Liebstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler
Jonathan Trigg takes you inside the genesis, training, deployment and battles of the infamous Waffen-SS division
It was the Waffen-SS division that carried the Führer’s own name and became the most coveted posting for dedicated Nazis. Jon Trigg looks at the unit's recruitment, training and combat operations.
Erwin Bartmann was a young Berliner who would leave the bakery where he was apprenticed to volunteer for one of the most infamous military units of the entire
20th century: ‘All through my teenage years I watched with admiration as Hitler’s personal guard, the Leibstandarte, paraded through the streets of Berlin. Immaculate in their black uniforms and shining helmets, marching in precise step – a sight that made my boyish heart race with pride.’
The formation that Bartmann joined began its life back in 1923 as the Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler, comprising a few dozen men tasked with protecting the rabble rousing leader of Germany’s small, far-right Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – the Nazi Party. Garbed in standard brownshirt uniform, they would use their fists and boots to stop
Communist Party toughs attacking their leader and breaking up his meetings.
Some 10 years later, with the Nazi accession to power, the formation was be renamed the SS-Stabswache, and given the job of acting as the public, uniformed face of the new Third Reich. Wearing a striking new uniform of black, red and silver, it performed ceremonial duties at major public buildings in Berlin, including the Reich Chancellery itself. Providing honour guards for visiting VIPs, the men were soon mockingly derided as asphalt soldiers as they goose stepped down the wide boulevards of the capital.
Hived off from the mass membership Sturmabteilung stormtroopers, the Schutzstaffel, or SS for short, swore personal loyalty to Hitler, and proved it the following year by taking a bloody part in the Night of the Long Knives, when they murdered Ernst Röhm and
most of the brownshirt leadership by firing squad. Having proven its loyalty, Heinrich Himmler, as head of the SS, began to expand his organisation and its influence across the Reich by creating the armed, or Waffen-SS.
Recruitment and training
Enlistment into the rechristened Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler was notoriously difficult, as Mathieu Klein recalled: ‘From the 120 of us who volunteered, only 23 were chosen after three intensive medical examinations.’ Richard, another would-be recruit, remembered that: ‘You had to be 1.8m or 6ft tall, physically fit, with no criminal record, and prove you were Aryan for three generations.’
Successful applicants then underwent what Hans-Gerhard Starck described as: ‘Intense and repetitive training, repeated until everything was done almost automatically, as our instructors pushed us to the limits of our endurance.’
Great emphasis was placed on attaining physical fitness through sport, and relationships between officers and men were far closer than in the more traditional Army. However, valuable training time was also wasted on learning the Nazis Weltanschauung, their racist world view, and being indoctrinated with a hatred of Jews, Slavs and communists.
First blood
Having taken part in the bloodless reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, and then the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, the Leibstandarte was slated to see its first combat in the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939.
Organised as a motorised infantry regiment some 3,000-strong, Hitler’s bodyguard was a tiny fraction of the invading force, but stood out from the field grey ranks in their new camouflage smocks and helmet covers, with the double lightning flash runes of the
SS on their right collar tab. To further distinguish themselves they wore a black ribbon cuff title on the bottom of their left sleeve, with Adolf Hitler’s signature picked out in silver thread. Each man also had their blood group tattooed on the underside of their upper left arm to speed up medical treatment in case of injury.
The Leibstandarte’s commander in Poland was Josef Dietrich, one of the original 120 members of the unit and
Hitler’s former driver. His surname being German slang for a skeleton key, all the formation’s vehicles were marked with a key symbol. The Leibstandarte would retain this insignia throughout the war.
Advancing into central Poland, the SS troopers fought a series of tough battles near Pabianice and then Warsaw, where inexperience and reckless aggression led to Army criticisms of its relatively high casualty rate. There were also accusations of atrocities, including the massacre of 50 Polish Jews outside the town of Blonie. Regardless, the Leibstandarte was considered to have performed well enough to be lined up for Hitler’s next big move, the invasion of the West.
France and the Low Countries
Codenamed Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), the Wehrmacht crashed over the border into the Netherlands and Belgium on the morning of 10 May 1940. The Leibstandarte was in the vanguard, advancing an incredible 130 miles in just four days to reach Rotterdam on 14 May and link up with Fallschirmjäger (German paratroopers) who were already fighting in the city. Unfortunately, their
success was marred when several of their members accidentally shot Kurt Student, the founding father of Germany’s airborne forces. Student survived, but was hospitalised for months.
Sent south after the capitulation of the Dutch, the Leibstandarte’s next task was to fight the British rearguard trying to hold the perimeter around Dunkirk. As the Dunkirk miracle got underway, the Leibstandarte once again tarnished its record when some of its men under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Wilhelm Mohnke, drove a number of British POWs into a barn near the village of Wormhoudt, and opened fire. 80 men, mostly from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, were butchered.
The Russian Front
Successful invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece ended with the men of the Leibstandarte glorying in a victory parade through the streets of Athens in the shadow of the Parthenon, but it was their next campaign which would, in so many ways, come to define them as a unit. This was the invasion of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, the long-awaited clash between Nazism and communism.
Allocated to Gerd von Rundstedt’s
Army Group South, the Leibstandarte was now a division in all but name. With a strength of well over 10,000, it was built around a core of three regiments, two of which were infantry, and one of artillery, with an armoured battalion. Still refitting on 22 June 1941 when the Wehrmacht launched its attack, it hurried forward, Kurt Meyer’s reconnaissance battalion in the vanguard: ‘The one thing not to do was stop, just continue moving and take advantage of the enemy’s confusion!’
It soon dawned on the young SS troopers that this would be a campaign like no other. Non-Russian ethnic minorities would often welcome the advancing Germans, as Kurt Schmidt saw for himself, “The local Ukrainians saw us as their liberators from Russian oppression.” However, at the same time the resistance they met bordered on the fanatical, as Kurt Meyer acknowledged in his memoirs: ‘The Russians fought bitterly and tenaciously for every inch of ground. They were fighting in front of us, and to the north and south of us, I told my men that as of now the enemy is everywhere!’
Fighting every step of the way, the Leibstandarte advanced hundreds of miles until it stood outside the city of Rostov, the gateway to the Caucasus. In a daring coup de main, Heinrich Springer, a giant officer standing well over 6ft tall, led his company in a wild charge over the city’s enormous River Don bridge, capturing it and earning himself a Knight’s
Cross. Success was short-lived, as Erwin Bartmann recalled: ‘On 2 December we had to evacuate Rostov, the enemy was too strong and we had few or any supplies as we had outrun our replenishment vehicles.’ By now winter had descended on an ill-equipped Wehrmacht. Arriving as a replacement, Herbert Maeger saw first-hand how terrible the Leibstandarte’s losses were, writing: ‘The authorised strength of our company was 120 men in four platoons, but there were only 20 left when we arrived.’
Withdrawn to France in the summer of 1942, the Leibstandarte was officially converted into one of the new so-called panzer-grenadier divisions, with an entire panzer regiment now in its ranks.
Shipped back east following the Stalingrad disaster, the Leibstandarte played a major role in Germany’s last great victory on the Eastern Front, when it helped re-capture Kharkov and smash a powerful Soviet army threatening to crush the German front. Erwin Bartmann
was wounded by friendly fire during the battle: ‘I threw myself to the ground and got hit by a bullet in the right thigh. I felt the warmth of the blood on my legs…and could see the bullet. I dug it out myself and bandaged my leg.’ Staying with his unit, Bartmann’s leg healed enough for him to take part in the Wehrmacht’s summer offensive in the East at Kursk. Grouped together with its sister divisions, the SS-Totenkopf and SS-Das Reich, the Leibstandarte made steady progress as part of the attack’s southern wing, until it came face to face with the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army at the small hamlet of Prokhorovka on 12 July 1943. The ensuing tank battle has gone down in history, with hundreds of burning tanks and assault-guns littering the steppe. The battle ended the German offensive.
Withdrawn once more, the division was briefly based in Italy, where it disarmed Italian troops following the country’s capitulation to the Allies, and was upgraded to a fully fledged panzer division. One more campaigning season awaited it back in the Soviet Union, where it helped relieve the German defenders of the Cherkassy Pocket in early 1944, before trekking west to try to rebuild its strength.
Normandy and the Ardennes
D-Day found the Leibstandarte only partially ready for combat, but the Germans were so desperate it was fed into the battle regardless, where it suffered terrible losses. Manfred Thorn was a Panzerkampfwagen IV driver in 7. Kompanie and, at 19 years old, was considered one of the old men of the unit. Fighting for the village of Tillyla-Campagne near Caen, Thorn wrote: ‘Nothing in my previous experience on the Eastern Front could have prepared me for Tilly. The tactic of unbroken artillery barrages lasting for hours was gruesome mental and physical torture.’
Caught in the Falaise Pocket, the Leibstandarte was decimated and fled east towards the Reich as the German Army in France was crushed.
Reformed for the fourth time, the Leibstandarte was now commanded by none other than Wilhelm Mohnke of Wormhoudt infamy. Under his leadership, the Leibstandarte took part in Nazi Germany’s last offensive in the West, tasked with punching through American lines to cross the River Meuse in the Ardennes and then head for
Antwerp in the December snows of 1944. Key to the attack’s success was a 5,000 strong kampfgruppe (battlegroup) formed from the ranks of the Leibstandarte and led by Jochen Peiper. Ordered not to stop for anything, Peiper’s men committed a number of atrocities during their advance, most dreadfully at a crossroads near the town of Malmedy, where they machinegunned 84 American POWS.
Germany’s defeat in the Battle of the Bulge, presaged yet another switch of fronts for the Leibstandarte, as the survivors were bundled onto trains and shipped east, this time to Hungary. Tasked with trying to raise the siege of Budapest and recapture the country’s oilfields, the under-strength Leibstandarte was doomed to fail, despite the presence in its ranks of Panther tanks, Tiger I’s and even behemoth 70-tonne Königstigers.
Relentlessly forced back by the power of the Red Army, the Leibstandarte headed west, Hans-Gerhard Starck among them, “Anything which broke down was pushed to one side and abandoned.” Ending up near Steyr in upper Austria, it was finally all over, as Starck recalled, “On 8 May we were ordered to cross the River Enns and surrender to the Americans. That was the end of my service as a soldier.”