Das Reich (4 page)

They abandoned shaving for weeks on end to protect their skin, forgot mail from home, for it never came, grew accustomed to seeing their own ranks shattered in battle, rebuilt and shattered once again until their old units were unrecognizable. Casualties provoked meteoric promotions to fill the gaps. Heinrich Wulf found himself commanding a battalion reduced to a tenth of its establishment, yet when he himself left Russia, only one in ten of those men was left. ‘Our only concern was not to be captured,’ he said. The two armies rivalled each other in ruthlessness. One night Wulf’s young ordnance officer, Hubseh, was captured by a Russian patrol. At dawn, as the light revealed the Russian lines two hundred yards away, they saw the German lashed to a haystack. A few moments later, a Russian loudhailer broadcast simple terms: surrender within ten minutes, or watch the haystack fired. The haystack was fired. Karl Kreutz – by June 1944 the Das Reich’s artillery commander – remembered the discovery of an ambulance column, with forty German wounded systematically butchered by the Russians with their doctor. The order came down from division to take no prisoners for eight days. Was the order obeyed? ‘Of course.’

There was no peace in darkness, for the Russians were masters of night-fighting. After the first months of the 1941 campaign, when herds of bewildered, untrained Russian soldiers were driven by their leaders on to the German guns, Stalin’s commanders learned quickly. Every German who fought in the East returned with a profound respect for his enemy. There was no German tank to match the Russian T-34. By 1943, the Germans were awed by the huge artillery barrages laid down before the Russian attacks. Red infantry, sometimes stupefied with alcohol and driven on by their commissars at gunpoint, pressed home their assaults with the fury of despair.

Nor were the Russians always ignorant slaves. Fritz Langangke remembered a night in a hut, huddled over a little ‘Hindenburg light’ stove, when two Russian girls who spoke German talked to them for hours about the war: ‘They were so intelligent, they said with such certainty that we lacked the fervour to match theirs . . . That night I almost became a bolshevik,’ said Langangke wryly. He was a man of unusual imagination and sensitivity for an SS officer. But another Das Reich tank man, Otto Pohl, was also deeply impressed by a badly wounded Russian sergeant whom they blew out of his bunker with grenades: ‘We asked him his unit number. He replied simply: “An NCO of the Russian Army does not give information.” ’

It was the iron toughness of the Russians that they admired, and later compared so favourably with the qualities of the Americans. Some Russians were fighting just as doggedly beside the Germans, against their fellow-countrymen. Every German unit had its contingent of ‘Hi-Wis’ – Russian prisoners or renegades who served as batmen, stretcher bearers, ammunition carriers and scouts. Hi-Wi patrols would slip out of the German lines every night, returning at dawn with often vital intelligence, until the inevitable morning when they failed to come back. They were utterly expendable, easily and casually replaced.

Through those years in Russia, few German fighting soldiers expected to come home. There was a catchphrase among them about ‘Living like God in France’. The West came to seem almost a dream world. To the men of the Das Reich who emerged from the East in 1944, the rich fields and vineyards of south-west France brought them back to the glorious, happy memories of 1940. Yet they found that much had changed. Those who served there in 1940–1 had found most of the French people astonishingly relaxed and friendly. They now discovered that in public civilians addressed them coldly, or not at all. There was less to eat. The terrorist threat meant that it was impossible for vehicles or men to travel alone outside city centres. Even in Toulouse, the officers’ messes and the
Soldatenheim
were faced with wire mesh against grenade attack.

Almost all of them took it for granted that within a matter of months they would be committed to battle against an Allied invasion, probably in the north. Over wine in the cafes, the officers reminisced endlessly about Russia, and speculated about the British and Americans whom they had never seen. ‘We thought of the Americans as children,’ said one of them. An officer who had been in North Africa with the Wehrmacht described how the British would sometimes surrender simply because they had run out of petrol. ‘But we knew that their air forces would be a terrible problem. We were not frightened of their men, but of their material . . .’

Ever since the first winter in Russia, 1941, when the German Army suffered privations of Crimean proportions because of supply failures and military misjudgments in Berlin, many even among the SS had been puzzled by the High Command’s omissions and failures. By 1944 some, like Wisliceny, had long since abandoned hope of winning the war militarily, but still hoped for some political settlement at tolerable cost. Others, like the twenty-four-year-old veteran Otto Pohl, not only loved their tanks and their division, but cherished ambitions to reach high command, and never thought of defeat. ‘Until the very end in 1945, I was sure that it would be all right for us,’ he said. Pohl was a son of one of the old German elite who had transferred his allegiance very early to the new aristocracy. His father had been an officer in the Kaiser’s navy who joined Hitler in the 1920s, and was now an SS general. Young Pohl was educated at one of the special Young Socialist cadet schools, volunteered for Russia in 1941, and somehow survived there for three years. Some officers, like Otto Weidinger, had been troubled about the logic of invading Russia, but not Pohl: ‘A soldier never asks himself whether an operation is a good idea. Fighting is his business.’ When they asked themselves why they were sent the wrong type of ammunition, why there were desperate fuel shortages, why they were sometimes compelled to suffer terrible losses to no purpose, scarcely a man in the division considered fixing the blame on
Adolf Hitler. Some said that the Führer simply did not know of these things. Others, that he was badly advised by those around him, above all by Bormann and Ribbentrop.

But it is essential to perceive that, in many respects, these young soldiers of the SS – and the divisional commander was their only officer older than thirty-two – had much in common with the men of other armies. The SS newspaper prided itself on the freedom with which it criticized the failings of the organization. Officers and men shared a far closer relationship than those of the British Army. They inflicted their arrogance upon the outside world, not upon each other. Among junior officers, there was a hoary joke whenever some supreme organizational disaster was inflicted upon them: ‘. . .
Wenn der Führer wüsste!
’ – ‘. . . If only the Führer knew!’ When they sang, it was seldom the
Horst Wessel
song, more often a number like
Waldeslust
:

In the privacy of their billets, most of them enjoyed a reasonably civil relationship with the French civilians who were obliged to house them. A Frenchwoman who provided quarters for six men of the Das Reich in Montauban in 1944 described how one of them with punctilious correctness brought her a 1,000 franc note that he had found in his room. It was a matter of pride within the SS that no man was permitted to lock up his possessions in barracks, although some of them stole petrol from the unit stocks to get to the brothels in Toulouse. The SS officers were elaborately, Germanically courteous to the wives and daughters of their enforced hosts. They considered themselves, indeed, to be the very pattern of chivalry. An officer of the Das Reich cited to the author an example of his division’s gentlemanly code: in Russia, a colleague was found to have committed some aberration with a Russian woman, and was at once ordered to go to his quarters and shoot himself. He did so.

Yet these young men, so careful in their private courtesies and honesty, were also profoundly flawed. It is unnecessary to review in detail the principles of National Socialism, the anti-semitism, the uncritical devotion to Hitler – it can be taken for granted that almost every officer of the Das Reich shared all these, not least from practical gratitude for what Hitler’s Germany had done for his career. The only acceptable salute in an SS unit was ‘
Heil Hitler
’. Otto Pohl readily forgave his father-in-law and two brothers-in-law dead in Russia, Karl Kreutz his home in Berlin destroyed by bombing and his family refugees in Silesia, Ernst Krag his six wounds, and the half of his class comrades at officer school already dead.

The aspect of their conditioning that is most relevant to this story is the extraordinary respect with which they had been imbued for the virtues of strength, of ruthless dedication to the task in hand, and the equally extraordinary indifference to the claims of the weak and the innocent. All their virtues were reserved for others within their closed society. They possessed neither charity nor mercy for any who were not deemed to have deserved it by their own code. It is striking that when the survivors of the British First Airborne Division at Arnhem found themselves in the hands of the SS, they expected to be shot. Instead, they were treated with the respect due to heroes. According to the SS code of chivalry, these were fellow-knights worthy of their highest honour. Yet as we shall see below, those whom the SS did not deem worthy of its respect – above all, enemy civilians – were treated with unflinching ruthlessness. The young leaders of the SS had been educated and trained to believe that only one principle mattered – the interests of Germany as they themselves and their commanders saw fit to interpret them. They did not spurn morality or justice or process of law – these were simply forgotten or unknown concepts to them. If the
Einsatzgruppen
– the SS extermination squads – or the concentration camps ever passed through their consciousness, they never allowed these
mildly distasteful matters to linger. They were part of the natural machinery of the state, and no concern of theirs.

The greatest fear of an SS officer was that he might be considered guilty of weakness or cowardice. He could never be wrong if he adopted or accepted the most drastic solution to a problem. From the first appearance of the Waffen SS in the war, it had been made apparent that superior officers would always pardon an excess of zeal in the right direction. In September 1939, a member of an SS artillery regiment in Poland herded fifty Jews into a synagogue and shot them. The prosecuting officer at his court martial appealed for the death sentence, and the man was indeed sentenced to a term of imprisonment. But then Berlin intervened. An appeal hearing was held, at which the presiding judge said that the accused ‘. . . was in a state of irritation as a result of the many atrocities committed by Poles against ethnic Germans. As an SS man, he was also particularly sensitive to the sight of Jews and the hostile attitude of Jewry to Germans; and thus acted quite unpremeditatedly in a spirit of youthful enthusiasm.’ The sentence was quashed. The SS never looked back. Throughout the next four years of conquest and struggle, above all on the Eastern Front, the Waffen SS shot whomsoever they wished, whenever they wished. Within two weeks of the invasion of Russia, the SS Wiking Division had killed 600 Galician Jews ‘as a reprisal for Soviet cruelties’. The Leibstandarte Division found six of its men brutally killed by Russian troops, and shot every prisoner for three days, a total of about 4,000 men. In September 1941, a support unit of the Das Reich assisted an SS extermination squad to kill 920 Jews near Minsk. Mass killing in pursuit of state policy never became the professional business of the Waffen SS – the
Einsatzgruppen
looked after all that sort of thing. But there can have been few experienced officers and men in the Waffen SS by June 1944 who did not regard it as a perfectly legitimate exercise to carry out mass reprisals and wholesale killings if the situation seemed to justify them.

The qualities that the SS most signally failed to foster were intelligence and imagination, probably because these characteristics would have rendered their possessors unfit for service in its ranks. Throughout its history, the Waffen SS produced an extraordinary corps of soldiers and regimental officers, but failed to throw up a single outstanding higher commander. At divisional level and above, the Waffen SS was lamentably directed. Only Paul Hausser, the venerated Panzer commander who once led the
Verfügungstruppen
from whom the Das Reich derived, has any claim to military brilliance, and he was a product of the old German Army. The SS fought and died bravely, often fanatically. They can expect no higher epitaph.

General Heinz Bernard Lammerding, commanding officer of the Das Reich Division in June 1944, was a typical product of the new Nazi aristocracy. He was born in Dortmund, qualified as an engineer, and became an early convert to National Socialism. He took a job as director of an SA engineering school, and worked in various capacities for the organization until 1935. He then became SS member no. 247062. He was a Waffen SS engineer captain at the outbreak of war, served on the staff of the
Verfügungstruppen
division from November 1940 to August 1942, then took command of an infantry regiment. After a brief period on an armoured corps staff, in July 1943 he became chief of staff to General von der Bach-Zelewski. This officer was directing with legendary ruthlessness anti-partisan operations in the rear of the German armies in Russia. Lammerding’s signature appeared on several appalling documents, ordering the wholesale destruction of entire villages and towns which were judged guilty of assisting partisans. At the end of 1943, Lammerding took command of troops of the Das Reich Division operating against partisans in its rear areas, and on 25 January 1944, of the division itself. On 22 May 1944, while the division was at Montauban, it was announced with suitable celebration that Lammerding had been awarded the Knight’s Cross for his work in Russia. He was still only thirty-eight.