V

1944: Bled White in the East – the Wiking at Cherkassy and the Nordland at Narva

The time for grand-style operations in the East is now past.

Adolf Hitler to Erich von Manstein after sacking him as Army Group South’s commander in March 1944.

Since the launch of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht had lost just over 3,000,000 men killed, wounded or missing in the East. In effect, this was the entire strength of the original invasion force. True, the Ostheer still stood at a total of 140 infantry, 24 panzer, nine panzer grenadier and 36 allied divisions (16 Finnish, nine each from Rumania and Hungary, and one each from Slovakia and Spain), but this was not the magnificent war machine of 1941. The infantry divisions lacked men, while the panzer units would never fully recover from Kursk. Equipment, like the new Panther and Tiger tanks, was undoubtedly of excellent quality in terms of firepower, but the tanks were unreliable, and fuel was in short supply as Allied Bomber Command systematically destroyed Germany’s synthetic gasoline production. The Germans were becoming increasingly reliant on horses and boot leather to move around. The men themselves were not the same either. The incredibly well-drilled officers, NCOs and men of the 1941 Wehrmacht were long gone, buried under Russian soil across hundreds of battlefields. In their place were often hastily-trained conscripts, eager just to survive the war. Germany’s greatest strategist of the day, Erich von Manstein, said that the Army’s divisions had been burnt out beyond repair.

While the Wehrmacht was now a shadow of its former self, facing it was a Red Army well on its way to becoming the dominant military force on the planet. Even after its millions of casualties, its strength had actually risen to 5,989,000 men in the army, 480,000 in the air force and 260,000 in the navy (mainly used as ground troops) – 6,729,000 men all up. The Soviets fielded 5,600 tanks and assault guns, 8,800 aircraft and a jaw-dropping 90,000 artillery pieces. The thousands of sturdy, American-made, Lend Lease trucks provided real mobility, while the factories and plants poured out munitions and fuel on a prodigious scale to drive it all forward.

This was what faced the Scandinavian Waffen-SS of the Nordland and Wiking at the dawn of the new year. For the Nordland it would bring a first taste of action, while for the Wiking it was a third year of struggle. For both, the year would always be remembered for two of the great battles of the Russo-German war – the Narva and the Cherkassy Pocket.

Oranienbaum

The Oranienbaum Pocket, to the west of Leningrad on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, was centred on the powerful Soviet naval base of Kronstadt, and surrounded by the flat and swampy Ingermannland. A thorn in Army Group North’s side since their failure to overwhelm it back in 1941, the area had served as a staging post for Soviet attacks ever since. The Norwegians of the DNL had fought off just such an assault at Urizk in 1942. Since then depressingly little had changed in the northern sector of the Russian Front. Leningrad was still holding out, the Finns had not moved, and the Red Army was still launching offensives from the Volkhov River and the Valdai Hills to try and relieve the beleaguered city. Neither side had been strong enough to defeat the other; and both were pre-occupied with far grander battles farther south. Thousands had still died though, in brutal infantry fights and artillery duels among the forests, low hills and marshland. The front was now approaching a turning point as the Red Army grew in strength and the Ostheer’s combat power ebbed away into the snow and mud.

Anticipating a series of Russian winter offensives up and down the frontline, any available troops across Europe were transferred east by the OKW. Among those sent to Russia were Steiner’s III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps. Allocated to the Oranienbaum sector, as part of General Georg Lindemann’s Eighteenth Army, the Corps arrived in the last weeks of November and the first half of December. It also took under command a battlegroup of the SS-Polizei division, and two weak Luftwaffe Field Divisions, the 9th and 10th. These latter were not élite paratroopers, but mainly unemployed ground crew whom Goering had grouped in formations still under his arm’s nominal command. Rather than train them properly and then send them as much-needed replacements to tried and tested Army units, which would at least have given them a fighting chance of survival, an increasingly drug-dependent Goering had left them semi-trained and poorly equipped and led by officers with little if any combat experience. The exceptions to this latter rule were the divisional commanders of the 9th and 10th, Colonel (Oberst) Ernst Michael and Major General (Generalmajor) Hermann von Wedel respectively. Both men were professional officers and holders of the German Cross in Gold and the Knight’s Cross. Both would die in the coming battle. Despite the presence of these two gallant officers Steiner was not happy with his Luftwaffe charges, but needs must, so he set about positioning his troops as best he could. He placed the Luftwaffe troops to the east to soak up any attack, with the Nederland farther west, and the Nordland holding the south of the salient in depth and providing some sort of reserve. Unfortunately his most powerful armoured unit – the Nordland’s Hermann von Salza Panzer Battalion – was still marrying up with its Panther tanks and carrying out necessary familiarisation training, it would not rejoin the division for some time.

Coincidentally, the very first Frikorps Danmark commander, Christian Peder Kryssing, was stationed just to the east of the Corps as commander of Battlegroup Coast (Kampfgruppe Küste), a collection of naval, army and coastal defence units totalling 9,000 men. Promoted to SS-Brigadeführer on 1 August 1943, Kryssing’s battlegroup was almost as strong as the Nordland, with von Scholz’s Christmas strength return reporting 341 officers, 1,975 NCOs, 10,146 men, and 106 Hiwis – 12,568 men. This put it almost exactly 2,500 under establishment, with half of the shortfall being officers and NCOs.

The Red Army’s winter offensive

Just as in 1942 and 1943, the STAVKA had decided to launch a winter offensive against the Germans in the north of Russia. But whereas those attacks had been met by resolute defence and beaten back, this was a different time.

At 0700hrs on the morning of 14 January 1944, huge concentrations of Soviet artillery began pounding the German lines around Oranienbaum. Even as the guns shifted their fire to deeper targets, the assault troops of the Red Army’s 2nd Shock Army downed their hefty ration of vodka and threw themselves forward with their customary ‘Urrahs!’ Their attack was aimed squarely at the Luftwaffe divisions and, despite their commanders’ best efforts, the air force men were simply swept away by an enemy that outnumbered them by more than four to one. Michael’s 9th Division was even attacked from behind, as the Soviet 42nd Army broke through the Army’s neighbouring 126th Infantry Division and swung into the rear. The Nordland was immediately thrown into combat to try and stem the tide as the Germans attempted to rebuild a line to the south running northwest from the coast, down to the southeast below Leningrad. For an entire week von Scholz’s men were Steiner’s ‘fire brigade’, constantly switching battalions to halt Soviet breakthroughs and seal up holes in the line. The fighting was bitter, Fritz Bunse’s SS-Assault Engineer Battalion (SS-Pionier Bataillon 11) lost 100 men killed and wounded in just one day’s combat near the village of Malkunova. The DNL veteran John Sandstadt, now serving in the Norge’s 1st Battalion, recalled that time:

On the day of the major Soviet attack our company (the 1st) had a strength of 118 men: seven reichsdeutsche NCOs, 34 volksdeutsche soldiers, 1 Flemish Unterscharführer and 76 Norwegians (the largest number in the battalion) with two officers, 15 NCOs and 59 men.

On the night of January 15, 1944, the first enemy movement took place, and our counter-attack in the morning completely collapsed under Soviet crossfire. We immediately lost 13 dead and many wounded. It was the same for the 2nd and 3rd Companies. All the same we were finally able to hold our positions for some ten days, with our three companies reduced to the strength of just one company.

My brother Olav, born in 1921, had also enlisted in the DNL on April 28 1943 and served in the heavy platoon of our company. He fell in the Kosherizy area after five days. His last resting place was in the former divisional cemetery near Begunizy, between St Petersburg and Narva.

When we had some rest on January 27 1944, our company consisted of one Obersturmführer, 5 NCOs and some 35 men. Our Battalion Commander, Fritz Vogt, appeared and handed several soldiers – including me – the Iron Cross 2nd Class. Less as a recognition for brave deeds, but more as a ‘premium’ for having survived the previous 12 days.

In the end there was nothing else for it – Army Group North would have to retreat. Abandoning the positions they had held for more than two years, the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies were more or less bundled back southwest to rudimentary positions on the Luga River, rather grandiosely called the ‘Panther Line’. As the Eighteenth Army headed back west, an eerie silence hung over the miles and miles of trenches that had been home to so many soldiers for so long. Then, in an outpouring of joy, the citizens of Leningrad realised they were free at last and every bell in the city tolled. The longest continuous siege in the history of warfare was finally over. The city was safe but the fighting continued, with surviving enclaves of the Luftwaffe’s 9th Division and the Army’s 126th Division lying surrounded to the southwest near Ropsha, and in danger of being left behind. The Nordland lunged forward and broke them out in a last offensive effort, before streaming back to the relative safety of the river defences. Without the panzers of the Hermann von Salza, the Nordland’s most powerful armoured component was Rudi Saalbach’s far more lightly equipped Armoured Recce Battalion with its volksdeutsche recruits and Swedish veterans. Increasingly used as a rearguard, the battalion held Gubianzy covering the division’s withdrawal to the Luga crossing point at Jamburg (also called Kingisepp). Nilsson’s Schwedenzug especially was involved in bitter fighting, and was decimated at Volossovo and Orlovo. A Soviet night attack in the area on 26 January was crushed by Saalbach’s men, leaving 34 Red Army tanks burning in the snow. The young Dutch volunteer, Kaspar Sporck, distinguished himself while commanding a troop of half-tracks fitted with 75mm anti-tank guns. The Recce Battalion volunteer, Toni Ging, remembered the withdrawal:

I was trained as a driver and given an SPW with a turret and a 2cm cannon, the commander was an SS-Rottenführer and the gunner was a Swedish comrade, unfortunately I have forgotten both their names.

We were near Volossovo and were assigned to recce a village. We were accompanied by an SWP with panzer grenadiers. Since no enemies were to be seen, the other SPW went back and I turned to go back also. Scarcely were the grenadiers at our level when we came under heavy infantry fire from the village. I drove into a heap of stones, which had been hidden under the snow, and thus got stuck. The fire got heavier and heavier and we had to leave the vehicle. First the commander up in the turret, then the Swede, and then me. Ducking down we ran to the other SPW which was waiting for us. But before we arrived the Swede was hit. We crept to him and pulled him into the SPW. We went to the main dressing station but unfortunately our Swedish comrade died of his wound. Our 3rd Company still had a fighting strength of 25 men at that time.

Reaching Jamburg the Nordland safely crossed to the western bank of the Luga, but it was too late. The Red Army, in a clear sign of its growing mechanization, had actually reached the river to the north and south of Jamburg before a lot of the retreating Germans. The river was now useless as a defensive barrier, and the retreat had to continue back west to the old Estonian/Russian border at the River Narva. Meanwhile the Norge held onto the eastern bank of the Luga while much of Army Group North crossed over, with the 1st Battalion and its Norwegian component bearing the brunt of the rearguard fighting.

The Narva – the Battle of the European SS

At last the German retreat outpaced the Soviet advance, and the Narva was reached by the Nordland in early February. Von Scholz gathered his dispersed troopers and threw them into a hasty defensive line based on the river and the cities of Narva and Ivangorod on the east and west banks. The battered Norge crossed to the west bank and took up position in the swamps to the southwest of Narva city itself. This time it was the Danmark and Nederland that stayed on the eastern bank to form a bridgehead. The Soviets were just days behind, and no sooner had the Corps dug in than the Red Army stormed across the river to the south and tried to cut them off from the rear. Again the Norge bore the brunt of the fighting, it managed to pin them back into two pockets with their backs to the water – the Ostsack and Westsack – but it was not strong enough to throw them back over the river. The Norge lost its highly decorated commander, Arnold Stoffers, who died while personally leading an assault, plus two of its three battalion commanders; Hans-Heinrich Lohmann who was seriously wounded, and Albrecht Krügel who went to take over at Danmark when Graf Hermenegild von Westphalen was killed.

With the line somewhat stabilised, both Steiner’s Corps and Kryssing’s battlegroup were grouped together with Knight’s Cross winner General Anton Grasser’s XXVI Infantry Corps, to form the new Army Group Narva. Kryssing’s force had to fend off an amphibious assault on the night of 13 February as Soviet marines stormed ashore at the town of Merekuela. Assisted by the Nordland, Kryssing’s men held and the landing was thrown back into the sea. Steiner’s command was then given a real boost by the arrival of the newly formed 20th SS-Estonian Division (20th Waffen-Grenadier Division der SS estnische Nr.1). The Estonians were almost all former members of various Schuma Battalions (militia and self-defence units set up and organised by the Wehrmacht from local volunteers, mainly to combat the partisan threat.), or the Wiking’s own Estonian Narwa Battalion and its Waffen-SS Estonian Legion brethren. As such the majority were combat veterans eager to defend their homeland against the advancing Red Army. They were immediately caught up in the fighting, but it was clear that the Soviet advance was finally running out of steam after six weeks of action. That did not mean the fighting stopped. The Red Army was strong enough to be able to rest large parts of its order of battle while still feeding in fresh formations to keep up the pressure on the Narva. Using the Ostsack and Westsack as jumping off points, the Soviet 8th Army tried again to cut the main Narva-Reval road and isolate the Corps. The whole of March was taken up by this see-saw fighting as the Germans attempted to smash the pockets and restore the river line, even as the Russians sought to expand their bridgeheads. One such Red Army thrust threatened to split the Nordland from its southern Army neighbour, the 11th Infantry Division, and the two divisions had to launch no less than three co-ordinated counter-attacks along with Heavy Tank Battalion 502 (Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502 – an Army unit equipped with hugely powerful Tiger tanks) to finally smash the Westsack on 30 March. The Norwegian volunteer SS-Untersturmführer Kare Brynestad won the Iron Cross 1st Class for his bravery during the fighting. There was no such success against the Ostsack though, as it continued to hold out.

Johan-Petter Balstad, born 24 September 1924 in Norway, was an officer candidate in the Norge Regiment’s 7th Company during the ‘Battle of the European SS’ at Narva in 1944. He became an expert at destroying Soviet T-34 tanks with hand-held panzerfausts, hence his three tank killer badges on his right upper arm. He survived the war and passed away in Oslo in 1985. (James Macleod)

The Narva battleground today. This view shows the Danmark Regiment’s positions east and south of Orphanage Hill towards Auwere, specifically the ground held by the then-depleted 2nd and 3rd Battalions. (Paul Errington)

The Narva battleground today. The rebuilt fortress stands on the western bank and the photograph shows the Danmark Regiment’s bridgehead on the eastern bank. (Paul Errington)

Eventually the spring thaw brought a temporary halt to large-scale operations as the low-lying land of the area became waterlogged and impassable for vehicles. Even though their trenches were now full of water, the surviving Scandinavians of the Nordland breathed a huge sigh of relief. The Corps could now take stock and lick its wounds. Casualties had been extremely heavy. The Nordland’s baptism of fire had cost it a third of its total strength, with 24 officers and 788 men killed, 58 officers and 2,708 men wounded, and nine officers and 216 men missing. Only nine Hiwis survived the retreat. The Nordland was not exceptional. The Nederland, for instance, had lost an astonishing 3,300 men, some 60 per cent of its strength, while Eighteenth Army as a whole suffered 20,000 casualties in the first two weeks of the offensive alone. The race was now on to try and plug the gaps before the Red Army renewed its offensive; von Scholz had some real concerns about the combat value of his division as it strove to recover, which he detailed in a report to Berlin:

The Swedish volunteer and war reporter Sten Eriksson, during a lull in the fighting at Narva, looks across the river from the west bank towards the imposing Russian Ivangorod fortress. (James Macleod)

The fighting value of the Division was decisively influenced by high losses of officers and NCOs, which is all the more serious because of the few officers and NCOs available when it was established. In the composition of the Division (Germanic volunteers from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the south-eastern area) the fighting value rises or falls depending on the elimination of this shortage.

The meagre motorised capability (25% of the full vehicle numbers) along with the available weapons and equipment on hand at formation, has in the withdrawal led, despite the highest discipline, to drive the men to the borders of their physical limits and to extraordinarily high weapon and equipment losses.

The training level of the replacements arriving has not allowed their inclusion in the Division as frontline troops. Further training with the Replacement Battalion (four to six weeks) has been necessary. However the physical condition and morale of the replacements is good. The mood of the troops is good, even though political developments in Denmark and Norway have had a negative effect on the Germanic volunteers from those countries.

Until sufficient filling out with capable officers and NCOs, the Division has only limited capability for defence.

Hans-Gösta Pehrsson, the most decorated Swedish SS volunteer of the war at Mummasaara in Estonia in April 1944. (Lennart Westberg)

As for equipment, at the end of March the Corps’ armoured punch was badly lacking, with the Nordland only mustering a negligible 10 assault guns, and the Nederland about the same. Von Scholz did manage to grab some 710 men from the now-defunct 9th and 10th Luftwaffe Field Divisions, which were unsurprisingly disbanded. The new men were given Waffen-SS camouflage smocks and distributed around the 2nd and 3rd Norge and Danmark Battalions. The 1st Battalions of each of the Nordland’s two grenadier regiments were also broken up, having suffered crippling casualties. The majority of survivors were used to help fill the ranks of their sister battalions, while a cadre was sent to the Hammerstein training area, back in the Reich, to take on new recruits and ready themselves for a return to the division. As it turned out they never rejoined their comrades. By the time they were in any sort of shape to fight again, Nazi Germany was in a spiral of increasing chaos, and they were sent to reinforce the Wiking instead. Without them the Nordland would become, in effect, a model of the Wehrmacht 1945-pattern division with only four grenadier battalions and not the previous six. In those reduced four battalions there were still 1,089 Danes including 37 officers, but only 338 Norwegians (21 officers), as volunteers drained away to the Finnish front. As for the Schwedenzug, Walter Nilsson had been killed at Rogowitzky on 25 January during the retreat and was replaced by his fellow Swede, Hans-Gösta Pehrsson – an old-stager affectionately known as ‘GP’ by his men. Transferred to Mummassaara in the rear, the Schwedenzug was reinforced and re-equipped in preparation for the battles to come.

The Wiking at Cherkassy

By mid-December 1943 the Ostheer had been pushed back west from the mighty Dnieper River along its entire length – except for a short stretch, near the city of Cherkassy, centred on the town of Korsun. Two and a half years earlier the Wiking, in its first major operation of the war, had charged through exactly the same area as it raced to cross the Dnieper and head ever eastwards during the heady days of Operation Barbarossa. Then the division had been, numerically, the strongest formation in the whole Waffen-SS, and was the standard bearer of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS with hundreds of Germanic volunteers filling its ranks. By late December 1943 the Wiking was a very different division. It was now one of the Wehrmacht’s 30 fully-fledged panzer divisions with the Wiking old boy, Hans Mühlenkamp, in charge of an entire regiment of panzers (although only one battalion was present at the time), and it had earned a superb reputation for military efficiency and combat élan. As part of the reorganisation of the Waffen-SS in 1943 it also had one of the new SS-Assault Brigades grouped under it to provide extra combat power, in the Wiking’s case it was the Walloon Belgian 5th SS-Volunteer Assault Brigade Wallonien (5. SS-Freiwilligen Sturmbrigade Wallonien) commanded by the ex-regular Belgian Army officer Lucien Lippert. Along with the Nederland and the Wallonien, two more brigades were created, the French SS-Frankreich serving with the Hungarian volksdeutsche SS-Horst Wessel Division and the Flemish SS-Langemarck with Das Reich.

Felix Steiner had moved up to Corps command of course, but in his place was the Wiking’s previous head of artillery, the highly decorated and extremely experienced SS-Brigadeführer Herbert Otto Gille. Gille was tall, bespectacled, silver-haired and immensely respected by his men. Some of his Army commanders questioned his tactical skill at divisional level, but none doubted his bravery. The division, though, was not the multi-national force it had once been. Most of the Scandinavians and Dutchmen had been combed out the previous year to fill the Nordland and Nederland and their places taken by native Germans. Even so, there were still well over a thousand foreign volunteers scattered across the unit, with several hundred Scandinavians prominent among them. The Wiking was no longer the totem of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS, but nevertheless its story is still part of their story.

Wiking grenadiers and some of the division’s few Mark IV panzers advance across the desolate Ukrainian plain at Cherkassy, 1944.

A tired Norwegian Wiking NCO well kitted out for the cold of Cherkassy, 1944.

Herbert Otto Gille – initially Wiking’s artillery commander, then overall divisional commander and finally IV SS Corps commander – with his trusty walking stick.

A Wiking Mark IV panzer at Cherkassy. The Mark IV was outdated by the time of the battle but was still the workhorse of the German panzer formations. This one sports wide armour skirts to counter anti-tank shells.

Another Stalingrad? The December offensive

‘No respite for the Fritzies’, was the new clarion call from the STAVKA. The Red Army was well on the way to mastering all the technical arts of a modern military machine and had unprecedented resources. Their doctrine now emphasised a never-ending series of attacks and offensives, up and down the frontline, maintaining the initiative and never allowing the Ostheer either to recover its strength or effectively switch forces from sector to sector. Hitler’s stubborn insistence on holding the line on the Dnieper, with a view to a wholly improbable future German offensive, presented the Soviets with a golden opportunity to trap a large part of Army Group South against the river. The STAVKA eyed the multiplicity of formations on the Dnieper, XI and XLII Corps from Hans Valentin Hube’s First Panzer Army and Otto Wöhler’s Eighth Army respectively, with barely concealed glee. Surely here was the opportunity for another Stalingrad? For once however, Soviet intelligence was off-beam. The order of battle for the two Corps might have looked impressive on paper, but in reality they were phantoms. Colonel Schmidt of the Bavarian 57th Infantry Division (part of XI Corps) said of his division at the time:

The division’s fighting strength has been weakened by the months-long battle against an enemy superior in men and material. The infantry battalions are only at 20 to 30 per cent strength. Fighting morale has sunk. Within the unit is an apathetic indifference. The troops have been living under conditions in which the most primitive essentials of life have been lacking … harsh words of embitterment and lack of faith in the High Command are voiced by the troops.

Only the Wiking (again part of XI Corps) was still at anything approaching full-strength, and it was down to 14,000 men. Most significantly, with Hans Mühlenkamp absent reforming a second armoured battalion, the division’s panzer component was just 25 Panzer IVs, a dozen obsolete Panzer IIIs, and six assault guns led by Hans Köller. The Soviet plan envisaged an encirclement trapping more than 100,000 Germans, as it turned out the number would be more like 56,000.

Following the by-now usual thorough Soviet preparations, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts launched an all-out offensive on Christmas Eve 1943 from Ovruch in the north, all the way down to Zaphorozye in the south. Some 29,000 artillery guns and 2,360 aircraft pulverised the German frontlines, paving the way for 2,365,000 men to throw themselves at the shelled units of Army Group South and its 1,760,000 troopers. Within days the Front had disintegrated and over 2,000 Russian tanks poured through to cause chaos and effect a link-up behind the Wiking and its fellow formations.

The Wiking and two Corps are trapped

By 28 January the men of the 6th Tank Army and the 5th Guards Tank Army shook hands at the village of Zvenigorodka on the little Gniloy Tikich River (pronounced ‘neeloy teekitsch’), and the Wiking was surrounded. It joined its comrades in the Wallonien, and a half-dozen Army infantry divisions, now officially entitled Group Stemmermann after the most senior commander present, General of Artillery Wilhelm Stemmermann.

Moving with commendable speed, Koniev and Vatutin’s men established two rings between the Pocket (Kessel in German), and the main German lines. The outer would face any relief attempt, while the inner would frustrate any possible breakout. Simultaneously the 27th and 52nd Armies attacked the encircled landsers and SS grenadiers from east and west to smash the Pocket apart, amply supported by massed artillery, which worked backward and forward over the diminishing terrain still in German and allied hands. In frightening echoes of Stalingrad a year earlier, Hitler forbade Stemmermann from any breakout and instead insisted on a relief column advancing and reaching them. The Nazi dictator would simply not give up his last toehold on the Dnieper. Erich von Manstein, in charge of Army Group South, launched a hasty two-pronged attack on 1 February with the majority of five panzer divisions involved (his entire Army Group only fielded nine including the Wiking). Two years before, such a force would have shaken the Soviets to their core, but now they could counter the assault with no fewer than six tank corps, one mechanised corps and four infantry corps of their own. The attack was halted in a week, even as the Wiking and the Wallonien were being roughly pushed off the Dnieper. The Walloon veteran, SS-Standartenoberjunker Raymond Lemaire had only just rejoined his unit after specialist assault pioneer training in Dresden:

We pioneers had to occupy some of the infantry positions to maintain the line. After numerous actions and battles, I was the only NCO left in my platoon. The Soviets attacked our sector again on 30 January, but in two hours of hand-to-hand and close-quarter fighting we managed to beat them off. However, I was seriously wounded by grenade splinters in both legs in the process. Being unable to walk after a few hours I was evacuated by plane out of the Pocket.

Lemaire was one of the lucky ones; of his 2,000 comrades only 632 would eventually walk out alive from the Pocket. The Wiking’s Scandinavians fared little better. Still concentrated in the grenadier companies, especially in the Germania, dozens of the remaining Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were killed or wounded in the constant Soviet assaults. It wasn’t just the fighting that was bitter either, the weather was horrendous. All veterans remark on it. The open Ukrainian steppe was swept by freezing winds and blizzards that saw the thermometer plunge to twenty degrees C below zero. Just as at Demyansk, two years before, the Red air force tried to flatten every building to deny the trapped men any shelter. Again, just as at Demyansk, the crews of the Luftwaffe’s overworked transport fleet landed their ageing Junker Ju-52 planes onto improvised airfields to bring in supplies and ferry out the injured. In the 19 days of the battle they would fly in almost 868 tons of ammunition and 82,949 gallons of fuel, while flying out 4,161 wounded soldiers. Doing so would cost dozens of aircraft and their crews, and gut Germany’s remaining air transport capability. The Belgian Walloon volunteer and prominent pre-war leader of the Cristus Rex Party, Léon Degrelle, wrote: ‘Every day our “Auntie” Ju’s [Junkers Ju-52] were shot down after a few minutes of flight, they would fall down in flames amid the screams of the wounded who were being grilled alive.’

When the snow stopped a thaw would set in and turn the roads, already poor, into mud baths. Panzers would sink up to their side armour in the morass, to become stuck as if on flypaper. One of the Leibstandarte troopers in the relief columns said:

The fighting began in mud literally knee-deep. The heavy Ukrainian earth had mixed with snow to create a sticky mess. Even with a light nocturnal frost it hardened to hold vehicles tight and killed any chance of moving them again. Even tracked vehicles got hopelessly stuck in this lava-like mud.

Bad as things were for von Manstein’s relief troops, conditions inside the Pocket were even worse as the battle neared the end of its second week. Degrelle:

The tanks hadn’t come. The surrounded troops had held out as long as there was hope. Now everything was falling to pieces. We were down to our last cartridges. Since Sunday the quartermasters hadn’t any food. The wounded were dying by the hundreds from exposure and loss of blood. We were suffocating under the enemy pressure.

One last effort

Refusing to give in, von Manstein planned one last throw of the dice. Gathering all eight of his available panzer divisions; the 1st, 3rd, 11th, 13th, 14th, 16th, 17th and the 1st SS-Panzer Leibstandarte, he launched them northeast towards Lysyanka and its precious bridge over the Gniloy Tikich. At the same time, Stemmermann had moved his entire force southwest in a ‘wandering pocket’ formation to the village of Shanderovka, and there stubbornly held a perimeter waiting to break out. The village and its environs quickly became a hell-hole, crammed with desperate soldiers, more than two thousand wounded, hosts of Ukrainian camp-followers and all the detritus of an army in disintegration. SS-Unterscharführer Schorsch Neuber of the Wiking’s Signals Battalion (SS-Panzer Nachrichtung-Abteilung 5) recalled those last days: ‘We were tortured by hunger. For days we hadn’t anything to eat. Snow was our only sustenance. The last ration we received was laughingly small and was a small frozen-together lump of rice for eight men.’

But finally, after almost three weeks of the bitterest fighting, salvation was close. Battling through horrendous conditions and massed opposition, the armoured might of Army Group South was at last approaching the Pocket. The same Auntie Ju’s supplying the Pocket were also flying just feet off the ground near the relief columns and literally pushing 50 gallon drums of fuel out the doors to fall into the snow and mud to keep the panzers rolling.

Inside the Pocket all was action, as the divisions were moved and assembled in preparation to head west. Stemmermann placed the Wiking, as his only armoured force, in the vanguard of the break-out, and on 16 February, with von Manstein’s panzers less than five kilometres away, he gave the order to attack. But first he gave the order every commander dreaded – ‘leave the wounded.’ It had to be done, yet every soldier railed against it – after all it could be them, and those men were their friends. Every member of the Ostheer feared what would happen to them if they fell into Soviet hands, and especially if they were wounded, such an order was seen as tantamount to a death sentence. Most units disregarded it, including the Wiking, whose Chief Medical Officer, Dr Thon, put more than 130 seriously wounded men onto panje carts (local Russian sleds usually pulled by steppe ponies) for the trek west.

Between the beleaguered grenadiers and their would-be saviours was a dominating feature, a prominent hill with long gently sloping sides and called by its spot height, Hill 239. Control of the hill was vital. With it, the trapped Group Stemmermann could withdraw in relative safety to Lysyanka and its vital bridge. Without it, everybody would have to try and escape through a wall of Soviet fire. Unfortunately, after capturing it in a daring assault, it had had to be given up by Captain Walter Scherff’s small battlegroup from the 1st Panzer Division. His few remaining Tigers and grenadiers weren’t strong enough to hold the feature against the massing Soviets. The end result for Stemmermann’s men would be slaughter.

On being given the command, ‘Password Freedom’, the Wiking’s remaining panzers and assault guns thrust southeast out of Shanderovka to establish the escape corridor. Having succeeded in smashing a hole through the Russians, in an act of inconceivable bravery, Köller then turned his men round and headed back into the Pocket to cover the withdrawal. Not a single panzer would make it back to German lines. Léon Degrelle, who himself would be awarded the Knight’s Cross for his actions at Cherkassy, witnessed the about-turn:

The faces of those young tankers were admirable. Clothed in short black jackets with silver trim, their heads and shoulders protruding from their turrets, they knew they were going to die. Several proudly wore the tricolour ribbon and the large black and silver Knight’s Cross around their necks, a glittering target for the enemy as they ploughed up the snow with their treads and departed through the tangle of our retreating army.

In unforgettable scenes, close on 45,000 Army and SS men almost stampeded the few kilometeres to Lysyanka and safety. The Soviets realised their prey might elude them and flooded the area with tanks, cavalry, artillery and infantry. In a little over 24 hours thousands of men were butchered in an area of less than four square kilometres. Soviet tanks ran amok over anything they saw, crushing the wounded in ambulances and carts, and the Germans had almost nothing to stop them with. Red Army horsemen from the 5th Guards Cavalry Corps joined in the carnage, hunting down groups of stragglers desperate to reach the river. Chaos reigned and command broke down. It was something no one who saw it, like Degrelle, would ever forget:

A wave of Soviet tanks overtook the first vehicles and caught more than half the convoy. The wave advanced through the carts, breaking them under our eyes, one by one like boxes of matches, crushing the wounded and the dying horses … We had a moment’s respite when the tanks got jammed in the procession and were trying to get clear of the tangle of hundreds of vehicles beneath their tracks.

Dr Thon and the Wiking wounded were part of this convoy; a bare dozen survived the slaughter. Even the Russians were awed by the sheer scale of the horror. One of Koniev’s own staff, Major Kampov wrote of that day:

Hundreds and hundreds of cavalry were hacking at them with their sabres, and massacred the Fritzies as no one had ever been massacred by cavalry before. There was no time to take prisoners. It was the kind of carnage that nothing could stop till it was over. I had been at Stalingrad, but never had I seen such concentrated slaughter as in the fields and ravines of that small bit of country.

Some of Stemmermann’s force made it to Lysyanka and its bridge, but most did not, and found themselves on the wrong side of a very fast flowing, icy cold, eight-metre-wide river – the Gniloy Tikich. Gille, leading some 4,500 Wiking soldiers and a host of other troops, was among those who did not reach the bridge. In an attempt to cross over he ordered an armoured personnel carrier driven into the river to form a breakwater, but it was swept away by the current. Undeterred, he organised human chains as well as using any horses that could be found. Striding up and down the river bank in his fur jacket with walking stick in hand, he and his staff organised and encouraged the men and somehow got the vast majority to safety on the western bank.

Aftermath

As the survivors from the Pocket streamed into Lysyanka they were met by the welcoming arms of their comrades from the 1st Panzer and the Leibstandarte. However, there was no immediate rest as they were sent plodding on farther westwards in their sodden uniforms, which were rapidly freezing to their starved bodies. The bridgehead was too weak, and all too soon the relief column would have to withdraw. Having thought their ordeal was over, the sense of disappointment among survivors was palpable. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of men had indeed cheated death and capture. Of the 56,000 soldiers encircled at the beginning of the battle just over 40,000 had gotten out, either in the Ju’s or on foot. Their commander, the monocled Wilhelm Stemmermann, was not among them. In the break-out he had commandeered a Wiking staff car driven by SS-Rottenführer Klenne, which had then been hit by Soviet anti-tank fire. He was lacerated by shrapnel and killed instantly. When his corpse was found by the Soviets they described him as ‘a little old man with grey hair’.

The Danish Knight’s Cross winner Sören Kam celebrating his award with a drink. Kam was a veteran of the Winter War and the Frikorps Danmark before joining the Wiking. He won the Knight’s Cross in 1945 for bravery during the Wiking’s battles in Poland’s ‘Wet Triangle’ in front of Warsaw. (James Macleod)

As for his command, Graf von Rittberg’s Bavarian/Austrian 88th Infantry Division was reduced to just 3,280 troopers, while Kurt Kruse’s Hessian 389th Infantry Division suffered even worse and could only muster 1,932 men. As for the Wiking, its roll call had been almost halved to 8,278 after all the wounded were evacuated. This total included the remnants of the Wallonien, but not its commander Lucien Lippert, who had died after being shot in the stomach by a Soviet sniper in the fighting at the village of Novo Buda on the 13th. As for the Scandinavians, three Norwegian NCOs – the Germania’s Alf Fjeld and Helge Tollefsen, and the Westland’s Inge Martin Bakken – were all awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class for their part in the battle. Several Danes also distinguished themselves including the Winter War veteran Robert Hansen, who would become a company commander after the battle, and the Danish NCO, Sören Kam, who went on to become one of the three Danes to win the Knight’s Cross during the war.

The battle of the Cherkassy Pocket was now over. The Ostheer had avoided a mini-Stalingrad, but had suffered thousands of casualties and lost huge amounts of equipment. Army Group South had been pushed back even farther west, and more importantly its entire panzer force had been bled white. Von Mainstein’s panzer-arm had not yet recovered from the defeat at Kursk the previous summer, and had now lost more than 300 precious tanks lying wrecked and abandoned around Korsun, Shanderovka and Lysyanka. The battle was almost Erich von Manstein’s last hurrah. He gave one last masterclass by saving Hube’s First Panzer Army from annihilation following its encirclement in March at Kamenets-Podolsk; and then Hitler had had enough of a man who stubbornly failed to agree with his every idiocy. The architect of Germany’s victory on the Meuse in 1940, the conqueror of Sevastopol in 1942, the magician who performed the ‘miracle on the Donets’ in 1943 and now the saviour of Cherkassy and Kamenets-Podolsk, was told a few weeks later by his commander-in-chief that his services were no longer required. He would play no further part in World War II.

No rest at Kovel

The same could not be said for the Scandinavians of the Wiking. Unlike their German comrades they were allowed some home leave following their escape from Cherkassy, an exception which did not go down well in the division. However the situation at the Front was so grave, the shattered Wiking could not be sent to the West to reform. Instead it was mustered to the north in Lublin, in Poland near the Soviet border, and then sent straight back east to the Russian city of Kovel in the Pripet Marshes to try and hold it against the still-advancing Red Army. Most of Wiking’s panzer regiment, and two armoured infantry battalions, had missed Cherkassy as they were away being refitted, they now hurried eastwards to rejoin their comrades. In the meantime, Gille led his remaining emaciated grenadier battalions to the endangered city. Gille himself had been awarded the Swords (the Schwerter) to his Knight’s Cross following Cherkassy, and would soon become only the 27th man in the entire Wehrmacht to be awarded the Diamonds (the Brillanten) as a further honour. The only other recipient in the Waffen-SS of this coveted decoration was the black guard’s most senior commander of the entire war, Sepp Dietrich himself.

Gille’s plan at Kovel was to defend the city through a defensive blockade out to the east, trading space for time to allow Wiking’s heavy troops to catch up. But he had no such luck. The Red Army was advancing too quickly, and the Wiking arrived to find itself being surrounded once more. One of his staff officers, SS-Hauptsturmführer Westphal who had witnessed Stemmermann’s death in the Pocket and had ended up swimming the Gniloy Tikich to escape, observed the unfolding situation: ‘As evening fell we gradually realised that we were sitting in a city which was slowly but surely being surrounded on all sides by enemy forces.’

Belatedly the panzers arrived, and SS-Obersturmführer Karl Nicolussi-Leck led his brand-new Panther company on a drive to reach the besieged city on 30 March. Despite being ordered to turn back owing to ferocious resistance, Nicolussi-Leck pressed on and reached his beleaguered comrades. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross for his leadership and courage. It was to no avail though, the city was still cut off and once again the Wiking was having to be re-supplied by air.

The calm and the storm

Along with elements of the 4th and 5th Panzer Divisions and the 131st Infantry Division, the Wiking stubbornly held the city against its Red Army attackers for the best part of the next three months. The Soviet’s Ukrainian offensive had driven a huge wedge into the Ostheer’s front, and Hitler feared the salient would be used as a launch-pad for the inevitable Russian summer assault. Such an attack could drive north to the Baltic and cut off both Army Group Centre and Army Group North in the biggest encirclement in history. If this happened, the war really would be over by Christmas and Nazi Germany defeated. Kovel stood at the northern hinge of the bulge, and OKW was determined to hold it so any Soviet assault could then be hit in its vulnerable flank. Desperately needed equipment was shipped to the Wiking to ready it for the anticipated offensive, and almost all of the Ostheer’s precious panzers were concentrated nearby in preparation. But the Germans got it wrong. The blow came not in the south in the Ukraine, but in Belorussia against a weakened Army Group Centre. The Wiking could initially do nothing but watch, horrified, as the Red Army juggernaut tore a full quarter of the Third Reich’s total military strength to shreds to their north. As the full scale of STAVKA’s Operation Bagration became clear, the OKW transferred units from Army Group North Ukraine (AGNU) to try and stem the tide. (Army Group South had been split into Army Group North Ukraine under Walther Model and its southern neighbour Army Group A under Ferdinand Schörner.) In so doing they weakened the North Ukraine just as Koniev launched his enormously powerful 1st Ukrainian Front onto the offensive. With 1,600 tanks, supported by 15,000 artillery pieces and 2,800 aircraft, the Soviets crashed into the Wiking and its compatriots, who could only muster around half the Red Army force.

Maciejov and Ulf-Ola Olin

Right on the frontline, an armada of Soviet tanks pressed westwards from Kovel towards the Polish border. Reaching the tiny village of Maciejov on the Bug River, the Russians followed their doctrine and carried out a reconnaissance in force, sending a number of T-34 tanks forward to sniff out any lurking Germans. They were right to be watchful. Ahead of them lay a company of Wiking Panthers commanded by one of the last Finns serving in the Waffen-SS, SS-Obersturmführer Ulf-Ola Olin. Getting his panzers into protected hull-down positions with barely their turrets showing, the Panthers long-barrelled, 75mm high-velocity guns had a panoramic view of the ground in front of them. Hours of training on the tank firing ranges would now pay off, as Olin ordered his crews to let the recce tanks past and tempt the main body out of the village and into the killing ground in front of the Wiking guns. Reassured that all was well, the mass of T-34s streamed out of Maciejov to continue their headlong advance northwest. Olin gave the order ‘FIRE!’ and the Panthers’ guns barked. Tank after tank was hit, turrets were blown off, ammunition exploded, burning crewmen ran screaming from their wrecked vehicles to die horribly in the oil-slicked grass. The Soviet tanks were not equipped with radios, all messages were relayed by commanders using flags just like in old-fashioned warships, and so were unable to respond effectively to the hail of armour-piercing rounds slamming into them. Olin’s company was joined by other panzers from the 4th and 5th Panzer Divisions, and together they mercilessly pounded the Russians. The Wiking’s artillery was called in to add to the carnage and cut off any Soviet retreat, and in a few hours of battle the attackers were cut to ribbons. A few T-34s managed to escape back east, but the majority lay burning on the plain at Maciejov, victims of the Germans’ superlative gunnery. The best part of an entire Red Army tank corps, 103 tanks in all, had fallen to Olin and his men. They were not alone. All in all some 295 Russian tanks fell to German guns as they tried to cross the River Bug. But the cruel truth was that actions like this were less than sideshows that summer.

By now the Wiking could barely muster a hundred Scandinavians in its ranks, Olin being one. Some more would return from convalescence, others from specialist courses or leave, and even a tiny number of new recruits would arrive, but overall the Wiking was no longer a heartland for the Nordic Waffen-SS. However, it would fight on to the bitter end, as would the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Finns in its ranks. The focus was now firmly on the Nordland and the epic summer campaign about to start.

The celebrated Finnish SS volunteer and hugely successful Wiking panzer commander, Ulf-Ola Olin.

North on the Narva – Egon Christophersen

For the Nordland and its men, far to the north, spring had brought a welcome respite. The Red Army was content to sit on the Narva’s eastern bank carrying out patrolling and the occasional snap artillery shoot, and nothing more. The Danmark and Nederland maintained their toehold in Russia at the far end of the bridgehead, while the Corps worked feverishly to strengthen the defences for the next Soviet offensive. The two sides also continued to probe each other, search out potential weak spots, take prisoners for interrogation, and all in all make life difficult for each other.

Danmark had built a strongpoint, Outpost Sunshine, at the far south-eastern end of their positions to facilitate just that. An extensive earthwork fortified with logs and firing points, the regiment’s whole 7th Company garrisoned it. The Russians launched a surprise attack on 12 June that overwhelmed the position, killed most of the defenders and sent the remainder tumbling back to the main line. One of the survivors was the Danish ex-Wiking NCO, SS-Unterscharführer Egon Christophersen, who rallied a handful of men and immediately counter-attacked. Such was the ferocity of the assault the Russians upped and fled leaving Sunshine back in Danish hands. Christophersen was commended for his bravery and leadership and on 11 July 1944 became the first ever Scandinavian winner of that most coveted award, the Knight’s Cross. Only two other Scandinavian SS men, both Danes like Christophersen, would join him in that exclusive club of Knight’s Cross winners (the Ritterkreuzträgers who have a members association all of their own) by the end of the war.

Men like Christophersen could hold for now, but having already lost the river as a defensible barrier, a new line had to be established about 20 kilometres back linking the Gulf of Finland all the way down south to Lake Peipus. Historic features, such as the aptly-named eighteenth-century fortification the Swedish Wall, were incorporated into the fortifications dubbed the ‘Tannenberg Line’. Part of the Tannenberg Line were three hills of the Estonian Blue Mountain range; from east to west they were Orphanage Hill (so-called because of the deserted orphanage on its summit), Grenadier Hill, and lastly, Hill 69.9, named after its spot height and sometimes also called Love’s Hill (in German – Kinderheim-Höhe, Grenadier-Höhe, and 69.9-Höhe or Liebes-Höhe). These hills, with their gentle slopes and wooded tops, would be the key battleground in the coming struggle. They dominated the main Narva-Reval road network, as well as the railroad, as they emerged from the woods near the river. To the north was the Swedish Wall and to the south, swamps. Both would greatly hinder the movement of armour. If the Red Army could achieve a breakthrough on the road, they could get behind the whole Corps and cut off large parts of Army Group North from any retreat. The Russians could see it and so of course could Felix Steiner. The Norge’s two battalions held the sector from the far south, where they linked in with the Army’s veteran 58th Infantry Division, up to and including Grenadier Hill which it jointly garrisoned with the Danmark. The Danmark, and Estonian SS men from the 20th SS-Division, also defended Hill 69.9. To hold Orphanage Hill, as well as provide extra muscle for Grenadier Hill, Steiner asked for reinforcements and was sent a 500-man battlegroup (Kampfgruppe Rehmann) from the reforming Flemish SS-Assault Brigade Langemarck equipped with three 75mm anti-tank guns.

More than 340 years earlier a young and bullish Tsar Peter the Great faced a Swedish army and its Estonian and German allies on the Narva, as the Russians sought to invade Livonia (as the country was then known) and destroy the powerful Swedish empire in The Great Northern War. The result was bloody humiliation, as the heavily outnumbered Swedes thrashed their Russian foes and captured their entire artillery park. Livonia was saved from Russian occupation for another decade. This time round the forces involved were of an altogether different magnitude, the Swedes numbered in their dozens and not thousands, but the parallels were still there. Would history repeat itself, could the Russians be held?

A Norge Regiment anti-tank gun crew during the Narva fighting, 1944. (Erik Wiborg)

Nordland officers at the Narva 1944, from left; unknown, the Norwegian Olaf Wahlmann, the German Hans Hoff, and the Norwegian Frode Halle. (Erik Wiborg)

In the meantime the Nordland’s achievements during the early spring battles were recognised firstly by the award on 12 March to Fritz von Scholz of the Oakleaves (the Eichenlauben) to his Knight’s Cross, and then by his promotion to SS-Gruppenführer on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday on 20 April.

The Tannenberg Line

On 22 June the main Red Army summer offensive hit Army Group Centre like a tidal wave and swept it away. Over the next six weeks Operation Bagration liberated all of Belorussia and swathes of Poland inflicting the largest ever defeat on German arms in recorded history. Some 35 divisions, more than 350,000 men all told, would be wiped off the Wehrmacht’s order of battle. The losses even dwarfed Stalingrad, and the Germans would never recover. As the Wiking and other formations from Army Group North Ukraine were sent north, so OKW also pillaged Army Group North units to send south to try and stem the Russian advance. Again as with AGNU, this left the North severely weakened. Grasser, Steiner and von Scholz looked across the Narva with trepidation as they saw the Soviets remorselessly build up their strength in the first days of July. The failed bomb attempt on Hitler’s life on the 20th exacerbated the situation as command and control across the Wehrmacht seemed paralysed in a welter of recriminations.

An order from the Corps to withdraw the Nordland to the Tannenberg Line was cancelled by Steiner’s Chief-of-Staff, Joachim Ziegler, as the Danmark was caught up in beating off battalion-sized Soviet incursions into its lines. Having done that, and taken 71 casualties into the bargain, Ziegler finally gave the withdrawal order and at 2330hrs on the night of 24 July the Germans, Scandinavians and Dutchmen of the Nordland and Nederland began to move back from the city and its river to the pre-prepared defences of the Tannenberg. The Russians guessed what was happening immediately and threw themselves forward. The result was a disaster. A withdrawal in contact, as an operation of war, is recognised among professional soldiers as the hardest thing to successfully carry out, with calamity never more than a heartbeat away. That night the Germanic Corps was unlucky. The Scandinavians managed to find their way through the woods in the dark and reach their allotted trenches but the Dutch SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 48 General Seyffardt was not so fortunate. Caught in the open by the Soviet advance guard it was butchered along with its commander, Richard Benner. Only around 20 per cent of its members escaped. Just days later the Finnish SS Battalion’s old boss, Hans Collani, would be wounded and take his own life, leading General Seyffardt’s sister regiment, the De Ruyter. At the Line itself, all was confusion as men and equipment arrived pell-mell. With the Russians hot on their heels, troops were hastily marshalled into the defences and became hopelessly mixed-up.

The climax of Narva

Up until then the fighting at Narva had resembled more a campaign that had gone on for several months rather than a ‘conventional’ battle that was won or lost in days. That was about to change over the next four days as the fate of Army Group North was effectively in the hands of the Nordland and its Dutch, Flemish and Estonian allies. The Scandinavian Waffen-SS was now at the very fulcrum of Hitler’s war with the Soviet Union.

As the General Seyffardt was being wiped out on the 25th, the Nordland was preparing itself for battle. The summer nights that far north are short and it had been light since 4am on the 26th, but the Russians did not begin their assault on Orphanage Hill until gone midday. When they did, the fighting was savage. The Flemings’ German commander, Wilhelm Rehmann, took himself to the rear with a ‘wound’ that Steiner himself dismissed as trivial. The young Flemish nationalist, Georg D’Haese, took over in time to see almost every other Flemish officer killed including his two fellow company commanders, Frans Swinnen and Henri Van Mol. Despite this the defenders held on, but the next day the Soviets launched a massive assault on the heights that threw the Flemings off Orphanage Hill. Steiner ordered an immediate counter-attack, and the Norwegian company commander Thomas Hvistendahl led his Norge men forward to try and retake the hill, reinforced by D’Haese. Some sixty Flemings were stranded in the abandoned orphanage itself, and they willed their rescuers on as they twice tried to reach them in the teeth of Soviet fire. It was no use. The grenadiers were not strong enough and during the night the beleaguered SS men were wiped out to the last man.

As dawn broke on the morning of the 28th, everyone sensed this was to be the decisive day. The Soviet Front Commander, Govorov, concentrated troops from no less than six tank brigades and 11 rifle divisions in the lee of Orphanage Hill ready to sweep west and take Grenadier, then 69.9 and finally break III SS-Germanic Panzer Corps’s resistance. The Russians carried out their usual huge artillery barrage to soften up the defenders and then poured forward. In front of them stood a lone, five-foot-four-inch railway worker’s son from Kemptich in Flanders, Remy Schrijnen, and his 75mm PAK gun. In the next hour Schrijnen single-handedly destroyed seven Soviet tanks, including three mighty Joseph Stalin JS-2s (Joseph Stalin tanks had very thick armour and a truly enormous 122mm main gun, the shells of which weighed 25 pounds) and successfully stalled the whole attack. Schrijnen was badly wounded and knocked unconscious when his gun was finally wrecked by a tank round, but he had saved Grenadier Hill and was awarded the Knight’s Cross for his bravery. During the same morning’s fighting, Fritz von Scholz was hit in the head by a shell splinter. Rushed off to a field hospital, there was nothing the doctors could do and he died the next day from his injuries. He was posthumously given the Swords to his Knight’s Cross.

Govorov would not give up and on 29 July he once more sent his tankers into battle to break the Nordland’s line. By now the trenches were filled with dead Scandinavians, Estonians and Dutchmen, and the survivors were exhausted. Just as all seemed lost, the ex-Wiking artillery officer, SS-Obersturmbannführer Paul-Albert Kausch, led every last one of the Hermann von Salza’s panzers in a desperate counter-attack. Supported by Norge’s grenadiers in particular, the von Salza’s Panthers, Mark IVs and Sturmgeschütze(turretless self-propelled assault guns) charged forward. At the end of the day 113 Russian tanks were left blazing around the three hills; and a badly wounded and barely-conscious Remy Schrijnen was rescued from his wrecked gun-pit.

Knight’s Cross winners from the Narva at the award ceremony on 23 August 1944. From left, the Estonian SS officer Harald Riipalu, the commander of the Nordland’s Hermann von Salza panzer battalion Obersturmbannführer Paul-Albert Kausch, Schluetter and Hans Collani’s Adjutant from the Dutch SS De Ruyter Regiment, Karl-Heinz Ertel. Ertel also served alongside Collani in the Finnish SS Battalion. (James Macleod)

Narva was held and the Red Army frustrated. The Ostheer might have been in the process of losing Belorussia, the remainder of the Ukraine and swathes of Poland, but in the far north the Front was safe, at least for a while. In recognition of the magnificent performance of all of his men, Felix Steiner was awarded the Swords to his Knight’s Cross. Ferdinand Schörner, who had left Army Group A in the south to take over Army Group North, wrote the recommendation:

SS-Obergruppenführer Steiner has achieved with his III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps a defensive success for the entire Eastern Front. With his two weak divisions and one brigade he held the front in Narva unbreakable against the storming 2nd Russian Shock Army and 8th Army with 11 divisions and six tank brigades. More than 1,020 tanks were destroyed. The enemy suffered heavy losses. His personal decisiveness, and his brave and versatile battle leadership, deserve special recognition.

Old Fritz’s successor

With von Scholz dead, his place was taken by the Corps Chief-of-Staff, the impressively tall 40 year old Spanish Civil War veteran, Joachim Ziegler. Ziegler was a career Army officer, and had only officially been transferred to the Waffen-SS a few days before he was appointed to lead the Nordland. Promoted to SS-Brigadeführer, this experienced and courageous officer would command the division almost to the very end of the war.

Scandinavian recruitment dries up

Having been through two of the most savage battles the Russian Front had witnessed, both the Nordland and Wiking were desperate for fresh blood. The grenadier companies in particular were threadbare, and although men returning from leave and injury would do a little to fill the gaps, it was more of a sticking plaster. What was really needed was a new wave of volunteers from Scandinavia. No such wave was forthcoming. No amount of propaganda could hide the fact that the Third Reich was losing the war, and after almost five years of occupation, unrest was growing in Denmark and Norway.

Denmark’s so-called ‘model occupation’ was falling apart. The King made no secret of his loathing for the Nazis and led a dignified, passive opposition to the Germans. Many of his subjects took matters further and industrial sabotage in particular became commonplace. Civil disturbance reached its height in June of 1944 with the Copenhagen General Strike called after the Germans imposed a curfew. In a hitherto unheard of gesture, the working population of Denmark’s capital downed tools and went onto the streets to protest. The authorities were helpless to stop it and chaos reigned for days. The result was more severe repression, and needless to say this did not encourage recruits to come forward. Pro-Nazis were now openly vilified, support for the DNSAP had collapsed, and recruiting pools such as the party’s youth wing had been mined out. Frits Clausen, frustrated in his ambition to lead his country, had increasingly turned to drink. He enlisted in the Waffen-SS, was admitted to hospital for alcoholism and subsequently stepped down as Party leader in May. His fall from grace would be complete that November when he was expelled from the Party. The Danish armed forces had already been disbanded earlier in the year, and they were followed by the police in September. From now onwards public order would be kept by the Hipo Corps (Hilfspolizei Korpset – a new uniformed force based on the intelligence sections of Knud Martinsen’s Schalburg Corps). The Corps would wage an increasingly bitter war against the Resistance in the dying days of the conflict, with arson attacks and vicious tit-for-tat murders.

Up in Norway the situation was similar, with the Resistance growing in strength and the Germans becoming more and more heavy-handed to keep order. Quisling had taken over government, as Minister President, only to fail spectacularly, with clumsy attempts to radicalise the population falling flat, especially when he clashed with the unions and the teachers. Again, this adversely affected recruitment among the general population, while the barrel of the Far Right had just about been scraped. The SS recruiting office in Oslo reported that the GSSN, for example, had 1,247 registered members at the end of September, but 330 were already at the Front, 245 were in the police and 511 were in emergency units at home. That left just 161 men uncommitted. It also stated that of the 4,133 Norwegians it had recruited already, only 1,434 remained in service, 606 had been killed and 2,043 discharged at the end of their contract term. The recruiters went on to say that 1944 had been a very slow year with only a handful of men coming forward. The well, never deep, had just about dried up.

The Wiking on the Vistula

Ulf-Ola Olin and his men had bloodied the Red Army’s nose on the Bug, but the Red Army’s massive 1st Ukrainian Front pressed on regardless and succeeded in crossing the Vistula (Weichsel in German) at Baranow and Sandomierz about 100 miles south of Warsaw, and Magnuszew just 20 miles southeast of the city. The Reich’s response to this deadly threat was to create the IV SS-Panzer Corps, comprising the 3rd SS-Panzer Division Totenkopf and the Wiking, under Gille’s command. His place with the Wiking was meant to be taken by the 35 year-old Bavarian Knight’s Cross winner, Dr Eduard Deisenhofer, but the ex-Totenkopf man went instead to the 17th SS-Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen, before being killed in action in Arnswalde in 1945 whilst on his way to take command of the 15th Latvian SS Division. In his absence, leadership of the Wiking went to one of its most distinguished old boys, Hans Mühlenkamp. The Luftwaffe’s Hermann Goering Panzer Division and the Army’s 19th Panzer Division were then combined with the new Corps to establish a formidable armoured force. Together, they pinned the Soviets back into their bridgehead at Sandomierz, although they could not destroy it, and then switched north to savage the Soviet 2nd Tank Army in front of Warsaw itself in the so-called ‘Wet Triangle’. The battle saw the Russians lose more than 170 tanks, 3,000 men killed and 6,000 taken prisoner.

Wounded during the fighting was the young Norwegian SS-Untersturmführer, Fredrik Jensen. Commanding the Germania’s 7th Company, the tall, blond Jensen had already earned the Iron Cross 1st Class in the Ukraine the previous summer. His bravery in front of Warsaw won him the German Cross in Gold, confirmed in December, and although his injuries prevented him from returning to the Front again, the award would be enough to make him the highest-decorated Norwegian Waffen-SS volunteer of the war. His place with the 7th Company would be taken by yet another Norwegian Bad Tölz graduate and old Nordland Regiment veteran, Arne Gunnar Smith, who would be killed himself five days later.

The Warsaw Uprising

Behind the Corps, Warsaw rose in revolt on 1 August. After years of brutal occupation, the Polish Home Army (the Armija Krajowa or AK for short) under the leadership of General Duke Tadeusz Komorowski, codenamed Bor, attacked key points across the capital. For the next 63 days some of the most horrific fighting of the war would rage in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. Under the leadership of the head of Nazi Germany’s anti-partisan forces, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a mixed force of Army and Waffen-SS (which included Azeris, Cossacks, Ukrainians and Oskar Dirlewanger’s convicts) forsook every accepted rule of war and butchered, raped and burnt their way to victory and infamy.

A portrait of the most highly decorated Norwegian Waffen-SS volunteer of the war, the Germania Regiment’s Fredrik Jensen. (James Macleod)

The Norwegian Wiking volunteer Fredrik Jensen relaxes in the sun. He won the German Cross in Gold as well as the Iron Cross. Today he lives in Spain. (James Macleod)

Controversy has raged ever since as to whether Stalin left the Polish patriots to their fate so as to prepare the ground for a post-war communist takeover, or if he had no such intent. On the balance of evidence it is absolutely clear, and Norman Davies’s work on this is extremely powerful, that although the Red Army was exhausted, the Soviet dictator did indeed abandon Warsaw and watched with glee as thousands of potential Polish foes died manning the barricades.

The Wiking, the ‘Wet Triangle’ and Sören Kam

As for the Wiking, and its new stable mate the Totenkopf, the two SS panzer divisions continued to defy two entire Soviet armies in front of the city throughout the autumn and into the winter. In early October, Mühlenkamp left the Wiking to become the Inspector of the Waffen-SS Panzer Troops, and was succeeded by the Knight’s Cross winner and ex-Das Reich and Totenkopf officer, Karl Ullrich. Ullrich would lead the Wiking for the remainder of the war. At the same time, to help keep the division up to strength, the reformed 1st Battalions of both the Norge and Danmark Regiments, now almost entirely made up of teenage German conscripts and unemployed Luftwaffe ground crew, were shipped from their Hammerstein training ground to the Polish front. Incorporated into the Wiking they would never serve with the Nordland. About 80 Danes and Norwegians were in the two battalions, evenly split between them, many of them by now being NCOs or officers.

An earlier photograph of the Danish Waffen-SS volunteer Sören Kam, in the uniform of the paramilitary Schalburg Corps back in Denmark. Following the end of the war he settled in Germany, like many other foreign veterans, to escape persecution at home. (James Macleod)

Untersturmführer Wolfgang Eldh, Swedish Adjutant of a German Battlegroup during the Latvia battles in July 1944. Eldh was badly wounded in the fighting at Dünaburg later the same month. (Lennart Westberg)

Two such volunteers were the 19-year-old Norwegian Karl-Aagard Østvig, an officer in the Norge’s 3rd Company, and the Danish platoon leader and ex-Frikorps veteran Sören Kam. Both were heavily involved in the vicious struggle in front of Warsaw, with Kam briefly having to take over command of his entire battalion when every other officer was either killed or wounded. He would become the second Dane to be awarded the Knight’s Cross for his actions. Østvig too distinguished himself, but was not so lucky and died in the fighting.

Army Group North cut-off

Such was the strength of the Red Army in 1944, and the weakness of the Ostheer, that the STAVKA could resource constant attacks along the entire frontline from Narva in the north to the Crimea in the south, which the Germans could do little to stop. The destruction of Army Group Centre was the key, as with no available reserves it forced the OKW to draw troops from every other army group, so creating weak points. The Wiking may have helped halt the flood in front of Warsaw, and the Nordland had stopped the advance on the Narva dead in its tracks, but in the huge expanses of the Russian Front élite units, like those containing the Scandinavian Waffen-SS, were few and far between and the Red Army was everywhere. To Steiner’s south, the Soviet 2nd Guards, 6th Guards and 51st Armies found just such a weak point and punched west taking Daugavpils, Panavezys and finally Siauliai before turning north where Colonel Kremer led his 8th Guards Rifle Brigade to the shores of the Baltic itself at Klapkalnice, to the west of Riga, at the end of July. The III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps had only just beaten the Russians at Narva (and won a staggering total of 29 Knight’s Crosses doing so), and now found itself cut off in a giant pocket. That pocket was all of Estonia and most of Latvia, and in it were the 27 divisions and 500,000 men of two whole German armies – the Sixteenth and Eighteenth – basically Army Group North in its entirety. Without delay, the Germans had to push west to avoid disaster.

Estonia is abandoned

In the way that only Adolf Hitler could, a decision to order Army Group North to leave Estonia and rejoin the German frontline was delayed seemingly endlessly. Without doubt there was a moral dimension in leaving Estonia to its fate, for the Waffen-SS that would visibly manifest itself in its 20th Estonian Division, an excellent formation that would now effectively lose its raison d’être. But it was clear that the immorality of abandoning Estonia to Soviet brutality was not even on Hitler’s short list. Absurdly, it was his old cry of ‘to the last man and the last round’, that had already cost Germany so dear, which framed his thinking. Only a personal plea from Schörner as the Army Group’s commander could save it. Schörner told Hitler:

The Front is undoubtedly broken at several places. The Estonians have run away again. They’re simply going home, we have now lost two-thirds of the infantry force and we are deceiving ourselves it we think we are just going to depend on the courage of the troops to take care of everything again. That cannot happen time after time! We are talking about the fate of an entire Army Group here!

It worked and Hitler relented. The go-ahead was given for Operation Aster, the break out from Estonia and withdrawal west into Latvia.

Carrying out a fighting retreat the III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps ‘crabbed’ south-westwards, elements went by sea from Pernau, but most of the men crammed onto any vehicle they could find and drove to freedom – albeit temporary. The Red Army desperately tried to take Riga, Latvia’s capital, and cut off the retreat but in the end the corridor was held open for most of September and the Army Group survived. A new defence line was now set up in Latvia stretching from the base of the Courland peninsula south-west to Memel (now Klaipeda) and to the borders of the Reich itself. In the teeth of heavy Russian attacks, during which the ex-DNL veteran Peter Thomas Sandborg was killed commanding Norge’s 11th Company, the Red Army reached the Baltic yet again and Army Group North was isolated once more: this time in the Courland peninsula.

The Courland Pocket

Courland, called Kurland in German and Kurzeme in Latvian, is Latvia’s westernmost province and sticks out in a bulge into the Baltic Sea. A prosperous, fertile area, its traditional ‘capital’ was the city and port of Liepaja (Libau in German) at its south-western corner, with its other major town being Ventspils (Windau in German) to the north at the mouth of the Venta River. Like much of the Baltic coastline it had been conquered by the Teutonic Knights, a medieval Germanic crusading order. The conquest had been followed by migration, and ethnic Germans dominated the local land-owning classes. Now this area would become the scene of no less than six separate battles, which would only stop with the surrender of the surviving 180,000 German troops on 8 May 1945.

Six Swedish Waffen-SS officers at Mummasaara, Estonia, April 1944. From left: the war correspondents Untersturmführer Gösta Borg and Untersturmführer Hans-Caspar Krüger, the Nordland men Obersturmführer Hans-Gösta Pehrsson and Untersturmführer Gunnar-Erik Eklöf, and the war correspondents Untersturmführer Carl Svensson and StandartenOberjunker Thorkel Tillman. Tillman held joint German/Swedish nationality and would be killed in action in July of that year while serving with the Hitler Jugend Division in Normandy. (Lennart Westberg)

Finland had now made peace with the Russians and was out of the war, so the Red Army in the north could concentrate all of its offensive power on the hapless men of Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies. As the leaves fell across the Courland forests in October, the Germans and Scandinavians of the Nordland withdrew across the Daugava River, blowing its bridges and taking up position in the east of the peninsula, basing their defence on the villages of Bunkas and Jaunpils. Riga fell on the 15th as the Soviets instigated what became known as the First Battle of Courland. The 1st Shock, 6th Guards and 51st Armies pushed west from Riga, capturing Kemeri, and were then halted by determined resistance. The Nordland’s own line was threatened on 27 October at Trekni, when the assaulting Soviets overran a nearby hill that dominated the surrounding landscape. Ziegler called on Pehrsson and his re-equipped Schwedenzug to re-take the hill immediately and secure the defence. Charging forward in their SPWs with all guns blazing, the Swedes and volksdeutsche roared into the assault. Soon the fighting became hand-to-hand as the SS grenadiers cleared the trenches of Red Army men. The charge was successful, but the Soviets counter-attacked time after time to take it back. The attacks were repelled for four days, but on the fifth day the Swedes were forced to retreat. Pehrsson’s headquarters bunker was only a hundred metres behind the Front, and when he saw that the line had broken he grabbed every man he could find and charged. There were just 12 of them. The Soviets were dumbstruck, and retreated in confusion. Pehrsson and his men took more than a hundred prisoners that day. For his bravery and example the young Swede was awarded the much-sought after Roll of Honour Clasp of the German Army (the Ehrenblattspange des deutschen Heeres). But the price was high – half of all the Company’s Swedish speakers were either killed or wounded in the fight. From now on the Swedish Waffen-SS numbered some 20 men all told. Pehrsson was not the only Scandinavian Waffen-SS man to distinguish himself during the first two battles of what became the Courland odyssey. The two Danes, Alfred Jonstrup and Per Sörensen, also earned the Roll of Honour Clasp for their bravery during a counter-attack. It cost the ex-Frikorps man Jonstrup half his jaw.

Overall, during the autumn fighting, casualties were very heavy on both sides. During September and October the four Red Army Fronts, (each roughly equivalent to a German Army in size) facing Army Group North’s two armies, lost a total of 56,800 men killed and 202,500 wounded. Broken down, the Leningrad Front lost 6,000 killed and 22,500 wounded, the 1st Baltic 24,000 killed and 79,000 wounded, the 2nd Baltic 15,000 killed and 58,000 wounded and the 3rd Baltic 11,800 killed and 43,000 wounded. German casualties were not on that scale, but tens of thousands had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner, and unlike the Soviets, their losses could not be replaced.

In late October and mid-November the Red Army launched further attacks on the trapped Germans, the Second and Third Battles of Courland. The fighting was intense, with the Nordland’s ever fewer panzers, armoured cars and half-tracks shuttled around the Pocket sealing off breakthrough after breakthrough. A German volunteer, SS-Rottenführer Albert Sudhoff, described some of the fighting:

When I walked around a shed I was suddenly standing in front of a T-34 that was pointing its gun at me. Frightened, I fired my panzerfaust and rushed into a shed. Outside there was a tremendous noise and I landed in the midst of some guys. At first I couldn’t see clearly but then I felt a sword-belt and a sidearm. I groped further and felt a sticky mess on my hands. It was a short while before I realised that comrades had gone into hiding before me and had not survived a direct hit … two Russians appeared at the door and I threw myself beside my comrades and played dead. The Ivans shot blindly into the heap and disappeared. A shot had struck me in the upper thigh, and my leg went its own way and shook around.

Then suddenly two SPW and a Sanka [German military ambulance] were outside … I was unnoticed and crawled out of the shed as best I could. The Sanka was filled to the roof with wounded men, and about 100 metres away from me – then it took a direct hit and I saw with horror how the bodies flew through the air.

Another German volunteer, SS-Unterscharführer Eduard ‘Edi’ Janke, recalled the Third Battle of Courland especially. Janke was a platoon commander in the 4th Company of the Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion and knew Pehrsson and his Schwedenzug well. He was a combat veteran and already held the Infantry Assault Badge, the Wound Badge and the Close Combat Clasp:

One day in December 1944 a heavy snowstorm began. I informed the whole platoon that the Russians would come in white camouflage and they should all be especially watchful. In the evening I lay down but was awakened by the shout of one of the machine-gunners; ‘Unterscharführer, the Russians are here!’ As I fired a white flare some 30 Red Army men stiffened at once. Immediately I shot off a second flare, then the machine-gunner on my right swung his gun round and fired a whole belt into them. When I fired my third flare we could see the Russians running away. Afterwards we found one wounded and nine dead Russians who had broken through our wire and had just planted a mine in front of us. I made a report and the company commander gave the alert gunner his own Iron Cross 1st Class. The name of the gunner was SS-Sturmmann Konrad.

The German Nordland Recce Battalion veteran, Eduard ‘Edi’ Janke. (James Macleod)

Even as the fighting went on, civilians, the wounded and some designated units were taken out of the Pocket and back to Germany by sea. The latter included most of the Nordland’s remaining armoured complement, who left their panzers to other units and headed back to Germany to be re-equipped. This, and combat attrition, reduced the Army Group’s strength down to 250,000 men by year end. The Ostheer desperately needed those men to defend eastern Germany, but the Nazi dictator would not countenance withdrawing them, despite pleas from his own Chief of the General Staff, the panzer legend Heinz Guderian. In Hitler’s own fevered imaginings, Schörner’s men not only tied down huge numbers of Soviet troops that could be better used elsewhere, but also safeguarded Swedish iron ore imports, enabled the Kriegsmarine to test new designs of U-Boats in the Baltic, and held out the prospect of launching a future grand offensive. This was beyond self-delusion, it was a kind of madness.

The Scandinavian Waffen-SS in 1944

1944 had been a seminal year for the Wiking and the Nordland, with vital roles in two of the bloodiest battles of the Russo-German war – Cherkassy and the Narva. Transfers and casualties had eaten away at the Germanic character of the Wiking so that by year end it was essentially a German SS division. Men like Ulf-Ola Olin continued to fly the flag for the Scandinavian Waffen-SS in their former ‘home’ formation, but to all intents and purposes the Nordland was now the heart of the Nordic SS. That division had been tempered in the fire of Estonia and Latvia, and had proved itself a worthy successor. Both of these units were emblematic of the Norwegians, Danes, Finns and Swedes in the ranks of the black guards, but they were not the whole story. Far away in the frozen north there were hundreds of Norwegians wearing the double sig runes and fighting the Red Army, and they were part of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS as well.

Norwegians in the Nordland may have been pretty thin on the ground, but there was no such problem in manning the ranks to fight in Finland, as a member of either the SS-Ski Battalion Norge or the SS-Police Companies, which were designed to serve alongside the SS-Nord division. The end of 1943 had seen the old SS-Ski Company Norge reorganised and strengthened into a roughly 450-man battalion commanded by the decorated German SS officer, Richard Benner. Benner led his men through their work-up training in Oulu, Finland and organised them into an upgraded version of the original unit, with three infantry companies and a headquarters company that included platoons of combat engineers, signallers, supply troops and medics. What they did not have, unlike the other battalions in the SS-Nord, was a heavy weapons company as it was not considered necessary for their stated role of mobile warfare and long-range patrolling.

They were joined in Oulu by the 160 volunteers of Hoel’s 2nd SS-Police Company, although Hoel soon handed over command to another ex-Norwegian Army officer, Lothar Lislegard. All too soon both units were sent north, to Karelia in north-eastern Finland, where they took up position on the Nord division’s left flank near Lake Tiiksjarvi in January 1944. They were now part of Germany’s 85,000 strong Twentieth Mountain Army (XX Gebirgsarmee) led by the victor of Narvik, Edouard Dietl. Alongside them were the Finnish Army numbering barely 180,000 frontline soldiers – the lines were thin indeed. Opposing them was the Finns’ old enemy from the Winter War, General Kirill Afanasievich Meretskov, and his Karelian Front comprising the Soviet 14th and 19th Armies, and farther south the much larger Leningrad Front. What became clear to the Norwegians very quickly was that this was not the Winter War anymore; the Red Army had changed and was now better led, better equipped and better trained. What had not changed was the Soviets’ ability to field massive forces. Facing the Finns, Germans and their Norwegian allies were 450,000 men, 11,000 artillery pieces (including 1,000 of the dreaded Katyusha rockets), 530 aircraft and 800 tanks. The Germans lacked any and all of these resources. It was going to be a long, hard spring and summer in the far north of Europe.

Back with the SS-Police and the Norge, the men began to settle into their new positions and role, and their expertise on skis and natural affinity with both the few locals and the terrain, made them a very welcome addition to Lothar Debes’s division. In the forested vastness of the landscape the Norwegians played an endless game of cat and mouse with their Red Army counterparts as both sides aggressively patrolled against each other. The men were quartered in huts and tents and even in wooden bunkers, but spent most of their time silently gliding through the forests on their skis looking for any Red Army troops bold enough to probe their positions.

Struggle at Schapk-Osero

The few pieces of high ground in the whole region were overwhelmingly in the hands of the Wehrmacht and Debes used them as a string of strongpoints to group his troops around and so dominate the surrounding countryside. This was probably the best tactic in the circumstances, but it did mean that there was the potential to be isolated, cut-off and annihilated. Heavy weapons and strong reserves could insure against this but the Germans lacked both. As it was, the SS-Police were grouped around a major strongpoint on the top of a hill called Schapk-Osero, with a single platoon semi-detached to the north on yet another hill, the Medevara. Like everybody else, the Company was almost alone in the wilderness, and found itself facing an enemy who was determined to attack across a broad front, seize the hills and control the area. After two months of stand-off and relative quiet, the Red Army threw an entire regiment against Schapk-Osero, outnumbering the defending Norwegians by 10 to 1. But Lislegard’s men had not been idle and had used their time to cut down every tree for several hundred yards, giving them deadly fields of fire. As their Finnish cousins had done some three years previously, the Norwegian SS men let the assaulting Soviets get to within a few metres of their positions before unleashing a devastating wall of automatic fire. The result was carnage. Soviet dead were piled waist high on the slopes and the attack disintegrated in a welter of blood. Having failed in their initial aim, the Red Army had to settle for repeated probing and heavy use of artillery, gradually thinning the Norwegian ranks. Over the next few weeks casualties mounted, which included two of the four Norwegian platoon commanders, SS-Untersturmführers Erling Markvik and Øystein Bech, both killed in action. Relieved from Schapk-Osero at the end of March, the remains of the Company were sent to the strongpoint at Sennosero, where they were merged with their countrymen of the SS-Ski Battalion Norge’s 1st Company under Willi Amundsen.

The Norge had not been idle either, and had already joined with a battlegroup from the SS-Nord in destroying a growing concentration of Soviet troops in front of the divisional line in the same month. The attack itself was intended as a short, sharp, shock action, but quickly developed into a major engagement as the Soviets brought heavy artillery to bear and rushed reinforcements forward. Although outnumbered, the SS troopers continued their attack until the Soviets abandoned their positions.

Kaprolat and Hasselmann Hills – the Norwegian SS fights for its life

Following the fighting in March the decision was taken by the SS authorities that a Norwegian should lead the SS-Ski Battalion, so Benner was replaced by the 38-year-old SS-Hauptsturmführer Frode Halle, flown up from the Narva front at the beginning of April. Halle was ex-Norwegian Army, who had then served in the DNL before transferring across to the SS-Nordland’s Norge Regiment. A professional, dedicated officer, he was an ideal choice to lead the battalion.

On arrival he found his new command holding an extremely long section of the line on the Nord’s northern flank. The main anchors were two hills; Kaprolat and Hasselmann, which were protected by log-trunk bunkers and trenches covered in thick protective snow. Fritz Grondt’s 3rd Company held Kaprolat, while SS-Obersturmführer Tor Holmesland Vik’s 2nd Company was based on Hasselmann (Vik had replaced Martin Skjefstad). Grondt was the only German company commander in the battalion and when he was wounded he was replaced by none other than Bjarne Dramstad’s old anti-tank commander from the DNL, Arnfinn Vik. Getting wounded in April cut Vik’s tenure short, and his place was taken by another Norwegian, SS-Untersturmführer Axel Steen, an ex-Norwegian Army officer and GSSN member. Constant patrolling had worn down the ranks, but the addition of Lislegard’s SS policemen had helped keep the unit in some sort of shape. However, within a couple of months everything had changed as the SS-Police finished their term of enlistment and were sent home and SS-Obersturmführer Sophus Kahrs’s 1st Company (Kahrs was ex-DNL and had taken over from Willi Amundsen) were detached to shore up the line elsewhere.

Halle and his remaining 300 men were now desperately vulnerable, and with the onset of summer, the defences on Kaprolat and Hasselmann lost the snow that hid them from view, softened the blast impact from artillery shells and provided the Norwegians with their mobility. Inexplicably, during this time of utmost danger, Halle (now promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer) was sent back to Norway on a staff assignment, and over a hundred of his men were also given home leave. On Kaprolat, Steen had just 57 men to man the defences.

Axel Steen, the Norwegian SS-Ski Norge officer in command of Kaprolat Hill in Finnish Karelia, summer 1944. Surrounded and almost out of ammunition he shot himself rather than surrender. (Erik Wiborg)

The Norwegian Nordland and then SS-Ski Battalion Norge commander, Frode Halle.

Kaprolat Hill today. With hills few and far between, they were key features in the cat and mouse fighting in Finnish Karelia. (Erik Wiborg)

Norwegian SS-Ski jägers return to their bunkers on Kaprolat Hill after another patrol. (Erik Wiborg)

Norwegian SS-Ski jägers on parade, clearly some of these soldiers are little more than boys, and soon they would be pitched into battle against the Red Army. (Erik Wiborg)

Norwegian SS MG34 machine-gun crew in action on the Finnish Front; they are wearing snow-shoes. (Erik Wiborg)

The Norwegian SS-Ski jägers use a mortar on the Finnish Front. (Erik Wiborg)

Panorama of an SS-Ski jäger patrol on the Finnish Front. (Erik Wiborg)

On 22 June the news started to filter through to the battalion that a massive Red Army offensive had struck Army Group Centre far to the south. Reports were very sketchy, but it was clear that the Soviet Bagration offensive was on a massive scale. Whilst not of the same magnitude, it would soon be the Norwegians’ turn. In fact, Meretskov had concentrated two of his full-strength Rifle Divisions to hit the SS-Nord, now little more than a brigade, and punch through their ‘Road Position’ on the Kiestinki-Louhi Corridor. The Norwegians were right in the path of the intended attack.

Three days after Bagration began to tear Army Group Centre to pieces, the Soviets launched their own offensive in Karelia. Kaprolat was targeted first. A massive artillery barrage was followed by an entire regiment of assaulting infantry who swarmed up the hill’s pretty gentle slopes. Steen and his men fought back ferociously and inflicted horrific casualties on the Russians. One of the Soviet regiment’s battalions was reduced from 400 to just 36 men in the fighting. But the end was inevitable. Bunkers and trenches fell throughout the day and night, until finally the Soviets reached Steen’s command post and surrounded it early the following morning. Along with Steen, who was already wounded, was his fellow Norwegian, SS-Standartenoberjunker Birger-Ernst Jonsson. With ammunition running out, Steen and Jonsson shot themselves rather than surrender. Only one Norwegian commander was still alive, Jonsson’s Bad Tölz classmate SS-Standartenoberjunker Kaare Børsting. He gathered the few survivors together and led them in a desperate breakout attempt. Fighting all the way, Børsting managed to guide the remnants of his Company to Hasselmann Hill where they gratefully threw themselves into the arms of the 2nd Company. Their relief was short-lived though, as the Red Army offensive rolled on and hit them later that same day. Hasselmann saw the same pattern as at Kaprolat, with massed Russian artillery being followed up by determined infantry assault. As at Kaprolat, the Norwegian SS men put up a stout defence, but the odds were stacked against them. When Kaare Børsting was killed as his stick grenade detonated before he could throw it, the heart went out of the defence and the hill fell. A handful of Norwegians escaped the disaster and fled west, where they married up with a relief column from the SS-Nord’s SS-Mountain Regiment 11 Reinhard Heydrich sent to support them.

It was too late. The SS-Ski Battalion Norge had been virtually exterminated. Halle had rushed back from Norway but had been too late to save his unit from destruction. In less than three days of fighting the 2nd and 3rd Companies were wiped out, with an estimated 135 volunteers killed and more than 40 captured. Fifteen of these prisoners did somehow manage to overpower their guards and escape back to German lines but it was scant consolation. For their unluckier comrades, years in the gulags awaited them. It was not until 1955 that the last Kaprolat POWs were repatriated from the Soviet Union after 11 dreadful years in captivity.

A Norwegian SS-Ski trooper kitted out for the cold of Finnish Karelia. (Erik Wiborg)

Lonely sentry duty for SS-Ski troopers in the snowy wastes of Karelia. (Erik Wiborg)

Norwegian SS-Ski troopers on another long patrol across the silent forests of Finland. (Erik Wiborg)

SS-Ski grenadiers pose in Finnish Karelia; the middle trooper is armed with a Soviet submachine-gun. Many troopers used captured Russian weapons on account of their sturdiness, reliability and ready access to ammunition. (Erik Wiborg)

As for the dead, alongside Steen, Jonsson and Børsting, the 3rd Company lost its other two platoon commanders, Rolf Walstrøm and the SS-Wiking veteran Tor Torjussen. Second Company lost one of its platoon commanders, Sverre-Andersen Østerdal (who had been the President of the Norwegian Sporting Association), its most senior NCO, SS-Oberscharführer (‘Senior Squad Leader’) Ola Magnussen, and its overall commander, Holmesland Vik, who had been badly wounded. To put Kaprolat and Hasselmann in context, the DNL lost 158 legionnaires killed in more than 12 months service at the Front, and the SS-Ski Battalion Norge lost about the same in less than 72 hours.

Aftermath

The Norge had taken a hammering but its solid defence had helped the SS-Nord to stem the Soviet tide. The same was true along the line as Wehrmacht and Finnish units held out, taking the steam out of the Russian assaults. Fighting continued for most of the next month, but without a decisive breakthrough. Kahrs’s 1st Company was reunited with their surviving comrades and took a full part in the defensive battles. Halle and Kahrs were awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class for their bravery, as was Steen, although his award was posthumous. With the Front now quiet the SS-Ski Battalion set about building new defensive positions on the Sohjana River and reorganising, and one company was even sent to man an island in Lake Pundum from where it patrolled up to the neighbouring Lake Pja. Any enemy they spotted were dealt with by long-range artillery fire from the SS-Nord’s guns to the south.

The return of the troopers on leave gave the battalion a significant boost, as did the recovered wounded like Arnfinn Vik who came back as a company commander. A fresh tranche of 50 new recruits also fleshed out the ranks, as did the arrival of Berg’s 3rd SS-Police Company fresh from training at Sennheim. The battalion was now back up to a strength in excess of 400 men, and prepared to face further action against the Red Army. However on 4 September 1944 the situation changed dramatically.

The Norwegian 3rd SS-Police Company is inspected. (Erik Wiborg)

The Norwegian 3rd SS-Police Company take a break during training in 1944. Their generally unpopular commander, Aage-Henry Berg, is in the middle at the back wearing the peaked cap. (Erik Wiborg)

Finland capitulates

The utter destruction of Army Group Centre and the astonishing loss of 350,000 German soldiers in a few short weeks had convinced Marshal Mannerheim and the rest of the Finnish Government that Nazi Germany was beaten. Their only hope to avoid calamity was to negotiate an honourable surrender. The Red Army offensives against Karelia had been stopped but the attack out of Leningrad had not; the Soviets were now advancing north killing thousands of Finland’s best troops. Moscow’s peace terms were not unduly harsh, but they did demand that Finland turn her armed forces on her erstwhile ally and expel all German military personnel, by force if necessary, in a matter of weeks. The Germans had laid contingency plans for a Finnish surrender, even so, considering the vast distances involved there was no way they could comply. They had hardly any vehicles and little fuel in any case, the roads were few and generally pretty poor and the withdrawal route to Narvik was more than 1,000 kilometres long. The scene was set for tragedy.

Dietl had died in an air crash back in June, so it was the Twentieth Mountain Army’s new commander, Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic, who led the retreat back to Norway. Rendulic would later go on to command the III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps and its component Norwegians. The SS-Nord was used as the Army’s rearguard, and the SS-Ski Battalion Norge as the SS-Nord’s rearguard. Thus they were some of the very last Wehrmacht men to cross over into their homeland some three months later after having to fight off attacks from their old allies. The irony was complete, the Norwegian SS men had volunteered to fight alongside their Finnish cousins and had ended up shooting at them. Bjarne Dramstad took part in the withdrawal as a member of the 3rd SS-Police Company:

At the beginning of September Finland capitulated, this led to mixed emotions in the Company, some were angry that they were not given the chance to fight the Russians and help the Finns, but I could really understand them, they were under enormous pressure and had to do what they could to save their country. But it was bitter, most of the Finns probably felt the same.

Well, we were given the order to walk back, thousands and thousands of soldiers retreated on the long, cold, hard march. I was given the job of being head of the Company’s field-kitchen, this was a good but demanding job, as we were constantly on the move so it was hard to keep the food warm.

In Rovaniemi an ammunition train was blown up and I was thrown onto the field-kitchen, but didn’t get any injuries. A lot of the NCOs and soldiers were constantly drunk in Rovaniemi, the four years of war had taken their toll, and by now we knew the war was lost. Finally we reached the Norwegian border at Skibotn. Luckily the Finns never attacked us, that would have been very hard for me, I had struggled so hard to fight for the Finns, so this was an ironic end to it all. First I was fooled by the Germans and sent to the Leningrad front and not to Finland as promised, and finally when I managed to get there the Finns gave up.

Bjarne Dramstad (helmeted soldier shaking hands) receives the Police Honour Medal (Politiets Hederstegn) from Jonas Lie himself in Oslo, spring 1943. (Knut Thoresen)

Back in Norway while the Norge was sent south to Oslo, Bjarne and his comrades were kept in Narvik and used as hunting teams (Jagdkommandos), to patrol the far northern border, guarding against Red Army incursions and local resistance:

Service in the Jagdkommandos in Norway meant hard, long ski patrols that lasted for days, often under harsh conditions. Our squad was stationed in a farm at Dividalen National Park patrolling the border area. The farmer, as I later found out, was connected to the Resistance, and he probably warned them when we went out on patrols. This gave me a great respect for him even though he belonged to the other side. I had the pleasure of meeting him [in 2007], he was then one hundred years old, but still remembered how he fooled us during the war. This gave us both a good laugh.

Vidkun Quisling inspects men of the Norwegian SS-Ski Battalion Norge. (Erik Wiborg)

Bjarne’s service finally ended early the following year when his Company was first sent south to Oslo and then subsequently disbanded. His old company commander, Oscar Rustand was trying to establish a 4th Company at the same time of course for one last throw of the dice but needless to say there were few takers.

As for the Norge down in Oslo, it was renamed the SS-Ski Battalion 506 (motorised), and ordered to prepare to combat a possible communist-inspired uprising and root out any internal resistance. That was a step too far for Frode Halle who refused to fire on fellow Norwegians, he relinquished command and the old SS-Police company commander and Iron Cross 1st Class holder, Reidar-Egil Hoel, took over. It was an inglorious end to a story full of heroism and tragedy. The specialist Norwegian SS ski troopers had joined to help Finland and ended up in Lappland fighting alongside Germans and some three hundred kilometres from the nearest Finnish unit. There, in a beautiful but forgotten wilderness, they had lost more than half their number in vicious fighting, and had then been ignominiously cast out by the very people they had signed up to fight for. Back home they were then expected to turn their guns on their own countrymen.