Voices of the Waffen SS by Gerry Villani

Author:Gerry Villani [Villani, Gerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2019-03-11T23:00:00+00:00

Waffen SS tank commander – source unknown

The story of Karl

Like many things in life, it was not planned. During the fifth year of Gymnasium, male students had to pick one of the services to be inducted into. I chose the Kriegsmarine. They took me to Hamburg and gave me a ride in a U-Boat and a minesweeper. A little while after that I was sleeping on the couch in my family's home in Upper Silesia when my father wakes me up saying: "Karl! They are coming to arrest you!" He had seen an SS man walking up our walkway, but they were only coming to take me to the induction physical! This NCO and 3 others escorted 22 of us to our examination. After graduation, I reported in Breslau. This was in June of 1944...First I had basic training, then NCO school, then officer school. The whole process took 5½ months. Early in the war, it took 2 years to become an SS officer, and the older officers never let us forget it. But late in the war, it was made much faster. Basic training lasted about a month, maybe a little longer. About 2 or 3 months into the schools I went to the front for my "Zwischen-Prüfung". This is where you went to the front to prove that you had the right stuff. You were supposed to go for 6 weeks, but I stayed for only 3. I got training for armored officers in Posen-Treskow. After a total of 5½ months, I bought my first set of shoulder-boards; they cost me exactly 2 Marks and 80 Pfennig. My commanding officer presented them to me. When I was at the Panzer school in Posen, we learned to drive tanks in this Tiger tank that had no “Turm” or turret. Our instructor was this mean Hauptsturmführer who was missing an arm. We called him the "one-armed bandit". He had five tank destruction strips on his sleeve. Many of the instructors were invalids, but they were good instructors. Anyways, he had this metal sign on a stick that was used to signal vehicles in the column. The Hauptsturmführer would use this to whack us on the legs as we drove. "Turn!" WHACK! He was mean. Well, there was this bridge that was just wide enough for a tank with quicksand on both sides. We were approaching this bridge, and I was just going to pull the Hebel or handle to make the left turn to get on the bridge. But the one-armed bandit wacked my knees with that sign and yelled: "Right turn!" When I didn’t, he hit me again - "Right turn, that's an order!!" So, I pull the right Hebel and the tank goes into the quicksand and started sinking fast. We students all got out but the one-armed bandit couldn't. Nobody liked this guy, we thought about letting him go down with the Panzer. But I threw him my belt and he grabbed it. I held onto a root or something with one hand and pulled up with the belt.

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