Das Reich Read Online Free PDF Page B

1944 who did not regard it as a perfectly legitimate exercise to carry out mass reprisals and wholesale killings if the situation seemed to justify them.
    The qualities that the SS most signally failed to foster were intelligence and imagination, probably because these characteristics would have rendered their possessors unfit for service in its ranks. Throughout its history, the Waffen SS produced an extraordinary corps of soldiers and regimental officers, but failed to throw up a single outstanding higher commander. At divisional level and above, the Waffen SS was lamentably directed. Only Paul Hausser, the venerated Panzer commander who once led the Verfügungstruppen from whom the Das Reich derived, has any claim to military brilliance, and he was a product of the old German Army. The SS fought and died bravely, often fanatically. They can expect no higher epitaph.
    General Heinz Bernard Lammerding, commanding officer of the Das Reich Division in June 1944, was a typical product of the new Nazi aristocracy. He was born in Dortmund, qualified as an engineer, and became an early convert to National Socialism. He took a job as director of an SA engineering school, and worked in various capacities for the organization until 1935. He then became SS member no. 247062. He was a Waffen SS engineer captain at the outbreak of war, served on the staff of the Verfügungstruppen division from November 1940 to August 1942, then took command of an infantry regiment. After a brief period on an armoured corps staff, in July 1943 he became chief of staff to General von der Bach-Zelewski. This officer was directing with legendary ruthlessness anti-partisan operations in the rear of the German armies in Russia. Lammerding’s signature appeared on several appalling documents, ordering the wholesale destruction of entire villages and towns which were judged guilty of assisting partisans. At the end of 1943, Lammerding took command of troops of the Das Reich Division operating against partisans in its rear areas, and on 25 January 1944, of the division itself. On 22 May 1944, while the division was at Montauban, it was announced with suitable celebration that Lammerding had been awarded the Knight’s Cross for his work in Russia. He was still only thirty-eight.
    Few of the surviving officers of the Das Reich Division havemuch to say in favour of Lammerding as a commander. He lacked personal presence, and possessed none of the obvious gifts of a leader of men. He was a curiously colourless, forceless figure, whose greatest merits were administrative competence and friendship with Heinrich Himmler. It was rumoured in some Das Reich officers’ messes that it was this personal alliance which had secured him command of the division. Himmler paid them a personal visit in the spring of 1944: ‘It was obvious that Lammerding and Himmler got on well, although I couldn’t say whether this affected Lammerding’s career,’ said his senior staff officer, Major Albert Stuckler. ‘After all, Lammerding had been a good engineer.’ But the impression emerges of Lammerding from all the accounts of June 1944 of a man overpromoted and quite unsuited to a fighting command, who would have been much more at ease on Himmler’s staff.
    In May 1944 Fritz Langangke was suddenly ordered to carry out a major rail reconnaissance for his tank regiment: ‘I had always wanted to have a railway since I was a little boy, and suddenly I was given one. I was provided with a special train with a saloon car and a carriage full of Russian soldiers as escort, and ordered to check every possible rail route for the division to the front.’ For two idyllic weeks, he coasted comfortably around southern France, measuring tunnel heights, checking bridge capacities and road connections. The train was commanded by a major who had been a pre-war wine merchant, and used the trip to shuttle hundreds of cases of black market wine hither and thither about his domains: ‘These fellows,