Hitler's Panzers (38 page)

Its variant identity did not make Viking anything but an SS division. During service entirely on the Eastern Front, the men whose shoulder patch was a stylized longship acquired and preserved a reputation as not being freely given to the large-scale, gratuitous ferocity characteristic of their fellows. That of course did not avert shooting Jews on what admittedly by SS standards were limited numbers: a few hundred here and a few hundred somewhere else, usually justified as “reprisals” and underwritten by an internal order that Jew-killing was not a punishable offense.

Leibstandarte and Das Reich served in the Balkan campaign, enhancing the Waffen SS reputation for aggressiveness and arrogance. An officer of Das Reich at the head of a dozen men was able to bluff the mayor of Belgrade into suspending resistance until it was too late. When some men of the Leibstandarte hesitated to advance against a Greek position, their battalion commander, himself in the front line, got them moving by throwing a grenade at them. “It’s not bragging when you back it up.” And if the army as an institution still found the Waffen SS as a concept unpleasant to swallow, its four motorized divisions on the ground looked better and better as Barbarossa’s orders of battle were finalized.

In June 1941, the Waffen SS remained firmly under the army’s organizational thumb. Leibstandarte and Viking went with Army Group South, Das Reich with Center, and Totenkopf with North. Hoepner kept the Skulls in supporting roles. Mopping up stragglers and maintaining contact with Bock’s left flank, the division took heavy casualties as it fought toward Leningrad through the forests and swamps.

Das Reich was initially not even allocated road space by Army Group Center, but when it found a way to the front it played a crucial role in the late July fighting around Yelna. One of its staff officers used the division’s last reserve, its pioneer battalion, to stop a major Soviet breakthrough. The corps report singles out the SS riflemen for “fearlessness and bravery,” swarming over heavy tanks to set them afire with gasoline when the antitank guns proved useless. And the casualty records show Das Reich took almost three times the losses of 10th Panzer Division, which fought alongside it.

That pattern persisted throughout the drive for Moscow. As part of Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, Das Reich fought to within sight of Moscow, then was caught in the Soviet counterattack and hammered so badly its effective remnants were organized into a battle group and the remaining survivors sent all the way to France for rest and refitting. Not for a year would it return to the east, and to a new emergency.

Leibstandarte was also held in the wings during Barbarossa’s early stages. It was a week before it joined III Panzer Corps, then XLVII Panzer Corps, for the drive into the Ukraine. Leibstandarte had always been the best of the Waffen SS formations, and it sustained that reputation both in the attack and while fending off Soviet counterattacks. It got as far as the Black Sea before turning north in November 1941 and rejoining III Panzer Corps to play a key part in capturing the city of Rostov. A Leibstandarte rifle company set up the victory by capturing a vital railway bridge before it could be blown. Its quick-thinking CO ordered his men to shoot up a locomotive and stormed across under cover of the clouds of steam.

That was the kind of warrior performance that inspired Mackensen to inform Himmler that every unit wanted to have Leibstandarte on its flank in a tight spot. And if the “toughness” Mackensen praised manifested itself occasionally in the mass shooting of Soviet prisoners—as many as 4,000 in a single incident, according to one allegation—the usual explanation was that the shootings were reprisals for the murder and mutilation of captured SS men. It was a fig leaf, but it camouflaged what the army understood to be a negotiable trade for SS “discipline, eagerness, and enthusiasm.”

Soviet counterattacks drove the Germans out of Rostov and inflicted heavy casualties. By the turn of the year, more than half Leibstandarte’s originals were dead or wounded. The replacement pool was almost exhausted; Soviet counterattacks so reduced its fighting power that Leibstandarte was not considered for Operation Blue. Instead it was withdrawn to France in June for refitting—and assignment to the newly forming SS Panzer Corps.

Viking saw its first action fighting for Tarnopol in Galicia, then shifted south across the Dnieper and served alongside Leibstandarte in the capture and loss of Rostov. Viking also held the line in the Ukraine during a winter of counterattacks. Unlike Leibstandarte, Viking was not favored with reassignment to France. Instead, replenished and reequipped on the ground, it received its own tank battalion and proved a key to the successes of 1st Panzer Army during its drive into the Caucasus. Viking crossed the Kuban Steppe in hundred-degree temperatures, fought into Grozny as the oilfields burned, sent spearheads toward Astrakhan, and won consistent praise from the panzer corps to which it was assigned.

By no means was all of this flattery aimed at Himmler by uniformed politicians. Retitled “panzer grenadier” in October 1941, Viking increasingly assumed the role of a panzer division in a theater where armor was scarce and distances wide. Half its 50 tanks were Panzer IIIs, and its officers made up for the relative lack of armor with by-now predictable aggressive tactics that earned the grudging respect of the Soviets. Steiner proved a clear-eyed general as well as a hard-driving commander. As early as mid-September he reported to his SS superiors that Hitler’s directive was impossible: the Caucasus could not be crossed before winter set in.

If Viking was at one end of the Waffen SS approach to war-making, Totenkopf set new standards at the other. The Skulls were one of the half dozen divisions and 100,000 men trapped in what came to be known as the Demyansk Pocket by the Soviet Northwest Front’s massive offensive of February 1942. When terrain, weather, and command arteriosclerosis put an end to the operation, Demyansk remained, attacked repeatedly by a total of five Soviet armies, and kept minimally supplied by air. And by all accounts and admissions, Totenkopf was the backbone of the defense. Combining with army troops or fighting on their own, the SS men held nothing back. Eicke’s pathological ferocity focused a spirit of “no quarter, no surrender” that rendered four-fifths of the division casualties by the time the pocket was relieved in April.

Not many of the original concentration camp guards remained when Totenkopf’s remnants joined Leibstandarte and Das Reich in France. By this time the occupied zone was developing into a rest and refit area for divisions burned out in Russia. “To live like God in France” is a familiar German proverb, and the SS survivors took full advantages of the opportunities provided in a society still complaisant, if not enthusiastic, about its situation. It was not all down time. The SS divisions were reconfigured and upgraded to panzer grenadier status. The title was another fig leaf to keep the army quiet. While not officially renamed until October 1943, all three were full- fledged panzer divisions where it counted, with, thanks to the lobbying of Himmler and Hauser, two-battalion tank regiments, at least a battalion on infantry in half-tracks, and—eventually—a company of Tigers.

This upgrading was a major step in an anomaly. The Waffen SS was the only large-scale high-tech elite force fielded by any army during World War II. The special forces, rangers, raiders, and commandos, the paratroopers, even the US Marines, depended to varying degrees on the quality of their personnel to compensate for a lack of the hitting power sacrificed to mobility and flexibility. The Red Army’s guards units were upgraded to recognize combat performance. Only the Waffen SS—and only its best divisions—combined physical, ideological, and material elements to the same degree.

With their generous allowances of supporting weapons, the divisions’ authorized strengths grew to more than 20,000—a sharp contrast to the army, whose divisional strengths were being steadily reduced to cope with diminishing manpower. There were certain costs involved. The reinforcements’ standards of training were generally described as low. For the first time, even Leibstandarte was constrained to accept men born outside the Reich but “German” by official standards of racial descent—which, in passing, grew increasingly flexible as the war continued. A living link with the worst aspects of the Waffen SS also returned to its ranks when Eicke, recovered from his wounds, resumed command of Totenkopf. Its men welcomed him like a returning father.

Hitler had first authorized an SS Panzer Corps in May 1942, strongly against army wishes. Its commander was Paul Hausser, recovered from a wound that cost him an eye, and supremely confident that his corps was just the instrument needed to restore the situation and turn the tide in the east. Redeployed east in January 1943, it played a crucial role in Manstein’s offensive. Hausser, the “lowly corps commander” mentioned above, may well have averted a second Stalingrad by defying Hitler’s initial order to hold Kharkov. His men paid for the city’s recapture with more than 12,000 casualties. Leibstandarte’s fighting strength was reduced by almost half, the city square was renamed in its honor, and its men were accused postwar of clearing a hospital by the simple expedient of shooting its 700 patients. Das Reich also took heavy losses in the city’s industrial zone, and according to one of its captains, had the subsequent pleasure of showing the ladies “who the real men were” in Kharkov. The Skulls lost their CO when Eicke’s light plane was shot down between the lines on February 23, 1943—and took more losses recovering the body. Manstein received the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, and came away with a different attitude toward the men in black who had helped hang it around his neck. The Waffen SS would be front and center in the next German offensive.

CHAPTER SIX

T
HE BATTLE OF Kursk established the conditions for the rest of the Russo-German War. It developed in the wider contexts of a war that the Reich’s leadership, from Hitler downward, understood now hung in the balance. In the aftermath of El Alamein, Hitler had reinforced defeat in North Africa, committing two panzer divisions plus a number of Tiger tanks to Tunisia, creating a new panzer army headquarters to command them. The result was a few tactical victories, won against inexperienced troops, that proved operationally barren and strategically empty.

Rommel, worn down mentally and physically, halted one attack when the American artillerymen facing it had a fifteen-minute supply of ammunition remaining. He managed to concentrate three panzer divisions for an attack against 8th Army, which was advancing from the east—the largest armored attack the Germans made in the entire campaign. But ULTRA intercepts gave Montgomery an outline of his enemy’s intention. Rommel ran headlong into a multilayered, prepared defense that tore the heart out of the panzers. “I have six hundred antitank guns, four hundred tanks, and good infantry holding strong pivots,” Montgomery commented. “The man must be mad.” After less than a day Rommel ordered a withdrawal from the battle that, by all accounts, ranks as his greatest embarrassment.

Were these events stumbling blocks or straws in the wind? Hopes for the U-boat campaign and faith in new weapons, from nerve gas to super-long-range cannon to rocket bombs, were balanced against an aerial offensive absorbing increasing amounts of the Reich’s high-tech capacities and the prospects of a cross-channel invasion sometime in 1943 by an alliance demonstrating an uncomfortably high learning curve.

PARADOXICALLY, CIRCUMSTANCES SEEMED more promising in the East. The victories at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus initially encouraged the Soviet High Command to plan a major offensive on a front extending from north of Smolensk to the Black Sea. But the price of success had been high. The Germans, against expectations, had come back strong and added a new high card to their order of battle in the SS Panzer Corps. The second front long promised by the western Allies still consisted of promises and substitutes. Significant evidence indicates Stalin seriously considered the prospects of a separate peace with Hitler, or with a successor government willing to respond. Tentative contacts, most of them indirect, began in Sweden during the spring of 1943 and continued for most of the year.

By any rational calculation, the Reich’s short-term prospects of total victory in Russia were close to zero. The concluding volume of
Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweiten Weltkrieg
summarizes a project begun thirty years ago by suggesting that without Hitler’s iron determination, Germany would probably have been ready to conclude peace in 1943. But by that time the National Socialist Führer State had so far eroded the principal institutions of state, Wehrmacht, and party, that neither institutional nor personal forums for discussing the issue existed. No one but Hitler was responsible for the whole. No one—above all no one in the military—was willing to risk considering the whole and acting on the results. Like many a plan before it, Operation Citadel would take on a pseudolife of its own.

Postwar historians in general have followed the generals’ memoirs in blaming Kursk on Adolf Hitler. He is indicted, tried, and convicted first for refusing to accept the professionals’ recommendations and shift to an operational defensive, temporarily trading space for time while making good the losses of the winter campaign, allowing the Red Army to extend itself in a renewed offensive, then using the refitted panzer divisions to “backhand” it a second time. Once having accepted the concept of an offensive, Hitler is described as first delaying it while the Russians reinforced the sector, then abandoning it when, against the odds, the generals and the Landser were on the point of once more pulling the Reich’s chestnuts from the fire.

Reality, as might be expected, is a good deal more complex. Hitler badly needed a major victory to impress his wavering allies—perhaps even to convince Turkey to join the war. And his argument that south Russia’s resources were significant for sustaining Germany’s war effort could not be simply dismissed. The army high command, moreover, was not precisely of one mind on the issue. Guderian, restored to power and favor, argued against any major offensive during 1943 in favor of rebuilding a panzer force stretched to the limits by the fighting at the turn of the year. Wait until 1944, he urged, then strike with full-strength panzer divisions built around Panthers and Tigers, with increased numbers of half-tracks and assault guns and a mobile reserve strong enough to hold any second front the British and Americans could open.