He arrived in the middle of January and immediately began organizing counterattacks, but brought no reinforcements or new equipment with him. The troops at the front would have to drive back the Soviets without outside help in sub-zero temperatures and knee-deep snow.

Stemming the Red tide

The Ninth Army was ordered to launch a counterattack to trap the spearheads of the Soviet Twenty-Ninth Army approaching Vyazma. It was a daring but desperate move that needed determined soldiers. The Das Reich Division proved up to the job. It quickly punched a corridor to German troops to the west, including the survivors of the SS Cavalry Brigade, and closed a ring around 36,000 Soviet troops, standing ready to hold off a relief attempt by the Red Army's Thirty-Ninth Army. For more than three weeks the 650 men of the Der Führer Regiment and the SS Cavalry Brigade held their positions against relentless Soviet attacks. Day after day, waves of Soviet T-34s tried to blast their way past the Waffen-SS men. Das Reich anti-tank gunners and tank-hunting parties drove off the Soviet tanks on each occasion. Scores of Soviet tanks were knocked out in front of the German lines, but the Das Reich troops suffered grievously. Whole companies were wiped out in the battle, and when the Soviets gave up their attempt to free their trapped comrades the Der Führer Regiment was down to 35 men fit for battle. The battalions of the SS Cavalry Brigade were equally depleted to 30-40 men each.

There was still no respite for the men of the Das Reich Division, who were called up to fight in the Rzhev salient for just over a month. Both the Soviet and German high commands were trying to tidy up their fronts, and eliminate salients and threatening concentrations. By the end of February, the Waffen-SS division had lost another 4000 casualties and each of its frontline battalions was barely able to muster 100 men fit for action.

In the Army Group South sector, the Leibstandarte and Wiking Divisions were fully committed to the defence of the Mius River line to the west of Rostov. Although the Soviets made repeated attempts to break through the Waffen-SS lines, the German defensive positions were built on the top of a ridge high above the river. Defenders could easily pick off any attackers trying to close on them with artillery, mortars and machine guns.

The SS divisions stand fast

Through the winter into the spring of 1941-42, the two Waffen-SS units held firm, and allowed other German mobile units to strike northwest to seal off a Soviet breakthrough at Izyum that threatened Army Group South's supply lines back to the Dnieper. As Soviet offensives were engulfing Army Group Centre in December 1941 and into January 1942, this storm of steel soon spread to the northern sector and almost swept away the Totenkopf Division. Like their comrades in front of Moscow and farther south, Theodor Eicke's men were exhausted, freezing cold and had no idea when they would be relieved. They stood shivering in their trenches on the night of 7/8 January when two Soviet armies smashed the units on either side of them. Totenkopf troops were able to repulse the attacks on their positions.

prev | next