Waräger’ by Himmler (‘Varangian’ in English – after the ancient Viking bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperors), the intention was to bring together all of the Scandinavian and Dutch Waffen-SS into one division. Hitler liked the idea, but disliked the name, thinking it far too obscure even for his taste. Casting around for something simpler, he settled on one already in use – Nordland. This made sense as the cadre unit (the Stamm Einheit) for the new formation was, understandably enough, to be the Wiking’s veteran SS-Nordland Regiment. As was usual practice, the veterans would then be split amongst the division’s sub-units, filling key command appointments and providing backbone to the ranks. New recruits would then be grouped around these experienced men to learn the ropes. The ‘new’ Nordland’s order of battle would comprise three infantry regiments of three battalions each, a panzer regiment of three battalions, an armoured reconnaissance battalion, an artillery regiment, an assault gun battalion and the usual assortment of other battalion-sized divisional troops such as anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns and combat engineers. The main sub-units were given national rather than German names, as proof of ‘Germanic’ identity, and were designated as the following:
The DNL veteran Olaf Lindvig leads a company of volunteers from the Norwegian SS (the GSSN) on a parade through Oslo on 16 April 1943. This company was raised as a response to the establishment of the Nordland Division and would go on to form the Norge Regiment’s 1st Company. Lindvig became an outspoken figure after the war before passing away in 2007. (James Macleod)
SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 23 Norge
Comprising Norwegian volunteers, commanded initially by Wolfgang Joerchel, who then went to command the Dutch SS General Seyffardt Regiment, and was replaced by the highly experienced Regiment Nordland officer Arnold Stoffers. The three grenadier battalions, 1–3, were commanded respectively by the Norwegian Finn Finson (succeeded by Fritz Vogt) and the Germans Albrecht Krügel and Hans-Heinrich Lohmann.
SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 24 Danmark
Comprising Danish volunteers, commanded by another German, the aristocratic Graf Hermenegild von Westphalen. The 1st and 3rd Battalions were led by the old Frikorps commanders Knud Börge Martinsen, lured back from the Schalburg Corps, and Per Neergard-Jacobsen respectively. The latter was succeeded in due course by Kryssing’s former protégé Per Sörensen, another Frikorps veteran of course. Martinsen’s tenure didn’t last long. A political fanatic with a volatile temper, he felt snubbed at not being given command of the regiment as a whole, so headed home and left the Waffen-SS all together. Back in Copenhagen he devoted his considerable energies to combating the Danish resistance and converting his fellow-countrymen to the National Socialist cause he revered so much. His place as battalion commander was eventually taken by Siegfried Scheibe. The 2nd Battalion was led by Kurt Walther. Both of these latter officers were German.
SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 25 Nederland
Comprising Dutch volunteers, see below.
SS-Panzer Regiment 11 Hermann von Salza
Named after the legendary thirteenth-century Grand Master of the crusading Order of Teutonic Knights, commanded by the German ex-Wiking artillery officer Paul-Albert Kausch. Having a three-battalion panzer regiment would, in effect, have made the Nordland a panzer division, but this turned out to be a pipe dream, and the division’s armoured component was scaled down to a single battalion.
The Norge and Danmark
This all looked great on paper, however, from the start the new division struggled for manpower and equipment. The Dutch were the first hurdle, with Holland’s collaborationist leader, Anton Mussert, protesting that they deserved an all-Dutch SS division. No other nation in western Europe contributed more volunteers to the Waffen-SS than Holland, and so, given that fact, Himmler gave way. There would be no Nederland Regiment in the Nordland. Instead, the surviving 2,500 Dutch Legion veterans were combined with a fresh draft of 3,000 volunteers to form the 4th SS-Volunteer Panzergrenadier Brigade Nederland.
With no third grenadier regiment, it was doubly important that the Norge and Danmark were full-strength units, and that meant finding around 6,000 men ready and willing to fill them. But the entire Scandinavian Waffen-SS was only half that total, and they were spread across a number of formations, mainly the Wiking and the disbanding Legions.
Berlin’s first step to address this issue was to appeal to the existing volunteers to sign on again. This policy was only partially successful. Of the 2,296 Norwegians and 1,896 Danes who had enlisted in the lifetime of the DNL and Frikorps, 824 Norwegians (36%) and 311 Danes (16%) asked to be discharged at the end of their enlistments. Of the rest, over 600 Danes re-enlisted, but only around 300 Norwegians did the same, with many joining the new Norwegian SS-Ski Battalion instead (see below for this unit’s history). One Dane who did transfer over to the Nordland was the 16 year-old Vagner Kristensen:
Having been born in 1927 I was too young to volunteer before 1943, but I became a member of the NSU and was eventually allowed to enlist in the Frikorps Danmark only to see it disbanded. We were told about the new Danmark Regiment and transferred over, we didn’t even see it as a choice really, we just did as we were told.
Secondly, Berlin made it official policy to combine all the existing Scandinavian Waffen-SS volunteers into the new division. The Legions were already in the process of disappearing of course, but the biggest effect of this decision would be to bring to an end the Scandinavian presence in the division that bore their ancient name – the Wiking. Most of them were in the Nordland Regiment anyway and came over as cadre, but others were combed out of the divisional sub-units to transfer across. This resulted in several hundred Danes, and over 250 Norwegians, joining their fellow-countrymen in the Norge and Danmark. In truth, not all Scandinavians transferred over, some stayed due to the vagaries of the system and individual choice. So by the summer of 1944 the Wiking officer Peter Strassner noted that there were still 177 Danes, 47 Norwegians, 5 Swedes and 2 Finns serving in the Wiking; but by and large the vast majority of Nordics would, from now on, fight in the Nordland. The symbolism was potent, with the ‘baton’ of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS being passed on from the old to the new. Scandinavians in the Wiking, always a relative minority, would now become a pretty rare species.
The transfers from the Wiking and the Legions were a start, but the Norge and Danmark were still desperately short of manpower, which meant a new impetus was put into recruiting fresh volunteers. In Norway, Quisling called for no fewer than 3,000 NS men to step forward, but he was hardly knocked down in the stampede. In the end, only about 100 new recruits came forward from the Party. A greater number of recruits did come, unsurprisingly, from among the ranks of the GSSN. When Olaf Lindvig was wounded at Urizk, he was sent home to convalesce and took up the post of acting Chief-of-Staff of the Norwegian SS. A big man in every sense, Lindvig was incredibly keen to get back to the Front, and on 11 March called for other GSSN members to join him once more in the struggle out East. Some 160 put their hands up and were paraded through Oslo in front of Quisling on 16 August, prior to joining the new division. There they would become the mainstay of the Norge’s 1st Company under Lindvig’s command. The picture was much the same in Denmark, and welcome though all these men were, numbers were still in the low hundreds and not the thousands the Norge and Danmark needed. Nils Per Immerslund was clear as to the reasons for this poor response:
Norwegians had volunteered to fight for Norway on a contract basis, not to fight for Germany throughout the war’s duration. Norwegian volunteers had been spread too thinly in German units, and most would fight better if they could stand alone as Norwegians and just go where the Germans indicated.
Unrest and resistance back home
One factor that greatly affected recruitment was the growing domestic turmoil in Denmark and Norway. In Denmark, dissatisfaction and resentment of Nazi Germany was escalating with frequent strikes and increasingly overt protests. The Danish Waffen-SS veteran Paul Hveger, now serving back home after being invalided out after the Caucasus, was caught up in the troubles: ‘After leaving hospital I went to Copenhagen and served under Standartenführer Boysen as a driver in the Germanic Liaison Office. Things were fine at first, but trouble really started in 1943, I myself was involved in violent rows in the street with civilians.’
Some 5,000 Danes had even crossed to neutral Sweden and, with an official blind eye turned, had formed the so-called Danske Brigade ready to intervene back home once the Germans had left. Alongside them were some 15,000 Norwegians training to do exactly the same thing in their own homeland, although as it turned out neither force ever actually saw any combat. For those who stayed, the level of resistance to German occupation started to step up. The Norwegian underground tried to avoid killing collaborators so as not to incite reprisals, but things were different in Denmark where an increasingly vicious campaign of tit-for-tat killings between the Resistance and pro-Nazi groups, such as Martinsen’s Schalburg Corps, began to spiral. The Germans began to lose patience with their ‘model occupation’ and resorted to oppression. Firstly they disbanded the Danish armed forces in March 1943, partly because they hoped this would spark a rush of recruits into the Waffen-SS. That did not happen. Next, a State of Emergency was declared in August, and the decision was taken in Berlin to round up Denmark’s 7,500 Jews and send them to the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp prior to their murder. A locally based German maritime attaché, Georg F. Duckwitz, warned the Danes just days before the deportations were due to start on 1 October. The Danish response was magnificent. With the direct collusion of the police, the civil service and the coastguard, Denmark’s Jews were smuggled en masse to safety in Sweden. The German squads swept through the streets and found their quarry had escaped them. In all over 7,000 Jews were saved and only 472 were arrested, of whom 52 died in Theresienstadt. The Nazi reaction was to disband the elected government and rule through an unofficial board of civil servant technocrats headed by Niels Svenningsen.
Simultaneously over in Norway the German defeat at Stalingrad was having a marked impact on the population, as related by Ornulf Bjornstad:
At the start of the war we made it clear to everyone we were fighting with the Germans because they offered the best chance of defeating communism. I had a lot of encouragement from my family and friends, but when the war started going against Germany their attitude changed to hostility against the whole German cause. This change of attitude dated from the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 and the subsequent retreat.
The resistance grew bolder and scored a massive success when it destroyed Nazi Germany’s stocks of heavy water in Telemark (an act made famous by the film The Heroes of Telemark).
This action effectively prevented the nightmare of a Nazi atomic bomb. Unsurprisingly, any sign of defiance was treated extremely harshly after that, and some 40,000 Norwegians (including Norway’s tiny Jewish population) were either imprisoned in the nation’s jails or deported to concentration camps. Two thousand of these unfortunates would die in captivity, of whom 700 were Norwegian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Another 500 Norwegians were either executed as resistance or died in direct clashes with the Germans during the occupation.
Speer and the labour pool
As Berger cast around for more men for the Nordland that spring, two further policy changes were made by the Berlin authorities, one which helped the recruitment effort, and one which hindered it. Firstly, there were vast pools of foreigners in the Reich at the time working in every conceivable industry from farming through to armaments production, often living in desperately harsh conditions. Those from the East tended to have been press-ganged and were virtually slave labour. But many from the West had been enticed with the promise of better wages and conditions. There were, for example, some 100,000 Danes working in Germany in the spring of 1943, and up until now their work had taken precedence and they were off-limits to recruiters. Indeed, Albert Speer (the architect turned Armaments Minister) guarded them jealously. However, with the disasters at Stalingrad and Tunisia wiping two entire field armies from the Wehrmacht’s establishment, this position was no longer tenable. As a result, recruitment among Germany’s foreign workers was allowed from April onwards, and Berger’s men went at it with gusto.
By mid-August the SS had recruited 8,105 foreign labourers, of whom 3,154 passed Waffen-SS selection, but there were only 119 Danes and just two Norwegians among this draft. Part of the problem was that it was not just the Waffen-SS who were allowed to recruit, it was everyone else too, and service in other arms usually carried far less risk and the same level of reward. Thus many Scandinavians joined the Kriegsmarine or the Luftwaffe (there were even two Norwegian Luftwaffe pilots, one of whom was the decorated SS-Wiking veteran Alf Lie) and its anti-aircraft units. More than a few Norwegians opted for the SS-Ski Battalion Norge.
The volksdeutsche arrive
In the end, the Danmark could field 1,280 Danes, and the Norge just 810 Norwegians. Senior command down to regimental level was filled by Germans. Below that about half of all battalion and company level posts were filled by Scandinavians. For instance, the Danmark had 16 German officers and 16 Danish officers giving it a much-needed Nordic ‘feel’. But there was no hiding the fact that the concept of wholly-national Scandinavian regiments had failed. The SS had no choice but to look elsewhere for thousands of men to fill the ranks. Their first port of call was German nationals, with 4,131 brought in to make up a full third of the division. However the biggest contingent by far were Rumanian volksdeutsche from the Siebenbürgen region, the so-called Transylvanian Saxons. Many of these men had previously served in the Rumanian Army, and were transferred over according to an agreement between the Bucharest and Berlin, while others had been recruited direct from their home towns and villages. In the end almost half the division, 5,895 men, would be volksdeutsche. The effect was felt across the Nordland – for example, alongside the Danes in the Danmark Regiment were 1,120 volksdeustche and 800 German nationals. The proportions in the Norge were even more heavily skewed towards the volksdeutsche. There were some Nordics in divisional posts, but overall the division contained just 2,491 Scandinavians out of an establishment of over 12,000.
The rest of the Corps had the same problem. The Nederland struggled to recruit and was majority non-Dutch, with 40 per cent volksdeustche and 20 per cent German nationals, and only 181 members of the 900-odd non-divisional Corps troops were Germanics. The reality of the situation was that it was ethnic Germans, and not Germanics, that were the mainstay of the Corps from the very start, and then, as now, controversy surrounds them and their role in the Waffen-SS. Many saw them as second-rate soldiers who couldn’t even speak German properly. The language of command in the Nordland was German, as usual, and this gave the volksdeutsche as many problems as it did the Scandinavians. They only really started to appear in the Waffen-SS in large numbers from 1943 onwards, and unsurprisingly the first waves of recruits seemed to be of a higher quality than those that came after. From veterans’ testimonies it would seem the Nordland and the Wiking received some of the best. The Wiking’s Jan Munk fought with them:
It was July 1943 and we were near the Donets, at that time I had an MG34, a beautiful machine-gun, very reliable and accurate. My Number 2 was a Rumanian farmer’s son. His German was not too good but his willingness to help was enormous, and so was his strength. So I had an excellent machine-gun, a first-class Number 2, plenty to shoot at but poor quality ammunition [by 1943 most German bullets had steel rather than brass casing due to shortages and they tended to jam the barrel]. I heard a noise to my right and saw that my Number 2 had fallen back in the trench, just as he was lifting a full ammunition box. He had been hit in the left temple and killed instantly.
Over in the Nordland one of the new draftees was Hans Hedrich:
I was born in 1924 in Mediasch, Siebenbürgen, and volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1943. I believed I had to make my contribution to the German people’s fight for existence – that was how the war was portrayed to us at that time. There was also a moral pressure from the ‘German People’s Group of Rumania’ and from friends and family.
Assigned to the SS Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion Nordland, I was trained in Grafenwöhr. I found the training to be excessively hard. Despite all the chicanery in the training, it seems to have been strictly forbidden for the native German trainers to use denigrating expressions that hinted at the origins of the ethnic Germans. Generally there were no problems between the native Germans, us ethnic Germans, and the Scandinavians.
This view was echoed by the Norwegian volunteer John Sandstad:
After the DNL was disbanded I was sent to the SS Armoured Grenadier Training and Replacement Battalion 11 in Graz. There I took NCO training along with nine other Norwegians. After a home furlough and several weeks as an instructor in an ethnic German recruit company in Graz, I was sent to SS Armoured Grenadier Regiment 23 Norge in Croatia on November 2nd, 1943. Many of the Norwegian volunteers were disappointed because there was no exclusively Norwegian unit like the Legion or the Norwegian SS-Ski Battalion in Finland. The ethnic Germans came in a group in August and made up about 50% of the unit’s strength. Basically we got on well with them.
The Swedish ‘specialists’
Away from the volksdeutsche issue, the establishment of the Nordland made a huge difference to the smallest of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS contingents – the Swedes. Overall, Waffen-SS attempts to recruit Swedes were a disaster. Official Swedish government hostility to the idea and a preference among volunteers to serve with the Finns, were the main reasons why only about 180 native Swedes enlisted in the Waffen-SS during the war. They were joined by some 50 ethnic Swedes from Estonia, and around 100 others from the Swedish Ukrainian community, bringing the grand total to almost 350. Another 15 or so went into other branches of the Wehrmacht including the Swedish Army officer, Nils Rosen, who served for two years as a panzer commander with the Army’s Panzer Regiment 6.
The Swede Sten Eriksson was a journalist before the war and served in the SS’s own regiment of war reporters, the Kurt Eggers. (James Macleod)
Of those that did join the Waffen-SS, more than 80 per cent were members of Far Right parties or had family connections to Germany. On enlistment they tended to be spread across a wide range of units with no real ‘home’ unit. Berger wanted to form a purely Swedish battalion, the Tre Kronor – the ‘Three Crowns’ after Sweden’s royal emblem – but the plan was abandoned due to an obvious lack of manpower. Ten Swedes served as war reporters in the Kurt Eggers – among them were Carl Svensson (ex-Swedish Navy and anti-aircraft gunnery specialist and one of only six pre-war professional officers who joined the Waffen-SS), Gösta Borg (ex-SSS leader, friend of Sven-Olov Lindholm and Winter War veteran), Thorolf Hillblad, Hans-Caspar Krüger, and Thorkel Tillman (who was killed in action in July 1944 while serving with the Hitler Jugend in Normandy). Svensson and Borg were also two of the almost twenty Swedes who graduated from Bad Tölz, one of whom, Wolfgang Eld-Albitz, came top of his class. Two other Swedes, Robert Bengtsson and Lars Blom (the latter held dual Swedish-German nationality) served with the Leibstandarte, while one Swede, SS-Oberscharführer Sven-Erik Olsson, even served throughout the war as Heinz Harmel’s (the Frundsberg’s divisional commander) personal radio operator, and ended up winning the German Cross in Gold as well as both classes of Iron Cross. The advent of the Nordland changed all of this and ushered in a very different era.
The designated flag bearer for the Swedish Waffen-SS was to be none other than the Nordland’s Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion. A handful served in the Hermann von Salza panzer battalion itself; the Adjutant, Bad Tölz luminary and Iron Cross 1st Class winner, Per-Sigurd Baeckland being one, but the majority served under Rudi Saalbach and his Adjutant Georg Erichsen. Erichsen, of course, was one of 1,292 ethnic Germans from Danish North Schleswig serving in the Waffen-SS at the time. Within the Recce Battalion the Swedes were then concentrated in the 3rd Company. Their influence was such that it was nicknamed the Schwedenzug, even though most of the men were actually Rumanian volksdeutsche – a fact not universally popular with all of the Swedes, as Erik Wallin recounted:
‘Old’ Ragnar Johansson was among us [an ex-Swedish Army sergeant from the Skövde-based Skaraborgs Regiment]. He was an extremely strong Swede, in front of whom the whole company shivered. Under the influence of strong drink and with a wild look in his eyes, he would go looking for Mussulmen, as he called the ethnic Germans from Rumania and whom even in a sober state he found it hard to accept.
The 3rd was one of five companies in the battalion; two of which were equipped with half-track armoured personnel carriers (the ubiquitous SPW), one with wheeled armoured cars, one with half-track armoured cars, and the last with anti-tank and infantry guns as well as flame-throwers. The Schwedenzug was 160 men strong and one of the two SPW companies. It had four platoons, the first three composed of volksdeutsche grenadiers, and the fourth comprising SPW’s armed with heavy weapons, manned by 5 Swedish NCOs, about 35 Swedish rankers and some 20 ethnic Estonian-Swedes. The prevailing thinking in the Waffen-SS was that Swedes were heavy weapons experts. The Swede Walter Nilsson led the platoon and there were four other Swedish officers in the Company; Rune Ahlgren, Gunnar-Erik Eklöf (who would go on to serve in the SS-Main Office in Berlin before becoming a member of Otto Skorzeny’s special forces unit the SS-Jagdverband Nordwest in 1945), Hans-Gösta Pehrsson, and the Germania Regiment veteran Heino Meyer. Meyer was twice declared officially dead during the war, before turning up on both occasions wounded but alive in field hospitals. The Swedes were overwhelmingly Wiking old-boys, and even though they were the minority they dominated the Company. It was the closest the Swedes ever came to having their own ‘national’ unit in the Scandinavian Waffen-SS.
The unit flag of the Norwegian SS-Police Company. (Erik Wiborg)
The Norwegian 1st SS-Police Company drawn up in three ranks and ready to be inspected on 17 May 1942. (Erik Wiborg)
The SS-Ski Battalion Norge and the SS Police Companies
Where were the Norwegians? The Norge was intended as their regiment, Quisling was fully behind the project, and the Norwegians of the DNL and the Wiking were a ready-made cadre. Despite this, recruitment was slow and there were always far more Danes in the Nordland than Norwegians. Granted, just as with ex-Frikorps members, there was a number of DNL legionnaires who felt they had done their bit and would not sign on again, and overall the recruiting pool at home was getting shallower as time and combat emptied it out. But even so, new Norwegian volunteers coming forward for the Nordland were far thinner on the ground than in Denmark; was there another reason? The answer was Finland.
Back in 1939 the Winter War had shocked Scandinavia and cast the Soviet Union in the role of bogeyman. Many would-be volunteers felt the attack on Finland was an attack on them all, and that by fighting alongside the Finns they would be directly protecting their own homelands. This was powerful motivation indeed. Most of those who signed on thought that they would be fighting the Red Army on the Finnish front, and when this did not happen it caused widespread resentment, Bjarne Dramstad testified to that. But the Norwegians did not forget Finland and when a generation of units were established in the spring of 1943 that satisfied this need, they drained recruits away from the Nordland. These new units were the SS-Ski Battalion Norge and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th SS-Police Companies (the SS-og-Polit Kompanies).
The 1st SS-Police Company had been formed and led by Jonas Lie, and served alongside the DNL of course, and the concept had proved its worth. Further companies were then either planned or raised over the next two years. When it was confirmed that these units would serve in Finland, and not with the Nordland, they proved very popular. The 2nd Company was the first to be formed, and was led by the ex-Norwegian Army engineer captain, SS-Hauptsturmführer Reidar-Egil Hoel. Its 160 men were sent to Finland to serve alongside the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 6th SS-Mountain Division Nord. Aage-Henry Berg, quite an unpopular ‘parade ground’ officer even though he was ex-DNL, was given the task of raising a 3rd SS-Police Company to join them in the summer of 1944, but by then the situation at the Front would have changed dramatically. As it was, some 11 ex-DNL and Wiking veterans did sign on for the 3rd Company, including the ex-French Foreign legionnaire August Amundsen, and the veteran DNL anti-tank gunner Bjarne Dramstad:
After I came back from the Front the first time, I joined the Germanske SS Norge [this made Bjarne one of only two GSSN men in the anti-tank company], the Norwegian version of the Allgemeine-SS. I participated in a three-week course at Kongsvinger, and was then given a black uniform to keep at home, that was about it really.
After the Legion was disbanded I stayed home until I signed up again for the 3rd SS Police Company. This unit was supposed to serve as an independent reconnaissance company directly under the 6th SS-Mountain Division Nord in Finland. This was in March 1944. Even though I had seen the war, the bad leadership, and was sick and tired of it all, it was better to be among comrades than in my village where there were a lot of people with sympathy for the other side. And this unit was guaranteed to go to Finland, which was my motivation in the first place. Besides, I felt that the war wasn’t over yet and I had to do my share.
Three of the Norwegian Waffen-SS’s most influential commanders, from left, the middle-aged former police officer Oscar-Olsen Rustand, Frode Halle, and Verre Lyngstad. (Erik Wiborg)
Recruits were hard to come by in Norway, the exception was for the SS-Ski Battalion Norge, which in this picture is parading through Oslo. (Erik Wiborg)
In August, Bjarne and their 148 comrades would arrive in Finland only to find themselves retreating back towards Norway, along with the rest of the Wehrmacht’s forces in the Arctic circle. Eventually the Company would end up holding the unique record in the Norwegian Waffen-SS of never losing a man in combat.
Before the Company was deployed, Berg was replaced by Oscar-Olsen Rustand, an elderly ex-Norwegian Army NCO and police officer. However, veterans always describe their German Company Sergeant-Major Otto Kuhnle as the ‘real’ company commander during the withdrawal, and once back on home soil Rustand formally departed to try and recruit a 4th Company to carry on the fight. That plan came to nothing as the war ended before the new force was ready to join the fight. But the numbers tell their own story, overall more than 400 volunteers, who would have significantly strengthened Norge’s Norwegian roster, chose instead to fight as SS policemen in Finland.
As it was these men were joined in the frozen north by an even larger body of Norwegian Waffen-SS men led by a Danish-born skiing expert and Professor of Physical Education – Gust Jonassen’s SS-Police Ski Company, which would become in time the SS-Ski Battalion Norge (SS-Schijäger-Bataillon Norwegen in German). Jonassen, the NSUF’s Sports Leader, was a subordinate and close friend of Bjørn Østring, but rather than join the DNL he proposed instead to form and lead a group of ski specialists to fight in the trackless forests of Finnish Karelia. The intent was for a purely Norwegian unit that would be engaged in long range patrolling, deliberate ambushes (i.e. planned long term ambushes perhaps lasting for days), and behind-the-lines attacks. The Germans acquiesced to the plan to smooth ruffled Norwegian feathers after the DNL was sent to Leningrad and not Finland, and in no time at all some 120 eager volunteers were training at Sennheim in the Alsace. Many of these men, mostly idealistic young NS members, would doubtless have ended up in the Nordland. As it was, Jonassen himself was packed off to Bad Tölz to earn his rank of SS-Obersturmführer, while his men ended up being put through their paces by a team of instructors led by the Finn, Jouko Itälä, an ex-Wiking artillery officer. Itälä ignored the order to go home and would serve in the Waffen-SS until the very end. Even more exotic was the addition to the company of the Italian SS volunteer Giovanni ‘Nino’ Niquille, who was assigned from the Nord as the new unit’s war correspondent.
Like Jonas Lie’s men, Jonassen’s were officially classed as SS-Police rather than full Waffen-SS members, and so after Sennheim they finished off their training in Hallerau near Dresden at the German Police Instructional School. Highly rated by the powers-that-be, the Company joined the SS-Nord division in Karelia during March of 1943, where they quickly gained an enviable reputation for combat effectiveness. Organised into three platoons of three sections each, they travelled on foot, or on skis when there was snow. They were armed with a lot of automatic weapons including one machine-gun per section and with every other man having a submachine-gun. They had a section of mortars as ‘mobile artillery’ and uniquely there were two snipers in each section.
The war in Karelia was not one marked by cataclysmic battles between competing tank armadas, rather by vicious small-unit combats and almost individual duelling, as men silently hunted each other through vast acres of hushed pines. In this wilderness, air and artillery support was minimal, fields of fire were measured in metres, and dominating features like hills were few. The rarity of high ground made it hugely important and would lead the SS ski troopers to their defining battles in the summer of the following year. That was yet to come. As it was, the Company was in action for less than three months before it suffered the same fate as the Frikorps Danmark and lost its inspirational commander in action. Whilst out on patrol with his men on 26 May, Gust Jonassen stepped on a mine and was blown to pieces. Although replaced immediately by Otto-Andreas Holmen – a popular former member of the Norwegian Royal Guard, graduate of Bad Tölz and NS member – the Company went into shock, and was sent home on leave in July to recover. The furlough also signalled the end of the majority of the volunteers’ enlistments, which had only been for one year. The Company had been a success though, and the SS authorities committed to reconstituting the unit if enough volunteers could be found. Timing turned out to be bad, as the call went out at almost exactly the same time as the Nordland was desperately trying to fill the Norge regiment.
Given the chance to sign up for another tour of duty in Finland, however, almost every volunteer did so. A number of other ex-DNL men did too, and they were joined by a crop of young volunteers eager to ‘do their bit’. So successful was the recruiting drive, the unit expanded to a battalion strength of more than 450 men and was rechristened the SS-Ski Battalion Norge. Added together with the SS-Police Companies, the net result was to deprive the Nordland of close on a thousand Norwegians.
Where are the panzers?
Back with the Nordland, after manpower, came the all-important issue of the armoured component of the division. The original plan called for near enough a full regiment of panzers, but there were never the men nor the tanks to fulfil this ambition. Without doubt, Speer had revolutionised Germany’s war industries (for example, he had reduced the total assembly time for a typical panzer down from 12 weeks to six days), but even so, supply could never keep up with demand. After all, Germany’s entire armoured might on the eve of Barbarossa of 3,332 panzers had been reduced to 140 serviceable vehicles in just seven months of fighting. The result for the Nordland of the Reich’s inability to provide the necessary hardware was the downgrading of its armoured punch to a solitary battalion, albeit equipped with the extraordinary Panther tank armed with its extreme high velocity 75mm gun and superb protective sloping armour. The separate self-propelled anti-tank and assault-gun battalions could not be equipped either, and were combined into a single unit, further reducing the division’s effectiveness.
Nordland Regiment officers at Staraja-Blismezy on the Donetz River in April 1943. The majority would leave to join the new Nordland Division in Croatia within a month. From left: Hauptsturmführer Bergfeld, Obersturmführer Schlager, Sturmbannführer Hans-Heinrich Lohmann (who would command the Norge’s 3rd Battalion), Obersturmbannführer Wolfgang Joerchel (who would command the Norge Regiment before going on to the Dutch General Seyffardt Regiment), Sturmbannführer Hans Collani (the Finnish SS battalion commander who would die at Narva), Hauptsturmführer Meyer, Obersturmbannführer Albrecht Krügel (who would command the Norge’s 2nd Battalion before being killed leading a counter-attack at the Altdamm bridgehead in 1945), Hauptsturmführer Haupt (half-hidden).
Despite all this, the Nordland still packed a big punch. The division had over 80 panzers, assault guns and tank destroyers, the artillery regiment had 18 self-propelled guns, the anti-aircraft battalion some 20-plus half-track mounted multiple guns, and the reconnaissance battalion more than 20 armoured cars with cannons. Plus the majority of the six battalions of infantry were in armoured half-tracks (about 15–17 per company, many armed with cannons and flamethrowers as well as machine-guns), and every battalion had companies of towed anti-tank guns, infantry cannons and light anti-aircraft guns. Its infantry numbers were low (the total establishment of just over 12,000 compared badly to the Wiking’s pre-Barbarossa strength of 19,377), but the majority of them, be they ex-Rumanian Army volksdeutsche, national Germans or Scandinavians, had been fighting the Soviets for two years or more,. They were battle-hardened veterans armed with the very best military hardware Nazi Germany could produce at that stage of the war. Gone were the days of inadequately trained foreign units equipped with second-rate kit, now the Scandinavians had a plethora of cannon, artillery, heavy mortars, heavy machine-guns, Panthers, assault guns and even the mighty 88mm anti-tank gun. Full strength it may not have been, but it was still a formidable threat, and the Red Army would have to take it seriously.
South to Croatia
Berlin decided that the best place for the new III SS-Germanic Armoured Corps, and its Dutch and Teutonic/Scandinavian units, to form up and prepare for the inferno of combat on the Russian Front, would be the puppet state of Croatia in the former Yugoslavia. There, it was reasoned, the Corps could be married up with its equipment, carry out work-up training and keep a lid on local Partisan activity at the same time. Entraining from Grafenwöhr from 20 August onwards, the Corps arrived in its Sisak assembly area south of Zagreb (called Agram by the Germans) as autumn arrived in the Balkans. Stretched across the Sava, Una and Glina rivers, the troops settled into their billets, began to receive their heavy equipment and were put through their paces under a new divisional commander – none other than their old friend and former Nordland Regimental boss, Fritz von Scholz.
A major blow was dealt to the Corps when the news came through that the Wiking could not be spared from the Eastern Front. It was fighting bitter defensive battles down south on the Donetz in the aftermath of the failed Kursk offensive and the ensuing Soviet counter-offensive. So Steiner’s Corps would be limited for the time being to the Nordland and Nederland. The Wiking was one of seven Waffen-SS panzer grenadier divisions officially re-designated a panzer division at the same time, so along with the establishment of the Nordland, the Waffen-SS now contributed seven of the Wehrmacht’s 30 panzer divisions and six of its 17 panzer grenadier divisions. Both sides, especially in the East, now realised that the keys to success on the ground were tanks, self-propelled artillery and armoured infantry. The race was on to upgrade existing forces; but it was a race the Wehrmacht was losing even as it was shipping the newest of its panzer grenadier divisions down south to the Balkans. As for the Wiking, the truth was that operational imperatives and the ever-worsening military picture meant it would not join the new corps during its lifetime. The two standard bearers of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS would never fight alongside each other.
Training, combat and the Italians
Officially assigned to the Second Panzer Army as part of Army Group F (von Weichs’s Heeresgruppe F – the Wiking had been under his overall command for the 1942 Caucasus offensive), the Nordland began work-up training at platoon and company level, and also took part in local actions against Tito’s increasingly effective Partisan army. This fighting, plus lack of equipment and fuel, prevented the Corps from training at the high level it really required to get itself up to speed. The situation worsened when the Italians surrendered and switched sides in September. The Nordland, like all other Wehrmacht units, was forced to move at great speed to disarm neighbouring Italian Army units and ensure their weapons and positions did not fall into Partisan hands. In a lightning-fast operation, von Scholz’s men surrounded the northern Italian 57th Infantry Division Lombardia, took over its equipment and disbanded the men. Without Italian forces to help, the Germans and their remaining allies were stretched thin and the Partisans stepped up their attacks. The 26-year-old Norwegian Eivind Ingebrigtsen was a victim of the increasing violence, killed in Jablanica on 8 November in a communist attack. More of his comrades were to follow. The fighting, as always in civil and insurgency wars, was brutal and unforgiving.
The Danmark especially was involved in some extremely hard combat around the towns of Petrinya and Hrastovica, in the Glina area, in late November. A glimpse of the intensity of the struggle can be gleaned from a Special Corps Order issued by Felix Steiner himself following one particular action:
SS-Unterscharführer N.O. Christensen [a Danish volunteer], 1st Battalion SS Armoured Grenadier Regiment Danmark, after heavy fighting with superior numbers of the enemy on the 22nd of November 1943, fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks. Before they could search him, he reached into his trouser pockets, in which he had two hand grenades, and set them both off. The explosion shattered SS-Unterscharführer Christensen, the four SS men standing around him, and all the Bolsheviks surrounding him.
SS-Unterscharführer Christensen demonstrated the highest heroic courage and deserves to live on in the ranks of the regiment as an example of the highest bravery, scorn of death, and proper Germanic attitude. In the units of the Germanic Corps, his death will be a symbol of the great Germanic ideal to all young soldiers, a sign of soldierly manliness to inspire emulation and live on in the history of the Corps.
Although it is more than likely that the Partisans would have shot Christensen and his fellow SS men out of hand, it is still incredibly difficult to imagine the level of commitment needed to carry out this last act of self-destruction.
Christensen and Ingebrigtsen were not the Nordland’s only casualties. In the space of just 10 weeks, when the division was meant to be focusing on training and preparing for the cauldron of Russia, two officers and 41 men were killed in action, and a further two officers and 109 men were wounded. One of the dead was the Dane, Viggo Christophersen, whose brother Egon would go on to become a Knight’s Cross winner at Narva. A total of 48 Iron Crosses were awarded to divisional members during their time in the region. Croatia was no picnic for the Nordland.
The SS-Wiking in southern Russia
The Nordland had now become the mainstay of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS, but that did not mean the Wiking was now ‘free’ of its Nordic heritage. Well over 200 Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Finns (and even one Icelander – Grettir ‘Egidir’ Odiussen) remained in the division along with Dutch, Flemish and Swiss volunteers. For these men 1943 had been a year of desperate defence. They started the year by escaping potential encirclement in the Caucasus and ended the year fending off further Red Army assaults. In between, the division did not take part in the titanic, and ultimately disastrous, Kursk offensive in July, but was subsequently caught up in the huge Red Army counter-punch that followed. With the cream of Nazi Germany’s panzer forces burnt out in the Kursk fighting, élite units like the Wiking were desperately needed to try and stem the tide. (Though ‘burnt out’ may be an exaggeration. For an analysis of the actual panzer losses at Kursk consult Zitadelle by Mark Healy.) From mid-July until just before Christmas, fighting every inch of the way, the Wiking was relentlessly pushed back from the Donets and Mius rivers to the great Dnieper bend. Two accounts from opposite ends of the year recall the intensity of the combat. Firstly the Germania’s Ornulf Bjornstadt:
I returned from leave in Norway to my unit on the Kalmyk steppe in the Ukraine, and it was bitter cold, [February 1943] and difficult for both sides because our weapons were frozen stiff. Our mortars were more or less alright, but our machine-guns were hopeless. Luckily we were well-served with warm clothes but nevertheless there were inevitable casualties from frostbite.
We were no longer in a defensive position, but were urged forward and ordered to attack constantly because of the threat from Popov’s forces [an armoured group comprising four tank corps, two independent armoured brigades, a ski brigade and three rifle divisions] who were trying to drive a wedge between us and some neighbouring Italian and Rumanian troops. When we reached the Donets we dug in at a point on the river bank with the Russians on the other side directly opposite us, but theirs was a partly-wooded area and we couldn’t see them properly. We sent out recce patrols, but the Germans weren’t natural hunters and seemed incapable of moving silently. We did take prisoners though, among them were four Tartar renegades who said they would be willing to work for us and so we set them to digging trenches. They shared the same bunker as an Army artillery group whose loaded machine-pistols were hung on a post. Overnight the Tartars seized the weapons and slaughtered everyone in the bunker. Then they melted back to the Russian lines. We were forbidden to have any more prisoners in the frontline after that.
We had to deal with a command post and billets in a nearby village, but as we advanced we were puzzled by what we thought was a half-hearted Russian defence. Their troops seemed content to hit us with a bit of light artillery but nothing else. When we got within attack distance – some 100–200 metres – we found out why. Around a dozen tanks came roaring out to hit 2nd Company on our left. Our comrades had no chance, the tanks simply drove over them and they were crushed to death. My company only survived because we happened to be in a hollow on the right. Soon though our 88s were in position and got many of those tanks through their turrets.
We peeled away from the tanks and made to attack an enemy machine-gun post, firing all the way from a small dry culvert before capturing it. I have two abiding memories of that fight. One was the sight of a junior officer of ours running like hell and shooting at the same time. Then he got a bullet through the head. He spun round 180 degrees before he fell, but he didn’t stop firing until he hit the ground. Then there was the gigantic haystack in our path. There would have been nothing unusual in it if the haystack hadn’t started to move, and from it emerged a T-34. The tank drew level with the village cemetery and it was from there that a young SS-Obersturmführer appeared, suddenly rushing forward and slapping a magnetic mine on it. A bit later I was crouching in a culvert with my mortar in position behind me and through my binoculars I could see the enemy bunched ahead. They made a fine target, particularly one cannon I had my eye on. I was just about to line up on the cannon when there were a number of loud ‘pings’ by the side of me and, thinking they were Russian, I rolled over to get out of the way as fast as I could. Then I saw the muzzle of this 75mm anti-tank gun, but not before I took the full force of the muzzle blast on my cheek. The gunner had concentrated solely on the target and hadn’t seen me. I was angry because he had shot up the gun I wanted and also because I was stone deaf for a long time after that.
Next we could see the Russians retreating at speed up the slope of a hill, so we moved into the now-abandoned village and had a brief rest. Then one of our SS-Obersturmführer’s appeared asking to see me. After congratulating me warmly he told me that I had been granted a place on a special officers training course at Bad Tölz. But I told him that I had had enough, having originally volunteered for one year and having stayed on for two and a half. He protested that I would be leaving some good comrades behind and maybe we could discuss the whole thing over a bottle of cognac. When we finished the bottle, he gave me a broad grin and, confessing his joke, produced a sheaf of documents from his pocket. They were my discharge papers.
As soon as I was able, I made the difficult journey home via Germany and on to Norway, but not before I learnt that we had helped to stop General Popov’s advance.
Bjornstadt was right about Popov, not only was he stopped but his entire force, including 251 tanks and 198 guns, was destroyed in Erich von Manstein’s masterly operation that saved the southern wing of the Ostheer, and became known as ‘the miracle on the Donets’. It was the end of the road for Bjornstadt, but not for Jan Munk, who was still with the division in November:
Our positions were still in the Dnieper area but were rather exposed. There were lots of bushes and undergrowth, but only a few trees. The Russians tried several attacks in what was, for them, very favourable terrain, but we managed to stop them every time. During their night attacks for example it was almost impossible for them to move without making a noise, so we had no problems in that respect.
On 2nd November 1943, we knew something was up because we heard the enemy singing and making a lot of noise. In other words they had had their ration of vodka to boost their courage prior to an attack. Sure enough, at about 1800hrs we received information that an attack was imminent. At that time I commanded a squad, and I sent them all out of the bunker we were in to take their positions in the trenches. They all went except for one, a Rumanian volksdeutsche, who told me that someone had taken his steel helmet and the one left behind was too small for him. He wanted to stay behind and guard the bunker. I told him what I thought of that and gave him my own helmet. It fitted. I went out wearing my camouflaged field cap. Then I joined my number two on the machine-gun.
The attack came, a bit fiercer than usual, but we managed to beat it off again. As always, that was the time when our own artillery started shelling, in front of the retreating enemy, catching them in between our shells and machine-gun fire. This time the barrage was very close by. I heard one gun in particular, the rounds from which landed short and to our left, then the next one was again to our left but nearer still. The one following was a bull’s-eye. It landed right in front of us and destroyed our machine-gun. We had been a split-second too late in taking cover. It felt as if an enormous weight had pushed me down violently. My number two started to splutter that the bastards had blown his nose off. It wasn’t quite that bad though. A tiny splinter had pierced his nose from one side right through to the other, and he was bleeding like a stuck-pig. We decided to go back to the bunker so that I could bandage him properly. To my surprise I found that I couldn’t move. I thought I had merely cut off the blood supply to my legs by squatting on my haunches. When the next shell came I was pushed, or so I thought, through the trench so fast that I could not keep upright, and I scraped my face on the ground. I shouted to my comrade not to be so bloody stupid and to calm down. He helped me to the bunker. Once inside, however, he told me that he hadn’t touched me, let alone pushed me. It dawned on me that something wasn’t quite right. My legs were still useless, so I undid my belt and the lower buttons of my tunic and felt along my back, but found nothing. I loosened my trousers and inspected that area too, still nothing. I dressed again and went back to bandaging my friend. We both had a smoke and then I began to feel hot and sweaty. I took my cap off and blood poured down over my face. With my fingers I could feel where the blood was coming from, a small cut right on the top of my head. Now I knew why my legs wouldn’t work. After a while I was carried through the trenches to an area where it was wide enough to use a stretcher. I was then brought to a collection point to wait for proper transport. Quite a few men were there, some on stretchers, some badly injured and others not quite so bad.
Then the Russians attacked again, and all the wounded who could walk were told to man their positions again. Those of us remaining were left behind to fend for ourselves as best we could. We were given some grenades and machine-pistols and wished ‘Good luck’. We fully understood. More than a dozen men would have been needed to carry us away, and they couldn’t be spared.
The Russians appeared and shot at us – we shot back. They threw hand-grenades and we replied. Fortunately the Wehrmacht counter-attacked with the support of some light tanks. We did not lose a single wounded man, although some of us, including me, collected a few more wounds, though nothing serious. I was then taken by stretcher again to a bunker. It was deep, with a well-protected entrance and a very thick roof. Inside were tables and easy chairs. A radio was playing, and it looked almost like something from a propaganda picture. A doctor examined me and said: ‘When did you last have a piss?’ As far as I could remember that was noon the previous day, a good 17 hours before. Before I knew what was happening I had a catheter inserted. I didn’t feel a thing, though the doctor was pleased that he had done it in time.
During and after the German counter-attack several Russian prisoners were taken. These were used, as usual, for carrying ammunition and, on this occasion, to carry the stretchers. To go back to the dressing station we had to cross a rather bare, flat field. The Russians were directing some artillery fire on this area and every time a shell landed the Russian carrying the foot of the stretcher I was on would drop it and take cover. The one at the head end was more careful and lowered me gently. By this time I had a splitting headache and all the dropping wasn’t helping. I told the one holding my feet that if he dropped me again I would shoot him. I had to warn him twice more. After each warning he would initially lower his end, but soon went back to just dropping me. Eventually I got my pistol out and fired a shot over his head. Everything went fine after that.
The long road to capitulation
The failure of the Wehrmacht to land a knock-out blow on the Red Army in 1943 condemned Nazi Germany and its allies to eventual, bloody defeat. Germany was only ever geared up for a short war and the battle of attrition it was now facing in the West and East was one it could never hope to win. It was rapidly losing the vital armaments production race and was starting to get very near the bottom of the manpower barrel. By contrast, its opponents were really starting to come into their own. The Ostheer had managed to kill and capture Soviet soldiers at a ratio of almost five to one in 1941; that had now reduced to two to one. The old-style lumbering masses of the Red Army, herded mindlessly onto Wehrmacht guns or into Wehrmacht prison camps, had been replaced by a behemoth that was now not only more mobile than the Ostheer, but was equipped with firepower on an unheard-of scale. The future looked bleak for the Wehrmacht.
As for the Waffen-SS, it had finally addressed its shortcomings regarding the treatment of its foreign volunteers. Consequently their training and military effectiveness had come on in leaps and bounds, and they were now an established and valued part of the growing Waffen-SS world. For the Scandinavian Waffen-SS this had meant the establishment of their own division. The Nordland had drawn together the bulk of the Nordics in the black guards, but it had failed in its purpose. The Finns had gone home en masse and many volunteers were still spread across half a dozen formations, most notably the Wiking, the SS-Ski Battalion Norge and the SS-Police Companies. But the Nordland as a gesture had failed. There was no new avalanche of recruits and thousands of Balkan volksdeutsche had had to fill the gaps. With the war clearly turning against Nazi Germany, there would be even fewer willing to take the plunge – from now on the Scandinavian Waffen-SS would only get smaller.
The Nordland may have failed in mass recruiting but it had succeeded in concentrating the cream of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS in a new, powerful force equipped with panzers, assault guns, self-propelled artillery, armoured cars and armoured personnel carriers. Their military proficiency was recognised not only in their equipment tables, but also in their growing prominence in technical arms and most importantly, in command positions. Across the new division, hundreds of corporals, sergeants, platoon, company and even battalion commanders could speak Danish, Norwegian or Swedish together and talk of home. Together they would defend the Third Reich back to the very gates of Hitler’s bunker itself, 18 months later.