There were also strong communications, medical, supply and maintenance elements assigned to each division. Mobile repair teams were a key element, because they were able to recover damaged tanks from battlefields and return them to action within days. This ensured the divisions did not have to wait weeks for new tanks to arrive from factories thousands of kilometres from the front. At full strength, a Waffen-SS panzergrenadier division comprised around 21,000 men. The nearest Red Army equivalent was the Tank Corps, which in 1943 boasted some 12,000 men, more than 180 T-34/76 tanks and some 60 SU-76 assault guns or SU-85 tank destroyers.

The SS Panzer Corps

The SS Panzer Corps headquarters was activated in the summer of 1942 in Germany, before moving to France to oversee the establishment of the Waffen-SS panzergrenadier divisions. The headquarters mustered several thousand specialist staff officers and technical experts. Its core was a radio communications unit to allow the corps commander to talk to his divisions and higher headquarters. There was also an artillery command cell to allow the firepower of all the divisional artillery regiments to be moved around the battlefield in a coordinated manner.

Depending on the battlefield situation, the corps could also take under its command army level artillery units with 210mm towed guns or mobile rocket launchers, known as Nebelwerfers. In 1942 the Waffen-SS did not have any of its own such units, but they were formed in 1943 to boost its firepower. In the middle of 1943 the first of three Waffen-SS heavy tank battalions was formed, but the battalions were not ready for action until the spring of 1944, when they went into action during the Normandy campaign.

The second SS panzer corps

In late 1942 the SS Panzer Corps was the only such formation in existence, but Hitler was keen to expand his private army even further, and so six months later he ordered the establishment of a second corps, to be titled I SS Panzer Corps Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. The original corps headquarters was then retitled II SS Panzer Corps just prior to the Battle of Kursk in July 1943. I SS Panzer Corps was to be made up of the Leibstandarte Division and the soon-to-be-formed Hitlerjugend Panzergrenadier Division, although the two divisions did not serve together under the command of the corps headquarters until the summer of 1944, because of the need for the Leibstandarte in Italy and Russia. Once II SS Panzer Corps was withdrawn from Russia in the autumn of 1943, it was put in command of the Hohenstaufen and Frundsberg Panzergrenadier Divisions, which had been forming in France since December 1943.

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