Chapter 16:
The end of the war and the legacy of the Waffen-SS.
In the final days of January 1945, “Sepp” Dietrich’s battered panzer divisions went through one last cycle of receiving new equipment and recruits to prepare them for another offensive. This time their Führer wanted his panzer élite to turn back the Soviet spearheads that had overrun Hungary and were threatening the Third Reich’s last oilfields.
The Waffen-SS veterans of the Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Hohenstaufen and Hitlerjugend Divisions went through the procedures of preparing for this new battle, but many were just going through the motions and were openly talking about Germany losing the war. Others were dismayed that Hitler was even contemplating sending his last armoured reserves on a wild-goose chase into a backwater, when the might of the Red Army was less than 80km (50 miles) from Berlin itself.
The Führer wanted his offensive, and he got it. In mid-February, Dietrich’s troopers launched forward into their final offensive, going into battle alongside their Waffen-SS comrades from the Wiking and Totenkopf Divisions. Dietrich’s army was renamed the Sixth SS Panzer Army to signify its enhanced status. For a month they seemed to have the initiative, bringing back memories of the old days. It was not to last. The Soviets soon regained their composure, then began to drive back the Waffen-SS men. Gaining momentum, the Soviet steamroller started to roll westwards. Dietrich’s men barely managed to get out of Hungary, and were struggling to avoid encirclement.
Hitler was furious that his favoured Waffen-SS divisions had ignored his orders to fight to the last man. Underground in his Berlin bunker with Soviet troops closing in, a ranting Hitler insisted that the Leibstandarte and Hitlerjugend men remove his name from their sleeve cuffs. This was the final straw for the dispirited men of Dietrich’s battered army as they struggled across the Austrian border. Dietrich’s remaining troops tried to stage a rearguard action to defend Vienna, but it was futile. Soon they were heading westwards again. Once back on German soil, many of the conscripts now serving in the ranks of the Waffen-SS began to drift away. The hardcore officers started to concentrate on getting themselves and their remaining men away from the vengeful Soviets. Fighting the Führer’s war was no longer their priority.
Rush for safety
When Hitler committed suicide in Berlin on 29 April, he released his Praetorian Guard of their oath of loyalty to him. The retreat through Austria and Czechoslovakia now became a headlong rush for the West and safety. It was hoped the British and Americans would afford them civilized treatment as prisoners of war under the terms of the Geneva Convention.
In the first week of May 1945, as Germany formally surrendered, the Waffen-SS panzer divisions entered captivity in different degrees of dignity. The bulk of Dietrich’s army managed to escape the Soviet armoured columns which were snapping at their heels. When the hour came for them to lay down their arms, many of the Waffen-SS men meekly surrendered to American troops. Others took to the hills in the hope of finding their way home. Dietrich himself headed for Switzerland, dressed in traditional Bavarian costume, with his wife. Many of these fugitives, including Dietrich, were captured, although some were spirited away by the shadowy Odessa group to exile in Switzerland, Spain and South America. Das Reich’s Heinz Lammerding and the flamboyant Otto Skorzeny were among the lucky few.
The Leibstandarte, Das Reich and Wiking Divisions managed to evade Czech partisans to reach American lines, then just melted into the countryside and never formally surrendered. The Hitlerjugend Division marched up to American lines to surrender, but when a Soviet tank column appeared, its men panicked and stampeded straight past the GIs. The Hohenstaufen Division was able to peacefully surrender en masse to American troops, but its sister Frundsberg Division from II SS Panzer Corps was fighting in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war and was overrun. Most of its men ended up in Stalin’s Siberian Gulag. A similar fate awaited the men of the Totenkopf Division which, although it managed to surrender to the Americans, was handed over to the Soviets.
As the remnants of Dietrich’s army were being rounded up in a string of temporary prisoner-of-war camps spread through southern Germany, it began to dawn on the Waffen-SS that the victorious Western Allies were not going to treat them as honourable defeated opponents. The officers were soon separated from their men, and squads of investigators arrived to take statements about the deaths of Allied prisoners of war in a spate of incidents from Normandy to the Ardennes.
At the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, the Allies declared that the whole of the SS, including the Waffen-SS, was a criminal organization. At a stroke, the imprisoned Waffen-SS men were stripped of the protection of the Geneva Convention. Soon the war crimes trials started. The Canadians went after Kurt Meyer and his Hitlerjugend men for their alleged involvement in the killing of their captured soldiers in the battles after D-Day. Das Reich commanders were pursued by the French for the Oradour massacre, and Lammerding was condemned to death in absentia.
Many Leibstandarte officers were rounded up by the Americans, herded into the former concentration camp at Dachau, and tried for the killings of captured GIs in the Ardennes. The mass trial of the Leibstandarte commanders, including Dietrich and Peiper, had a theatrical quality about it. Many of the 74 defendants said they had been tortured into signing confessions, and the trial was rigged against them. Given Dietrich’s role in the extra-judicial executions during the early years of Hitler’s reign of terror, this was rather ironic. Peiper and 42 others were sentenced to death by hanging. All the others, including Dietrich, either received life sentences or – such as Dietrich’s faithful chief of staff, Fritz Kraemer – got similar long spells in prison. The Italians joined the war crimes effort, attempting to get Peiper extradited for the killing of civilians during the Leibstandarte’s brief posting to their country in the autumn of 1943. Peiper successfully resisted this move. Two Leibstandarte members, however, were convicted by a Belgian court in 1948 for their part in the killing of civilians in Stavelot.
British leniency
The British were less inclined to participate in this process. Perhaps the good treatment of the thousands of British paratroopers captured at Arnhem by Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps meant that the Waffen-SS was less of a hate principle to the British public. The only Waffen-SS commander suspected of killing British POWs, Wilhelm Mohnke, was never prosecuted. He had been captured in Hitler’s Berlin bunker by the Russians, and did not return home from Siberia until 1955. He was never charged, and was still living in freedom in Hamburg in the 1990s.
Paul Hausser and Willi Bittrich were held and charged by the British, along with several senior Wehrmacht generals – including the famous Erich von Manstein – of war crimes in German-occupied Russia. They were convicted of being in command appointments when mass murder and other war crimes occurred.
Commuted sentences for the SS
By the early 1950s, the international mood had changed, as the Western Allies were locked into the Cold War with Stalin’s Soviet Union. The western part of Germany was rehabilitated as the Federal Republic and the frontline base for NATO’s military stand-off with the Communist Warsaw Pact. Only two Hitlerjugend men were ever executed for war crimes. All the rest had their sentences commuted. Slowly and without fanfare, the Waffen-SS men were released from jail. Jochen Peiper was one of the last to be set free in 1957.
The newly released Hausser and Meyer formed HIAG, the Waffen-SS veterans’ organization, to campaign to rehabilitate Hitler’s élite fighting unit. They attempted to have the German parliament, the Bundestag, to differentiate between the General-SS and Waffen-SS. It was defeated in 1961.
Most of the former Waffen-SS officers and soldiers tried to put the war behind them and make a living in the new Germany. They shared many different fates. Lammerding, as well as Heinz Harmel and Walther Harzer, all became successful businessmen. Others went on to become minor public officials or lowly labourers.
The infamous Peiper, the so-called butcher of Malmédy, became the lightning rod for the public obsession with all things Nazi. He was hounded from one job to another. The Italian Government tried to have him extradited, then Italian workers in the Volkswagen car factory boycotted him. In 1970 he slipped quietly out of Germany and moved to France to try to live out his remaining years in obscurity, earning a living translating books.
When a French newspaper tracked him down to his log cabin in Traves, he started to receive death threats, allegedly from the Italian Red Brigades terrorist group. On 14 July 1976 his house was attacked by unknown gunmen. The former Waffen-SS commander was killed and his cabin burned to the ground. No one was ever brought to justice for the incident.
More than 50 years after the end of World War II, the exploits of the Waffen-SS continue to be the subject of debate. They are portrayed either as evil war criminals, or as simple soldiers who were on the wrong side of the victors’ justice.
The zealous Waffen-SS
The Allied trials of the Waffen-SS men were far from perfect, but they were more than most Nazi victims ever received. These Waffen-SS men were almost all volunteers and fanatical Nazis. They all believed in the justice of their cause and fought the war with a degree of zeal rarely found on the Allied side. Of the million or so men who served in the Waffen-SS, over one-third died in battle. This was an unprecedented level of casualties that few other fighting formations, outside the Imperial Japanese Army, could equal.
On the battlefields of northwest Europe in the last year of the war, Hitler’s Waffen-SS gave their all for him. In Normandy they thwarted all of General Montgomery’s attempts to break out of his bridgeheads and, after the American breakout, Waffen-SS generals took charge of the situation, leading trapped German Army units to safety out of the Falaise Kessel.
At Arnhem, the lightning reaction of II SS Panzer Corps put paid to Montgomery’s ambitious plan to end the war by Christmas. Two months later the Waffen-SS was in the forefront of the Ardennes Offensive, making some of the deepest penetration into American lines. The fact they got so far, given the terrible weather and road conditions, was a remarkable feat of arms. Even though Hitler’s plan was fundamentally flawed and over-ambitious, Waffen-SS commanders gave it their best shot. Five years into the war, despite their over-riding losses, they still believed Germany could win.
In the end, the Waffen-SS troops were unable to turn back the Allied tide. Less than a year after D-Day, Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich was in ruins. Their tactical prowess and fanatical fighting spirit could not compensate for Allied numerical and materiel superiority. For every Sherman tank the Waffen-SS knocked out in Normandy, there were 10 to take its place. At the same time, thousands of Allied fighter-bombers swarmed over the German Army in Normandy, denying it the freedom of manoeuvre.
On top of this must be added the effect of the Führer’s crazy orders to hold to the last man in every situation. While the fanatical resistance of the Waffen-SS undoubtedly lengthened the war, Hitler’s insistence on holding Caen, his mad Mortain counter-attack and his demands that the Ardennes offensive be continued into January 1945, all doomed the Waffen-SS to suffer horrendous and irreplaceable losses. Without the Führer’s interference, the Waffen-SS panzers might have held out even longer.
For the opponents of the Waffen-SS panzer divisions, the experience was traumatic. For the British and Canadian armies in Normandy, fighting the Waffen-SS resulted in casualty levels on a par with those experienced in World War I. The British Army ended the war in total awe of its German opponents, and began to recast its armoured doctrine and tactics along the lines of those used by the Waffen-SS in Normandy. The all-arms battle group became the normal tactical formation, and the mission command procedure was adopted instead of the rigid directed command method used in Normandy. The main post-war British tank, the Chieftain, was designed along the lines of the German Tiger. It was designed with armoured protection and firepower as the overriding priority, rather than the vehicle’s mobility.
The Americans, who never had to face large numbers of Tigers in Normandy, stuck to their concept of having lightly armoured medium tanks, along the lines of the Sherman. It was not until the 1970s that the Americans followed the lead of the British, and opted to field a heavily armoured tank, the M1 Abrams. This was part of a major effort by the US Army to recast its doctrine and equipment to counter the Soviets on NATO’s central front. Suddenly, the Americans looked to the experiences of the Waffen-SS armoured units in their defensive battles and began to draw lessons from the tactics of their former enemies.
Fortunately for the people of occupied Europe, the attempt by Hitler’s Waffen-SS panzer divisions to hold back the Allies failed. In the autumn of 1944 France and Belgium were freed from Nazi tyranny. The defeat of Operation Autumn Mist prevented the return of German rule to Belgium and the final defeat of Germany in May 1945 completed the liberation of Europe.
Hitler’s élite panzer force was designed and built to protect his murderous regime. Behind its protective shield, millions of innocents were slaughtered and others oppressed. Evil certainly reigned in the shadow of the Waffen-SS.