The SS Hunter Battalions: The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944-45 (Revealing History) by Perry Biddiscombe

Author:Perry Biddiscombe [Biddiscombe, Perry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752496450
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

North by North-West

Jagdverband Nordwest faced special challenges compared to the other three ‘Territorialen Jagdverbände’. Since the unit covered the Low Countries and Scandinavia, many of its operational zones were never taken by the enemy and there was little need for various parts of the organisation to evolve beyond an embryonic stage of development. It is true that Belgium was liberated by the Western Allies in September 1944 – it thereafter became Nordwest’s main theatre of operations – but only the fringes of the Netherlands and Norway were overrun by Germany’s foes. Finland, one of the Third Reich’s hesitant allies, remained unoccupied by any of the major belligerents, a peculiar situation that both facilitated and stymied German efforts at subversion. Neither the Western Allies nor the Soviets were able to move forces into Denmark, at least before the final German capitulation in north-western Europe, although Skorzeny established a presence in that country because of his efforts to terrorise the Danish patriot resistance movement.

It was this relative lack of battlefield commitment that limited the number of Nordwest personnel, although one also has to take into consideration that no Brandenburg contingents were allotted to Nordwest. Plans had been made in the summer of 1944 for Leutnant Pavel to field an ‘Einsatzgruppe Flandern’ under the auspices of ‘Streifkorps Nord Frankreich’, but this process was little advanced before the mobilisation of the Jagdverbände.1 This left Jagdverband Nordwest as something of an orphan. The Germans addressed this problem by recruiting 130 volunteers at the Waffen-SS training grounds at Sennheim, mostly Belgians and Dutchmen, but also a handful of Danes, and they augmented this group with a trickle of manpower from the SS ‘Langemarck’ and ‘Niederlande’ brigades, some of whom passed through a parachute training course at Papa, Hungary. Belgian and Dutch policemen and SD agents were also signed up, including fifty men from the SD school at Drogen, and later recruitment efforts focussed upon foreign ‘volunteers’ from German factories or Hitler Youth training camps. A few additional troops were attracted from the Luftwaffe.2

Himmler ordered Nordwest organisers to meet with the leaders of the Belgian fascist parties and to draw recruits from their ranks, particularly since 2,000 to 3,000 Belgians had fled to Germany, settling in the Lüneburg Heath and the Alfeld district of Hanover. Ironically, the largest fascist movement, the Vlaamsch National Verbond (VNV), was not invited to participate in destabilising Belgium, mainly because its strident Catholicism and support for Flanders’s union with the Netherlands, rather than Germany, alienated it from the SS. Indeed, Himmler restricted the movements of senior VNV leaders in Germany and he limited their political activity.3 Having thus forsaken the help of a party with a legitimate mass base in western and northern Belgium, Himmler was forced to depend on its two more minor counterparts, the Flemish DeVlag, under Jef van de Weile, and the Wallonian Rex, which was led by Léon Degrelle. Both DeVlag and the Rex insisted that a pro-German resistance movement be built solely from their cadres, although the results of recruitment actions yielded only mixed results.

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