221st Infantry Division (Wehrmacht)
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221st Infantry Division |
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|---|---|
| Lineup | August 26, 1939 |
| Country |
.svg){kind=small} German Empire
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| Armed forces | Wehrmacht |
| Armed forces | army |
| Type | Infantry Division |
| structure | structure |
| Installation site | Wroclaw |
| Commanders | |
| list of | Commanders |
The 221st Infantry Division (ID) and later the 221st Security Division was a major military unit of the Wehrmacht .
Division history
221st Infantry Division
The 221 ID was set up as a division of the 3rd wave in Breslau in August 1939. Shortly thereafter, it served as a division reserve of the 10th Army and 8th Army in Poland. During the attack on Poland , the 221st Infantry Division reached the Bzura via Kalisch , where the decisive battle of the Bzura in September 1939 decided the defeat of the Polish army. After the end of the fighting, the 221st Infantry Division carried out security and occupation tasks in occupied Poland. In December 1939 there was a reorganization by converting the 4th company of each infantry regiment into a machine gun company. The division was appointed to the OKH reserve and relocated to the Upper Rhine in April 1940 in the case of yellow . In June 1940 she crossed the Rhine near Marckolsheim and occupied Colmar in Alsace . The division was inactive from August 1940 to March 1941. In March 1941 there was a reassignment and allocation to the security divisions 221st, 444th and 454th.
221st Security Division
- Areas of application
- Germany: March to June 1941
- Eastern Front , Central Section: June 1941 to July 1944
The 221st SD was formed in Breslau from parts of the 221st ID. It was deployed behind the front lines of the central sector in the Soviet Union. It was not until the Wehrmacht withdrew from Moscow that she was deployed in the Army Group Center . In July 1944 it had to be disbanded after heavy losses during Operation Bagration near Minsk .
War crimes of the 221st Security Division
In accordance with its security mandate, the 221st Security Division was involved in occupation crimes by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union. Although it is not known how many soldiers and civilians this unit killed during its occupation, based on the reports and operational reports that have been preserved, it is known that they followed the commissioner's orders as well as shooting female members of the Red Army as " shotgun women ". However, it revealed its greatest brutality in the context of fighting real and alleged partisans . Between June 22nd, the beginning of the attack on the Soviet Union, and July 3rd, 1941 alone, seven of the 4,004 prisoners registered by the division were shot as commissars and another 323 as " irregulars ". These "rates" were essentially retained in the following period, as the sources show, from which it can be seen that the division shot another 1,847 " partisans " from mid-September to mid-November 1941, for example . In addition, a total of 12,237 other “ partisans ”, “ partisan helpers ” and “ [P] artisan suspects ” were arrested during the same period .
The 221st Security Division was at least partly responsible for the mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of war in the transit camps under its command (abbreviated to Dulag ), in which the captured Red Army soldiers were initially housed. One of the largest of these camps was Dulag 131 in Babrujsk , Belarus , which was subordinate to the 221st Security Division with a few interruptions from the beginning of the war until the beginning of March 1942. Around 158,000 Red Army soldiers had been smuggled through this camp by November 1941, but 14,777 of them had died by November 20, 1941 as a result of the poor accommodation, but above all of the poor nutrition.
In the end, the 221st Security Division was also involved in the extermination of the Jews , as their written reports show, in which the execution of Jews is noted over and over again. The greatest excesses in this connection were not committed by the units of the division themselves, but by the police battalions subordinate to them . One of the most terrible massacres took place in the first days of the war in the Polish city of Białystok . Soldiers from Police Battalion 309 , in which Heinrich Schneider served as platoon leader, killed between 2,000 and 2,200 people here on June 27, 1941, including at least 700 Jewish men who were burned alive in the city's synagogue. The resulting major fire not only killed large parts of the city center, but also numerous city dwellers.
Loss of the 221st Security Division
For the 221st Security Division, with a nominal strength of 10,267 soldiers during the deployment from June 1941 to December 1943, 9,474 soldiers are documented or calculated as losses. Whereby no data are available for the months of October 1942 and September, October, November and December 1943 and this gap was closed by calculated average values. Among the losses, 1,595 soldiers were killed and 723 soldiers were missing. There are also 7,157 wounded. The losses in this division are distributed relatively evenly over the months. Only in January 1942 did the division record an unusually high number of wounded due to the cold when deployed at the front in winter. Of the 1,289 casualties in January 1942, 1,224 soldiers were wounded. For the period from January 1944 to July 1944, there are no documents on the losses other than missing person reports.
Medal for members of the 221st Security Division
Members of the 221st Security Division received relatively few medals for a division on the Eastern Front. Seven members of the division received a German cross in gold. 2,770 soldiers received an Iron Cross 2nd class and 184 an Iron Cross 1st class. In addition there were 498 repeat clasps of both classes of the Iron Cross. 4,615 men were awarded the War Merit Cross (1939) with swords. While the number of Iron Crosses awarded was greater than that of War Merit Crosses in front formations, in this division the ratio is reversed.
Commanders and staff
| period of service | Rank | Surname |
|---|---|---|
| August 26, 1939 to March 15, 1941 | Major General / Lieutenant General | Johann Pflugbeil |
| period of service | Rank | Surname |
|---|---|---|
| March 15, 1941 to July 5, 1942 | Lieutenant General | Johann Pflugbeil |
| July 5, 1942 to August 1, 1943 | Major General / Lieutenant General | Hubert Lendle |
| August 1 to September 5, 1943 | Major general | Karl Boettger |
| September 5, 1943 to March 1944 | Lieutenant General | Hubert Lendle |
| March to April 1944 | Lieutenant General | Bogislav from Schwerin |
| April until dissolution | Lieutenant General | Hubert Lendle |
| period of service | Rank | Surname |
|---|---|---|
| April 1 to November 4, 1941 | Captain | Karl Huebner |
| February to June 1942 | major | Richard Benke |
| July 1942 to September 1943 | Lieutenant colonel | Helmuth Kreidel |
| December 10, 1943 until unknown | major | Prince of Castell-Castell |
Structure of the 221st ID
- 350th Infantry Regiment
- 360 Infantry Regiment
- 375th Infantry Regiment
- Artillery Regiment 221
- Engineer Battalion 221
- Field Replacement Battalion 221
- Anti-tank department 221
- Reconnaissance Department 221
- News Department 221
- Resupply Troops 221
literature
- Christian Hartmann : Wehrmacht in the Eastern War. Front and Military Hinterland 1941/42 (= sources and representations on contemporary history, Volume 75), R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-58064-8 .
- Werner Haupt : The German Infantry Divisions 1921–1945. 3 volumes. Dörfler Verlag 2005, ISBN 978-3-89555-274-8 .
- Georg Tessin : Associations and troops of the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in World War II 1939–1945 . Volume 8: The Land Forces 201–280 . 2nd Edition. Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 1979, ISBN 3-7648-1174-9 .
Web links
- 200th through 370th German Infantry, Security, and Panzer Grenadier Divisions. Organizations and Histories 1939–1945 ( Memento from February 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 461 kB), Nafziger Collection, Combined Armed Research Library.
Notes and individual references
- ^ Organization of the war on September 1, 1939
- ↑ See Hartmann (2009), pp. 496-499 and 523-526.
- ↑ Hartmann (2009), pp. 334–336, 579, 716, note 103, and p. 727. - Hartmann's conclusion: “ In the period from July to November 1941 there is actually hardly a daily report of the 221st, in the once a German war crime would not be reported ”. Ibid., P. 335. The author's emphasis has been omitted.
- ^ Hartmann (2009), p. 577 and Dieter Pohl : Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht. German military occupation and local population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58065-5 , p. 224.
- ↑ See Hartmann (2009), p. 680 f.
- ↑ See Hartmann (2009), pp. 272–276 and Annette Weinke : F. Anders u. a. (Ed.): Białystok in Bielefeld. In: H-Net Reviews. Humanities & Social Sciences Online, May 2004, accessed February 28, 2011 .
- ^ Christian Hartmann: Wehrmacht in the Eastern War. Front and Military Hinterland 1941/42 R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2009, 201ff.
- ^ Christian Hartmann: Wehrmacht in the Eastern War. Front and Military Hinterland 1941/42 R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2009, 189ff.
