16. SS-Panzergrenadier-Division "Reichsführer-SS"

The 16th SS-Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’ was formed in autumn 1943 in Slovenia and Italy. It mostly comprised soldiers of various preexisting units, notably the SS-‘Totenkopf’ Division as well as the SS-Begleit-Bataillon (SS Escort Battalion) that had been under the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ Kommandostab (command-staff) since summer 1941. 

The ‘Reichsführer-SS’ command staff was a unit made up of various mobile formations of the Waffen-SS; it was deployed in the summer of 1941 on the Eastern Front. Its task was maintaining security in the rear area and along the communication lines in the area of Army Group Mitte. At the start of the Holocaust, its troops played a decisive role, perpetrating numerous massacres of Jews in the Pripyat Marshes in Polesia, a border region near Ukraine and Belarus. The SS-Escort Battalion had originally been deployed in the summer of 1941 as a guard unit serving Heinrich Himmler’s field quarters near Zhytomyr. In 1942 it was given security tasks and deployed against partisans in Ukraine and Belarus. It was responsible for the destruction of several villages and the murder of their inhabitants. Toward the end of the year, the battalion was shifted to the Arys training camp in East Prussia and then to Brittany in occupied France. Through addition of new units, including some from the army, it reached the strength of a brigade and received the name SS-Sturmbrigade ‘Reichsführer-SS’. SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Gesele, a former SS cavalry commander and staff officer, was appointed as the new brigade's commander.

Other soldiers joined from the ‘Totenkopf’ Division, one of the most notorious SS units, stemming from the SS-‘Totenkopf’ units created in 1934 to guard concentration camps. Many men in the cadre of the units that emerged as the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ Division in 1943/44 had been trained in Dachau in brutal, impersonal violence against the prisoners.

In July 1943, the SS-Sturmbrigade ‘Reichsführer-SS’ was transferred to Italy. At the month’s end, it arrived in Corsica, where after the September 1943 armistice it fought against Italian and French troops and Corsican partisans. In early October, the brigade was again moved to the mainland, initially with a short stay near Rome. 

In autumn 1943, Hitler ordered the brigade’s expansion to a Panzergrenadier Division and gave it the name ‘Reichsführer-SS’. Begun in Slovenia and Italy, this restructuring would prove consistently difficult because of the personnel deficit of the Waffen-SS. Large portions of the troops remained stationed near Lucca in Italy. The first 5,500 recruits arrived between mid-October and mid-December 1943. Initially, approximately 3,000 men born in 1926 joined, consisting mainly of armored infantrymen, engineers, artillerymen, and signalmen. They were followed by 2,500 older armored infantrymen and artillerymen born between 1902 and 1922. 

That autumn of 1943, selected companies served as guard troops for Mussolini’s governmental seat on Lake Garda.

The new division was divided into two Panzergrenadier regiments with three battalions each, each in turn divided into four companies. In addition, each regiment had a staff company and three companies consisting of regimental units. The division also contained an artillery regiment, an armoured reconnaissance battalion, a Panzer battalion, and engineering, signalling, flak, and supply units. 44-year-old SS-Gruppenführer Max Simon took over the division’s command.

SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 35 mainly consisted of men from the former SS-Sturmbrigade and various reserve and training units; the regiment’s deployment encountered serious problems. Nearly all the trained personnel had to be assigned to other formations, so that the only remaining men were cadre personnel, basically leaders of companies, platoons, and groups and their deputies. As reinforcement, the battalion received trained personnel from the I and III Battalions who had already been serving for three to four months. But now as well, the unit could not operate at full strength – this would only be possible after the disbanding of the SS-Panzergrenadier training regiment in late June.

SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 36 was founded in autumn 1943 in Ljubljana. After deployment was finished training began in December; but in late January, already, the incomplete II Battalion was separated from the Regimental unit, reinforced in a makeshift way, and sent to Nettuno. The I and III Battalions would remain in Laibach until March 1944, when their training was also interrupted; together with the rest of the division they now participated in the occupation of Hungary. But a few weeks later, all its troops, including the cadre personnel, were moved to the ‘Totenkopf’ Division.

Deployment of the Reconnaissance Battalion was equally difficult. The battalion was formed in November 1943 in Bad Stein near Lubljana from an original core of two companies handed over by the SS-‘Hohenstaufen’ Division; supplementing this core were additional personnel from various training units. The NCO corps was formed from already operative battle units; shortly after being transferred to Italy, it had to hand most of its men over to the ‘Totenkopf’ division. It was only reinforced on 22 June, directly before departure to the front, when personnel from the disbanded training regiment of the SS-Panzergrenadier School could be incorporated for the first time.

Due to the repeated organization of battle units, the division lacked opportunity to develop unit cohesion critical for military efficiency. Additionally, the ongoing operational tempo prevented bonds from forming between experienced personnel and recruits. The division did not receive favorable treatment compared to Wehrmacht units in terms of personnel or material. 

It was thus clear that no elite unit could be deployed on lines of the first Waffen-SS divisions, but at best a below-average unit. For more than a few of its leaders, to a great extent themselves stemming from ‘Totenkopf’ ranks, that may well have been a source of frustration. Hence in a letter of June 1944, the Ia-officer SS-Obersturmbannführer Ekkehard Albert, wrote as follows: ‘I would never have thought that a ‘Reichsführer SS’ Division would have to be established under such unfortunate circumstances.’ The division was undermanned and consisted of second-choice soldiers; the recruits were inadequately trained. Beyond this, the material situation was deficient, especially concerning heavy weapons and means of transport. 

 In late June 1944, SS-Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 16 and the II Battalion of SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 35 were the first division units to reach the front. North of Grosseto, the two battalions intercepted troops of the American 34^th Infantry Division. On the front, these SS units displayed a fanatical will to fight that could temporarily compensate for the lack of equipment and men. They had some successes delaying American progress, but these were accompanied by heavy losses. The most intense fighting took place around Cecina and Rosignano. The division slowly withdrew toward Livorno, reaching the Arno River in late July. Meanwhile, the division was decimated, with many troops having been captured alongside the dead and wounded. In one month, 3,587 men had been lost in fighting between the Grosseto and Arno rivers, a figure including 71 SS leaders, 446 NCOs, and 3070 ordinary soldiers. Around 600 men had fallen ill.

Of the German troops, the most heavily hit were those in SS-Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 16 and the II Battalion of SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 35, the units chiefly involved in the division’s future massacres. The reconnaissance battalion lost ca. 400 men, and the II Battalion at least 270. The dead and wounded included many SS leaders. Some could no longer fulfill their duties and had to be removed. Given the difficult situation and the soldiers’ inadequate training, discipline collapsed in many places, and soldiers even sometimes refused to fight. Some platoon and company leaders had to intervene with weapons at hand. A 20-year-old SS-Sturmmann who participated in the Rosignano fighting and was killed on 14 July 1944 had written as follows in his notebook on 6 July: ‘Will we come out of this with our lives?’; on 7 July: ‘We’re lying on the edge of Rosignano with the S[ub]M[achine]G[un]. Artillery fire. Hopefully, we’ll manage to escape this shit’; on 8 July: ‘We’re still holding Rosignano. We should soon be replaced, but when?’; 9 July: “Today is Sunday. And Tommy is letting us very nicely alone today. But for how long?’; and on 10 July: ‘Attack with artillery, preparation with mortar [?]. We’re moving with the SMG to the back heights of Rosignano. Attack at 7. Will I still be able to get out of here alive?’

After Germany's surrender, the division's surviving members were taken prisoner by the British Army in Austria. The Allies' approach to these men largely depended on their age and rank. Younger regular SS soldiers were often quickly released. Higher-ranking SS leaders and NCOs faced longer internment in holding camps while their histories underwent scrutiny. Some officers, like Helmut Looß, evaded apprehension by adopting false names and disappearing. Others falsified records to hide membership in units implicated in war crimes. However, such cases were rare. Most senior division leadership remained under examination in the internment camps for extended periods.

Max Simon and Walter Reder had already drawn Allied attention in the course of investigating the division’s war crimes. Simon was tried by a 1947 British military court in Padua, while Reder faced an Italian military court in Rome in 1951.

Some former members, including division intelligence officer Ekkehard Albert, began coordinating witnesses for Simon and Reder's defense. This initial group also included former schoolmates, friends, acquaintances, and less implicated Nazi supporters. Finding witnesses proved challenging, as many feared testifying could lead to self-incrimination.In July 1955, Max Simon warned his former comrades: ‘The punishment of Reder and myself saved many comrades from a trial. Maybe the time will come when I can show this without doing damage.’ 

As a result, ex-members did not immediately form a separate association, instead joining the Waffen-SS veterans' HIAG lobby and Totenkopf Division groups.

By the mid-1970s, these concerns had abated. Lower-ranking veterans, for example, Theobald Kurz from Kaiserslautern and Rudolf Hacker from Graz began planning the first meetings of former members of the division’s artillery regiment. Former commander Otto Baum then suggested expanding the participants’ circle to take in the entire division. Starting in 1979, there were annual meetings in cooperation with the HIAG. The first took place in Speyer amid protests by left-wing and democratic groups and parties. To attract less attention, the following meetings were in smaller places in Rhineland-Palatinate and Lower Franconia; there were meetings in Styria and Carinthia every three years. 

In 1988, protests again broke out before a planned meeting, this time organized by the German Federation of Trade Unions and Social Democratic Party. The SS-veterans were then denied entry to the space rented for the meeting; subsequently, their activities became more discrete. Nevertheless, Austria’s well-known and controversial right-wing (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs/Austria’s Freedom Party) politician Jörg Haider appeared several times as a speaker at the association’s meetings in Ulrichsberg, Carinthia. The last official meeting was in 2005.

In the 1980s, the association had ca. 670 members from all the division's units. It included former SS leaders and NCOs together with regular soldiers, mostly living in Germany and Austria, but also Denmark, France, and Italy. As a rule, between 60 and 250 members would attend the meetings, accompanied by their spouses. In the final years, the number of those attending sank markedly because of old age and death. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, public activity was also dampened by journalistic scrutiny and legal investigations and trials.

Over the years many SS-veterans championed the idea of writing down the division’s history. In view of the complicated legal proceedings against Max Simon and Walter Reder, not all former SS leaders were pleased with the idea. As late as the 1970s, former Ia-officer Ekkehard Albert thus suggested that ‘specifying names and places, through which […] attempts could be made […] to charge us with things possibly undertaken by partisans’ might be to former division members’ detriment. Nevertheless, a first working group already came together in the second and third of the association’s meetings, in 1980 in Styria and 1981 in Mechtersheim near Speyer, an active Austrian army officer, Josef Paul Puntigam, assumed the project’s direction. Puntigam was not himself a veteran of the division but simply had a strong interest in its history. The first volume was written by Puntigam; it treated the fighting in the border region between Austria and Hungary in the war's final phase. In 1988, the working group made a ‘study trip’ to the scenes of the fighting in Italy, with short visits to Sant'Anna di Stazzema and the priest of Sasso Marconi, near Marzabotto, Don Dario Zanini, who had supported Walter Reder in prison. 

Puntigam wished to write a more comprehensive history, treating the military events in Italy and bringing in Allied sources. The veterans were, on the contrary, interested in a simple chronicle of the events in the area of Italy where the division was stationed. This difference of opinion led to a break in the early 1990s. This second book was finally written without any contribution of Puntigam; it appeared in 1998, published by the right-wing Schild Verlag (Munich) under the title Im gleichen Schritt und Tritt [= ‘In the Same Step’]. Die Geschichte der 16. SS-Panzer-Grenadier-Division ‘Reichsführer-SS”’. The book is a chronologically arranged summary of division-related events, apologetic in tone and tenor and consisting mainly of reports by former division members, covering the period from the summer of 1943 to the move to Hungary. The archival material used is limited to a few documents from the German Federal Military Archives in Freiburg. Anti-partisan warfare and reprisal measures, including massacres, are hardly mentioned. In respect to the ‘Reder case’, the authors simply based their characterization of Reder's actions solely on the reports and comments from Reder himself, denying wrongdoing or that those crimes even took place.