Olympic Showjumper Saves the Day
Among many ‘probationary’ troops in Dirlewanger’s ragtag brigade were several senior officers assigned to the brigade as punishment after being implicated, one way or another, in the 20 July plot to kill Hitler.
One of these officers was Oberst Harald Momm, who led the equestrian showjumping team at the 1936 Olympics. Until the evening of 20 July, he had been in command of the Wehrmacht’s horse cavalry school in Potsdam. After uttering a remark in the officer’s casino that night expressing disappointment that Hitler had survived, he was arrested by the Gestapo. Sentenced to death, he was given a reprieve if he volunteered to serve in the Dirlewanger Brigade at a reduced rank of Hauptsturmführer. Momm agreed, and soon found himself in SS uniform commanding 5. Kompanie, II. Battalion, Ss-sturm-regiment 2.
After the Soviet attack on 15 December where his battalion disintegrated, Momm was without a company, which had deserted except a few men who remained loyal. His troops were consolidated into a single infantry company led by the battalion commander, Sturmbannführer Ewald Ehlers, and Momm was without a job.
Overall commander of German troops on the scene, Generalmajor Josef Rintelen, who knew of Momm’s reputation as an Olympic horseman, commandeered him and sent him north to Ipolysag to do what he could to lend a hand. Momm did not make it to Ipolysag, but found himself on the southern outskirts of the town of Deménd facing a disorganised mob of SS men streaming out of the village of Gyerk with a column of Soviet T-34s in hot pursuit.
Quickly sizing up the situation, Momm took charge of three retreating 4.5 cm antitank guns and their crews, rounded up 27 stragglers, and placed them in position a few hundred metres north of the bridge at Kistompa.
Although the guns stood little chance of knocking out T-34s, his small Kampfgruppe kept up such a blistering rate of fire that the tankers hesitated, not knowing whether this show of resistance was a precursor to a larger German counterattack. This bold move bought time for German engineers to blow up the bridge, preventing the Soviet attack from extending beyond the Ipolysag narrows and allowing German reserves to construct a new defence line.
According to the order of the day that Rintelen published on 17 December:
“Hauptmann Momm was the only leader I found when I arrived in the breakthrough area who, through his independent action and energetic determination, built up the defensive front in the Deménd section.”
He survived the war as well as five years in a Soviet POW camp. Returning to Germany, he was reinstated to his former rank and became Chef d’equipe of the German showjumping team in1951, retiring after the team won Gold at the 1956 Stockholm Games.