The SS Hunter Battalions E-Book

Professor Perry Biddiscombe

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Conventional wisdom suggests that the Allies and the Soviets were the only side in the Second World War to support resistance movements. This book shows that Hitler had his own version of the SOE and the OSS, and that the Nazis too encouraged underground resistance against their enemies, especially as Europe was liberated in 1944-5.

Leseprobe

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE NAZI RESISTANCE MOVEMENT 1944–45

About the Author

Perry Biddiscombe is Professor of History at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He is the acknowledged world expert on the guerrilla forces of the Third Reich. His other books include The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944–1947 and Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement 1944–1946, described by The Independent as ‘the most complete history of the Nazi partisan movement’. He lives in Victoria.

PRAISE FOR PERRY BIDDISCOMBE

‘Throws fresh light on the Third Reich’s last days’ BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE

‘The book explores the background to the movement, its operations and its wholly negative legacy… this type of terrorism is a nasty constant in the history of the German radical-right’ HISTORY TODAY

‘Detailed, meticulously researched and highly readable... a must for all interested in the end of the Second World War’ MILITARY ILLUSTRATED

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE NAZI RESISTANCE MOVEMENT 1944–45

PERRY BIDDISCOMBE

First published 2006

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Perry Biddiscombe, 2006, 2013

The right of Perry Biddiscombe to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9645 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1

The Skorzeny Leute

2

East is East

3

The Balkan Cockpit

4

South of the Alps and West of the Rhine

5

North by North-West

6

The Time of the Wolf

Epilogue and Conclusion

Glossary of Foreign Terms and Names

Table of Ranks

List of Illustrations

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

My recent researches have resulted in a series of fascinating correspondences and exchanges with scholars working in analogous areas, whom I want to acknowledge for providing their expertise and for stimulating my own thinking. Thanks to Paltin Sturdza, Michael Jung, and especially Jeff Burds, with whom I have exchanged much information and whose insights have proven invaluable in developing my understanding of the situation in Eastern Europe. Jeff is most kind in sharing knowledge and truly regards our discipline as a collaborative effort. Thanks as well to my colleague, Serhy Yekelchyk, who provided advice on Ukrainian sources, and to Eugéne Martres, who helped me with literature on German parachutists in France.

A work of this scope – it covers twenty-four different countries – would not have been possible without the help of a number of specialists who provided me with access to literature in languages that are beyond my ken. In this regard, I especially want to thank Sonja Yli-Kahila and Chris Wojtan, who are former students of mine and graciously came to my aid. Sonja and Chris translated literature on resistance movements in Finland and Poland, and the depth of the sections of the book dealing with such matters owe directly to their contributions. My appreciation as well to Rachel Dekker, who helped me investigate rumours about Skorzeny’s possible connection with Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands. For aid with letter-writing to various archives and libraries, thanks to Pasi Ahonen, Vanetta Petkova, Bogdan Verjinschi and Sharon Willis.

A special debt of gratitude is owed to the various archivists and librarians who have helped me over a long period of time. So thanks to the archivists at the National Archives II (College Park), the National Archives of the UK, the various offices and bureaux of the Bundesarchiv, the Archives Nationales, the National Archives of Canada, the Imperial War Museum and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Aila Narva at the Arkistolaitos in Helsinki kindly provided me with references to Finnish literature, and the staff at the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Guerre et Sociétés Contemporaines, in Brussels, gave me material on pro-German activists in Belgium. Thanks as well to the librarians at the Library of Congress, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (especially the Zeitungsabteilung, Westhafen), the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Centre Pompidou, the British Library, the Robbins Library (London School of Economics), the German Historical Institute (London), and of course the McPherson Library, which is the intellectual centrepiece of my home institution, the University of Victoria. In particular, the librarians in the Interlibrary Loans section at McPherson Library deserve commendation for their hard work and diligence.

My publisher, Jonathan Reeve, kindly showed interest in a book of this scope and gave me considerable latitude. Certainly, I am grateful for his patience and good humour. Thanks as well to the production team at Tempus, who excel at their jobs. Their ability to format a book that is pleasing to the eye makes it much easier to present a historical narrative that is not a chore to read. And thanks to one of my department’s secretaries, Eileen Zapshala, who helped me with technical issues involved in preparing the manuscript.

Finally, my sincere appreciation to my wife and son, who helped with research, proofread several chapters of the manuscript and have generally acted as a sounding board for my ideas and inspirations. Through thick and thin, they have always supported me.

Perry Biddiscombe, Victoria, BC

Introduction

Readers who crack the spine of this volume will find themselves through the looking glass. They will encounter a faltering Third Reich, around 1944–1945, that attempted to field partisans and ‘freedom fighters’ against its enemies, promising to ‘liberate’ Europe from the very powers that were themselves delivering the continent from tyranny. Such efforts revolved around the central figure of Otto Skorzeny, the notorious German commando chief – and rescuer of Benito Mussolini – who created a network of special units which functioned at the intersection between military force and politics.

Although Skorzeny prided himself a simple man, his was a house of many mansions. The centre of his network was a series of SS battalions called Jagdverbände, or ‘hunter formations’, which were assigned the job of leading a guerrilla war behind the lines of the advancing Allied and Soviet armies. This volume, however, also chronicles the story of a closely related body called ‘Section S’, which trained saboteurs and terrorists, and it provides an account of Abwehr ‘Frontaufklärung’ (‘front reconnaissance’, FAK) detachments, some of which specialised in sabotage and bore responsibilities that overlapped those of the SS-Jagdverbände. All three types of units were controlled by Skorzeny, at least loosely, and he planned to amalgamate them into a coherent whole. A clear recognition of the nature and function of these organisations will help us understand the legacy of their chief, perhaps in a different sense than he himself might have wanted.

Anyone who seeks to understand the real history of the Skorzeny Leute (personnel) must first cut through a powerful narrative created by Skorzeny himself. Even while still in post-war Allied captivity, Skorzeny convinced an American journalist to publish his account of the Mussolini rescue in True magazine, thus introducing himself to the English-speaking world. Memoirs followed in 1950, although these were originally greeted with a storm of controversy: French communists rioted over the serialisation by Figaro, while the US Government froze the proceeds from the English-language edition. Even as late as 1963, the States Attorney in Cologne initiated an investigation against the German publisher of Skorzeny’s double volume autobiography on the charge that the books were inimical to the well-being of German youth. Despite such embarrassments, Skorzeny was widely credited with providing the ultimate account of his units’ operations, and he did his best to present a non-political image.1 He further influenced the literature by graciously granting interviews as he basked in exile in Franco’s Spain, and his output was supplemented by the work of his sycophantic biographer, Charles Foley. In the commercially successful Commando Extraordinary, Foley followed his subject’s preferences in seeing Skorzeny as a good soldier, ‘not… like Hitler, a fanatic ready to pull the world down on its head’. In fact, in order to get preferential access to Skorzeny, Foley blithely ignored evidence of Skorzeny’s Nazi convictions, including rumours about his continuing association with the post-war fascist underground.2 Once Skorzeny had hurdled obstacles set by war crimes and denazification trials, he became highly protective of his reputation. When a fellow German veteran questioned the veracity of his stories, he challenged him to a duel, and when an American television documentary suggested that he was wanted by the Israeli Government for war crimes, he notified the programme’s sponsors that he would sue for libel in the absence of a retraction.3

The key impression that Skorzeny sought to create was that of a politically neutral man-of-action, and he directed the public’s attention toward a few of his most outstanding stunts, particularly the ‘rescue’ of Mussolini and the infiltration of American lines during the Battle of the Bulge. He attempted to write history in the Greek heroic vein, creating a chronicle of extraordinary events rather than an account of process or a description of structure. Skorzeny was also comfortable with being an icon of masculinity and soldierly comradeship, but not with being readily identified as a National Socialist. Similarly, he wanted to be regarded as a swashbuckler – ‘a German D’Artagnan’ – rather than as a plotter whose units were essentially instruments of subversion.

There are several other reasons why Skorzeny failed to provide a detailed organisational history of the Jagdverbände, Section S or the FAK detachments. First, he was trying to develop a reputation as a tactician of genius, perhaps even having lessons to teach the armies of the Western Powers, as the latter steeled themselves for a supposedly inevitable confrontation with the Soviet Union. In crafting this image, he was willing to exaggerate his own role in several high-profile enterprises, and he was reluctant to admit mistakes.4 On the other hand, an honest look at many of his systematic attempts at sabotage reveals Skorzeny to have been an overextended, inefficient and often inept intriguer. Moreover, his men frequently appear in an even worse light, sometimes unable to achieve the level of sobriety or self-composure necessary to mount efficient operations, or so disheartened by the Third Reich’s string of defeats they could barely rouse themselves to action. In addition, personnel from the SS and the military components of Skorzeny’s network fought each other constantly. One of the by-products of this dysfunction was that Skorzeny’s operations in various countries were infiltrated by enemy agents; his top agent in France, for instance, actually entered into the employ of the Allied intelligence service. The Skorzeny Leute were a dangerous lot, but their feckless approach to matters of operational efficiency and security made them less lethal than would otherwise have been the case.

Second, some of Skorzeny’s units had perpetrated war crimes, particularly in Slovakia, Greece and Denmark, where they were trying to clear the ground of patriot resisters and thus create the ‘clean slate’ that they needed to launch their own operations. Since Skorzeny was tried in an Allied military court for breaches of the rules of war in the Ardennes, he hardly wanted to emphasise his association with such units, particularly where instances of foul play involved the massacre or manhandling of civilian populations. He had to admit killings of civilians in Denmark – these actions were directly controlled by his headquarters – but he had a set of convenient excuses for why he was not responsible for most of the damage in that unfortunate country. Skorzeny and his forces also murdered German and Austrian civilians late in the war, but Skorzeny naturally admitted nothing about such outrages.

Skorzeny’s attempt at public relations did not leave him immune to censure, particularly from critics who felt that his self-glorification was a slap in the face to the real heroes of the Second World War, or from voices who charged that he had never engaged in a reflective consideration of his role in service of an obvious evil. Orville Prescott called his autobiography ‘the proud record of the military achievements of an insensitive, unscrupulous and essentially stupid man’. However, Mary McGrory cut to the heart of the issue in contending that Skorzeny’s memoirs were ‘as interesting for what they leave unsaid as for what they say’, and that he actually offered ‘precious little’.5 Thus, what is obviously required is a contrapuntal investigation of the role played by Skorzeny and his units during the last year of the war. The weighting that Skorzeny attached to the various aspects of his career, his depiction of the central purpose of his detachments, and the meaning and relevance that he attributed to various operations – all these are matters that should be re-examined. Engaging in such a reinterpretation of the SS-Jagdverbände, Section S and the FAK units is the purpose of this book.

The true role of Skorzeny’s special forces was not only to carry out ‘one-shot’ political and military tasks, as specified by the Führer, but to subvert the liberation of Europe, and to do this in a systematic fashion. In later describing his adventures, Skorzeny largely ignored this second – more insidious – purpose. The historiography has unfortunately followed his lead.6 In truth, the primary function of Skorzeny’s force was to rouse Europeans into anti-Soviet and anti-Allied resistance. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, made arrangements in September 1944 to launch pro-German rebellions in all of the territories recently evacuated by the Wehrmacht, and two months later Skorzeny was instructed to make use in such operations of existing nationalist guerrilla groups in Central and Eastern Europe, such as the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA) and the Polish Home Army (AK). Skorzeny was also told to coordinate his efforts with other SS, military and Foreign Office bodies involved in the same process.

Substantial numbers of men were deployed. The Luftwaffe parachuted over 450 FAK saboteurs in the summer of 1944, ninety-seven operations being carried out along the Eastern Front alone. Overall, the Luftwaffe’s special services squadron, Kampfgeschwader 200, dropped one thousand parachutists along enemy lines of communication. At least 600 men were deployed behind Soviet lines in the last part of 1944, when the Jagdverbände and FAK units were attempting to divine the direction of the forthcoming Soviet Winter Offensive. The bulk of the Skorzeny Leute were infiltrated through the main battle line, stay-behind operations accounted for another ten to twenty per cent of deployments, with the remainder (twenty to thirty per cent) accounted for by parachute drops. The Jagdverbände carried out twenty to twenty-five missions monthly along the Western Front, plus at least an equal number in the Balkans.7

Belatedly assuming the mantle of ‘freedom fighters’ was a difficult shift for the Nazi leadership that controlled Skorzeny. Hitler, for instance, was contemptuous of minor countries and told Joseph Goebbels ‘that the rubbish of small nations still existing in Europe must be liquidated as fast as possible’.8 In addition, one does not usually think of National Socialism as an internationalist or cosmopolitan movement: Hitler had said in Mein Kampf that he had no intention of putting the Nazi Party in the vanguard of a league of ‘freedom movements’ because he regarded the prospects of such groups as grim and because he had no intention of linking up with supposed racial inferiors, especially Russians.9 He also regarded Pan-Europeanism with disdain, judging it a recipe for political paralysis. His vision of Europe’s future, particularly in the East, was one of colonial subjugation to Germany, a project for which he did not expect much sympathy from those being subjugated.10

There was, however, also a rival school of thought within the Nazi Party and the SS that drew from an older sense of German imperialism and which regarded the Reich as the gravitational centre of a Mitteleuropa system of states. This group sought a neutralised and neutered France; a constellation of minor satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe, all of which would ‘naturally’ seek the protection of German arms; plus a Russian heartland that was sovereign but weak, and would serve Germany as a supplier of raw materials and food.11 As the SS drew more foreign volunteers into its armed wing during the 1940s, its propaganda and recruitment policies increasingly shifted toward this type of view. In other words, despite originally being the staunchest proponents of Germanisierung and ethnic cleansing, the SS became increasingly internationalised as the war progressed, a process obviously related to the Third Reich’s increasing need to augment its own strength by mobilising anti-Soviet sentiments throughout Europe. By 1944, even Himmler belatedly came around to expressing sympathy for the ‘Russian liberation’ project, and the Third Reich’s security chief, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, argued in early 1945 that ‘our policy toward the Poles must be revised immediately’.12

German propaganda also came to emphasise the Germany-as-protector-of-small-nations theme. The Deutschesnachrichtenbüro argued that the Western Powers had sold out the interests of small countries to Stalin, and that while they blamed Hitler for picking on minor powers, the Führer had ‘waged a passionate battle to ensure peace and for cooperation with equal rights of European peoples… Germany alone is fighting for right and justice.’ Danube Radio, beaming to the Balkans in February 1945, made the point even more explicitly: ‘To liberate all the small nations and return to them complete economic and political sovereignty, this is the principle for which National Socialist Germany fights.’13

One might well question whether or not this late-blooming concern for national selfdetermination (and for supra-national Pan-Europeanism) was genuine: ‘new right’ and apologist writers have long claimed that it was, culminating in Hans Werner Neulen’s contention that the Waffen-SS came eventually to embody a ‘Eurofascist’ idea quite distinct from National Socialism. However, deep doubts about Nazi sincerity are probably justified. It is certainly significant that the SS ‘General Plan for 1945’, which reflected the thinking of the powerful Gottlob Berger, chief of the SS Main Office, talked about luring the West into a false sense of complacency and about the inevitability of a third world war, ‘Europe versus Eurasia’. Despite Himmler’s well-publicised concessions to the ‘Russian liberation movement’, he still believed, as late as 1944–1945, that Russia’s western boundary would eventually have to be pushed as far east as Moscow,14 and in November 1944, he announced that ‘sooner or later we shall again advance beyond our frontiers and borderlands, thus creating the territorial forefield and glacis of power which the Greater Germanic Empire needs’.15

What, then, was the point of the evolving Nazi ‘Wilsonianism’ (as hollow as it was)? By the last year of the war, German military strategy was increasingly designed to prevent defeat – perhaps by building solid river defence lines at the Roer, the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder or the Vistula – until the tenuous enemy coalition had a chance to fall apart. In September 1944, Gottlob Berger called for holding the Soviets in the Carpathians and central Poland and meanwhile launching local counter-offensives that could push the Western Allies back to the Somme, leaving a central realm that the Germans could spend the next ten years securing. It was also hoped that the development of missiles, supersubmarines or jets could turn the tide of battle, but it was thought that such projects would need time to mature.16 In thinking about the means to supplement such strategies, the Germans decided that the Soviets and Western Allies had taught them a valuable lesson, namely, that the development of wireless communications and airborne methods of supply had revolutionised the waging of war behind enemy lines. Certainly, they hoped to use such techniques as profitably as they had been employed against the Third Reich. The SS ‘General Plan’, for instance, talked about ‘mobilising groups which have been stimulated by the occupation of the enemy in both Eastern and Western Europe’.17

To achieve success, the amended Nazi approach to Europe obviously had to have resonance outside the Third Reich. There is good reason for doubting whether Europeans would fight for the same country that had oppressed them for three or four years, even if the latter was now claiming to fight for ‘European’ culture. It was one thing for the Nazis to mobilise resources and manpower from regions that they had occupied and then to tell themselves that this help was freely given. It was quite another to raise support in areas from which the Germans had withdrawn and where they had spent the previous few years brutally manhandling the population. Despite the fact that their cause had been weighed down by this recent history, there were SS and Wehrmacht officers who believed that nationalist elements and former collaborators in evacuated areas could still be incited into action.

With the exception of a few groups in Eastern Europe, there is not much evidence that the resistance groups mobilised by Skorzeny had a mass base or that they included more than a small cohort of misguided nationalists and rabid anti-communists. Nonetheless, the Nazis were trying to make a virtue out of necessity by 1944–1945, arguing that ‘a small troop of convinced fanatics is worth more than a big party’.18 It is also apparent, however, that the much-lauded guerrilla movements supported by the Allies and the Soviets were not mass organisations either, at least until 1943 (by which time an element of opportunism had entered into calculations). The romantic image of the resistance fighter as the manifestation of a common European spirit of freedom has been one of the most durable of wartime legends, but with the end of the Cold War and the transformation of the French and Italian communist parties, a much more critical historiography of the anti-German resistance has begun to take shape. Indeed, some studies have emerged that, as Tony Judt notes, would have been unthinkable in conception and unpublishable in form only a short time ago.19 To some extent, this study mines the opposite side of this seam, suggesting that while the winners in 1945 imposed their own politicised and functional interpretation of resistance, they also prevented the formation of public memories about different kinds of resistance that did not fit comfortably into prevailing conceptions of the war.

It is also difficult to claim that the resistance movements supported by the Germans had much strategic or even tactical value. Authorities as diverse as Basil-Liddell Hart, John Keegan and Alan Milward have long cast doubt on the effectiveness of pro-Allied and pro-Soviet resistance movements, arguing that such groups were usually not subjected to much command-and-control nor were they prepared to attack targets of strategic value during periods when armies in the field most required such services.20 Certainly, as we shall see, the same caveat applies to the movements associated with the Germans. Although these groups caused limited damage to Germany’s foes, they did not have the capacity to create strategic reversals. Larger and more independent groups, such as the UPA and the Chetniks, had contact with the Germans and accepted weapons from them, but there is no evidence that they took orders about which targets to attack. The benefit to the Germans came more in the form of various bits of assistance and intelligence, which often arrived unexpectedly. It was not an arrangement upon which they could rely.

Amidst the euphoria of Allied victory and the subsequent concerns of the Cold War, Skorzeny’s attempts at subversion were forgotten. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, we are only too familiar with the damage done by ethnic nationalism, the tendencies of ‘failed states’ to surrender authority to warlords, and the violent potential of fanaticism. These themes bring Skorzeny to mind and they suggest new perspectives for interpretation. Unless we want to take Skorzeny’s account as the final word on the role that he and his units played in the Second World War, we are merited in taking a second look at the topic. In fact, we may have to take a wrecking ball to the edifice that has been so carefully constructed by the commando chief and his admirers.

1

The Skorzeny Leute

Like all things, Skorzeny’s sabotage units did not suddenly materialise from stardust, fully formed and absent of any progenitors. Rather, they were the product of discrete forces in German history and reflected a sense of encirclement that legitimated any means of weakening Germany’s rivals, even irregular modes of warfare. Indeed, Skorzeny’s network of units grew over the course of time from an unlikely seed born of the attempt to exploit Britain’s traditional Achilles’ Heel in Ireland. The story of how an obscure commando company evolved into a brigade-sized politico-military force with a chain of command running to the pinnacle of the Nazi state must rate as one of the more bizarre narratives from a time and place notable for outlandish events.

PRECURSORS AND ANTECEDENTS

As early as the 1880s, Otto von Bismarck had considered rousing a revolt in Russian Poland in case of war with the Tsar, and the Kaiser Wilhelm II proceeded further in the same direction, encouraging plots in Muslim countries under the domination of powers in the Entente. During the First World War, the German high command and Foreign Office encouraged guerrilla warfare throughout the empires of the Allied powers, concentrating special attention upon Morocco, India, Poland, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Ireland. They enjoyed some success, particularly by threatening Allied interests in Persia and Afghanistan and by using these countries as bases for operations against Allied territory. By 1918, the Imperial Government had spent 382 million marks on insurgency propaganda and special operations, and the idea of ‘self-determination’ had become an important element in German foreign policy.1

Even the Weimar Republic pursued similar strategies. During the 1920s, German military intelligence, the Abwehr, cooperated with the borderland guerrilla service, the Feldjägerdienst, in organising skeletal bands of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) living in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania.2 With the advent of the Third Reich, even larger numbers of Volksdeutsche were recruited as agents. In fact, such operations were eventually organised not only by the Abwehr, but by the SS Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD). Recruitment of Nazi or pro-Nazi underground groups helped pave the way for seizures of territory in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium and Yugoslavia,3 and after the assault upon the Soviet Union, the Germans were able to inspire a degree of unrest even among Soviet-Germans living in the Volga river basin, hundreds of miles behind Soviet lines. Stalin responded by dissolving the entire Volga-German Autonomous Republic and deporting its inhabitants into Asia, a process that served as a prototype for his eventual treatment of ethnic groups in which even small numbers of people showed signs of sympathy for the invader.4

Early attempts to exploit Nazified Volksdeutsche were organised on a case-by-case basis, although in the autumn of 1939 the Abwehr institutionalised the method by creating ‘Special Building and Instructional Company 800’, which was based in the old garrison town of Brandenburg and took that city’s name as its moniker. The Brandenburg unit represented a crucial stage of evolution in the Third Reich’s capacity to wage ‘Kleinkrieg’ (‘small unit warfare’), and it particularly proved its worth during the early years of the Russian campaign, when German troops in mufti seized Soviet bridges.5 The Brandenburgers’ very successes, however, resulted in problems of over-extension. By 1943, the unit had been built up to divisional size and was increasingly being diverted into regular combat duties, particularly in the Balkans, a development that resulted in the loss of some of its highly trained specialists amidst the grind of conventional fighting. Many recent cases in military history have shown that when hard-pressed generals throw specialist commandos and light infantry formations into regular combat, these units are typically cut to ribbons, notwithstanding their élan and their high degree of physical and mental fitness. Certainly this process effected the Brandenburgers, and to reinforce their capabilities for combat they were armed with artillery and tanks, which in turn further diminished their sense of particularity.

Nazi leaders also suspected that because of the Brandenburg unit’s association with the largely anti-Nazi Abwehr, it was being cultivated as the praetorian guard of the conservative opposition within the Third Reich. This supposition was not far from wrong and as a means of pre-emption, the Nazi leadership transferred control of the division from the Abwehr to the Wehrmacht Führungsstab. Hitler and his cohorts also made arrangements in 1944 to strip the Brandenburg Division of its surviving capabilities for special operations, which went to the SS.6

If the use of Volksdeutsch commandos and partisans proved problematic, the employment of non-German-speaking foreigners was even more difficult, particularly after the advent of the Third Reich. Many Nazis showed disdain for foreign guerrillas and troublemakers, even if their causes coincidentally worked to Germany’s advantage, although providing secret support for such elements would fit well into the Hitler regime’s predatory foreign policy. Eventually, most Nazis decided that the amoral opportunism of Nazi statecraft had to take precedence over the disagreeable aspects of working with ‘racial inferiors’, particularly in Eastern Europe. In the 1920s, the main proponent of foreign resistance movements was the Abwehr’s sabotage bureau. Although its enthusiasms were held in check by the conservative Weimar policy of ‘fulfilment’, which meant avoiding direct challenges to the major powers, the Abwehr did contact such disparate groups as Hungarian revanchists in southern Czechoslovakia and Breton separatists in western France.7 However, the Abwehr’s main cat’s paw was the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which was used to threaten and destabilise Poland. Although contacts with the Ukrainians briefly terminated in 1933, due to the racial intransigence of the new regime, the Ukrainian capacity to upset potential enemies was too lucrative to ignore, and in 1937 the Abwehr re-established links with the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and began training the movement’s members. For the Ukrainians, the result of such ties was a record of repeated betrayals by an arrogant and callous ally: when the OUN tried to grab Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia from a disintegrating Czechoslovakia, the Germans gave the land to Hungary; when the Ukrainians tried to liberate Polish Galicia during the ‘September War’ against Poland, the Germans handed the territory to the Soviet Union; when they tried to proclaim the independence of the entire Ukraine during the early days of Barbarossa, they were told that the western part of their country would now be part of German-dominated Poland and that the rest would be run as a colonial dependency of the Third Reich.8 Similar betrayals were perpetrated in the Baltic states, where the Germans also cultivated local nationalists and received their help in launching anti-Soviet uprisings in 1941. As was the case in the Ukraine, the Germans eventually unveiled their own irredentist programme for the region.9

Despite Nazi deceit, there is no doubt that support for pro-German subversion yielded considerable dividends, especially during Barbarossa. As a result, the German machinery to encourage such activity evolved to a considerable degree of complexity. The Abwehr’s sabotage wing, its second section (Zweierorganisation), was charged with equipping and training Abwehr Kommandos and a staff, code-named ‘Walli II’, was organised in Warsaw in order to coordinate these operations. The ‘200 series’ of these Kommandos, that is, the formations with three digit unit numbers beginning with a two, were charged with sending saboteurs up to 120 miles behind Soviet lines. ‘100 series’ Abwehr Kommandos were organised by espionage-oriented sections of the Abwehr and were responsible for intelligence gathering; ‘300 series’ units were tasked with counter-intelligence and antipartisan operations. Eventually, Abwehr Kommandos of all three types were attached to German forces on every front and were renamed Frontaufklärung (FAK) units. As before, the ‘200 series’ retained sabotage as its special province.11

In order to match the pace and extent of Abwehr operations in Russia, the SD also organised its own sabotage agency called ‘Zeppelin’, which in 1942 began infiltrating and parachuting squads of pro-German Russians, who were often deployed hundreds of miles behind Soviet lines.12 Although ‘Zeppelin’ originally recruited great masses of personnel from the ranks of Red Army deserters and POWs, this strategy shifted around the turn of 1943–1944, when Berlin ordered that ‘numerous small groups are to be formed… for the solution of purely political questions in enemy territory’.13 Although the Soviet security services rolled up many ‘Zeppelin’ groups, the SD received reports suggesting that they occasionally carried out acts of industrial sabotage and demolished railway lines, and through ‘Zeppelin’ the Germans learned much about the mood of the Russian people and the military disposition of the Red Army.14

As the struggle in Russia bogged down into an attritional campaign, the scale of German efforts accelerated. Many Abwehr specialists, along with officers of Wehrmacht combat formations, came to believe that the only way to win the war was to liberalise Nazi occupation policies, address the alienation of increasingly indignant populations behind German lines, and try to reawaken a Russian civil war.15 The Abwehr and ‘Zeppelin’ did what they could to realise this objective and to gather any important intelligence that became available along the way. The number of agents parachuted into the Soviet rear doubled in 1942, increasing by another fifty per cent in 1943, and the number of groups infiltrated through enemy lines also rose exponentially.16 Dozens of commando attacks caused Soviet losses that were small, but nearly always exceeded the casualties amongst the troops conducting the raids.17 In 1942, for instance, Abwehr losses in sabotage attacks totalled 654 men (mostly Russian personnel), while the Soviets lost 6,700 troops, plus six trains and over one hundred vehicles and armoured cars.18

By 1942–1943, the German sabotage services had reached the ultimate geographical extent of their reach, operating at some points over 2,000 miles from Berlin. In the North Caucasus, German teams supported local rebellions and the mountains were alive with armed groups of local civilians and Red Army deserters. A Caucasian specialist with Army Group A reported that ‘partisan warfare is burning particularly hot in the territories of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetya, Kabarda and Adegeja… The fighting has assumed a severe character and even the Soviet air force has had to undertake raids against the partisans.’ Stalin repaid the Chechens and Ingushi in the same way that he had dealt with the Volga-Germans: in early 1944, the NKGB violently uprooted and deported nearly the entire population of these mountain nations.19 The roots of the present-day conflict in the North Caucasus lie partly in this horrendous outrage.

The Germans also retained contact with guerrillas even further afield, particularly in central and southern Asia. They estimated that there were 80,000 anti-communist partisans in Soviet Turkestan, to whom they sent liaison officers and advisors. Many of the operations to support these ‘Basmachi’ bands were run through Afghanistan, although disaster struck when the local Abwehr mastermind in that country, Hauptmann Dietrich Witzel, was expelled in 1943.20 Afghanistan also served as a base for operations against India, where the Germans supported rebel tribal leaders in the North-West Frontier Province and had contact with a radical faction of the Congress Party.21 To the west, in Iran, the Abwehr ceded priority to the SD, which was busy cultivating the hill tribes, elements in the army and Islamic clergymen, even as early as 1940. When Iran was militarily occupied by Britain and the Soviet Union in 1941, the Germans launched a pro-Axis underground and they had some success in organising sabotage attacks, at least until their agents were rolled up by the Allied security services.22

In the Arab world, the Germans had to remain alert to the sensitivities of Spain and Italy, both of which held North African territories and frowned upon Abwehr or SD operations designed to stir up Arab nationalist sentiment.23 Nonetheless, the Zweierorganisation was suspected of complicity in an uprising by the Algerian Rifles, who in January 1941 massacred their officers and marched on Algiers.24 The Germans also encouraged nationalist plotters in Iraq, who rose in an anti-British revolt in May 1941, and veterans of this abortive rebellion, together with Syrian and Palestinian nationalists, were later trained by Sonderstab ‘F’, which occasionally sent parachutists back into the Middle East.25 In Egypt, Abwehr agents established contact with anti-British conspirators in the army, and in Morocco they made similar overtures to regional nabobs and landed airborne saboteurs in the country.26 In Tunisia, Abwehr Kommando 210 made dozens of attempts against Allied-controlled railways, bridges and supply dumps, and they set up a stay-behind organisation.27 The SD also participated in such activity by creating Operation ‘Parseval’, which had a mandate to ‘deal with the direction of resistance movements in French north-west Africa’, and was manned mainly by Frenchmen, Spaniards and Arabs.28 Even after the Germans were chased from North Africa, they continued to visit secret airfields and drop saboteurs into the region.29

While it is obvious that the Germans had launched sabotage efforts at many widely scattered points by 1943, several fundamental changes occurred after the key turning point battles at Alemein and Stalingrad. In the first place, as the Germans began to withdraw from areas within Europe, there was a great temptation to do what the enemy had done to them in supporting the construction and growth of armed resistance movements. Thus the emphasis in German efforts increasingly shifted to defensive modes of Kleinkrieg, particularly through the preparation of stay-behind activities. In fact, as conventional German military capacity diminished, the importance of weakening the enemy through irregular means increased accordingly, and the scale of such efforts grew by leaps and bounds.

Just as a realisation of their defensive posture was dawning on German guerrilla warfare specialists and spy-masters, the importance of the SD in these areas also grew exponentially. Identifying what they obviously saw as a field of opportunity, SD officers no longer wanted to stake a claim just over a few remote outposts like Iran, but to dominate the entire realm. This increasingly seemed possible because the Abwehr’s anti-Nazi inclinations and its links to the anti-Hitler resistance movement were starting to imperil that agency’s existence.

IRISH ORIGINS

Although it is a largely forgotten story, the original wedge for expanding the SD’s sabotage/subversion effort was born of German attempts to exploit tension in Ireland. At first, German plans for Ireland, around 1940–1941, were fixed upon using the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to raid Ulster, or perhaps exploiting the nationalists as a medium through which to get Eire’s premier, Eamon de Valera, to invade the British part of the island. Such troubles could prove a useful diversion for any prospective German invasion of Great Britain. By 1942, however, a variant of this plan, code-named ‘Thousand’, had replaced the original, offensively oriented version. As the opportunity to conquer Britain faded, German concerns shifted toward keeping southern Ireland free of Allied occupation and thus denying it as a base for anti-submarine warfare in the North Atlantic. Fearing that the temptation to grab control of Irish ports was increasing as the U-Boat scourge became more severe, the Abwehr and the Foreign Office suggested that two Wehrmacht divisions be held in readiness at Brest, France, so that they could be ferried to Ireland in case of a British invasion. This plan was rejected out of hand by the Armed Forces High Command (OKW), which had neither sufficient land nor sea forces to undertake the mission.

At this juncture, Edmund Veesenmayer, the Foreign Office’s specialist in conspiratorial intrigue, advanced a more modest scheme that he discussed with the SD-Ausland. In a series of conferences hosted by the OKW’s Special Staff on Commercial and Economic Warfare, and in which navy, Luftwaffe and Abwehr representatives took part, Veesenmayer proposed that aircraft and blockade-running sea vessels be reserved in order to supply the Irish with arms in case of an emergency, and that a small SD special services company be built in order to help the Irish Army should British invaders push into Eire. In case of such a coup de main, a small IRA-German team would be landed in order to prepare Irish opinion for a limited German intervention. This detachment would also reconnoitre drop zones for a main party to follow. Several days after the dispatch of the pathfinders, the SD unit would be parachuted or landed by sea, whence it would start guiding Irish regular and irregular forces in rear-guard efforts and in the organisation of partisan warfare, for which the Irish were felt to be suited by both temperament and tradition. The German specialists would also be responsible for training Irish soldiers and ‘volunteers’ with modern weapons, a supply of which would be air-dropped or landed on the coast by German vessels.

Until the middle of the Second World War, the SD-Ausland had no special services unit of the sort required for the prospective intervention in Eire. SD-Ausland regional bureaux had created their own sabotage groups on a case-by-case basis, such as ‘Zeppelin’ and ‘Parseval’, but the only SD subsection formally charged with supporting general sabotage activity was the supply office, Section F, which Himmler had ordered to form a guerrilla-warfare and subversion directorate code-named ‘Otto’. Based at 6a Delbrückstrasse, Berlin, ‘Otto’ was run by Sturmbannführer Hermann Dörner, a former adjutant to Himmler and a rising star in the SD hierarchy. When the SD agreed to organise a formation for combat in Eire, it was placed under the loose purview of ‘Otto’, although a large role in determining the character of the unit was played by Obergruppenführer Jüttner, the training chief of the Waffen-SS. Jüttner acted as the initial liaison with SS combat formations, from the ranks of which the unit’s men were recruited. In August 1942, a Dutch SS officer, Pieter van Vessem, was transferred to the SD and led one hundred Waffen-SS volunteers to an SD training ground at Oranienburg, near Jüttner’s headquarters at Fichtergrund. At Oranienburg, the men cooled their heels for over a month, not being informed of their mission, until Dörner finally arrived and launched preparations for operations in Ireland.

Despite the fact that the Oranienburg unit was well-trained and well-armed, two Brandenburg specialists who were sent to observe the company in November 1942 were not impressed. When these officers, Helmut Clissmann and Bruno Rieger, showed up at Oranienburg, they explained that they had been ordered to provide English lessons and wireless instruction, although Clissmann was a close associate of Veesenmeyer and was also supposed to check on the unit’s overall progress. Clissmann had lived in Eire before the war and was considered an expert on Irish matters. He and Rieger found the three platoons of trainees in a feisty and arrogant mood, noting that with their utter contempt for all things foreign, they would not make themselves popular in Ireland. The SD troops, Clissmann later recalled, had been ‘too overbearing and spoilt by SS discipline for use in Catholic Eire’. He and Rieger issued a negative report, while at the same time Hitler began to reconsider the ‘Thousand’ scheme because of the changing strategic situation. In conversations with Dörner, Veesenmayer agreed to make the SD unit available for other duties, and a number of Irish nationalists recruited by Dörner were released for alternate missions.30 In general, it was not a propitious start for a formation that was destined to evolve into the main German locus for the organisation of guerrilla warfare throughout Europe.

A HERO DESPITE HIMSELF

After plans for ‘Thousand’ were abandoned, the SD-Ausland decided to retain the Oranienburg Special Operations Unit as a permanent addition to its roster, controlled administratively by the SD but depending on the Waffen-SS for personnel and training. Dörner used the new organisation to train foreign agents, and in the spring of 1943 he spent considerable time preparing twenty German saboteurs, plus Persian translators and guides, for air-drops into Iran. The idea behind this project was to stir up Iranian insurgent groups. A six-man team was deployed on 29 March 1943, with the insertion carried out by a long-range aircraft from Crimea tasked by ‘Zeppelin’. Two of the operatives were able to find and join Franz Meyer, an SD agent who was already on the ground, but the mission as a whole failed when its chief, Gunther Blume, was arrested.

A similar plot was developed for the Belgian Congo. With the help of Flemish fascists, a small group of missionary fathers and a few disaffected Belgian colonists, SD special forces hoped to land a ten-man ‘Vorkommando’ by U-Boat and then build up an insurrectionary army of 2,000 men. The ultimate goal was to make contact with a rebellious African tribal chief, accepting his hospitality in the bush and carrying out sabotage attacks, while a radio outpost would keep SD controllers informed about operations. Oil wells were considered an especially important target. This scheme never materialised – perhaps the notion of aiding revolutionary African tribesmen caused the racists in the SS leadership to blanch – and the Portuguese Legion, which had a base in Angola, refused a request for help.

Finally, van Vessem and company were also being trained for operations in the Balkans,31 but before they could be sent to this front the course of the unit’s history was abruptly altered by the appearance of the monumental figure of Otto Skorzeny. Because of the SD’s increasing concern with irregular operations, the organisation’s chief, Walter Schellenberg, decided to dispense with the services of Section F and create a new bureau, Section S, which would be totally devoted to training saboteurs. The leader of this new office was Obersturmführer Otto Skorzeny, a 35-year-old Viennese SS man who had joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1932 and had bloomed as a protégée of Austrian SD luminary Ernst Kaltenbrunner. At a hulking six-foot-four and 195 pounds, his heavy features and dark complexion highlighted by a duelling scar that ran the length of his face, Skorzeny was a considerable physical presence. Intellectually, he had no special abilities and was far from being a member of the Viennese literati, although he was a quick study and had a working knowledge of several languages. Like his father Anton and brother Alfred, Skorzeny was trained as an engineer. He was employed in various engineering and construction enterprises and in 1937 bought ‘Otto Skorzeny Scaffolders’, a firm he had been managing since 1934. From 1922 onward, Skorzeny had also been a member of various student cadet corps, eventually graduating to the ultimate right-radical gathering ground, the Allgemeine-SS. As an SS volunteer, Skorzeny played a role in the Anschluss, the Nazi-inspired unification of Germany and Austria, and in the Kristallnacht, a nationwide anti-Semitic pogrom that proved a precursor to the Final Solution.

In 1939, Skorzeny joined the Luftwaffe, but his dreams of rapid promotion faded and he began pulling strings to wrangle a transfer to the armed wing of the SS, applying even to the Totenkopf units that guarded concentration camps. In February 1940, he was accepted into the SS-Leibstandarte ‘Adolf Hitler’, later shifting to the ‘Das Reich’ Division. Skorzeny fought on the Western Front and in Yugoslavia and Russia, being awarded the Iron Cross and rising quickly through the ranks. He became an officer in February 1941, although he was then invalided with gallstones, being detailed to a desk job at the Waffen-SS motor pool and driver training section in the southern suburbs of Berlin. This was a difficult period. For an action-lover like Skorzeny, relative idleness was hard to bear, particularly since it seemed to smack of shirking, and in the summer of 1942 the SS and Police Court actually accused him of absence without leave, a charge that was only dropped after investigators determined that he was genuinely ill and that he craved a combat assignment. It was from his modest post in Berlin-Lichterfelde that Skorzeny was eventually plucked by SS boss Heinrich Himmler and given a mandate to found the new ‘S Section’ of the SD-Ausland and to coordinate SD sabotage schools (‘S’ initially stood for ‘schools’ rather than ‘sabotage’). According to the paperwork, Skorzeny was chosen ‘on the grounds of his technical expertise’. He reported for duty on 18 April 1943, was promoted to Hauptsturmführer ten days later, and then set up his offices in the SD-Ausland headquarters at 32 Berkärstrasse, Berlin. A considerable row surrounded his promotion because Skorzeny had recently been confined to house arrest for entering a bar in Paris during a day of national mourning, after which he had abused the military police patrol that had come to pick him up. Officers in the SS motor pool complained that Skorzeny should never have been promoted during the penalty phase of his punishment, but ‘since the Reichssicherheitshauptamt cares nothing about regulations’, they could have Skorzeny with the best of luck.

Skorzeny was a talented amateur in the field of Kleinkrieg, although he was not in the same league as his hero, T.E. Lawrence. Nonetheless, he did share with Lawrence a defining brand of firebrand nonconformism. Fancying himself the Viennese striver in a world governed by stodgy Prussian Brahmins, Skorzeny was at odds with the regimentation of the Wehrmacht, and he was interested in pursuing original tactics and new forms of military strategy, although these were not always successful. Nazi war reporter Robert Kroetz called him the ‘new type of warrior… the total political soldier’, and it is interesting to note that this was the way in which the Hitler regime was officially disposed to interpreting Skorzeny.32 The ‘political soldier’ – a bastardised form of the Nietzschean superman – was defined in neo-conservative and SS ideology as an unflinching warrior schooled in direct action, in particular one willing to use military methods both on the battlefield and in the political or diplomatic fields. In fact, these latter spheres were understood simply as extended forums for the historic and transcendent struggle in which the Nazis believed they were engaged. This idea gave rise to a notion that we shall soon encounter as ‘diplomatic direct action’, that is, the romantic doctrine that a political or military leader was the incarnation of a cause, an army or a nation, and that by strengthening or hindering the individual leader his following could be either boosted to victory or mortally weakened.

Skorzeny had first shown his prowess as a ‘political soldier’ in Austria, where at the time of the Anschluss he had led an SS squad in apprehending the Austrian head of state. This episode had brought him kudos from senior Austrian Nazis like Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and as a reward he received the captaincy of a Viennese motorised formation in the Allgemeine-SS. It was probably this episode that made Skorzeny a credible candidate, once the time came, for the leadership of the SD’s new sabotage section. Skorzeny also benefited from the fact that Kaltenbrunner’s star was on the rise; after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner was appointed chief of the SS security directorate, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), of which the SD-Ausland was a part.

With Kaltenbrunner suddenly in a position to help his friends, not only was Skorzeny now recognised as a first-rate ‘political soldier’, but the standing of other Viennese officers in the SD improved. Kaltenbrunner and Skorzeny, along with two of the section chiefs in the SD-Ausland, Wilhelm Waneck and Wilhelm Höttl, formed a Viennese ‘mafia’, often at odds with the chief of the SD-Ausland, Walter Schellenberg, and with the boss of the powerful SS-Main Office, Gottlob Berger. Skorzeny and Waneck took particular pleasure in ignoring regular bureaucratic channels. In so doing, they banked on Schellenburg’s disinclination to face issues directly, and despite the fact that the latter had a superior intellect, as well as Himmler’s ear, he lacked the courage to bulldoze Skorzeny and Waneck back into line.33

Once in the saddle, Skorzeny gathered a coterie of romantic misfits and desperadoes who regarded themselves as free thinkers. Skorzeny’s right-hand man was a fellow Austrian named Karl Radl. According to Eugen Dollmann, Radl was ‘intelligent and understanding… a typical Viennese’ averse to pointless bloodletting. Three years younger than the commando chief, he was also a member of the Austrian SS and in the 1930s had been a close friend of Skorzeny’s wife, through whom he knew Skorzeny himself. After studying law at the University of Berlin, Radl volunteered for front-line duty, but when commissioned he was attached to the SD-Ausland. Several years later, he accidentally bumped into Skorzeny in a Berlin restaurant and agreed to Skorzeny’s request that he join him as his deputy. Made of finer clay than his boss, Radl had a mandate to move paper and to integrate Section S within the ponderous machinery of the SS bureaucracy. Popularly known as ‘Skorzeny’s Nanny’, he provided a crucial centre of gravity in the new sabotage headquarters and attended to the red tape that his high-flying chief felt was beneath him.

Three other key recruits were Arnold (Arno) Besekow, Adrien von Fölkersam and Werner Hunke. Besekow was a criminologist from the Magdeburg police who met Radl in May 1943 and was subsequently recommended to Skorzeny. He was then appointed as head of the Fourth Bureau of Section S, which controlled the training of agents and the formation of stay-behind networks, and he also succeeded Radl as the chief of the Second Bureau, which planned and controlled small-scale operations. It was in this capacity that he was sent to the Netherlands in 1943 in order to collect reports from captured parachutists about Allied special operations. By one account, he also directed the laying of 380 sabotage dumps in areas likely to be overrun by the Soviets and the Western Allies. A thick-set and ruddy-faced cigar chomper, Besekow appeared in both uniform and civilian clothes, but was invariably well-groomed. One SD officer at Skorzeny’s headquarters later remembered Besekow and Radl as ‘the brains of the organisation’ – ‘Skorzeny himself was a heavy drinker and eater, stupid but popular’, although Besekow too had a fondness for drink and for women. Although amiable, he could be brutal: he bragged of having ordered the killing of 800 men, and he threatened at least one acquaintance with death by his own hand should he ever suspect him of betrayal or obstruction.

Baron von Fölkersam was a thirty-year-old Baltic German who spoke a number of languages and was an early member of the Brandenburg detachment. The Byronic counterpoint to Besekow’s loutish pug, he had garnered a reputation by slipping a commando unit behind Soviet lines near Maikop and creating havoc along Red Army lines of communication. To get authorisation for the transfer of von Fölkersam and ten other prospective Brandenburg volunteers, Skorzeny had to endure a three-hour interview with the Abwehr chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and even then he was only finally able to recruit von Fölkersam by slipping him through a backdoor bureaucratic channel. The young Brandenburg officer became the chief of staff in Skorzeny’s commando unit.34

Hunke had an even more exotic background. The son of an engineer residing in Tientsin, China, Hunke lived in the Far East until he was sent to Germany in order to attend middle school. He then became an enthusiastic Nazi, studying at an elite National Socialist academy and, like Skorzeny, training as an engineer at a technische Hochschule. After joining the Waffen-SS in 1939, he spent four years in Finland and Russia and was brought back to Germany in order to serve as a China expert in SD-Ausland. After it became apparent that he had lost touch with the land of his youth, he become one of Skorzeny’s company commanders and eventually, in September 1944, his operations officer. Hunke transmitted Skorzeny’s orders, compiled reports and recruited personnel.35

When Skorzeny agreed to organise Section S, he got as an endowment the Oranienburg Special Operations Unit. Skorzeny felt strongly about these troops – his ‘beautiful men’ as he called them in one misty-eyed moment after the end of the war.36 At first, however, Skorzeny’s recruits were anything but ‘beautiful’, at least in moral composition, and they were hardly an elite. As the Oranienburg Sonderkommando was refocused away from its original concentration on Ireland, it was built up to battalion size by recruiting Waffen-SS convicts who agreed to undertake dangerous assignments in lieu of finishing their sentences in SS stockades. In fact, many of the inductees into the Oranienburg formation came from an SS probationary camp in Chlum, Czechoslovakia, although Skorzeny later claimed that he found ninety per cent of these personnel unsatisfactory and sent them back to Chlum. Skorzeny, however, was reluctant to give up on probationary convicts as a source of manpower, and as a result he negotiated an arrangement to improve the screening process. The chief of the SS Legal Bureau, Franz Breithaupt, agreed that his office would scour the personnel records of prisoners in SS stockades and disciplinary units and focus only upon convicts who had good records in confinement and might be persuaded to apply voluntarily for ‘Sondereinsatz’ (‘special action’). Breithaupt wanted Himmler to institutionalise this procedure and give him authority to make appropriate transfers of personnel.

Unfortunately for the SS, the movement was embarrassed when Skorzeny used elements of Section S – Hunke in charge – to set up joint training programmes for special services personnel from the Luftwaffe, the navy and the SS. Several cycles of a four-week course organised along such lines were held at the Leibstandarte ‘Adolf Hitler’ barracks in Berlin-Lichterfelde. It was not long, however, before the volunteers provided by the armed forces discovered that their SS confrères were probationary convicts. Naturally, ‘unpleasantness’ occurred and navy officers, in particular, complained about having to associate with such men. The matter came to Himmler’s attention, and although Skorzeny and Kaltenbrunner recommended simply hiding the status of the trainees, Himmler showed a preference for recruiting future Skorzeny Leute from throughout the SS, not just from amongst convicts. In fact, he refused to approve Breithaupt’s request for permission to automatically transfer SS convicts into Skorzeny’s formation, instead instructing that cases be evaluated on an individual basis. Indeed, in the case of nine potential transfers that were sent forward for his approval, Himmler sanctioned only two, sending the other seven men to the notorious Sonderregiment Dirlewanger.

During the same period, Kaltenbrunner suggested issuing an appeal throughout the SS for volunteers willing to undertake ‘Totaleinsätze’, that is, near-suicide missions, arguing that a similar entreaty in XI Fliegerkorps had raised 450 men for a special Luftwaffe unit. This call circulated in the late spring of 1944 and was pitched toward SS men from Russian-occupied territories, troops who had lost relatives in air raids, and soldiers ‘who have nothing to hope for’. The ‘Totaleinsatz’ appeal changed the nature of the Oranienburg Sonderkommando, although it never entirely lost its probationary character. The expanded range of recruits also caused Skorzeny’s unit to grow to the point where it comprised a headquarters formation and three line companies, the last of which was formed in 1944 and consisted of Flemish and Dutch volunteers drawn from sabotage schools in the Low Countries. Skorzeny also renamed the unit Jägerbatallion 502 and moved its headquarters to a hunting lodge at Friedenthal, not far from its original home at Oranienburg.

With the rush of ‘Totaleinsatz’ personnel, it is legitimate to begin describing Skorzeny’s troops as an ‘elite’, and they were increasingly characterised by the usual markers of such personnel: they were subjected to gruelling standards of endurance, physical fitness and technical proficiency; they had a romantic notion of warfare and were fond of striking heroic (and often anti-technocratic) poses; they were typically alienated, ill-disciplined and tribalistic; and they were contemptuous of mass action, whether on the battlefield or in the realm of politics. Relations between officers and ranks were fraternal, a necessity for men deployed in conditions where they were often outside of their officers’ immediate control. Despite this temperament, there is room for scepticism about such men’s capabilities. Many of the Skorzeny Leute