The Soviets now tried a wide encircling move to the north of Warsaw. By 4 August, IV SS Panzer Corps, now with the Totenkopf and Wiking Divisions under its command, had already been ordered by Model to set up a blocking position north of the city, and was ready and waiting when the Soviet storm burst on 14 August. For a week the Waffen-SS formation held off 15 Russian infantry divisions and 2 tank corps. A Waffen-SS counterattack on 11 September drove the Soviets back, and again defeated a link-up with the Polish Home Army.

The Totenkopf and Wiking Divisions were the linchpins of the German operation to crush the Warsaw rising, even though they did not actually take part in the fighting against the Polish Home Army. By preventing a link-up with the Red Army, they consigned the population of the city to two months of siege.

Retribution

On 2 August, SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was appointed to put down the uprising - no matter what it took. Civilians and prisoners were indiscriminately butchered by Bach-Zelewski's SS special police squads and Sonderkommando. On 2 October the Poles - starving, with their ammunition supplies exhausted and all hopes of rescue by the Red Army extinguished - came out waving white flags. Hitler ordered that all of the city's population be deported. Many of them ended up in SS death camps.

IV SS Panzer Corps, flushed with victory, remained on duty in northeastern Poland for the rest of 1944, where it tried to hold the line against repeated Soviet offensives that started on 10 October. It had to fall back at the end of that month, but the front soon stabilized as the Russian drive ran out of momentum once more.

The Soviet High Command was now preoccupied with clearing out the Balkans. Russian troops swept through Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and up to the borders of Hungary. In October 1944 the Hungarians were wavering, so Hitler ordered the launch of Operation Panzerfaust to seize key points throughout the country's capital, Budapest. Adolf Hitler's daring Waffen-SS commando leader, Otto Skorzeny, led a raid to seize Hungarian government leaders. Other SS and army units then occupied the city and prepared it for defence. At this point Soviet troops were only a few kilometres from Budapest, and by Christmas the city would be encircled. When that happened some 70,000 German troops would be trapped.

Looming defeat

The combat performance of the Waffen-SS divisions was the only bright spot in a gloomy strategic situation on the Eastern Front. At the end of 1944, the Eastern Front had been pushed back to the borders of Germany itself. Soviet troops were poised to strike at the very heart of the Third Reich.

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