The Himmler's SS (44 page)

Despite the good fighting reputation quickly gained by the western volunteers, they were simply too few in number to meet SS requirements for replacing battle casualties and so Berger turned to the Volksdeutsche scattered throughout central and eastern Europe. In just three countries, namely Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia, it was estimated that there were some 1,500,000 Volksdeutsche in 1939, and this was clearly a rich source of potential manpower. Recruitment of Romanian Volksdeutsche began as early as the spring of 1940, but a sudden influx of volunteers from Yugoslavia after the invasion of April 1941 led Berger to suggest to Himmler the formation of an entire division of Yugoslavian Volksdeutsche. The result was the raising in the summer of 1942 of the SS-Gebirgs Division ‘Prinz Eugen', designed for anti-partisan duties against Tito's mountain-based resistance movement. Later that year, faced with an ever-worsening manpower crisis, Hitler gave the SS formal authorisation to conscript the Volksdeutsche, who fell outwith the remit of the Wehrmacht as they were not German nationals. In that way, an impressive numerical level of recruitment was maintained, but many of the conscripts were poor in quality and consequently Volksdeutsche units tended to be second rate. They soon earned for themselves the reputation for being specialists in perpetrating massacres against civilian populations and other soft targets. The associated policy of recruiting Croatian and Albanian Muslims into the ‘Handschar', ‘Kama' and ‘Skanderbeg' Divisions, to take on the Christian Serbs from whom many of Tito's partisans were drawn, was a total disaster and all three divisions had to be disbanded in order to free their German officers and NCOs to fight elsewhere.

SS-Obergruppenführer Artur Phleps, founder of the ‘Prinz Eugen' division and commander of the 5th SS-Gebirgs-Korps in 1944. Phleps was an ethnic German from Romania who had served on the General Staff of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War and later as an instructor at the Bucharest Military Academy. Unlike most of his Volksdeutsche subordinates, Phleps was granted full SS membership as indicated by the runes worn below the left breast pocket. He was captured and subsequently killed by Russian soldiers on 21 September 1944, near Arad.

Himmler inspecting Bosnian Muslims of the ‘Handschar' artillery regiment being trained in the use of a Pak 38 anti-tank gun at Neuhammer in Silesia, October 1943.

In May 1944, Haj Amin al-Husaini, the self-styled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and spiritual leader of Bosnia's Muslims, reviewed troops of the ‘Handschar' division, who were kitted out with their distinctive field-grey fez.

In the Soviet Union, the Germans made better use of local nationalist groups opposed to Stalin's government, successfully persuading large numbers of the native population to enrol in the Schutzmannschaft for counter-guerrilla operations. The breakthrough for the Waffen-SS recruiters came in April 1943, when no less than 100,000 Ukrainians volunteered for a new SS division, of whom 30,000 were duly accepted. Over 80 per cent of them were killed the following year when the Ukrainian division was trapped in the Brody-Tarnow pocket. In the summer of 1944, after the failed July bomb plot against Hitler, Himmler was given unprecedented military powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Army, which effectively gave him control over all reserve and replacement forces in the Reich. He took the opportunity to enhance his personal status still further by transferring many Armenian, Baltic, Caucasian, Cossack, Georgian and Turkestani volunteers from the hastily mustered foreign legions of the German army into the Waffen-SS. However, while the wide range of nationalities involved undoubtedly had some propaganda value, the actual performance of the eastern troops in combat left much to be desired. The Baltic SS divisions, grouped together under SS-Obergruppenführer Walter Krüger as the 6th Waffen-Armeekorps der SS, lived up to modest expectations and were particularly ferocious when defending their homelands, but the remainder were poor at best and at worst a complete rabble. Himmler regarded them merely as racially inferior auxiliaries, in effect expendable cannon-fodder. They were never considered for SS membership proper, and were prohibited from sporting the SS runes. Although they wore a sort of diluted SS uniform for convenience, they had their own series of distinctive badges so that there would be absolutely no possibility of their being mistaken for ‘real' SS men. Not surprisingly, the loyalty of the easterners was always in question, and their horrific behaviour when set loose among the civilian population of Poland during the Warsaw uprising of autumn 1944 led to frequent demands for their withdrawal, even from other SS commanders. Several units had to be disbanded, and some of their leaders were tried by SS courts martial and executed for looting and other excesses.

Non-German nationals ultimately made up the greater part (57 per cent) of the Waffen-SS. It is estimated that 400,000 Reich Germans served in the Waffen-SS during the war, as opposed to 137,000 pure west Europeans, 200,000 pure east Europeans and 185,000 Volksdeutsche. A detailed breakdown of non-Germans by nationality is shown below:

Pro-Nazi Cossack volunteers riding under the flag of the death's head, 1944.

While the majority of Waffen-SS men were non-Germans, the wartime Waffen-SS officer corps consisted almost entirely of German nationals, who held all of the most senior posts. The vast majority of non-German officers in the foreign divisions of the SS had their ranks prefixed by ‘Legions-' or ‘Waffen-' rather than ‘SS-' (e.g. ‘Waffen-Stand-artenführer der SS') and they, like their men, were not classed as SS members. Because of this, even ‘heroic' figures such as Léon Degrelle, holder of the Knight's Cross with Oakleaves and first recipient of the Close Combat Clasp in Gold, did not merit inclusion in the
Dienstaltersliste
.

The summer of 1941 saw the Waffen-SS officer corps in its best condition, and witnessed an influx of recruits from the police, transferred Wehrmacht officers, party and state officials, doctors, lawyers and youth leaders eager to serve with the new élite before the anticipated victorious cessation of hostilities. However, the subsequent blood-letting in Russia destroyed the cream of the early graduates of Bad Tölz and Braunschweig, and their replacements bore scarcely a token resemblance to them. By 1 July 1943, the officer corps numbered 10,702. Even so, only 4,145 were designated as career or professional officers, with about 1,000 of them holding ranks of SS-Sturmbannführer and above. Himmler observed at that time that the ‘Führerdecke', or ‘officer cover', for many front-line SS units was lamentably thin, and that the state of the officer corps had deteriorated drastically since the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Three times as many SS officer dossiers survived the war as there were numbers of SS officers in 1941. The great bulk of the remainder related to battlefield commissions granted to Waffen-SS NCOs who had proved themselves at the front between 1942 and 1945. Many thousands of officers were thus added to the corps in a fairly short period, men whose ties with the NSDAP and prewar SS were tenuous or even non-existent. The ‘military élite' commanding the European SS of 1944 was, therefore, far removed from the politically motivated SS-VT officer corps of the late 1930s. During the last year of the war, Waffen-SS senior officers' conferences saw elderly former Wehrmacht and police officers standing shoulder to shoulder with the younger generation, many of whom had been NCOs or subalterns in 1939 and were now hard-bitten and highly decorated colonels and brigadiers. The members of this new officer corps were dubbed by the SS Old Guard as ‘Nur-Soldaten', or ‘only soldiers', men whose responsibilities were limited to fighting and whose remit did not include the eventual policing of a conquered Europe. The result was a fragmentation of the officer corps between the ‘politicals' and the ‘fighters', a split which grew ever wider as the war drew to a close. The Waffen-SS uniform never supplanted the Allgemeine-SS membership card in Himmler's mind, and by 1944–5 the typical Waffen-SS officer at the front identified far more with his bloodied Wehrmacht colleagues, and even with his long-suffering enemies, than with his bureaucratic SS seniors in Berlin and Munich.