Waffen-SS: Battle of Berlin, 1945

Background

It was supremely ironic that in the last days of the Third Reich, many of Hitler's Waffen-SS soldiers who fought in the rubble of Berlin were non-German nationals. The élite Aryan divisions of the Waffen-SS were in the process of saving themselves as their Führer faced his final days in his capital. And the greatest act of loyalty shown to him was by a group of French SS volunteers.

Himmler's field command

In January 1945 millions of Soviet troops, backed by several thousand tanks, guns and aircraft, stood poised to strike towards the German capital. During January and February, the Red Army smashed open the German defences in Poland and drove hundreds of miles westwards to the River Oder, some 56km (35 miles) to the east of Berlin. Amid this rout, SS chief Himmler had his chance at being an army group commander and suffered the indignity of being sacked by Hitler for incompetence. His brief tenure as commander of Army Group Vistula had seen thousands of German soldiers die in hopeless counteroffensives.

The Eleventh SS Panzer Army

A key figure in the final battles around Berlin was the Waffen-SS general Felix Steiner, who still commanded what was left of his III SS Panzer Corps. During Himmler's brief command in Pomerania, Steiner's force had been grandly retitled the Eleventh SS Panzer Army, but in reality it consisted of little more than an oversized division. The core of Steiner's command was the Nordland and Nederland Divisions, which were still made up respectively of Scandinavian and Dutch Nazi sympathizers. They were both oversized regimental battlegroups with around 3000-4000 fighting troops each. His corps was later reinforced by the Flemish-speaking Belgians of the Langemark Division and French-speaking Belgians of the Wallonien Division, which were much smaller than the other two units of the corps. Steiner's men were a hard core of veterans from the Eastern Front, but were desperately short of tanks, artillery, trucks and other essential equipment. The Nordland Division's panzer battalion alone had heavy armoured vehicles in the shape of 26 StuG III assault guns and 2 Panther tanks, of which only half were operational at any time.

German defences on the Oder

As the final deployment for the battle of Berlin was made during March 1945, Steiner's men were positioned to the north of the German capital behind the main defensive position on the Oder as a reserve counter-attack force. Steiner's command was a shadow of its former self, and Hitler gave it an importance in his plans out of all proportion to its capabilities.

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