Oskar's Last Stand

[Major Major]

Hardly anyone would think Oskar Dirlewanger a Feldherr, a great military commander. He was more brave than capable; his eleven wounds, Iron Crosses (from both wars), and Knight’s Cross bore testimony to the former. As for the latter, many superiors, including the Army Group commander who had escaped capture by the skin of his teeth when visiting a position he had ordered the Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger to hold, could say otherwise.

Unfortunately for the general military efficiency of the desperate German Army, holding to its last positions on the Oder against the Bolshevik horde, one of those who believed was his superior officer, the commander of the Heeresgruppe Weichsel, no less than the Reichsführer-SS himself, Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler commanded at considerable remove, having betaken himself to a sanitarium for his health. When the actual commander, the chief of staff, gave orders, things went not too badly.

However, when Dirlewanger came to personally express his gratitude for his new expanded responsibility, something clicked in the torturous mind of the Reichsführer. And so, two days after the new division commander left, he received orders giving him a new assignment. Perhaps it had to do with the abrupt change-over of chiefs of staff, when General Wenck was injured in an automobile accident.

“The vanquisher of Bolshevik pretentions in Warsaw will deliver the final blow to Bolshevik pretentions in Berlin itself!”

Whoever wrote those melodramatic words — perhaps one of the bizarre and nigh-deranged associates of the Ahnenerbe — wasn’t much in touch with reality. What they meant, though, was dire.

Dirlewanger had been promoted and named commander of the V SS-Jägerkorps. Not that it had anything to do with mountains or much to do with the SS. At first. (As the Nazi domain shrank, the grandiosity of its formations swelled in equal and opposite proportion.)

The Army commander, General Busse, did not seem to care. He was glad to be out of Courland. So, to add to his rag-tag collection of rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists, Dirlewanger got two other divisions of whatever SS types Himmler could scrape up. Somehow having a unit styled “SS und Polizei Panzergrenadierdivision” under his command didn’t seem to fit Dirlewanger’s . . . er . . . style. That and the division of officer cadets.

But it looked very impressive when written down:

V SS Jägerkorps
SS-Gruppenführer und Generallieutenant der Waffen SS Oskar Dirlewanger
32. SS Freiwillingengrenadierdivision ‘30. Januar’
35. SS und Polizei Panzergrenadierdivision
36. Waffengrenadierdivision der SS ‘Dirlewanger’

Calling any of these division was something of a joke, of course, but in Berlin the Führer was pleased.

Shortly thereafter, Himmler had to lay down some of his burden, and a real army commander, Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, took over. He did not care to have contact with Dirlewanger, whose corps was in any case in a quiet sector. So he did not know of the secret order Himmler had given his Treue Oskar.


On April 19, for some unaccountable reason Dirlewanger decided that the special orders would come into effect. The SS units, heretofore thinking they could make a run for it, were told to make a run for it.

Some, anyhow, knew that the jig was up. As the Dirlewanger “Division” headed west and then north, there were a number of desertions. Then, they stopped abruptly.

Along the way, another formation joined in. The Dutch SS had provided a division, or at least the recruits for one, to fuel the Aryan fantasies of the SS high command. Now, a regiment of this had somehow run across this command. Safety in numbers.

So it was with great glee that the Führer was informed that the defenders of Fortress Berlin had been augmented by three and a half divisions of SS. Loyal ones, not like those shirkers who had failed in Vienna.

By then, as everyone else knew, the designation of a unit as a division was sufficient in Hitler’s mind to make that a full-strength unit, with the ranks and the fighting strength of a unit from before the war.

There were other considerations. Meddling again, Hitler went on to assign the other SS unit already there to Dirlewanger (“A True Aryan, a German Hero!” he said); the “Nordland” Division, which was built around Norwegians and Danes, and had attatched to it the remnant of the “Charlemagne” Division of Frenchmen.

Yes. Berlin would be defended by those who had nothing left to lose; renegades and criminals. Even Oskar Dirlewanger, a man with no illusions as to his own fate in a defeated Germany, could fight well when he was a cornered rat. His men had learned city warfare in a hard school, and could have no illusions as to their fate.

[Jotun]

Oskar Dirlewanger was without doubt one of the most repulsive persons ever to have been accepted into the SS and that is really saying something. He was a rapist, a pedophile, an embezzler and more and one of the worse war criminals in a time and an organization replete with war criminals. The name alone makes my gorge rise.

I wonder where you intend to go with your TL...

[Major Major]

Thirty years afterwards, the Russians and Ukrainians who had fought in the Battle of Berlin still shuddered at the memory, and the Victory Day parades were few, far between, and scantily attended by those vets.

The Berlin Garrison had held out with desperation. SS General Dirlewanger had assigned SS Colonel Fritz Knöchlein from the Nordland division as commander of a Sonderkommando for morale. The “morale” consisted of requiring men to participate in the execution of the few Soviet prisoners, thus making them accomplices, a status that Dirlewanger and his men were extremely familiar with.

For all that Goebbels’s garrison newspaper Der Panzerbär printed huge flaming headlines of ENDSIEG ODER TOD, most of the men acknowledged that Final Victory was no longer on the table, and Death was about the only choice, with the question being how many Bolsheviks could one take as an escort to Hell.

A Königstiger commander received the Knight’s Cross for driving his tank through an alley packed with Russians assaulting a fortified building. However, the SS men holding the building managed to set it afire firing their Panzerfaust at this Red tank driving at them, knocking it out. They knew that the Bolsheviks had no concern for their own men and would gladly drive tanks over them to take a position.

On May 1, Stalin summoned Marshal Ivan Koniev of the First Ukrainian Front to Moscow, to explain why he had allowed Dirlewanger’s corps to get into Berlin. However, Koniev never got there. The official story, conformed by the six SMERSH officers who were the marshal’s escort, was that he had got drunk and tried to escape from what he believed to be a crashing plane, but had been so drunk he had not put on a parachute. Marshal Zhukov was given command of all the troops fighting in Moscow.

In Berlin that day, Hitler personally awarded Dirlewanger the Diamonds to the Knight’s Cross. The few observers who survived the war later told historians that it was a toss-up which of them appeared to be in worse shape.

Also that day, in an epochal meeting General Eisenhower finally gave General Patton the order to go on to Prague. Leading elements of the Third Army were in the Czech capital by noon on the second, where General Vlasov personally surrendered to them. There was some confusion amid the Americans over why Russians should be fighting on the German side.

And that evening a Ju-52, piloted by Hanna Reitsch, flying down canals and often getting its wheels brushed by grass along the way, finally landed at Flensburg, carrying the Chancellor-designate, Dr. Goebbels, and his family, along with the Führer’s testaments and final orders.

Goebbels had been the target of a Führer Order, and he wanted to get his family away from the Soviet Order to Rape that he had been so avidly publicizing. He planned to return alone and perish with the Führer, but for some reason the British just wouldn’t let him.

[Swordman]

Oh Dear:

Methinks someone has been watching 'Blazing Saddles' a few too many times......

Mike Garrity

[backstab]

Oskar Dirlewanger was the only nazi to be expelled from the party for moral offences ..... shows how much of a fruit loop this guy was.

[DuQuense]

I think this is built around there being several thousand more troops with their equipment inside Berlin, Troops with nothing to look forward to except execution if they surrender.

It won't change the final ending, just make it a lot more bloody, which is a large job in itself.

However the Butterflies from Berlin holding a couple extra days with more Russian Causalities, and more destruction inside Berlin, could be immense.

[Major Major]

Originally Posted by Major Major

So, to add to his rag-tag collection of rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists, Dirlewanger got two other divisions of whatever SS types Himmler could scrape up.

Originally Posted by Swordman

Oh Dear:

Methinks someone has been watching 'Blazing Saddles' a few too many times......

Mike Garrity

And you don't think that's a correct description of the troops of the Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger? You'll really freak out at the POW interrogation!

"How did you get into that unit?"

"Rape, murder, arson, and rape."

"You said 'rape' twice."

"I like rape."

[Major Major]

In the final phase of the battle, the Russians were bringing Katyusha multiple rocket launchers up to the front line and using them as flat-trajectory weapons. Since the trucks usually blew up under German return fire, sometimes even after they had launched, the casualties among artillerists were high.

Sometime on May 4, as rockets tore apart the Reichschancellery above his head, Hitler finally decided that all was up. He married his long-term companion Eva Braun, after which they both killed themselves.

A number of others followed their example.

Party Secretary Martin Bormann, trying to surrender, was informed that only a military surrender was acceptable. This entailed getting Dirlewanger, the senior surviving officer in Berlin, to carry that out. The OKW chief Field Marshal Keitel had died when his Storch was shot down while trying to escape; his deputy General Jodl had drowned when a U-Bahn tube flooded; the acting Chief of the General Staff General Krebs had been killed in a burning building; General Weidling of the LVI. Panzerkorps had fallen in a counterattack; and SS General Mohnke of the central defense area had been run down by a T-34 while trying to escape.

Dirlewanger, in the Flak Towers with the last remnant of his men, demanded to see the “Soviet High Commander”. General Chuikov of the Eighth Guards Army, who had set out to negotiate the surrender, was initially disgruntled at having to pass the honor to his superior.

The German emissary who delivered the credentials of the Berlin Commandant to Marshal Zhukov turned out to have a bomb under his uniform tunic. No one in the tent survived.

Many years later, a magazine published in Cairo described in moving detail the final assault of Dirlewanger and the band of racial heroes who assailed the Judeobolshevik lines. It may have even been partially true; Dirlewanger’s body has never been identified.

[Major Major]

I'm going to do some more on this tomorrow, I believe, and want to get the thread up to the first (or second, things have been busy) page. The Potsdam Conference is going to be interesting.

[jaybird]

Originally Posted by Major Major

The German emissary who delivered the credentials of the Berlin Commandant to Marshal Zhukov turned out to have a bomb under his uniform tunic. No one in the tent survived.

You know, I could totally see that happening.

[Aracnid]

I simply don't think at this stage they would allow a German emissary into a tent with Zhukov without his being searched thoroughly. Otherwise great.

[Major Major]

Originally Posted by Aracnid

I simply don't think at this stage they would allow a German emissary into a tent with Zhukov without his being searched thoroughly. Otherwise great.

They were a bit shell-shocked.

[Kome]

Originally Posted by Aracnid

I simply don't think at this stage they would allow a German emissary into a tent with Zhukov without his being searched thoroughly. Otherwise great.

Was it really that common to search in a man's nether regions?

[Major Major]

Berlin was ruins. The number of civilians who died of starvation, of suicide, at the hands of disgusted soldiers . . . added up to several times that of the late garrison. The Soviet army exacerbated the circumstances by ordering the surviving troops to shoot anyone trying to leave the place.

The statistics on the number of Soviet troops shot, for desertion, “battle fatigue”, by themselves, or in error were immediately classified and still have not been revealed, even now. Had the Western Allies launched an offensive against the Soviets, as General Patton was rumored to have proposed, the “Combined German Front” (as the troops which had taken the city were hurriedly redesignated) could not have put up any resistance.

As it was, the U.S. Third Army occupied Western Czechoslovakia, or Czechia, or whatever. Based on prisoner interrogations, General Patton was in no mind to leave, and his superiors were coming to agree with him.

The Western Allies still held at their stop line in Germany, well into what had been proposed as the Soviet zone of occupation. General Eisenhower cited security problems, keeping order in the occupied territories, and other similar issues. Not to mention a small number of deserters from the Soviet Army, shell-shocked men who had been the sole survivors of their companies during the assault on Berlin.

The Potsdam Conference had the ruins on the horizon, as it were, during the session. During which Stalin began by overplaying his hand.

Citing the “immense sacrifice” that the Soviet people had endured, up to and climaxing with the capture of Berlin, the Soviet leader demanded an increased occupation zone, reparations from the western zones, the handing-over of all prisoners who had been fighting against the Soviets, an occupation zone in Japan, and acceptance of a temporary Soviet presence to ensure stability in those parts of China they had liberated. Oh and the return of all Soviet emigres in the west, including those who had escaped before the war even.

Groups in the American and British press, not to mention the French Communist Party, thoroughly endorsed these proposals. Massive public demonstrations urged the western governments to consider the massive sufferings of the Russian people and grant them the minor concessions they needed to restore their well-being.

If the western leaders had not been informed of the intelligence provided them by said emigres or refugees or whatever, this might have worked . . .

[jaybird]

Originally Posted by Major Major

story

Oh...oh, this will be bad. Very bad.

[Major Major]

The Potsdam Conference ended in acrimony and a divided Germany. The new President, Truman, had managed to win a repatriation of all American and British prisoners of war who had been liberated by the Soviets, while promising to return the Soviet prisoners of war “once they have recovered from their treatment by the Nazis”.

Left unmentioned was the persistence of their troops along the Elbe, well within the proposed Soviet occupation zone. This was painted as a measure of assistance for the devastated Soviet Army.

Just as the pledge by Stalin to join in the Pacific war was let pass. It was acknowledged that the Soviets, having been so devastated in one war, had no need to expend their blood and treasure in another.

The conference didn’t cover the problem of Czechoslovakia. Or Czecho-Slovakia, or even Czechia and Slovakia. The exiled Czech government had returned to Prague, but the Soviets had set up a government in Bratislava. It looked as if the post-Munich division of the country would be perpetuated, or even perpetrated.


In August and September, the American newspapers were full of MacArthur, MacArthur, MacArthur, as he accepted the surrenders of the Japanese. The dramatic scene in Harbin where the leaders of the once so arrogant Kwantung Army laid their swords at his feet was splashed across the cover of Life Magazine, for example.

The distressing race between Chinese troops and the British Pacific Fleet to gain the surrender of Hong Kong was less heralded, particularly because the Nationalist army sent to liberate the colony was drawn off by an attack by “bandits” (who were actually Communist troops, also trying to liberate the stinking urinal of capitalist colonialism).


Matters blew apart in the fall, as plans for the trial of the Nazi War Criminals floundered, with Soviet obstructionism and general muddle delaying them.

The London Polish government had been understandably less than enthused about the situation in the homeland, and when Russian-speaking Poles assigned to the evaluation of the Soviet prisoners reported the situation, the Poles lost no time publicizing the infamous record of the Red Army.

Berlin had not been the only capital devastated, understand. Warsaw did not do well, either.

[Georgepatton]

Oh, good stuff you've got going on here. Can't wait to see where you're taking this.

Just a small question, if you'll indulge me: is my namesake still fated to have a particularly nasty traffic accident, or will the pretty little butterflies handle that one for us?

[Major Major]

Originally Posted by Georgepatton

Oh, good stuff you've got going on here. Can't wait to see where you're taking this.

Just a small question, if you'll indulge me: is my namesake still fated to have a particularly nasty traffic accident, or will the pretty little butterflies handle that one for us?

The Clichés of AH thread should include:

Patton dies in a traffic accident.

Patton is murdered by (the State Department)(the future Eisenhower campaign).

In one AH novel I am doing (I'm afraid it won't sell because it doesn't have the Nazis winning) he has different ambitions . . .

[Major Major]

The Trial of the Major War Criminals was delayed. Again.

Senator Patton — who had been appointed to the open seat after indicating an interest in running for the Senate from California — delivered a blistering speech denouncing the selection of the “German General Staff” defendant. The chiefs of the Wehrmacht office were dead; the previous chiefs of the “infamous” Greater General Staff were conspirators. Except for General Zeitzler, about whom nobody cared, and . . . Heinz Guderian, the master of the panzer corps. After listening to the speech, in which the Senator denounced the idea as undermining the entire concept of military subordination to civilian rule, the President was visibly shaken.

It didn’t help that through his lawyers, Goebbels was releasing long and vigorous denunciations of the Allies’ activities, hammering away on Katyn and the strategic bombing campaign. The occupation authorities tried to suppress them, but his memoranda kept on ending up in Stockholm and Berne, not to mention Buenos Aires, from where they were repated with impunity.

And the proposed Soviet prosecutor, Andrei I. Vishinsky, wasn’t much help, as he addressed a meeting in the ruins of Berlin, pointing towards the rubble that had been the Reichskanzlei and Reichstag, and shouting, “I demand that these mad dogs be shot!” The trucked-in audience of Communist Party of Germany members and Soviet army officers cheered on cue.


In other news, the conflict between the Soviets and the west had begun to shift into a war without fighting, as it were. The division of Czechoslovakia had become de facto, with a Czechoslovak Republic in Praha ruling Bohemia and a Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in Bratislava ruling the rest of the country, but each claiming sovereignty over the entire nation. Similarly, the London Polish government still had the recognition of the Western Allies, even though it only controlled the Polish embassies outside of the USSR and the Soviet occupied area.

In Germany, the Americans and British still occupied the western part of the Soviet occupation zone. Their garrisons in their occupation zones of Berlin were still in tents, there being almost no unruined buildings to use as barracks.

The Soviet prisoners of war were still receiving “rehabilitation”. The negotiations for their return had deadlocked, since some emigre movements had filed legal challenges in the U.S. claiming that the prisoners would suffer persecution if they were repatriated.

Tensions flared in the Middle East as Jews made their way to the Palestine Mandate. The Arab population of Palestine was leaderless, their former leader al-Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, having presuably died in Berlin, and every Palestinian Arab with more than one armed follower was making a claim for leadership. They killed each other with almost as much enthusiasm as they killed Jews.

Further east, Secretary of State George C. Marshall returned to Washington with the results of his visit to China, which Truman summed up as “Shanghai Jack is a lousy crook and Moose Dung is a bloodthirsty bandit.” In Korea, the corrupt Syngman Rhee was elected president in a blatantly rigged vote, and was sworn in in Pyongyang to the acclamations of thousands of people brought in from the countryside.

[Major Major]

President Truman referred to the 80th Congress as the “Do-Nothing Congress”. In fact, it did a great deal, only it was stuff that he didn’t like.

For example, there was the affairs of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, referred to bizarrely as “HUAC”, as if their topic were their purpose (as some more progressive types indeed thought). In dramatic theater, they held special hearings in the “rehabilitation camps” of Germany, eliciting long and vehement revelations regarding Stalinism.

In response, Democratic legislators held their own hearings in Germany. Solons were somewhat surprised to learn that the Malmedy Massacre had been preceded by the Le Paradis Massacre and the Wormhoudt Massacre. Some of the SS responsible had actually been outside of Berlin, and could be prosecuted.

The Balkans remained unstable. The nigh-lunatic spectacle of monarchies with Communist governments continued, with Soviet “advisors” warring covertly with Ameican and British “attaches” in funneling money to political parties.

The Soviet demobilization had been precipitous. The casualties incurred in taking Berlin, and afterwards (a substantial number of officers had been unmasked as being Trotskyite deviationists and wreckers in the pay of Nazi Germany and liquidated) had left the army less than confident. Also, resources were being devoted to another project which would restore the balance, officialdom said.

The Middle East also remained unstable. The Jews who trickled into Palestine thought the British colonial oppressors and the Arabs faithless killers. The British thought the Jews ingrates and the Arabs faithless although romantic savages. The Arabs thought the colonial powers were blotches on the face of Islam. War continued apace.

The Far East also remained unstable. The French sought to retain control of Indochina, the Dutch of the East Indies. China remained divided among warlords, some actually claiming national status. And the Philippines attained independence, and then had to put down an uprising.

The American Century, the era of world peace ensured by the cooperation of the great democracies, was proving not quite up to the promotional offer.