SS Hunter Battalions: The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944-5
448
SS Hunter Battalions: The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944-5
448eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752496450 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 11 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Hunter Battalions
The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944â"45
By Perry Biddiscombe
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Perry BiddiscombeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9645-0
CHAPTER 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.
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. 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, 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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'. 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.
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. 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. Dozens of commando attacks caused Soviet losses that were small, but nearly always exceeded the casualties amongst the troops conducting the raids. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Even after the Germans were chased from North Africa, they continued to visit secret airfields and drop saboteurs into the region.
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Hunter Battalions by Perry Biddiscombe. Copyright © 2013 Perry Biddiscombe. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
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,