Waffen-SS: Poland, 1939

Background

Hitler's plan for the attack on Poland included many of the features of his moves against Austria and Czechoslovakia. Ultimatums were issued to the Poles to force them to hand over the city of Danzig to Germany. Ethnic Germans in the city caused trouble with the help of Heinrich Himmler. SS men were dispatched to act as a "fifth column" in Danzig even though the city was nominally a neutral or demilitarized zone. During the summer a battalion of the Totenkopfverbönde, plus an anti-tank company, were smuggled into the city as "tourists" or as members of SS "sports clubs". Uniforms and weapons were then moved into the city in small boats. Despite heavy security measures, the Polish press was soon full of reports of the movement of arms from Nazi Germany into Danzig. In July the covert SS force was dubbed the SS-Heimwehr Danzig and was portrayed as a militia of local Danzig Germans. In reality it was under the direct control of Himmler in Berlin.

The German plan

The German plan was to defeat the Poles a few weeks before the French and British had time to mobilize and strike from the west. This would be an offensive that the world had not seen before - a Blitzkrieg or lightning war. Hundreds of tanks, dive-bombers and fighter aircraft would spearhead the German offensive, which was intended to paralyze the Polish Army in a matter of days and destroy its fighting ability. Hitler ordered 11 of his new panzer divisions, a total of 3195 tanks, and 4 motorized infantry divisions to lead the assault and open the way for some 40 infantry divisions to mop up the last pockets of Polish resistance. Some 850 bombers and dive-bombers, backed by 40 fighters, would assure the Germans of total air cover. The Polish Army was totally outgunned. It could muster more infantrymen than the Wehrmacht could deploy, but the Poles had only 225 modern tanks and 360 combat aircraft.

The SS's role in Poland

Hitler was determined that his SS units would play a prominent role in the coming glorious victory. The reorganization of the SS-VT was not yet complete, so the individual armed SS regiments were assigned to support army divisions and corps on key axes of advance. In East Prussia, the Deutschland Regiment was incorporated into an ad hoc panzer division under the army's Major-General Werner Kempf, which was to spearhead the Third Army's offensive from that area. The Leibstandarte Regiment and the SS-VT combat engineer battalion was attached to the 17th Infantry Division to lead the assault of the Eighth Army on the Polish Army defending the central city of Lodz. In the south, the Germania Regiment was to support VIII Corps' attack on Cracow and Lemberg in the far south of Poland.

Although army commanders were initially reluctant about involving the armed SS units, the fact that they were all motorized meant they would be useful to help maintain the tempo of the advance. The vast majority of the army's infantry divisions marched into battle on foot, and the size of the theatre of war meant motorized units were at a premium. The armed SS regiments were to be used as independent spearhead units to scout ahead of the infantry divisions and exploit any loopholes in the Polish defensive line.

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