Hitler's Vikings E-Book

Jonathan Trigg

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 502

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Nazis' dream of a world dominated by legions of Aryan 'supermen', forged in battle and absolutely loyal to Hitler, was epitomised by the Waffen-SS. Created as a supreme military élite, it grew to become Nazi Germany's 'second army', an immense force totalling almost one million men by the end of the War. An astonishing fact about the SS is that thousands of its members were not German. Men stepped forward from almost every nation in Europe — for many, sometimes complex reasons — that included hatred of Bolshevism and nationalist sentiment or even straightforward anti-Semitism. Foremost amongst them were Scandinavians from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Thousands were recruited from 1940 onwards and fought with distinction on the Russian Front. They served at first in national legions but were then brought together in the Wiking Panzer Division and the Nordland Panzer-grenadier Division. In Hitler's Vikings, Jonathan Trigg details the battles these men fought and what inspired them to join the Waffen-SS, based wherever possible on interviews with surviving veterans. Many of the photographs reproduced here have never before been published. Hitler's 'Vikings' were amongst the last men still fighting in the ruins of Berlin in 1945 — their story is truly remarkable.

Leseprobe

Furious, the Bolsheviks threw themselves against us, the situation was hopeless but the boys fought formidably. While I helped Gebauer to feed the MG with new ammunition I could hear myself swearing non-stop, wishing them the worst possible tortures in hell. I let Gebauer handle the MG alone while I fired alternatively with the assault rifle and with my sub-machine gun. He forgot the danger, pushing his chest above the parapet in order to fire better. ‘Down!’ I screamed but he laughed, he was just 19 years old. Too late. Gebauer suddenly jerked backwards and sank to one side. I turned him around towards me. He was hit under the left eye, the bullet passing through his neck. He was still alive, blood flowing down from cheek and neck. He begged; ‘Write to my mother … just a few lines …’ and then I was alone.

(Swedish SS-Unterscharführer Erik Wallin)

Front of jacket: Berlin 1945 – the end. Ragnar Johansson, probably the last Swedish Waffen-SS grenadier to die in World War II, lies next to the shattered Nordland Sdkfz 251 half-track he drove over the Weidendammer Bridge as he, Hans-Gösta Pehrsson and other Nordland survivors tried to escape the city after Hitler’s suicide.

To Erik, a soldier and a gentleman, rest in peace.

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Text

Preface

Introduction

I 1940 – Occupation, the SS-Wiking and the beginning of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS

II 1941: First Blood – the Den Norske Legion, the Frikorps Danmark and the Wiking in Barbarossa

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

IV 1943: The End of the Legions, the SS-Nordland is Born

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

VI 1945: The End of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS – the Wiking in Hungary and the Nordland in Berlin

VII Homecoming – Retribution and Legacy

Appendix A Wehrmacht Bravery Awards

Appendix B Waffen-SS Formation Organisation

Appendix C Waffen-SS Ranks

Bibliography

Copyright

Acknowledgements

This book was probably the first one I thought of writing when I set out on my journey, more than seven years ago now, to chronicle the various foreign volunteer contingents of the Waffen-SS. After all the SS-Wiking was far and away the most famous of the ‘non-German’ élite divisions and, as its deliberately evocative name suggests, Scandinavians were meant to be its mainstay. Yet I decided early on to delay it for later in the series, saving the best until last perhaps, who knows, that’s for others to decide. One unexpected advantage of that decision was that along the way I was able to meet and make contact with a host of people from all over the world whose interest in and knowledge of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS is second to none.

Foremost among this cohort are of course the veterans themselves. Thousands of Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns served in the Waffen-SS during the Second World War and although battle and old age has winnowed their numbers, there remains a relatively large community of men who were eyewitnesses to the greatest and most terrible conflict the world has ever seen. Their willingness to talk to me and share their memories and experiences are the very foundation stones of this book, and I am in their debt. In particular I would like to thank Bjørn Østring and his amazing wife Bergljot, Paul and Gertrude Hveger (as ever a soldier’s wife is his most prized asset!), Bjarne Dramstad, Vagner Kristensen, Erwin Bartmann, and the utterly irrepressible Jan Munk. To all I say a huge thank you and I hope the book does you and your memories justice. And a very special thank you to Greta Brörup and her husband Erik, who passed away in January 2010; Greta, I am saddened by your loss.

Alongside these veterans stand a great many others who have been instrumental in making this book a reality. First among equals is James Macleod, historian, enthusiast and soldier. Knut Flovik Thoresen of the Norwegian Army and Jens Post of the Danish Army (good luck in Afghanistan, Jens) have been a huge help. Not that wearing a uniform was a pre-requisite; a whole phalanx of civilian experts stepped forward too, such as the brilliant Lennart Westberg and Martin Mansson from Sweden, Olli Wikberg from Finland, from Australia Hugh Page-Taylor, from Florida Erik Wiborg (historian and shipping broker no less), and the ever-generous Paul Errington, Chris Hale and John Moore. Last but never least the captain of print and photo wizardry – Tim Shaw (and his eager apprentice Max). To those not named I apologise and offer my thanks.

In my first two volumes I followed the lives of volunteers from before the war, through their recruitment and service, and beyond. In my third instalment this was impossible given the almost total lack of surviving Muslim veterans. This time round there was an embarrassment of riches, and I decided it would be unfair to single out two or three veterans, which would have left the contributions of many others out in the cold. I hope readers agree this was the best approach.

Alongside the testimony of eyewitnesses, historians like nothing more than written primary sources, and in this context these usually consist of fading unit diaries, after-action reports, and citations. So many of these valuable records were lost at the end of the war but those that survived are looked after by some incredibly competent individuals who are seemingly always willing to help writers, so thank you again to Frau Carina Notzke at the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg, and to Frau Martina Caspers in Koblenz.

The work of other writers has of course been invaluable. Firstly, the incomparable Paul Carrell, whose pioneering work in the 1960s, Hitler’s War on Russia, looking at the war with the Soviet Union from a German viewpoint, should be required reading for everyone studying the period. Secondly, Douglas E. Nash’s book on the Battle of the Cherkassy Pocket, Hell’s Gate, delivers that rare treat, an astounding work of history and a cracking read.

Beyond veterans and archives, and often linking the two, lies the growing power of the internet. As online communities become ever-more pervasive and well-connected they can act as invaluable research and information tools, and for this topic yet again Troy Tempest’s www.feldpost.tv/forum and Jason Pipes’ www.feldgrau.net were incredibly useful.

Thank you as well to everyone who has bought and read Hitler’s Gauls, Hitler’s Flemish Lions and Hitler’s Jihadis; I hope that this fourth instalment doesn’t disappoint. Several people helped me with proof reading and with the text, made suggestions and amendments and corrected mistakes to improve the writing and flow, for that I thank them, and whilst I have of course made every effort to achieve accuracy if there are any mistakes then they are entirely my own.

Lastly I have now officially given up trying to convert my wife Rachel into becoming a fan of military history. It was a valiant effort but I am big enough to admit defeat. But, as ever, she has supported me all the way, and if this is the last book in the series I owe her a huge thank you for all the support over the years. As for the ever-wonderful Maddy and Jack, as this is the only part of the book they will read I will say read on and you never know, you might like it!

Notes on the Text

Military ranks: Waffen-SS ranks are used throughout for Waffen-SS personnel. A conversion chart to comparative British Army ranks has been provided as Appendix B. For officers and soldiers of the German Army (Heer) their ranks are given firstly in their original German and then the British Army equivalents in brackets. Red Army ranks are given directly in British Army terms.

Military terminology: As far as possible the military terminology used is that of the time and the army involved, on occasion an attempt has been made to ‘translate’ that terminology into modern British Army parlance in order to aid understanding.

Unit designation: All German orders of battle use an English translation and then the original unit designation, e.g. Mountain Corps is followed by ‘Gebirgs Korps’ in brackets, and this is continued throughout except in certain circumstances where it is further simplified to improve the flow of the text or to establish authenticity, as in the relevant chapter titles. The only exceptions to this rule are for the national legions from Norway and Denmark. As so many veterans from those units have been extremely kind to me in researching this book I feel it only right that I repay that kindness by using their own names for their formations. So I use the Danish ‘Frikorps Danmark’ instead of the German ‘Freikorps Danmark’ and the Norwegian ‘Den Norske Legion’ (the DNL) instead of the German ‘Legion Norwegen’. I hope this doesn’t confuse readers. Again, to remain true to the time, Russian formations are numbered, while German formations at corps or army level are either written out or use the original Roman numerals. Smaller units such as divisions and regiments are numbered.

Foreign words: Where non-English words are used they are italicised unless in common usage and English translations are provided. If they are then used often in the text they are no longer italicised.

Measurements: Distances are given in miles but weapon calibres are given in their usual metric form.

Place names: Particularly with regard to places in the former Soviet Union I have stuck with one spelling if there are several, mostly the one in common usage at the time, but have also initially tried to include other derivations in brackets to aid the reader following the ebb and flow of campaigns on any modern maps they may have. However, I am aware that since the Ukraine achieved its independence many place names have rightly been ‘ukrainianised’; I have tried to include them as well. French has its accents, German its umlaut, and the Scandinavian languages have their own intonations; I have tried to get this right, if I have failed I apologise.

Preface

Scans of every general-interest book on the Waffen-SS, and they are legion, constantly refer to Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns serving in their ranks and fighting in some of the most famous battles of the war. In fact the first ever book I read on the Waffen-SS, Rupert Butler’s The Black Angels, made enough references to these men to whet the appetite but not satisfy it. Like many others I was fascinated and wanted to know more. I dug deeper and found myself in a wholly unexpected world. A world not of dry history but of real people whose personalities began to emerge from the text: of a paranoid Adolf Hitler wanting a dedicated body of troops to protect him and his rule from overthrow, of Heinrich Himmler carrying out genocide for his master while dreaming of vast armies of blond, blue-eyed ‘supermen’ from every corner of the globe and all under his control. Suddenly the monsters weren’t under the bed any more but on the page.

The Waffen-SS has gone through several permutations in the public mind. A tiny gang of strong-arm thugs became goose-stepping giants decked out in sinister black uniforms. War transformed the picture into one of a brand-new military élite winning plaudits in campaign after campaign. Yet the trophies were tarnished. The links to the concentration camps, the Holocaust and the utter barbarity of the regime they served lingered on. Then in a post-war world, to quote the title of Gerald Reitlinger’s famous book, they became the ‘alibi of a nation’. Even now the armed SS stir up waves of controversy. Perhaps it is too much to hope for sober reflection and examination of the men who won such tremendous victories against the odds as the capture of Belgrade, the storming of the Klissura Pass and the victory at Kharkov, while at the same time shooting unarmed prisoners-of-war at Le Paradis and Malmédy.

There were no Scandinavians at Le Paradis or Malmédy, but they wore the same uniform as the men who pulled the triggers at those massacres. This book, the fourth in the Hitler’s Legions series, seeks to uncover the reality behind the myth. Why was there a Scandinavian Waffen-SS and what did they and their recruiters hope to achieve? The men who went off to war, sometimes thousands of miles from their homes, often did not return. For those that fought it was an intensely personal experience, and while the history of the great battles of the Second World War has been written and re-written it is far too easy to get lost in the sweeping movements of vast armies and forget that those hosts were made up of individuals, each struggling to do his or her duty and survive. This book seeks in some small way to tell the story of those individual soldiers caught up in what is still, and hopefully will remain, the largest war ever fought. As one of the veterans said to me at the end of an interview:

Last but not least, make sure that you do your very best to stop anything like it from ever happening again. Make sure that you and future generations will not have to face an ordeal like the one mine had to. So much evil, so many tears, so much blood … never again.

Jon Trigg

Sheffield, UK

Introduction

Let thunder growl, you were louder than it.

Let the winds blow, you were swifter than they.

Let the water freeze, you were harder than ice.

Let the wolves ravage, you were fiercer than they.

You were a man, a warrior, a Viking,

and none was your master, until one day your day was done,

and you went into the darkness still laughing.

From the thirteenth century Icelandic Viking saga, The Burning of Njal

Vikings, Northmen, the Norse – the very names themselves conjure up romantic and bloody images of strident, horn-helmed warriors and dragon-prowed longboats, of adventure, glory and legendary discovery. For almost 500 years, from around AD 800, these raiders and sea pirates terrorised huge swathes of Europe and Asia. In their open boats they dominated the North and Baltic Seas, sailed down the Liffey, the Humber, the Seine, the Dnieper and the Volga, crossed the Atlantic to colonise Iceland and Greenland, and even reached the New World centuries before Christopher Columbus was born.

At first they would appear from nowhere to raid and pillage, and then just as quickly sail away home, then they began to come to conquer and to settle. Hundreds of thousands of Scandinavians left their beautiful but poor homelands to make new lives in Ireland, Britain, France, the Baltic lands and even the Ukraine. With a sword in one hand, and more often than not, a bag of trade goods in the other they turned the seas and rivers of Europe into highways for commerce as well as routes for raiding and savagery. They founded cities that are still with us today like Dublin and Limerick, as well as long-disappeared states such as Kiev Rus, the Duchy of Normandy and the Orkneys. Sailors, merchants and craftsmen, they were first and foremost warriors whose military prowess was recognised as far away as Constantinople, the fabled Great City of Viking storytelling, ‘Miklagard’. In that city they formed the Emperor’s bodyguard, his élite Varangians.

Then, like a powerful storm, they seemed to blow themselves out. Having changed the face of Europe they disappeared from it. Other nations and peoples came to the fore as the Scandinavians sank into the relative obscurity that enfolds them still. Where once they were central to Europe and its future, they became little more than its northern fringe, both geographically and politically. A brief resurgence of empire and power for royal Sweden came in the seventeenth century but was abruptly ended by Peter the Great in the bloody defeat at Poltava in 1709.

Christianised during their heyday of pillage and war, the Scandinavians then began to form into centralised kingdoms that became free and peaceful constitutional monarchies over the course of centuries, and all without the trauma of a revolution or civil war. Multi-party democracy has become the accepted norm, and the modern states of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland were, and still are, prosperous and contented. Cultural traditions are strong and celebrated wholeheartedly, but the cult of the warrior (the dominant aspect of Viking life) has been firmly rejected; the national armies are small and poorly funded, and neutrality is the default position. When the horror of industrialised war enveloped Europe in 1914, the Scandinavians remained aloof and avoided the butchery of the trenches. Involvement in the Second World War was forced on them by invaders, but even then Sweden managed to remain neutral and free throughout.

As the populations of other European countries exploded with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and huge migrations swept across borders, the total number of Scandinavians stayed relatively low and the different populations remained ethnically homogenous. Even today, with pretty liberal asylum and immigration policies, the number of immigrants is remarkably low in comparison to elsewhere in Europe. On the eve of the Second World War the entire populations of Sweden (6.5 million), Denmark (4.5 million), Finland (4 million) and Norway (3.5 million) added up to less than a third of Great Britain’s, and minorities tended to be very small and made up of other Scandinavians – Finland’s biggest minority was ethnic Swedes.

Yet despite the passage of centuries the image of the Viking warrior has persisted, and was never more powerful than during the war that engulfed Europe from 1939 to 1945. It exerted a powerful pull on some members of the Nazi leadership, and found expression in the creation of six legions, battalions and divisions in the Nazis’ own Varangian guard, an organisation that remains deeply controversial even now, more than 60 years later – the Waffen-SS. The numbers involved were significant as well, with between 10 and 20,000 Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns joining during the war; the entire pre-war Danish armed forces numbered just 6,600 men.

At first the only Scandinavians in the Waffen-SS were a handful who joined before the war, and even then most of them were either ethnic Germans born the wrong side of a re-drawn border or of mixed German/Scandinavian parentage. But that didn’t matter as the Waffen-SS was established as a German and not a multi-national force, intended to showcase the superiority of the so-called Aryan master race (das Herrenvolk). However, before a shot had been fired in anger their character was changing. Adolf Hitler may have caused the armed SS to be born, but the man who nurtured it, Heinrich Himmler, had a very different vision as to what the armed SS could and should be. Himmler foresaw legions of athletic, blond, blue-eyed giants standing guard over a German-dominated Europe stretching from the Atlantic right up to the Urals, and to achieve this he needed men, and lots of them. The Wehrmacht (the German armed forces comprising the army – Heer, navy – Kriegsmarine, and air force – Luftwaffe) jealously controlled the flow of German national recruits so Himmler had to look elsewhere. Suddenly the idea of recruiting tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavians seemed a very good idea, and there were even rightwing pro-Nazi parties in the Nordic countries to act as ready-made recruiting pools. The only question was how to get hold of them; the answer was invasion.

The rise of the extreme Right in the 1930s was not a phenomenon restricted to Germany. All across Europe in the wake of Mussolini and Hitler a plethora of parties and movements had appeared. In Britain it was Mosley’s BUF, in France it was Doriot’s PPF and Déat’s RNP, in Belgium Degrelle’s Cristus Rex and De Clercq’s VNV, and in Holland Mussert’s NSB. In Norway it was Quisling’s NS, in Denmark Clausen’s DNSAP and in Sweden Lindholm’s SSS, among others. Nowhere, outside Germany and Italy, did these parties seriously challenge for political power, and levels of support varied from the PPF’s substantial quarter of a million members to the very low thousands for the Swedish parties. While elements of the French, Dutch and Flemish movements sometimes exhibited a semi-mainstream appeal, this was not the case in Scandinavia where they remained small, poorly-supported and prone to in-fighting. All this changed at midnight on 29 November 1939 with the following statement to his troops by General Kirill Afanasievich Meretskov of the Red Army:

The leader of the Danish neo-Nazis, Frits Clausen, strolls through crowds of saluting supporters.

Comrades, soldiers of the Red Army, officers, commissars and political workers! To fulfil the Soviet Government’s and our great Fatherland’s will I hereby order: the troops in Leningrad Military District are to march over the frontier, crush the Finnish forces, and once and for all secure the Soviet Union’s north-western borders and Lenin’s city, the crib of the revolution of the proletariat.

This communication heralded the invasion of one of Europe’s smallest countries by one of the world’s largest. The Soviet first wave alone comprised more than 250,000 men, it outnumbered the Finns two-to-one, and was accompanied by fleets of tanks and aircraft and masses of artillery. Against them the Finns had little more than a handful of First World War anti-tank guns and obsolete planes.

The rest of Scandinavia, and indeed the world, looked on horrified as a supremely confident Red Army swept forward into Finland expecting an easy victory over the tiny nation. The resulting fight was anything but, as the courageous Finns held their ground and inflicted devastating reverses on the ill-prepared Soviets; nowhere more so than in the utter annihilation of the Red Army’s 44th Division in the snow at Suomussalmi in late December. By the time hostilities ended on 13 March 1940 the Red Army had been forced to commit more than one million Soviet troops to the fighting and Stalin had been humiliated. As for the Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, they were both angry and fearful as they looked east and saw a brutal dictatorship seemingly willing to assault peaceful countries and bring death and destruction to their doorsteps. The Scandinavian Far-Right’s answer was to look south to Nazi Germany for salvation.

When the Germans came to Scandinavia though, it was not in a spirit of brotherly love, but in the back of armoured personnel carriers as they invaded and occupied Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940. Sweden remained neutral and inviolate. Himmler naively believed that the invasions would be the signal for thousands of locals to flock to the banners of the Waffen-SS. So recruiting offices were opened in Oslo and Copenhagen in 1940 to fill a new SS division of ‘Germanics’ – the term given to peoples Himmler considered to be on a racial par with Germans – the aptly-named SS-Wiking. The new division was to have three regiments; the veteran national German Germania, and the new Dutch Westland and the Scandinavian Nordland. The Finns were allowed to form an all-Finnish battalion (although many of the senior positions would be filled by Germans) – officially sanctioned by their government – in the new division.

Bjørn Østring in the trenches around Leningrad wearing a typically non-issue jumper from back home. For the Scandinavians comfort was more important than strictly adhering to the Germans’ rigorous dress regulations. (Erik Wiborg)

Danish recruiting poster for the Waffen-SS. The Viking image in the background was intended to evoke a glorious, martial tradition in the minds of would-be volunteers.

Recruiting poster for the Norwegian SS-Ski Battalion Norge. The theme is very much one of defending hearth and home from the evils of communism.

However, even including the Finns, fewer than 3,000 Nordics came forward to join the Dutch and Flemish recruits, and the SS-Wiking had to rely on native and ethnic Germans to make up the numbers. Disappointed but not finished, the SS tried again in 1941 using the new war against the Soviet Union as its recruiting sergeant. They formed so-called ‘national legions’ in both Norway and Denmark, respectively the Den Norske Legion and Frikorps Danmark (the Legion Norwegen and Freikorps Danmark in German). Swedes were covertly encouraged to join as well and a slow trickle started to come in. The DNL and Frikorps never reached even regimental strength and were not given the best equipment or thorough training. Armed with little more than small-arms, the Norwegians were sent to man the siege lines facing Leningrad in the frozen north of Russia. There they spent a frustrating 18 months slogging it out with the Russians in almost First World War conditions as their strength dwindled and reinforcements dried up. The Danes fared even worse, being sent to reinforce the SS-Totenkopf Division in the horror of the Demyansk Pocket. They lost two commanders in a month and whole rafts of volunteers were swept away in the vicious fighting.

As the Scandinavian legions were training and preparing for the Front their countrymen in the Wiking were taking part in the largest military operation the world had ever seen – Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Wiking’s Scandinavians drove across eastern Poland and into the Soviet Union proper, joining Army Group South in its advance through the Ukraine. Through the summer and autumn the Wiking distinguished itself in the ‘battles of the frontier’ and the subsequent capture of the Ukraine. The winter saw it reach the Don River before retreating back to the Mius River as the horrendous weather and ferocious resistance stopped the headlong advance in its tracks – Barbarossa had failed. In spring 1942 the Wehrmacht went on the offensive again, and the Wiking was in the forefront of the renewed push east to simultaneously reach the Volga River and occupy the oil-producing Caucasus region. Within touching distance of the fabled city of Astrakhan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, the Scandinavians were stopped again and forced to retrace their steps north. By this time casualties had wreaked havoc in their ranks and their numbers were pitifully low; the division had become German in all but name. The new year of 1943 found the Wiking and its remaining Scandinavians back in the Ukraine on the defensive against growing Soviet pressure.

Far to the north that warm spring, both Nordic national legions were depleted, disgruntled and exhausted. Withdrawn back to Germany they were disbanded and the legionnaires offered the chance to sign on again to join yet another new SS division – the SS-Nordland.

The Norwegian Wiking NCO, Rottenführer Tord Bergstrand, fighting in Russia during Operation Barbarossa, 1941.

The Nordland, as its name suggests, was conceived as the pinnacle of the Nordic war effort for the Waffen-SS. The regiment of the same name from the Wiking was nominated as the cadre for the new division with the majority, but not all, of Wiking’s Danes, Norwegians and Swedes transferred over. With this act the baton of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS was firmly passed from the veteran Wiking to the freshly-minted Nordland, and a new chapter begun for the Scandinavian Waffen-SS. That chapter would be written without the Finnish battalion, as its members were withdrawn home by their government and the unit replaced in the Wiking by an Estonian battalion. The Wiking old boys were joined in the Nordland by their countrymen from the national legions and a new tranche of volunteers. By this time the days of the Scandinavians being used mainly just to fill the ranks of the German-officered infantry companies were gone, and they occupied a lot of the technical posts as well as command appointments. The very best and latest equipment came along as well to complement their newly-recognised military competence, and the Nordland was designated as a powerful panzer-grenadier division (a mixed unit of infantry and tanks) with its own armour.

Forming and training in occupied Yugoslavia, the Nordland was intended as one of three élite divisions in the newly-created III Germanic SS-Panzer Corps under the command of the charismatic Felix Steiner. The other two were to be the Wiking (now a hugely-powerful panzer division) and a new Dutch division, the SS-Nederland. As it turned out the Wiking couldn’t be spared from the Russian Front, and indeed never fought alongside its intended stable mates, while the Dutch could only form a large brigade rather than a full division. Regardless, the Corps was considered battle-worthy and sent more than 1,000 miles north to the Oranienbaum Pocket near Leningrad. But after more than two years of siege it was the Red Army that held the advantage and not the besiegers. As 1944 dawned the Soviet juggernaut burst out of the Pocket and sent the Germans reeling back towards the Baltic states. The Scandinavians in the Nordland fought doggedly as they were forced backwards, joined in their desperate defence by Estonian and Latvian Waffen-SS divisions fighting to protect their homes. By spring the Nordland was dug in around the ancient Estonian city of Narva and the river that runs through it of the same name. Massive Soviet attacks developed into what became popularly known as the ‘Battle of the European SS’, some of the most brutal and intense fighting seen in the entire Russo-German war. The fighting was immensely costly with thousands of Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Dutch, Estonians and Flemings dying alongside their German comrades; but the Red Army was held, giving the Wehrmacht a rare success that summer.

Felix Steiner (centre, with peaked cap) as commander of the Wiking Division in Russia in 1941. He would become the guiding figure in the foreign Waffen-SS and a much-celebrated figure among veterans after the war. (Comm. Felix Steiner)

The Nordland Regiment advance through Russia during Operation Barbarossa, summer 1941. (Erik Wiborg)

Russia 1941 – some of the Wiking’s Danes; Torkild Herman Nielsen is sitting on the bonnet in the middle, Ignatz ‘Ine’ Schwab is second from right sitting on the fender. Schwab volunteered along with his two brothers Hugo and Niels. Niels was killed in action with the 1st SS-Brigade in February 1942. Ignatz was awarded the Iron Cross at Cherkassy before himself being killed in action. (Jens Post)

The German Army in the East (the Ostheer) might have held in the north, but it was not so fortunate in the south, where almost a quarter of its total strength was wiped out by the Soviets’ gargantuan summer offensive, Operation Bagration. As the Red Army charged forward the Wiking was called north from the Ukraine to bolster the desperate defence. Despite the creation of the Nordland there were still a few hundred Nordics who had stayed in the old flagship Germanic division, and these men now found themselves rushed to join their Waffen-SS brethren from the Totenkopf in the shadows of Warsaw. On the Vistula the two SS panzer divisions again proved their worth, and in dramatic fashion managed to finally halt the Bagration offensive hundreds of miles from its start point.

At the same time the German’s Army Group North was forced to send some of its best divisions south to try and plug the huge gap in the line left by Bagration, and was then hit by its own Red whirlwind and almost crushed. Estonia was lost and the Nordland, along with the rest of the Army Group, was bottled up in the Latvian province of Courland. With their backs to the sea and a ‘no retreat’ order from the Führer in their pocket, the newly-christened Army Group Courland fought a series of six epic battles that would finally end on 8 May 1945 with the exhausted survivors filing into Soviet captivity. The Nordland was saved from that uncertain fate by a withdrawal order that took it by sea back to Germany for one last throw of the dice defending the eastern German provinces of Pomerania and East Prussia.

For the Wiking, 1945 saw it sent with most of the remaining premier Waffen-SS divisions to the south of the Eastern Front in Hungary. So as a last irony, as the Red Army geared up for a final push across Germany to capture Berlin and destroy Nazism, the last and best of the Führer’s ‘fire-brigades’ were deployed hundreds of miles away vainly trying to relieve the siege of Budapest and recapture the Hungarian oilfields. Wiking’s Scandinavians would fight in three more desperate attacks on the Magyar plains before being bundled back into Austria.

Back in northern Germany a hugely depleted Nordland, along with its European stable mate divisions – the Dutch SS-Nederland and Belgian SS-Langemarck and SS-Wallonien – took part in one last offensive as they tried to blunt the Soviet advance towards the Oder River. Unsurprisingly, the flow of eager recruits from Denmark, Norway and Sweden had dried up and the Nordland’s battalions were mere shadows of their former selves, the gaps filled with unemployed ground crew from the Luftwaffe and sailors from the Kriegsmarine. In a last hurrah, the besieged German town of Arnswalde was relieved, and the grateful garrison and local civilians flooded out to dubious safety in German-held territory. The Nordland was then forced to retreat yet again to defend the Oder River line at the river port of Altdamm opposite Berlin.

Like an old punch-drunk boxer the division reeled under blow after blow, but stubbornly refused to lie down. It was at the mercy of events. When it came the Soviet offensive across the mighty Oder splintered the division with hundreds of men surrounded, killed or forced to retreat north. Those that survived, including the command group, somehow regrouped and ended up in Berlin where they became the mainstay of the defence. Along with a French battlegroup (a kampfgruppe) from the SS-Charlemagne Division, a Latvian SS battalion, some Hitler Youth boys and the remnants of some Army formations, the Nordland fought on in the rubble of the Third Reich’s capital. Hitler’s suicide finally signalled a welcome end to the fighting in the city. Spurred on by dread of Soviet captivity many of the surviving Nordic volunteers joined their German comrades in attempting to break out west on the night of 1 May. Most of them, including their highly-decorated former divisional commander Joachim Ziegler, did not make it. A few did succeed and headed home. Those who did not die or escape joined the endless columns of prisoners being herded east to years of suffering in the Soviet Union’s slave labour camps, the infamous gulags.

For the Danes and Norwegians still in the Wiking, the end of hostilities offered the same dangerous option, to head west and surrender to the Anglo-Americans and escape the vengeful Red Army. The Wiking men fared better than their comrades in the Nordland, and most reached safety. Those that didn’t, joined their countrymen in Siberia.

As the volunteers were gradually released from POW camps, they headed home and were greeted less than warmly by their countrymen. Denmark and Norway in particular were convulsed with a need to cleanse themselves of the shadows of collaboration. Tens of thousands of people were investigated, tried and convicted of a variety of offences. Leading collaborators and political figures were executed and most of the volunteers went to prison. Even neutral Sweden punished some of its own ex-Wiking and Nordland men, few as they were. It was to be many years before all the former volunteers were free from jail or Soviet gulags. Still young, they sought to rebuild their lives, neither forgetting what they had done, nor dwelling on it either. Most worked hard, had careers, married and brought up families. Grandfathers and great-grandfathers now, their actions still provoke powerful reactions even today, with some celebrating them as heroes and the harbingers of a new ‘European identity and army’, while others utterly condemn them. The reality though is that while the vast majority of people, quite rightly, deplore the evil of Hitler and Nazism, they know nothing of the foreign volunteers who fought for that most controversial force, the Waffen-SS. If we are never to repeat the tragedy of the war and the Holocaust it is necessary to continually inform and educate people as to what really happened, and for people to make a judgement on the Scandinavian volunteers it is just as necessary to put the facts in front of them so they can make up their own minds. This book sets out those facts about the thousands of young Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns who joined the Waffen-SS.

I

1940 – Occupation, the SS-Wiking and the Beginning of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS

A new man, the storm trooper, the élite of central Europe. A completely new race, cunning, strong, and packed with purpose … battle proven, merciless to himself and others.

Ernst Jünger, winner of Imperial Germany’s highest bravery award, the Pour le Mérite (the ‘Blue Max’) at the age of 23 in the First World War and author of Storm of Steel.

The Waffen-SS

In the near-anarchy of Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1930s it was commonplace at political meetings for fights to break out and speakers to be physically attacked by thugs from opposing parties. This was especially true for Communist and Nazi events, and the parties organised their supporters into paramilitary groups to both protect themselves and attack opponents. The Nazis enshrined this activity in the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (the SA – Storm Troop), but as the size of the SA ballooned it became harder to control. Under the increasingly strident leadership of the flamboyant ex-soldier Ernst Röhm, the SA began to demand revolutionary social change in Germany that was unacceptable both to Hitler and his backers in the German Army (the Reichswehr) and big business. Hitler needed a counter-balance to the SA and he found it in the concept of a small, élite, political police force answerable only to him – the SS.

Originally a tiny 20-man group of toughs recruited to protect Hitler personally as Nazi Party leader, the pre-war Schützstaffel (the SS – Protection Squad) was the brainchild of one of his subordinates, the bespectacled and unprepossessing Heinrich Himmler. Hitler bestowed upon him the rather grandiose title of Reichsführer-SS and encouraged a rivalry with the SA. Himmler was loyal but also possessed of vaulting ambition, and he used his talents as a ruthless political intriguer and administrator to take Hitler’s original idea and, in less than a decade, create nothing less than a state within a state, and a multi-faceted organisation whose malign power and influence spread across Germany and all the occupied lands.

As the SS gradually became a byword for every aspect of Nazi activity, Himmler did not forget its original purpose; indeed it was central to his plans for the future. Sitting in his headquarters, in a former art school on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin, or in the restored Gothic grandeur of the Schloss Wewelsburg in Westphalia, the strict vegetarian and one-time chicken farmer dreamed of an SS empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals. That empire was to be created and safeguarded by a new force, not the existing German Army, but by a ‘second army of the state’, utterly loyal and dedicated to the ideology of National Socialism – the ‘Armed’ or Waffen-SS.

Political soldiers

For the new Waffen-SS, Himmler translated Hitler’s vague concept into a fully-fledged programme encompassing everything from unbelievably strict entrance criteria, to exacting training standards, to views on religion and morality, even down to the minutiae of uniforms. As ever with Himmler the key was ‘detail’. All nations’ armed forces have entry standards, usually physical, educational and moral ones. Recruits must have the physical fitness and level of education that enables them to perform their duties, while being of good character and not a convicted felon. For the Waffen-SS these baseline requirements were taken to a hitherto unheard of extreme. Recruits had to be aged between 17 and 22, and a minimum of 5’9” tall (168cm – above the average for the time and also Himmler’s height). They had to be physically fit and at least of secondary education standard, although university graduates were quite rare, unlike in the Army.

While these standards weren’t unduly strict in themselves, they were overlaid with a ‘racial and political’ element that was exacting to say the least. From 1935 onwards Himmler instituted the requirement for every would-be SS recruit to prove their ‘pure’ Aryan genealogy, dating back to 1800 for enlisted men and 1750 for officer candidates –great-grandparents and beyond. Having to produce a family tree to enlist was unheard of in the rest of the Wehrmacht, and in any other army in the world for that matter. It was then, and remains still, a peculiarity of the Waffen-SS. But it wasn’t even enough to be Aryan; you had to look Aryan. The Reichsführer himself used to boast of examining the photo of every prospective Waffen-SS officer to ensure they exhibited the required level of ‘Nordic features’, with blond hair and blue eyes being top of the list. But it didn’t stop there; as the Waffen-SS was as much about the mind as the body, so applicants also had to demonstrate the requisite level of ideological commitment as outlined in ‘The Soldiers’ Friend’ (Der Soldatenfreund – a handbook issued to every member of the armed forces):

Every pure-blooded German in good health [can] become a member. He must be of excellent character, have no criminal record, and be an ardent adherent to all National Socialist doctrines. Members of the Hitler Youth will be given preference because their aptitudes and schooling are indicative that they have become acquainted with the ideology of the SS.

Even in supposedly ‘Aryan’ Germany these phenomenally high standards meant the rejection of a staggering 85 per cent of all applicants, and the rate was even higher for Hitler’s personal bodyguard regiment, the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LSSAH – the SS Bodyguard Adolf Hitler), where a single dental filling was grounds for rejection. For those lucky few who passed selection, the terms of service were a minimum of four years for rankers, 12 years for NCOs (corporals and sergeants) and 25 years for officers. In contrast, soldiers of all ranks in the modern British Army sign up for a maximum of three years.

TheLeibstandarte,Verfügungstruppenand theTotenkopfverbände

Once signed up, a recruit joined one of the three original premier Waffen-SS formations: a minority went into the Leibstandarte, commanded by Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, based at the old Prussian Cadet School in the Lichterfelde Barracks in Berlin. There they were a law unto themselves, even amongst the Waffen-SS, with much more emphasis on ceremonial and parade ground duties than was good for their future military effectiveness. While this military neglect was true for the semi-independent Leibstandarte, it was most definitely not true for the men who joined the real cradle of Waffen-SS military excellence, the Verfügungstruppen (SS-VT – ‘Special Purpose Troops’). Later famous as the Das Reich Division, the SS-VT was initially composed of two regiments, the Deutschland and Germania, who were then joined by a third, the Austrian-manned Der Führer, after the annexation of Austria in 1938 (the Anschluss). Unlike its sister formation the Leibstandarte, the SS-VT focused exclusively on becoming a first-rate military unit, and men from these three pre-war regiments would come to dominate the short-lived history of the Waffen-SS. If a recruit did not join Dietrich’s men or the SS-VT, he ended up in the aptly named Totenkopfverbände (‘Death’s Head Units’), under the brutal leadership of Theodor Eicke. Organised on a regional basis with regiments (Standarten) in each major city in Germany their duties revolved around guarding Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. While professional military training was not their forte, the Totenkopf regiments in effect became a major reserve pool for the Waffen-SS as it grew after the outbreak of war.

A new type of training

Initially military training in the Waffen-SS was pretty basic, but this changed dramatically after Himmler managed to persuade a number of professional ex-Army officers to join the new force. Lured with promises of rapid promotion and a blank page on which to make their mark, two men in particular joined up who would forge the Waffen-SS into the élite it would become – Paul Hausser and Felix Steiner. Both were decorated veterans from the First World War, had gone on to serve in the post-war fighting in eastern Germany against local Communists, Poles and Balts, and were also that rarest of beasts in any nation’s military – original thinkers.

Felix Martin Julius Steiner, born in 1896 in East Prussia, served as an infantryman during the First World War, fighting at the Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in the east, and Flanders and Cambrai in the west. Appalled by the mass slaughter of huge conscript armies in the trenches, he became a strong advocate of using small, highly motivated, highly trained and well-equipped assault units. Much of the training programme the Waffen-SS came to use was written by this fairly short, slightly overweight figure, who seemed to have a smile and cheery word for everyone who served under him.

Paul ‘Papa’ Hausser was 16 years older than Felix Steiner, and also an eastern German, hailing from Brandenburg. Every inch the military patrician, Hausser was of slim build, with grey-white hair and a prominent, aquiline nose. Having retired from the army in 1932 as a Lieutenant-General after a distinguished career, he was personally invited to join the Waffen-SS in 1934 by Himmler himself. Made responsible for ‘professionalising’ the Waffen-SS, and ensuring it was a modern military force in every sense, he started his transformation at the two SS officer schools at Bad Tölz in Bavaria and Braunschweig in Lower Saxony. After turning them into premier military academies, he went on to become the overall inspector of the SS-VT.

Young Finnish Waffen-SS volunteers take cover in a trench during training.

Between them these two quite extraordinary men created something entirely new in the German armed forces. Training in the German Army was very effective but also very formal, with an emphasis on building teamwork through parade ground discipline and a strict adherence to the hierarchy of rank. Hausser and Steiner swept this approach away, with their priorities being threefold: firstly, supreme physical fitness and comradeship built particularly through sport; secondly excellent combat skills including the repeated use of exercises with live ammunition, and lastly, skill-at-arms focusing on superior marksmanship. SS recruits were taught how best to operate in small groups, the eight-man section and the 30-man platoon (Gruppe and Zug – see Appendix B for further description), the value of aggression and attack in defeating an enemy and keeping down casualties, and the benefits of a close and easy relationship between men, NCOs and officers. All officer candidates had to serve time in the ranks, they trained and ate with their men, and promotion was seen to be on merit rather than class and education. Off-duty Waffen-SS men even addressed each other as ‘Comrade’ (Kamerad) rather than by their formal ranks. Such things were unheard of in any European army of the time. The Waffen-SS wore different uniforms as well, in the field they were the first force to wear camouflage combat clothing, and in barracks they often wore an all-black uniform, giving rise to their nickname, ‘the black guards’. Their entire theory of battle, their ‘doctrine’, was also different, insisting enthusiastically on an all-arms battle relying heavily on firepower and movement with tanks, artillery, aircraft and infantry all working together. These things are now standard practice in modern armies across the globe, but at the time they were ridiculed by the far more conservative German Army.

First Blood – the Night of the Long Knives

Despite its growing professionalism, the Waffen-SS was still viewed in 1934 as a political police force ‘playing at soldiers’. The SA was by far the dominant force in Nazi politics with its three-million-strong membership swaggering across Germany loudly shouting for a ‘brown revolution’ that would sweep away the old conservative institutions like the army, and remove power from the big industrialists to usher in a new ‘socialist’ state (Reich). Needless to say Hitler was horrified by these ideas and decided to destroy the monster he had created, and the instrument of that destruction was to be none other than the armed soldiers of the SS.

On 30 June 1934, SS formations left their barracks to break the power of the SA once and for all in the infamous ‘Night of the Long Knives’. The Leibstandarte was in the vanguard, and drove all the way south to the Bavarian spa resort town of Bad Wiessee, where Röhm had gathered many of his fellow SA leaders for a conference. The SS were given clear orders – round up the SA men and shoot them immediately. Röhm himself was arrested, put in a cell in Munich’s nearby Stahlhelm prison, and offered the opportunity to blow his own brains out. In total shock at the situation he refused, and was instead shot dead by his erstwhile comrade and Totenkopf leader, Theodor Eicke. Most of the senior SA leadership nationwide were murdered, many of them shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ as they faced the firing squads, believing they were actually victims of an SS plot to overthrow their beloved Führer. At a stroke the SA was decapitated and removed as a threat. Hitler was jubilant. His faith in the soldiers of the SS was vindicated, and as a direct result a grateful Führer elevated them into an independent arm of the Nazi Party, no longer subject to the control of the SA as they had been up until then.

Two months later in a state decree, Hitler outlined the main task of the newly-independent force. Trained on military lines, it was to stand ready to battle internal opponents of the Nazi regime should the need arise. Only ‘in the event of general war’ would it be employed outside Germany’s borders for military operations, in which case only Hitler could decide how and when it would be used. The Army was not happy with the situation, but the Defence Minister, Field Marshal Blomberg, foolishly let himself be convinced by Hitler that the intention was to create an armed police force and not another army. This reassurance, like so many of Hitler’s, proved entirely false.

Recruitment of ‘foreigners’ into the Waffen-SS before the war

Both Hitler and Himmler originally conceived the Waffen-SS as a purely German force. The belief was in a small, ‘racially and ideologically pure’ élite. However even from the very beginning a tiny number of recruits joined up who began to stretch the definition of ‘German’, and over time established a direction for the Waffen-SS that would lead to the multi-national army of 1945.

Back in 1919, the Versailles Treaty had not only emasculated Germany militarily, but had also annexed territory with ethnically German populations and handed it over to neighbouring states. The mixed Franco-German region of Alsace-Lorraine was given back to France (the future SS-Wiking panzer regiment commander Johannes-Rudolf ‘Hans’ Mühlenkamp was actually born a German in Lorraine, but ‘became’ French when he was nine), the 65,000 ethnic Germans in the Eupen area were handed over to Belgium, and Denmark got the 25,000 Germans living in agriculturally-rich north Schleswig-Holstein (called South Jutland by the Danes). Over in the east the creation of the Polish Corridor to the Baltic Sea had split Germany from its East Prussian province and left thousands of native Germans in newly-created Poland, where eventually of course they would become the casus belli for the Second World War.

As far as Hitler was concerned, all of these people were actually ‘Germans’ no matter what their passports said, and so from the start they were allowed to join the Waffen-SS. When they enlisted they were not officially recorded as Danish, Polish or whatever, but as native Germans and so their number is impossible to calculate accurately, but it was in the hundreds. Two such volunteers were Johann Thorius and Georg Erichsen, both ethnic Germans from Danish north Schleswig-Holstein. Thorius volunteered for the SS-VT in 1939 and served in the Germania Regiment. Recommended for a commission, he passed out from Bad Tölz and went on to command the 12th Company of SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment 24 Danmark as an SS-Obersturmführer. Never classed as a Dane by the Waffen-SS, Thorius’s war ended in 1944 when he lost an arm in combat in Estonia. Erichsen was another ‘non-Dane’ in SS eyes. Like Thorius he was recommended for a commission, and actually passed out as top student of Tölz’s 9th Shortened Wartime Course, beating the Finnish volunteer Tauno Manni to the prize. Erichsen’s reward was an instant promotion to SS-Untersturmführer, and appointment as Rudolf Saalbach’s adjutant in the famed SS-Armoured Reconnaisance Battalion 11 (SS-Aufklärungs Abteilung 11). Retreating into Courland with his battalion in late 1944, he took part in vicious defensive fighting and was recommended for the prestigious Honour Roll Clasp bravery award during the Fourth Battle of Courland. He was killed in action in late January 1945 before the award was confirmed.

Muddying the waters further were the large and diverse ethnic German populations scattered all over eastern and south-eastern Europe, stretching right into the very heart of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The blanket term used for these German-speaking peoples was ‘volksdeutsche’ (ethnic Germans) – as opposed to ‘reichsdeutsche’ which described those born within the 1939 frontiers of the Third Reich. The volksdeutsche were primarily a Hapsburg phenomenon, as the Austrian monarchy had encouraged a process of German migration into their ever-growing empire over the course of centuries, often to solidify their control of newly-acquired and distant provinces. So by the advent of Hitler’s Reich hundreds of thousands of these volksdeutsche lived in German ‘colonies’ in Yugoslavia, Rumania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. As for Russia, her volksdeutsche even had their own autonomous republic within the Union – the German Republic of Podvol’zhya, centred on the steppe lands of the Volga River region, with its capital the wholly German town of Engels. The two million or so Volga Germans, as they were known, were descendants of settlers invited by the Tsarina Catherine the Great after the end of the Seven Years War to colonise the under-populated area. Ironically, given later events in 1942, there were 24,656 of these volksdeustche living peaceably in Stalingrad of all places. Following the Wehrmacht invasion though, their centuries-old loyalty to Russia did not save them, and on Stalin’s orders the Republic was liquidated in September 1941 and the entire population deported en masse to inhospitable zones of far-off Kazakhstan. Hundreds of thousands died of hunger and disease, and their community disappeared from the pages of history forever.

Back in the 1930s members of these volksdeutsche communities were not directly targeted by the Waffen-SS, but some made their way across Europe to Germany to join up. Erwin Bartmann, who served as an SS-Unterscharführer in the Leibstandarte from early 1941, remembers just such a volksdeutsche from Rumania in his own unit. This volunteer spoke excellent German, unlike many of his brethren, and had been in the Leibstandarte for several years before Bartmann enlisted prior to Barbarossa. Before the war they were just a trickle, a curiosity, but in time the recruiting restrictions placed on the Waffen-SS by the Wehrmacht authorities hugely increased the importance of the volksdeutsche to Himmler’s dream of a new SS army.

However, outside of the ‘lost’ Germans of 1919 and the volksdeutsche, it was a third potential pool of recruits for the Waffen-SS that was to lead directly to the much-vaunted idea of the Waffen-SS as a ‘European army’ – the so-called ‘Germanics’. The Germanics were not in any way German, but were peoples that the Nazis considered to be their ethnic cousins, part of the Nazi legend of the greater ‘Aryan’ people of pre-history that had spread out over north-western Europe. Included on the list of ‘acceptable’ populations and ethnic groups were the Dutch, the Flemish Belgians (initially the Walloon Belgians were seen as ethnically beyond the Pale), the Anglo-Saxon English (but not the Celtic Scots, Welsh or Irish), the Swiss, and the Nordics of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Even Americans of northern European descent were seen by Himmler as potential future recruits. Bruno Friesen, born in Canada to German-speaking Mennonite Ukrainians, was in this category; he ended up serving as a tank gunner in the Army’s Panzer Regiment 25. Again, as with the volksdeutsche, there was no concerted recruitment effort to attract Germanics before the war started, but individuals were allowed to join. They were given no special dispensation by the Waffen-SS authorities, and had to pass the normal selection criteria and training programmes. By the invasion of Poland there were more than a hundred of these Germanics in the Waffen-SS.

This meant that by the summer of 1939 the Waffen-SS consisted of a handful of units, with no more than a small percentage of men who were not born within Germany’s existing frontiers. This only changed as a result of a direct clash between Himmler’s mounting ambition for his new force and traditional Wehrmacht manpower policy. From the perspective of the Scandinavians and the other Germanics, what changed was that cherished policeman’s phrase – motive and opportunity.

Five years after the SA was crushed, Himmler presided over a military arm consisting of four élite regiments –a German regiment was usually of 2–3,000 men, roughly equivalent to a British brigade – of the Leibstandarte, Deutschland, Germania and Der Führer, along with a further four of Totenkopf (Oberbayern, Brandenburg, Thüringen and Ostmark), and another couple of thousand men in various training, depot and administrative roles. Impressive as this was, Himmler was hungry for more. While Hitler was still convinced the Waffen-SS should remain small, his loyal lieutenant was increasingly thinking of huge legions of racially defined supermen. To achieve this Himmler needed far more than the 25–28,000 men he already possessed. Standing in his way was official Wehrmacht policy.

In 1940 the German Armed Forces High Command (the OberKommando der Wehrmacht – OKW for short) decreed a manpower ratio split of each year’s available draft at 66 per cent for the Army, 25 per cent for the Luftwaffe and just 9 per cent for the Kriegsmarine – Nazi Germany always saw itself as a land-based power. The Waffen-SS had no quota, and even if a recruit expressed the desire to join the black guards he was rarely allowed to, as the Wehrmacht usually just took the recruit’s wish ‘under advisement’. Begrudgingly, to accommodate Hitler’s wishes, a framework was put in place that allowed the Waffen-SS to take in men on a formation by formation basis only. Therefore Himmler could enlist men into the Germania Regiment for instance, but when it was full it was full, and no further volunteers could be put on the books.

Under such a system the SS-Main Office (SS-Hauptamt responsible for recruitment) forecast that at best they would get two per cent of the available draft in any given year. That was 12,000 men per annum, when the existing units alone needed 3–4,000 men a year just to stay at full strength. At that rate of growth Himmler would need the Reich to last its vaunted ‘Thousand Years’ in order to achieve the size he saw as essential to fulfilling his dream of a Germanic empire.

Ingenuity, administrative flair and a certain amount of deviousness were required given the situation, and as the Reichsführer-SS pondered his dilemma, the solution came from a 44-year-old ex-gymnastics instructor from Swabia with iron-grey hair and a bristling moustache – SS-Gruppenführer Gottlob Berger. Berger was a fanatic, whose life had been shaped by war. One of four brothers, he was the only one to have survived the horrors of the First World War. Two died in the trenches and the third was executed in the US as a spy. An early convert to Nazism, he joined the SS and rose through the ranks. Not one of Himmler’s favourites, he nevertheless headed up the SS main office. A practically-minded administrator, he had little time for Himmler’s more wild flights of racial fantasy, but regarding existing Waffen-SS recruitment he saw a large-scale solution to the manpower problem. For some time he had been investigating the enlistment potential of what the SS called, ‘similarly-related lands (artverwandten Ländern), such as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Flanders, as well as the volksdeutsche communities. Berger had even gone as far as becoming the chairman of both the German-Croatian Society (