These bitter battles took a heavy toll on the Polizei Division and it was now able to muster only a few thousand frontline fighting troops. In the spring, plans were announced to pull the division out of the line and reform it as a panzergrenadier division. Cadres of the division began moving from Russia to Croatia in the summer, but a battlegroup remained behind to man the Neva line until the spring of 1944.

III SS Panzer Corps

To bolster the siege lines around Leningrad, the SS chief Himmler ordered the newly formed III SS Panzer Corps to move from Croatia in December 1943. The former Wiking Division commander, Felix Steiner, was now in command of the corps and he soon reinvigorated the German defences around the southern rim of the Leningrad siege lines, and opposite the Oranienbaum bridgehead to the west of the city.

Steiner's corps was only a shadow of the powerful SS panzer formations that were mustered to fight at Kursk and in Normandy. Apart from his corps headquarters staff, Steiner only brought with him one major unit, the 11th Nordland Panzergrenadier Division, to relieve the pressure on the remnants of the Polizei Division.

Nordland was the second Waffen-SS division composed mainly of Western Europeans, primarily from Scandinavia and the Low Countries, and it included Danes, Dutch, Estonians, Finns, French, Swedish and Swiss volunteers. It was formed in the summer of 1943 by combining several Waffen-SS volunteer legions. Its core unit was the Nordland Regiment, which was composed of Western European volunteers that had formerly been attached to the Wiking Division. Volunteer legions from Norway and Denmark were also absorbed into the division, along with volunteers from Hungary and Romania. It was far from lavishly equipped and manned, mustering only 11,500 men when it left Croatia for the Russian Front. The division did not yet have its own panzer battalion, and its only armoured fighting vehicles were a couple of dozen StuG III assault guns.

By the end of December 1943, Steiner's corps headquarters had taken over control of the Oranienbaum Front, with the Nordland Division, a regimental-sized battlegroup of the Polizei Division, and the 9th and 10th Luftwaffe Field divisions under its command. Army Tiger I tanks of the 502nd Heavy Tank Battalion and 88mm flak guns of the 11th SS Flak Battalion were also attached to Steiner's command. A brigade of 5000 new Dutch SS volunteers was also in the process of arriving to augment the existing Dutch legion that was already fighting outside Leningrad.

Foreign SS units

Army Group North was also able to draw upon a variety of other Waffen-SS units that were formed largely from recruits from the Baltic states. The 2nd SS Motorized Brigade was a Latvian unit that had originally been raised for internal security tasks in the summer of 1943. More Latvians were grouped into the 15th SS Grenadier Division. In the rear of the army group was an SS police squad led by Freidrich Jeckeln, one of the first Einsatzgruppe commanders, who was charged with keeping German lines of communication clear of partisans. This unit was sent to the front in December 1943 to counter a Soviet breakthrough at Nevel, in the south of the army group's sector. Forming in Estonia was the 20th SS Grenadier Division, built from more local volunteers who were far from keen to see Soviet rule return to their country. The Polizei Division's former commander, Karl von Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, was in the Baltic states setting up VI SS Corps that would eventually take command of locally recruited Waffen-SS units.

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