'12th Hitlerjugend SS Panzer'
'12th Hitlerjugend SS Panzer'
This week's excerpt is from a history of the newly formed Division, composed of young men inculcated with Nazism, and how they fought in Normandy
One of the most tenacious enemy formations that the British and Canadian armies faced in Normandy was the 12th Hitlerjugend SS Panzer. They fought skilfully and with fanatical zeal against the much better-supplied Allies, maintaining their belief in Hitler right through to the end of the battles in Normandy. The Nazi decision to fill the ranks of a new division with 17-year-old young men who had spent their entire formative years being trained in the Hitler Youth movement was vindicated.
This new study makes use of much recently discovered material to tell the story as fully as possible. Alongside many photographs and a sequence of battle maps annotated to describe individual actions, 12th Hitlerjugend SS Panzer in Normandy uses many personal recollections to support the history of events. The authors do not shy away from the atrocities and controversies that are part of the story of 12th SS - but this is a detailed account and a valuable contribution to the history of the Normandy campaign.
The following two excerpts describe first, the formation of the division and, secondly, the events at the end of July as the German line faced the beginning of the end:
As a result of parental reluctance, to help persuade and cajole parents a tacit understanding developed that there would be no repeat of the 1914 Kindermort. In other words, the young soldiers would be of age and properly trained and equipped before being committed to battle. In addition, as the HJ [HitlerJugend] was to be ‘of the same value as the Leibstandarte', this was to be no hastily assembled ersatz formation: they would have a whole year from formation on 1 June 1943 before being declared operational on 1 June a year later.
The SS were only able to provide a cadre of officers and senior NCOs to Fritz Witt; consequently half the division’s junior NCOs would be found from among the volunteers, who were sent to the SS NCO school at Lauenburg. They graduated at the end of October; however, there were still many large manning gaps, which had been partly filled by fifty army officers. Consequently, some of the division’s officers and senior NCOs had to be found among the best-educated, most capable and suitable of the HJ recruits. These young soldiers found themselves as officer cadets or potential senior NCOs at a variety of SS and HJ establishments in western Germany, which were hastily converted to military academies in order to provide the junior leadership for the division and other SS formations.
…
Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, in an address to a selection of the division during its formation, set the tone by saying:
In these weeks, when the sacrifice of Stalingrad was on everyone’s mind, when the Russians mounted massive attacks, your Youth Leader made the decision to offer to the Fuhrer the best young boys of the new class for a new Waffen-SS division. The Fuhrer agreed happily ... After a few months in SS barracks you will enter a great formation ... You will then train further, shed many drops of sweat in order to save drops of blood and finally you will march alongside your sister division, the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. You will carry the name that the Fuhrer gave you: SS Panzergrenadier Division Hitlerjugend.
...
Operations South of Caen [July 1944]
GOODWOOD had forced the German command to bring the LAH [Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler] and HJ [Hitler Jugged] back to the front in order to contain the offensive, but they naturally wanted them back out of the line and available for counter-attacks and their own offensive purposes. The two panzer divisions would be replaced in turn by infantry formations, but the arrival of these divisions in Normandy was too little, delayed and too late! So it was that the Hitlerjugend wasn’t fully out of the line until 4 August, having been progressively relieved by the 272nd Infantry Division. In the mean time, they would continue to hold the ground forward of Vimont.
An anecdote by Captain Tibbs, medical officer of a British parachute battalion, demonstrates the undiminished depth of indoctrination of the young Hitlerjugend soldiers. There was no doubt it was sharpened by the necessity of fighting an under-resourced battle in which the enemy was so clearly labouring under no such disadvantage. Tibbs, who was wounded during this period and evacuated on a landing craft full of Allied and German casualties, recalled: ‘We landed at Portsmouth where our kindly WI [Women’s Institute] ladies, dispensing goodies, were shocked by some young SS soldiers who spat at them.’
During the fighting in Normandy in summer 1944, a revised order of battle for panzer divisions was issued and ordered to be immediately implemented because of the ongoing German manpower crisis. It aimed to make better use of support unit manpower in particular by the centralization of services, mainly supply and transport.
Workshop troops remained as far forward as possible, as discussed earlier. The pressure that the division was under meant that some aspects of the reorganization had to wait, but with the panzer regiment out of the line, for instance, company supply platoons were centralized at battalion level with significant savings, including in vehicles and equipment.
With casualties having continued to mount to almost critical levels, during this period in the line and reorganizing, 261 grenadiers were received from the SS infantry training organization, but this reinforcement of less than the equivalent of two companies was woefully inadequate. Other similarly small groups of specialists probably arrived in the division from other training organizations.
Replacement panzers and vehicles may have been few, but sixty-five dummy panzers were again set up by the 1/12th Panzer Regiment during the night of 2/3 August, in an arc north and north-west of St Sylvian, indicating to the enemy reserves and a strong counter-attack force.
The Break-Out
The German army in Normandy fought hard and well to contain the Allies in their beachhead, but repeated warnings by its generals that its divisions were reaching breaking-point had been ignored, while the Allies only grew in strength. The US First Army launched Operation COBRA on 24/25 July and by the end of the month was beginning to gain momentum south, reaching Avranches.
While much of the Hitlerjugend was still holding ground south-east of Caen, further west the British Second Army joined the offensive with Operation BLUECOAT. The moment of crisis had arrived that sucked all available forces west. These included a small Kampfgruppe under Sturmbannfuhrer Olboter, which was extracted from Wunsche’s I Panzer Corps’ reserve. It consisted of a company of Panthers, a company of panzergrenadiers mounted in half-tracks, a battery of 105mm Wespe self-propelled guns and a pair of recce sections. They were joined by a recce company from the Leibstandarte. This small force was referred to as Recce Group Olboter and came under command of II SS Panzer Corps after a drive of over 40 miles to that corps’ left flank near Vire.
Olboter’s command was not directly involved in the first unsuccessful attempts to cut off and contain the Hitlerjugend's old opponents, the British 11th Armoured Division, who were leading the offensive but fought to hold a line at the village of Chenedolle.
Grenadier Winkler, a member of a section of the panzer grenadiers, recalled:
We lay in the grass and among bushes under artillery fire, quite unable to move. We had been on our way to reinforce the 9th SS; we were all that could be spared, and we felt we would be kept by the 9th to help them throughout the battle, which became very fierce. One of my comrades was hit by a shell splinter and died in my arms. This was a terrible shock to me as we had trained together in Belgium and been in the battle together since 6 June. I laid him down on the grass and I cried, but the Rottenfuhrer saw me and told me to stop, but he himself was then slightly wounded and told us all to run off to better cover. He crawled after us but was then killed by a bullet before reaching us. Then an Obergrenadier directed us to set up our machine gun and we drove back the advancing British.
When it got dark, we heard a lot of movement and thought we would be surrounded. We could see nothing so one of the men shot off the only flare we had, but when it burst, and we stared down the hill we could see nothing at all. So, some of us fell asleep from exhaustion while the others tried to keep watch. We had no idea what was going on and were without orders.
Then, as it got light, the first bombers arrived, and we suffered the worst air-raid yet. We had dug holes, but they were quite unprotected from the fragmentation bombs that burst above and about us, and two more lads were killed. We were very exposed, so the senior grenadier told us we must go further round the hill, and as soon as the last bombers left we did that and on the way met a patrol of the 9th SS who sent us in the right direction. We found an artillery position where we were able to get some coffee and a little to eat. Then an officer sent us off with an Unterscharfuhrer and we were back in the battle again.
© Tim Saunders and Richard Hone 2021, '12th Hitlerjugend SS Panzer in Normandy'. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd
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I then told them I had just waded across it, that it was not over two feet deep, and that the only defense I knew about was one machine gun which had fired very inaccurately at me. I repeated the Japanese proverb: “One look is worth one hundred reports,” and asked them why in hell they had not gone down to the river personally.
The escorts opened up with deck guns, machineguns and flares firing in all directions. The convoy started to mill about smartly with Parche in the middle. Suddenly a medium sized merchant-man with a sizeable superstructure came in sight. The torpedo reload crews forward and aft reloaded tubes as fast as they could and Parche fired two tubes as soon as the outer doors were opened. The two torpedoes broke the merchant-mans back, which sent her down within a couple of minutes.
Most of the little SS scumbags of this division who surrendered in Normandy never made it to POW cages. That was true for most SS units, which is why they fought like they did since they knew what their likely fate was with Allied soldiers who hated Nazis.
It's true that following 'incidents' during the early clashes between the Canadians and the 12th SS few prisoners were taken. But enough prisoners were taken later on for the British to become concerned at the strength of Nazi faith amongst these SS youths - they feared that a whole generation of German youth would need re-educating. Of course, the situation was even worse for the SS prisoners in the East.