Taking Out the Trash

Though often protrayed as an elite combat force, Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen SS only became a major player on the battlefield relatively late in World War II. The General SS had only a political role and thus its men had no exemption from conscription. Many SS men avoided the army through the loophole that kept police out of the draft pool, and using SS units for occupation and security duties helped Himmler build his political and economic empire.

While some SS units saw front-line combat from the start of Operation Barbarossa, most of those sent into the Soviet Union after 22 June 1941 were intended as security troops. They would suppress resistance, mop up bypassed Red Army units, and most importantly in Himmler’s eyes, carry out the slaughter of Jews. Many of these units found themselves pressed into front-line combat during the Soviet winter offensive of 1941-1942, and when spring came the SS began to expand its combat role.

Still denied access to the general German draft pool, the SS turned to other sources of manpower. Ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsche, formed part of the “Great German nation” under Adolf Hitler’s racist ideology, yet were not subject to conscription by the regular German armed forces under German law and such a draft was forbidden under international law. As early as August 1940, Himmler’s recruiting chief, Gottlieb Burger, recommended that the Waffen SS seek volunteers among the Volksdeutsche of occupied Yugoslavia.

An Austrian-made ADGZ armored car
of the 7th SS Mountain Division.

Himmler approved the proposal in March 1942, authorizing formation of an SS mountain division from Volksdeutsche recruited in Serbia. The Germans did not yet press their recruiting efforts in the Italian-occupied zones of Yugoslavia, or the puppet state of Croatia. The most successful recruiting drive came in Romanian southern Transylvania, where Burger’s son-in-law, Andreas Schmidt, headed the SS political organization. Most of the new mountain division’s recruits came from Transylvania but as a sop to the Romanian government’s pride they were described as having come from Serbia in SS propaganda.

The new division, eventually known as the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen,” began formation in April 1942 at Weisskirchen in Austria. The unit sullied the name of Austria’s most successful battlefield commander, who settled many Germans in Serbia (the genesis of the Volksdeutsche community there) and initiated a campaign of what a later century would call “ethnic cleansing.” As with many examples of Nazi propaganda, the name choice was carefully considered.

A Romanian ethnic German, Artur Phelps, became the division’s first commander. Phelps, former commander of the crack Romanian Mountain Corps, had supported the fascist Iron Guard’s attempted coup in January 1941 and fled to Germany after its bloody suppression.

Phelps’ unit had two regiments, each of three battalions. Many of the cadre came from small SS units established from Volksdeutsche volunteers in Croatia after the German conquest of Yugoslavia in April 1941. The artillery regiment had four battalions, with Czech-made pieces. Most of the infantry weapons also came from Czech sources: The Waffen-SS, at this time still denied full access to German arms makers, depended heavily on the arms factories of occupied Czechoslovakia. The division had a large array of specialist units: a battalion each of motorcyclists, reconnaissance troops, tanks, anti-tank guns, engineers, anti-aicraft guns, bicyclists, cavalry and replacements. Despite having only two regiments, the 7th SS was thus one of the largest German divisions, with over 21,000 men at full strength.

A member of the 7th SS.

Tanks for the division came from captured French stocks: seven Char B-1 bis heavy tanks, a handful more converted to flamethrowing vehicles, and some R-35 and H-39 light tanks.

The new division was declared combat-ready in Octobver 1942 and sent to western Serbia under command of 12th Army. Most officers and NCOs were Germans from Germany, or Reichsdeutsche. The rank-and-file, almost all Volksdeutsche, were routinely referred to as “Musselmänner” (literally “Muslims,” but also the term used by SS concentration camp guards for starving prisoners soon to die) and scorned as lesser beings.

The division’s marching song, composed by SS Hauptsturmführer Sepp Krombholz, showed that the men knew exactly what their task would be:

Our trash division!
And many Serbian skulls
and many Serbian maids
will I soon see fallen . . .

Phelps sent his troops into their first action on 5 October, an attack against a partisan brigade led by Maj. Dragutin Kreserovic in the mountainous Kreva Reka area. Together with troops of the Bulgarian 9th Infantry Division, the SS men were to seek out and destroy partisan units. In case anyone misunderstood, Phelps noted in his order of the day that, “the entire population of this area must be considered rebel sympathizers.”

The operation failed to net many partisans, but that didn’t stop Himmler himself from visiting the division soon afterwards to dispense medals and promotions.

Throughout the winter the division participated in operations against the partisans, with limited success. While it did participate in the highly successful “Operation Black” in MOntenegro in May 1943, other Axis formations did most of the fighting while the SS men concentrated on their specialty, “punitive expeditions.” Entire villages were exterminated, the buildings burned to the ground, with mass rapes the order of the day as well. In multiple instances, the murders even included all house pets and farm animals. At Niksic, for example, 7th SS troopers systematically raped and then gunned down 121 women. While many Jews were murdered at their hands, the 7th SS also killed huge numbers of Serbs and Gypsies. The more lunatic fringe of today’s Serbia has even cited 7th SS massacres around Srebrenica in 1944 to justify the mass killings there in 1995.

The trash division spent most of 1943 fighting partisans, moving to the Adriatic coast in Spetember to assist in disarming the Italian occupation forces there after Italy’s surrender. Savage fighting broke out in several locations, with the SS men suffering serious defeats at Italian hands.

After suffering repeated defeats at partisan and Italian hands, the division went to the Dubrovnik area for reorganization and retraining. For several months the division attempted to improve itself, re-entering combat in November 1943 with similar results as it hunted partisans in the Sarajevo-Goradze area of Bosnia. Unlike the other SS divisions formed at about this time, the 7th SS did not have pre-war SS Standarten on which to draw for its cadres; the officers supplied by other SS units appear to have been the incompetents and other dregs — and few of the the SS units supplying such officers in 1942 had a surplus of skilled commanders to begin with.

We’ll look at the division’s last two years, including its disastrous commitment to combat against regular Soviet and Bulgarian forces, in a later installment. Panzer Grenadier: Edelweiss has a number of scenarios featuring the 7th SS, and more will probably appear in the near future.