16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS"

16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS"
Troop identification: The collar tab of the Reichsführer SS
active	October 3, 1943 to May 1945
Country	German Empire
Armed forces	Armed SS
Type	Panzergrenadier Division
structure	See outline
Second World War	Margarethe company Italian campaign Fight against the resistancea Eastern Front
commander
list of	Commanders

The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division “Reichsführer SS” was an armored infantry division of the Waffen SS . The unit had emerged from the personal battalion of the Reichsführer SS .

Members of the division are responsible for the massacres in Sant'Anna di Stazzema on August 12, 1944, Fivizzano on August 19 and from August 24 to 27, 1944, and Marzabotto on September 29 and 30, 1944 in Italy .

Foundation phase

On the way to the front in southern Italy, parts of the 16th SS Panzer Division “Reichsführer SS” pass through the city of Rome

When the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" was set up , the SS leadership relied on existing SS units. The Reichsführer SS command staff, which had existed since the summer of 1941, played a decisive role in the creation of the new division when it merged the SS escort battalion and the 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf" . Because the SS command staff and the two units subordinate to it "are considered [according to Martin Cüppers ] as pioneers of the Shoah ", which began the extermination of the Jews in the Soviet Union .

The SS escort battalion had been set up as a guard unit since 1941 to secure Himmler's Hegewald field quarters and was deployed in 1942 to fight partisans in Ukraine and Belarus , where numerous villages were destroyed and civilians were killed. At the end of 1942 it was sent to a training camp in East Prussia and later to Brittany . It was brought up to brigade strength by other army units and renamed SS-Sturmbrigade Reichführer-SS in February 1943 . It was led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Gesele . In July 1943, the brigade was transferred to Italy and received its first deployment in Corsica, where it fought against Italian and French troops and partisans. She returned to Italy at the beginning of October.

The 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf" was created in 1934 as a guard for concentration camps and became notorious for it. The leadership of the new 16th Panzer Grenadier Division “Reichsführer SS” was recruited from this cadre .

In autumn 1943, Hitler ordered the establishment of the new division. It was slow, and after four years of war there was a shortage of personnel and material. Part of the new division was in Ljubljana , but most of it formed the operational reserve in the Lucca area . When the division arrived in Italy at the end of May, the shortage of personnel was around 40 percent, only two thirds of the heavy machine guns were available, and there were no artillery or flak weapons . The armored units had no tanks, of the used assault guns that Hermann Göring's Parachute Panzer Division 1 gave them, only 20 percent were operational. The young SS men who had been recruited were hardly or poorly trained for their tasks and had no combat experience.

The first combat missions of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" demoralized the troops considerably. In its first deployment on June 26, 1944 north of Grosseto , the SS division fought with heavy losses against the advance of the 34th US infantry division . While the neighboring German divisions collapsed, it held its own. In the following skirmishes near Cecina and Livorno , she fended off four attacks. The losses were enormous, for example the 2nd Battalion of the 36th SS Panzer Regiment lost all vehicles and personnel, and only six men of the 6th Company survived.

commitment

The division's area of ​​operation extended from Italy and Corsica to Hungary . As an SS storm brigade, the division played a major role in the storming of the Corsican capital, Bastia , after the Italian occupation there refused to be disarmed following the unilateral armistice of the Italian government on September 8, 1943.

Towards the end of September 1943, the storm brigade was relocated to northern Italy and reclassified into an armored infantry division. Most of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division was relocated to Baden near Vienna at the turn of the year 1943 , where their training was completed. The return of the entire division to northern Italy took place in May 1944, when it received the order to fend off a possible landing by the Allies on the coast of Tuscany in the Carrara - Livorno section .

During the month of June, individual units of the division were transferred to the front in the area northeast of Grosseto and Follonica . On June 26 the fighting began in the Suvereto- Belvedere area. The SS Panzer Reconnaissance Division 16 and the 2nd Battalion of the SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment 35 stood in the way of the troops of the 34th US Infantry Division , which met tough resistance here for the first time since the liberation of Rome. At the beginning of July 1944 the fighting over the town of Cecina shifted southeast of Livorno . Hard fights took place mainly around Rosignano and Castellina .

The following retreat led the division on July 19, 1944 over the Arno to the area around Pisa , Lucca and Carrara . At the end of July 1944, the division moved to a new position on the north bank of the Arno, which it held until the beginning of September 1944. In the fighting south of Pisa and Livorno , the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division lost at least 3,000 leaders, Unterführer and men. After fighting in the Etruscan Apennines , southwest of Bologna , in autumn 1944, the division was relocated to the Adriatic Front.

The LXXXIII. Army Corps of the 10th Army was the last command authority of the division before it was moved to Hungary in January 1945 , where it was supposed to stop the approaching Red Army in the Nagykanizsa area. In the association of LXXXIII. Army Corps, the division withdrew to Styria at the end of the war in April 1945 , and the survivors were taken prisoner by the Allies.

Areas of application

• October 1943 to April 1944 ( installation and training, deployment in Hungary )
• May 1944 to January 1945 ( relocation to Italy in the area of ​​Army Group C, coastal defense, then front operations and partisan combat, massacres near Sant'Anna di Stazzema, Fivizzano and Marzabotto )
• January 1945 to April 1945 ( relocation to Hungary again )
• April 1945 ( retreat to Styria in the area of ​​Army Group South, with subsequent capture by the Allies )

War crimes

Most of the German war crimes in Italy in 1944 were committed by units of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" . The historian Carlo Gentile assumes that the particularly brutality of the accumulation of war crimes in the Italian catchment area of ​​the division can be traced back to ideological fanaticism and a racist attitude towards the population, because at the cadre level people had prevailed who had previously particularly brutalizing experiences made in the war of annihilation and not only made a fleeting impression in it. Young, poorly trained, inexperienced and easily influenced recruits were subordinate to this leadership cadre, whose life experiences, convictions and influences could turn into deadly actions at any time. Gentile coined the term “political soldier” for this type of soldier.

The criminal acts of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" reveal the following patterns:

• Massacre of civilians and destruction of villages
• Execution of civilian prisoners
• Killings for racist and ideological reasons such as the shooting of Jews, clergymen and incapacitated civilians

Assaults by this division against civilians in Italy increased sharply from August 1944 onwards. Initially limited to the Pisan area, the acts quickly spread to Versilia, further north, and the actual Carrara massif of the Apuan Alps , only to culminate in the Marzabotto massacre at the end of September . The total number of civilian victims murdered by the SS division in central and northern Italy is estimated to be at least 2,000. During massive “combs” for forced labor, the division recorded around 20,000 civilians from July to October 1944 and some of them were deported to Germany. Troops of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division “Reichsführer SS” were responsible for the larger massacres of Sant'Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto (all in 1944 ) and also for a large number of other acts. Most war crimes were committed under the pretext of fighting partisans , often within the framework of large-scale fighting operations under the leadership of the Wehrmacht command authorities . The actions in Sant'Anna di Stazzema (up to 560 dead, of which 389 were identified, on August 12, 1944), the Fivizzano massacre with 400 dead, for example, in two villages alone: Valla (107 dead on August 19, 1944) and Vinca ( around 200 dead on August 24 and 25, 1944) and in Bergiola Foscalina (72 dead on September 16, 1944) and in Marzabotto (over 770 dead between September 29 and October 5, 1944), a total of around 1,500 civilians died Victim. The SS men drove - occasionally with the help of Italian collaborators - the villagers out of their houses and homesteads, collected them in closed areas or in larger buildings and shot them with machine gun volleys or threw hand grenades into the crowd and shot the survivors down. The bodies were often cremated or buried under the blown houses. The victims were almost exclusively women, children and the elderly; Men of fighting age or even armed partisans were rarely among them.

On various occasions prisoners (or hostages) were murdered in response to attacks or attacks by partisans. In the course of so-called “retaliatory measures” by the division, around 250 civilians and partisans are said to have been killed. In contrast to massacres in villages, these were usually adult men, but only a few of them were actually active partisans. Examples of this practice are the deeds in Bardine di San Terenzo (53 men executed on August 19, 1944), a district of Fivizzano , Camaiore (35 dead on September 4, 1944), Carrara (42 dead on September 10, 1944) and Casalecchio di Reno (18 dead on October 8 and 10, 1944). Mass executions without direct reference to anti-partisan actions or partisan attacks took place at Lago di Massaciuccoli (72 dead on August 11, 1944) and in Massa (150 dead on September 16, 1944).

Finally, a number of actions by individual soldiers or small troops is documented, some of which can be classified as ordinary crimes and were often connected with robbing the victims, for example in the case of the head of the Jewish community in Pisa, Giuseppe Pardo Roques (12 dead on August 1, 1944), or the noble Minutoli family on September 2 near Massarosa . The group of "smaller massacres" includes the shooting of refugees, which took place at Monte Pisano , among others , in August 1944 at San Rossore (9 dead), Nodica (15 dead) and at Migliarino (9 dead), at San Giuliano Terme ( 5 dead) and at Santa Maria del Giudice (3 dead).

consequences

For a long time after the war, the massacres in northern Italy remained silent until the investigation began in 1994 after the files were found in the closet of shame . It took a few years to identify those involved, as well as witnesses and survivors of the massacre. In the summer of 2004, the trial against ten people responsible finally began, including the then company commander Gerhard Sommer . A year later, said military court of La Spezia the judgments . Life imprisonment was ordered against the ten main defendants, but this has not yet been carried out. As a result of these trials, there were also preliminary investigations in Germany, which, however, were discontinued without charge.

Hermann Langer , an SS officer in the division who played a key role in the Farneta massacre and was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court in Rome in 2005, lived afterwards as a pensioner near Giessen . He was not extradited from Germany, although a European arrest warrant was in place. He died in August 2016 at the age of 96 in a retirement home in Linden near Gießen.

At the beginning of March 2016 it became known that a member of the division, the then 22-year-old SS Unterführer Wilhelm Ernst Kusterer , had been sentenced to life imprisonment for manslaughter in Italy in 2008 and had been awarded a medal of honor by his home community of Engelsbrand for special commitment in 2015 was. The honor sparked protests in Italy. Investigations by the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office against Kusterer on suspicion of murder from 2013 were discontinued in June 2016 because he would not be able to stand trial due to severe need for care and because the evidence was insufficient to convict him.

structure

• Division staff
  • SS division escort company
  • SS News Department 16
    • SS-Feldgendarmerie-Firma 16
  • SS Panzer Reconnaissance Department 16
• SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 35 (previously 33)
• SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment 36 (previously 34)
  • SS Panzer Division 16
  • SS tank destroyer division 16
  • SS Flak Department 16
  • SS Pioneer Battalion 16
• SS Artillery Regiment 16
• SS supply units 16
  • SS Field Replacement Battalion 16

Commanders

• February 23, 1943 to July 31, 1943: SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Gesele
• October 3, 1943 to October 15, 1944: SS-Gruppenführer and Lieutenant General of the Waffen-SS Max Simon
• October 24, 1944 to May 8, 1945: SS-Oberführer Otto Baum

Commander and department head positions, summer 1944

• Commander: SS-Gruppenführer Max Simon (born 1899)

• Division staff:
  • Management department
    • First General Staff Officer (Ia) (Operations Department): SS-Obersturmbannführer Ekkehard Albert (born 1914)
    • Third General Staff Officer (Ic) (hostile situation and "fighting gangs"): SS-Obersturmbannführer Helmut Looß (born 1910)
    • IIa (adjutant): SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt-Fritz Mayr (born 1911)
    • III (Feldgericht): SS-Hauptsturmführer Alfred Sammer (born 1912)
  • Quartermaster's Department
    • Second General Staff Officer (IIa) (Supply Department): SS-Sturmbannführer Friedrich Steinbeck (born 1907)
    • IVa (directorate): SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Paul Knorr (born 1914)
    • IVb (division doctor): SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Kraus (born 1904)
    • VI (ideological training and troop support): SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Christophersen (born 1915)

• SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 35: SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Gesele (born 1912)
  • I. Btl .: SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinz Müller (born 1915)
  • II. Btl .: SS-Hauptsturmführer Anton Galler (born 1915)
  • III. Btl .: SS-Hauptsturmführer Max Trampler (born 1919)

• SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 36: SS-Sturmbannführer Josef Maier (born 1914)
  • I. Btl .: SS-Hauptsturmführer Ludwig Gantzer (born 1913)
  • II. Btl .: SS-Hauptsturmführer Günther Kaddatz (born 1916)
  • III. Btl .: SS-Hauptsturmführer Herbert Vetter (born 1912)

• SS Artillery Regiment 16: SS-Obersturmbannführer Martin Stange (born 1910)
  • Department I: SS-Hauptsturmführer Paul Heyse (born 1914)
  • Dept. II: SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Günther (born 1912)
  • Dept. IV: SS-Sturmbannführer Hans-Joachim Zientarski (born 1914)

• SS Panzer Reconnaissance Department 16: SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Reder (born 1915)
• SS Panzer Department 16: SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl-Manfred Schmidt (born 1912)
• SS News Department 16: SS-Sturmbannführer Werner Schuhmacher (born 1914)
• SS Flak Department 16: SS-Hauptsturmführer Erich Hieber (born 1914)
• SS Pioneer Battalion 16: SS Sturmbannführer Erwin Lange (born 1913)
• SS-Feld-Ersatz-Bataillon 16: SS-Sturmbannführer Heinz-Dietrich Groß (born 1910)

SS Panzer Reconnaissance Department 16: Officer positions, August – September 1944

• Commander: SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Reder (born 1915)
  • Adjutant: SS-Obersturmführer Paul Albers (born 1919)
  • Ordonnanzoffizier: SS-Untersturmführer Michael Herbst (born 1913)
  • Administrative leader: SS-Obersturmführer Ernst Braunschmidt (born 1917)
  • Troop doctor: SS-Hauptsturmführer Fritz Schildbach (born 1913)

• 1st company: SS-Obersturmführer Willfried Segebrecht (born 1919)
• 2nd company: SS-Obersturmführer Werner Szillat (born 1922)
• 3rd Company: SS-Obersturmführer Friedrich Schmidkonz (born 1912)
• 4th Company: SS-Obersturmführer Walther Biermann (born 1916)
• 5th Company: SS-Obersturmführer Max Saalfrank (born 1911)
• Supply company: SS-Obersturmführer Ernst Braunschmidt (born 1917)

literature

• In the same step. The history of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS". Ed. Division-historical working group of the troop comradeship of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS". Schild, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-88014-114-2 .

• Martin Cüppers: pioneer of the Shoah. The Waffen-SS, the Reichsführer-SS command staff and the extermination of the Jews 1939–1945 (= publications by the Ludwigsburg Research Center of the University of Stuttgart. 4). Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2005, ISBN 3-534-16022-3 (At the same time: Stuttgart, University, dissertation, 2004).
• Carlo Gentile: Le SS di Sant'Anna di Stazzema: azioni, motivazioni e profilo di una unità nazista. In: Marco Palla (Ed.): Tra storia e memoria. 12 agosto 1944: la strage di Sant'Anna di Stazzema. Carocci, Rome, 2003, pp. 86-117.
• Carlo Gentile: Marzabotto. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): Places of horror. Crimes in World War II. Darmstadt 2003, pp. 136-146.
• Carlo Gentile: Political Soldiers. The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" in Italy in 1944. In: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries. 81, 2001, pp. 529-561.
• Carlo Gentile: Walter Reder - a political soldier in the "gang fight". In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Gerhard Paul (Ed.): Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. (Publications by the Ludwigsburg Research Center at the University of Stuttgart. Volume 2.) Darmstadt 2004, pp. 188–195.
• Rolf Michaelis : The Panzer Grenadier Divisions of the Waffen SS. 2nd Edition. Michaelis, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-930849-19-4 .
• Georg Tessin : Associations and troops of the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in World War II 1939–1945. Volume 4. The Land Forces 15–30 . 2nd Edition. Biblio-Verlag, Osnabrück 1976, ISBN 3-7648-1083-1 .

Web links

Commons : 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division “Reichsführer SS”  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 , p. 200
2. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . Pp. 201-211
3. ^ Carlo Gentile: Political Soldiers. The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" in Italy in 1944. In: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries. Edited by Historical German Institute in Rome ( available online ), 2001, pp. 529-561, here pp. 555/556.
4. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 254
5. ^ Carlo Gentile: Gentile: Political soldiers. The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" in Italy. P. 534.
6. ↑ Lutz Klinkhammer : Between Alliance and Occupation. National Socialist Germany and the Republic of Salò 1943–1945. Tübingen 1993, cf. Pp. 506-517.
7. ^ Gentile: Political Soldiers. The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" in Italy. quoted P. 536 ff.
8. ^ Gentile: Political Soldiers. The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" in Italy. quoted Pp. 537-542.
9. ^ Gentile: Political Soldiers. The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" in Italy. quoted Pp. 537-546.
10. ↑ Article on the trial against Sommer and co-defendants ( memento of April 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on trial-ch.org , accessed on August 21, 2012.
11. ↑ Alexander Heilemann: Massacre of Marzabotto: Struggle for justice. Pforzheimer Zeitung, March 8, 2016, accessed on March 9, 2016 . 
12. ↑ 61 years later. Life imprisonment for EX-SS officer for massacre in Italy , from November 25, 2005, on News Austria. Retrieved September 18, 2019
13. ↑ Ex SS della strage di Farneta libero nonostante l'ergastolo (Italian), from November 26, 2011, on Lanazione. Retrieved September 18, 2019
14. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Schlamp: War criminal as honorary citizen: Scandal of Engelsbrand proves failure of the judiciary. Spiegel Online, March 10, 2016, accessed March 10, 2016 .