Das Reich (5 page)

Few of the surviving officers of the Das Reich Division have
much to say in favour of Lammerding as a commander. He lacked personal presence, and possessed none of the obvious gifts of a leader of men. He was a curiously colourless, forceless figure, whose greatest merits were administrative competence and friendship with Heinrich Himmler. It was rumoured in some Das Reich officers’ messes that it was this personal alliance which had secured him command of the division. Himmler paid them a personal visit in the spring of 1944: ‘It was obvious that Lammerding and Himmler got on well, although I couldn’t say whether this affected Lammerding’s career,’ said his senior staff officer, Major Albert Stuckler. ‘After all, Lammerding had been a good engineer.’ But the impression emerges of Lammerding from all the accounts of June 1944 of a man overpromoted and quite unsuited to a fighting command, who would have been much more at ease on Himmler’s staff.

In May 1944 Fritz Langangke was suddenly ordered to carry out a major rail reconnaissance for his tank regiment: ‘I had always wanted to have a railway since I was a little boy, and suddenly I was given one. I was provided with a special train with a saloon car and a carriage full of Russian soldiers as escort, and ordered to check every possible rail route for the division to the front.’ For two idyllic weeks, he coasted comfortably around southern France, measuring tunnel heights, checking bridge capacities and road connections. The train was commanded by a major who had been a pre-war wine merchant, and used the trip to shuttle hundreds of cases of black market wine hither and thither about his domains: ‘These fellows, they had already forgotten about the war. For me, coming from Russia, it was a revelation. For the first time I thought – “Oh yes, this is going to go . . . We can lose . . .” ’

Langangke found most of the French railway officials almost unctuously friendly and hospitable, complaining bitterly about the damage being done to the nation’s transport system by Allied bombing, which was indeed provoking passionate hostility to the
Allies in many great cities of France. But in the house where he was billeted with an elderly aristocratic lady, her nephew sometimes called to talk. One evening this man said to Langangke: ‘You poor devils made a big mistake when you joined the Waffen SS, you’re going to be the first to catch it when the time comes.’ The man offered to smuggle him to Algeria. Langangke said: ‘What would you do in my place?’ The Frenchman remained silent. Langangke never saw him again.

The Das Reich’s training programme was lamentably behind schedule, yet all that spring it was continually interrupted in order that units could take part in sweeps and punitive operations against the French Resistance. Week by week, around the huge area in which the division was encamped in its fifty barracks and lagers, the campaign of sniping, roadblocking and sabotage intensified. For a vast fighting machine such as an armoured division, the terrorists represented no substantial threat. But they obliged every unit to put its quarters under guard, every man to carry a weapon at all times, every ration truck to travel with an escort. Otto Pohl became so exasperated by the need to keep a four-man picket on the house in which he was billeted that he moved into quarters in the centre of Caussade with his men, Sadi Schneid’s anti-tank platoon found themselves the subject of a furious unit investigation one morning when it was learned that a stock of mines had been stolen from their store. Even Karl Kreutz’s gunners were periodically diverted from training to sweep stretches of the countryside where there were reports of arms being parachuted to
maquisards
. Sometimes they found odd containers in the woods or fields, but more often than not the operation was in vain.

In the month of May 1944, according to Albert Stuckler, the division lost some twenty men and a hundred vehicles to terrorists. A soldier was shot with his wife who was visiting him in their hotel room in a village near Caussade. An NCO coming out of a cafe in Figeac was killed by a burst of Sten gun fire. Any vehicle travelling alone was liable to ambush.

In those last weeks before D-Day, the 2nd SS Panzer Division made the price of Resistance very clear to the surrounding countryside. Reprisals were on a scale modest enough compared with Russia, but thus seemed savage enough at the time. On 2 May, one of the tank battalions was training near the small town of Montpezat-de-Quercy when an SS patrol was fired upon a mile to the south-west. The SS swept through Montpezat, setting fire to several houses, looting extensively and assaulting several civilians who seemed slow to acquiesce. On 11 May men of the Der Führer Panzergrenadiers conducted a series of sweeps in the Lot. Twenty-four people, including four women, were seized for deportation in St Céré, forty from Bagnac. In Cardaillac, two women were shot, of whom one died. In Lauze, fifty-year-old Mme Moncoutre and her twenty-year-old daughter Berthe were shot among their sheep. Orniac was comprehensively looted. On 1 June, a tank unit moving north of Caylus machine-gunned six civilians in Limonge, one at Cadrieu and two at Frontenac. On 2 June, after a
maquis
attack in the countryside, twenty-nine farms were burned, along with the entire village of Terrou, whose 290 inhabitants became refugees. On 3 June, after an SS truck was attacked near Figeac, two men of twenty-two and seventy-four were shot on the spot, and six men and a woman from nearby Viazac were taken out and shot. The most massive action by the Das Reich before D-Day was a raid on Figeac, in which the Germans discovered a Resistance arms dump including sixty-four rifles, three Bren guns, thirty-one Stens and a bazooka. The town paid a terrible price: more than a thousand people were arrested and deported to Germany. Forty-one were killed.

Yet for all the thoroughness with which the Das Reich approached these operations when ordered to carry them out, they were a matter of exasperation to the divisional staff, anxious about its training programme. Several protests were made to 58 Corps and Army Group G about this use of
Frontsoldaten
against communist bandits. ‘We were completely unsuited in character and mentality to this sort of warfare,’ said Major Stuckler. ‘There
were specially trained units for this type of work.’ Training was also being hampered by the chronic shortage of fuel. Although they exercised intensively at company and battalion level, they lacked opportunity to manoeuvre as a division. Communication and liaison between units was poor. Many of the raw recruits who had joined them in February and March were scarcely past basic training. They were still acutely short of transport – above all trucks for the infantry units and tractors for the towed artillery. Deliveries of tanks were proceeding slowly. On 16 May, they had received thirty-seven Panzer Vs and fifty-five Panzer IVs towards their new reduced establishment of sixty-two of each. But they possessed a full complement of thirty of the superb
Sturmgeschützen
– assault guns that were in effect turretless tanks, with a low silhouette that made them very difficult targets for enemy fire. The two
Panzergrenadier
regiments – each in British parlance a brigade – were at full strength, but under-trained. Major Weidinger, casting a critical eye upon his men, believed that they were capable of fighting a limited battle. His fear was that in a prolonged action, under continuous strain for a period of weeks, their inexperience and lack of training would tell against them.

Then Heinz Guderian, the godfather of all German armoured forces, arrived on an inspection tour. For three days he watched their exercises, above all the night movements which they knew would be critical against Allied air power, the ‘walking forest’ – heavily camouflaged advances of the tank units who had been warned that there would be none of the great sweeps across open plains that had been possible in Russia. Guderian pronounced himself reasonably satisfied. On his last evening, the officers arranged a dinner for him in their mess at a nearby château. Silver candles and linen tablecloths were found, the black market was swept for food, and that night a circle of dress-uniformed young tankmen and gunners sat down to dinner with the general at the head of the table. He was at his most affable and talkative. He told one of his favourite stories:

The officers of the
Sturmgeschützabteilung
laughed with the rest at his version of the development of their self-propelled guns.

With the benefit of hindsight, the success of the Allied landings in Normandy, against indifferent and poorly directed German resistance, seems inevitable. It did not seem so to either side at the time. Even a sceptic such as Fritz Langangke said: ‘It did not seem impossible that we could defeat the invasion. We did not then realize that not all Germany was fighting as we were.’ It has sometimes been suggested that the Das Reich in June 1944 was so weakened by its large intake of recruits of doubtful enthusiasm that it could have played no important role in Normandy, even had it arrived much earlier on the battlefield. In reality, its deficiencies of training and equipment were no worse than those of most other Panzer divisions in France at that period. It was better equipped with tanks and assault guns than most of its counterparts. Lammerding reported to Army Group G that 2nd SS Panzer was ‘conditionally ready for battle’.

Sadi Schneid, the young Alsatian recruit who wrote a fascinating personal memoir after the war for SS veterans’ consumption, testifies that many of the Alsatians were indeed lukewarm in their enthusiasm for the war, but intensive training and the fierce spirit of the SS had imbued an astonishingly high proportion with a
determination to do whatever was expected of them. He described an evening in their barracks, when his company of the reconnaissance battalion returned from an anti-terrorist sweep. Their senior NCO, Hauptscharführer ‘Hascha’ Kurz, a formidable veteran of the Eastern Front, was relieved and delighted that not one of his motley crew of
Volksdeutsche
, former prisoners of war and green Alsatians, had attempted to desert while they had the chance to do so, in open country. He made a speech to them:

For the men and women of the French Resistance, D-Day was the decisive moment of the war. After years in which their potential power and enthusiasm had been doubted and disputed in London and Washington, now they were to be put to the test. Resistance did not wage a continuous four-year guerilla struggle against the Germans. Only late in 1941 and early in 1942 did a small number of French people begin to stir from the terrible lethargy and trauma of defeat. Clandestine opposition newspapers were printed. There were cautious meetings of handfuls of like-minded enemies of Vichy. Very many of these courageous pioneers were caught and shot, but others followed. The early handfuls began to grow into a hundred, a thousand independent Resistance groups and escape lines. Each began to develop its own links with one of many interested organizations in London – the British-run French Section of SOE, MI6, MI9, De Gaulle’s BCRA and later the American OSS. These links, often forged by the chance of a brief encounter or an exchange of names, determined whether a circuit spent the remainder of the war gathering information, assisting escaping prisoners or preparing for open battle against the Germans. Despite the brief effective existence of a National Council for Resistance under the brilliant Jean Moulin in 1943, after his capture the quest for unity flagged, and in the interests of security this was probably fortunate. Until the end, Resistance remained a patchwork of overlapping and often mutually hostile independent networks. The British and French officers parachuted to provide arms and liaison with London could seldom do more than paper over the cracks of local rivalries, and try to steer the movement towards a broad common policy.

This policy was, quite simply, to direct every effort towards creating a clandestine army to rise on D-Day and cause the maximum difficulty for the Germans behind their lines. In 1942 and early 1943 the
Armée Secrète
– the AS as it was referred to – was composed of Frenchmen continuing their ordinary lives –
les légaux
who had agreed that when the signal was given they would drop their cover and take up arms. The seizure of Unoccupied France by the Germans in November 1942 gave the AS an important boost. Many officers and men who had served with Pétain’s Armistice Army, now disbanded, became
résistants.
Some, chiefly in the south, were able to bring arms with them. Then the German introduction of deportation for forced labour – the detested
Service de Travail Obligatoire
– gave Resistance a vast pool of recruits to which it could never otherwise have aspired. Hundreds of thousands of young men who would never have contemplated taking up arms against the Germans now found themselves compelled to do so. The only alternative to the STO was escape into the countryside, either to become a refugee in a remote community or to join a
maquis.
By the end of the war, the Germans had successfully carried away 17 per cent of the youth of France to the factories of the Reich. But they paid for this by inflating Resistance in a matter of months from a slight faction into a mass movement of young men, with millions of their worker and peasant parents bitterly alienated from Vichy and the Occupiers.