Kalmyk Cavalry Corps

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Kalmyk Cavalry Corps

active 1942 to 1945
Country German Reich NSGerman Reich (Nazi era) German Empire
Armed forces Wehrmacht
Armed forces army
Branch of service cavalry
Type corps
structure structure
Strength about 3400-5000
Second World War Eastern Front
Commanders
list of Commanders

The Kalmyk Cavalry Corps was a unit of the Wehrmacht , formed from volunteer Kalmyks during World War II .

prehistory

With the invasion of the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa began , which foreseen the overthrow of the Soviet Union by autumn 1941. Contrary to the German plans, the Soviet Union held out, so that in 1942, with Operation Blau , the conquest of the Caucasus , the oil fields of the Soviet Union were to come into German hands and thus the war was to be decided in favor of the German Reich . In the course of Operation Blau, units of the Wehrmacht moved into the Kalmyk ASSR (part of the Russian SFSR ) in August 1942 . Even before the arrival of the German troops, partisan groups had formed there to fight the Red Army and Soviet rule. With the invasion of the Wehrmacht, these Kalmuck partisans and other Kalmuck volunteers placed themselves under the command of the Wehrmacht. The Kalmyks hoped that the German invasion of their country would free them from the rule of Stalin , who suppressed their Buddhist religion and nomadic way of life .

First Kalmuck formations in the Wehrmacht

Soldier with Kalmuck headgear

The most important German unit in Kalmykia was the 16th Motorized Infantry Division , which divided the Kalmuck volunteers into three different groups: firstly into a police force in the Kalmuck villages under the command of the Kalmuck mayor there as self-protection for the Kalmuck people, and secondly from small ones Departments that kept Kalmuck villages under military occupation, which had no German occupation troops and, thirdly, cavalry units that actively participated in the war on the German side. Each of these three volunteer groups numbered about a thousand men.

The first two Kalmuck cavalry units were armed with Soviet booty weapons and uniformed in September 1942. Count von Stauffenberg (who carried out the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 ), at the time responsible for the so-called Eastern troops of the Wehrmacht, officially added these two Kalmuck cavalry units to the German army on October 17 and 23, 1942. On November 30, 1942, they were officially designated as 1st Kalmuck Squadron 66 and 2nd Kalmuck Squadron 66.

Seven Kalmuck cavalry squadrons, whether already officially led as German army troops or deployed by the German front troops as allied units, were used in the summer and autumn of 1942 in the close and long-range reconnaissance and to defeat Soviet scouting troops and Soviet partisans infiltrating into German-occupied territory in the Kalmyk steppe . As very familiar with the landscape, they provided first-class scouting services. The Kalmuck associations on horseback clarified the situation over hundreds of kilometers to the lower Volga , the Volga delta , Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea .

The Kalmyk Cavalry Corps

At the beginning of 1943, the Kalmyk cavalry squadrons of the 16th Motorized Infantry Division were led by Dr. Organizationally summarized Otto Doll. Doll belonged to the German military secret service, the Abwehr , and had been head of Abwehr Troop 103 in the Kalmyk steppe since mid-August 1942 in order to establish good relations between the Wehrmacht and the Kalmyk population. Doll was able to win the trust of the Kalmyks by standing up for the interests of the Kalmyks and was therefore recognized by the Kalmyks as the commander of the Kalmyks.

On January 15, 1943, six Kalmuck cavalry squadrons were placed as a Kalmuck detachment under the command of the German 444th Security Division . In February 1943, von Doll formed a reinforced regiment with three divisions from the Kalmuck cavalry squadrons and Kalmuck refugees who also left their homeland with the German retreat from the Caucasus region . Since Doll was the commander of the Kalmuck unit of the Wehrmacht, the association on the German side was mostly called "Kalmücke Association Dr. Doll "called, the Kalmyks themselves called their unit" Kalmyzki Kawalerijski Korpus "( Russian Калмыцкий кавалерийский корпус ; Kalmyk Cavalry Corps, KKK).

After the withdrawal from the Caucasus region, the Kalmuck Cavalry Corps had been at Taganrog on the Azov Sea since February 1943 and carried out mounted reconnaissance. At the end of April 1943, the Kalmuck Cavalry Corps, which had meanwhile been enlarged to four divisions, was subordinated to the German 6th Army and until autumn 1943 protected the railway lines on both sides of the Dnieper against partisan attacks. In June 1943, the officer Basan Ogdonov of the Kalmuck Corps and a Kalmuck partisan group were flown by German aircraft to fight the Red Army to Kalmykia. Kalmuck agents and partisans are said to have made further flights into their homeland by the summer of 1944.

On August 31, 1943, the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps consisted of four divisions of five squadrons each . Each squadron consisted of five platoons . The strength of a squadron was 100 to 150 men. Each of the four departments also had a hunting command , also known as a hunting squadron, made up of selected soldiers, each about 60 men strong.

On May 23, 1943, the corps consisted of 67 Kalmuck officers and 3,165 NCOs and men. On July 6, 1944, the corps had 147 Kalmuck officers, 374 NCOs and 2,917 men. The corps was also accompanied by a large number of civilians, mostly women and family members of the Kalmuck soldiers. At the end of 1944 the corps is said to have had a total of about 5,000 men.

After Doll's death in the summer of 1944, the Kalmuck cavalry corps submitted to the Kalmuck National Committee under Samba Balinov in Berlin in September 1944 . The corps sent its own liaison officer to the Kalmyk National Committee, who at the same time looked after the interests of the corps with the General of the Volunteer Associations in the High Command of the Army , General of the Cavalry Ernst-August Köstring .

From the end of 1943 the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps took part in the retreat of the Wehrmacht from the Soviet Union and across the Balkans and stood on the Drava at the end of the war in May 1945 . A larger part of the corps was captured by Yugoslav partisans and a smaller part by British troops and extradited to the Soviet Union.

structure

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Germans and Kalmyks 1942 to 1945 . Military History Research Office, Freiburg 1986, page 92
  2. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Germans and Kalmyks 1942 to 1945 . Military History Research Office, Freiburg 1986, pages 92-93
  3. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Germans and Kalmyks 1942 to 1945 . Military History Research Office, Freiburg 1986, pages 20-22
  4. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Germans and Kalmyks 1942 to 1945 . Military History Research Office, Freiburg 1986, pages 114-115
  5. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Germans and Kalmyks 1942 to 1945 . Military History Research Office, Freiburg 1986, page 118
  6. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Germans and Kalmyks 1942 to 1945 . Military History Research Office, Freiburg 1986, page 135
  7. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Germans and Kalmyks 1942 to 1945 . Military History Research Office, Freiburg 1986, page 136
  8. ↑ Nicholas Bethell: The Last Secret . Futura Publications, London 1978