Waffen-SS: Poland, 1944

Background

After their mauling on the Eastern Front in early 1944, the Waffen-SS panzer divisions were rested and rebuilt to bring them up to strength. Their services were soon required when the Soviet 1944 summer offensive, codenamed Bagration, broke like a thunderclap on the Eastern Front. The SS divisions fought desperately to preserve the shattered front and hold back the Red Army.

Operation Bagration

On 22 June 1944, the Soviet High Command unleashed Operation Bagration. In two weeks, the Wehrmacht's Army Group Centre was dissected with almost surgical precision by Soviet pincer moves that lanced into its flanks and then chopped the weakened German forces into a series of pockets. The battle destroyed 28 German divisions and 350,000 German soldiers were either killed or captured, including 47 generals. Almost overnight, a third of the German Eastern Front had ceased to exist. Desperate measures were needed to restore the situation. Hitler turned to Field Marshal Walther Model - his master of last-ditch defence - to save the day. Soon, he would turn to the only two Waffen-SS panzer divisions then available on the Eastern Front. They would be at the centre of his efforts to form a new defence line.

IV SS Panzer Corps

The remnants of the Leibstandarte and Das Reich Divisions were immediately shipped westwards after they escaped from the Kamenets Podolsk Pocket in April, to be rebuilt to meet the Anglo-American cross-Channel invasion. Wiking spent most of May and early June hunting partisans in the forests of eastern Poland. New tanks, trucks, artillery and weapons arrived steadily to bring it back up to something like a respectable strength by the end of June. The Totenkopf Division also received more than 6000 replacements from other Waffen-SS units and the concentration camp organization. Its most prized new asset was the return of its panzer regiment's 1st Battalion, with 79 new Panther tanks. The battalion had been training on the new tanks in Germany for several months, and it would significantly enhance the division's strike power.

As well as rebuilding the Totenkopf and Wiking Divisions, plans were made to send another SS panzer corps to the Eastern Front to lead the two divisions. IV SS Panzer Corps was formed in 1943 to train Waffen-SS forces in Western Europe, and would eventually be committed to action in Poland in August 1944, under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Herbert Gille.

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