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Nationality

German

Formation

1917-1919 German Army
1919-1929 Reichswehr
1934-1945 Politische Bereitschaften and SS Totenkopf units; Waffen-SS

Army branch

Deutsches Heer Waffen-SS

Joined the NSDAP

1931

Armed force

Waffen-SS

Unit

3. SS-Panzerdivision "Totenkopf"
16. SS-Panzergrenadier-Division "Reichsführer-SS"
XIII SS-Armeekorps

Years of service

1917-1929 / 1933-1945

SS-Gruppenführer

Offensive

Austrian Anschluss
Occupation of Czechoslovakia
Invasion of Poland
Western Front
Invasion of Soviet Union
Eastern Front
Occupation of Italy 1943-45
Fighting in Germany in war’s final phase

Confirmed Massacres

As Kommandeur, Max Simon was responsible for all massacres perpetrated by his division: Pisa, San Rossore, Lago di Massaciuccoli, Sant 'Anna di Stazzema, Bardine di San Terenzo, Valla, Vinca, Laiano di Filettole, Camaiore, Massa, Bergiola Foscalina, Fosse del Frigido, Monte Sole, Casalecchio di Reno, San Cesario sul Panaro, and Vignola.

Post war period

Trial before a British military court in Padua; death sentence 1947. Commuted to life imprisonment in 1951 and incarceration in Werl military prison. Early release in 1954.

1954-1960: Trial on account of Brettheim events of 1945

Training and war experience

• Military career and concentration camp deployment

  On the basis of his military training, in 1934 Simon was brought into the Politische Bereitschaften (‘political reserve troops’; a formation unit) with the rank of SS Oberscharführer. Later, both the SS-Verfügungstruppe (‘dispositional troops’) and the Waffen-SS would emerge from this special unit. It was initially set up at the initiative of the SS Oberabschnittsführer and, as an auxiliary police unit, was part of the State police force. Its chief task consisted in intimidating and terrorizing political opponents. 

  Im April 1934, Simon received a full-time position in the SS and took a leave from his duties in Thüringen. At the same time Theodor Eicke, Kommandant of Dachau, assigned Simon to the concentration camp’s newly established inspectorate: a body meant to see through the shift from the earlier unorganised camps to a system subordinate to the SS and its guidelines. To that end, Eicke conceived a form of training for the camp personnel that would later be called the ‘Dachau School’: the emphasis was on extreme distance and discipline, on treating prisoners with utmost severity and an absence of any leeway. During this ‘schooling’, the guards were trained in inflicting violence on prisoners; they participated in abuse and murder. Many of the later battalion and company commanders of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division 'Reichsführer-SS' went through this training. 

  Simon’s first posting was to the Sachsenburg camp, which functioned between 1933 and 1937. Labour movement members, Communists, Social Democrats, left-wing liberals, clergy in the Confessional Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews were imprisoned in this camp. Jewish prisoners were subjected to special abuse. With the handover of the camp direction to men trained by Eicke in summer 1934, treatment of the prisoners worsened; with introduction of punishment by beating, Sachsenburg emerged as the most feared of Germany’s early Concentration camps. 

  On 9 Nov. 1934, Simon was appointed an SS Untersturmführer and made Kommandant of the camp guards. He rapidly rose to SS Sturmbannführer and deputy camp-Kommandant. In May 1937 Eicke brought him to Dachau and gave him the command over the 1^st SS Totenkopf ‘Upper Bavaria’ Regiment.

• Kommandeur of the 1st SS Totenkopf Infantry Regiment on the Eastern Front

  Between 1939 and 1940 the different Totenkopf units were transformed into a Waffen-SS division. As Kommandeur of the 1^st SS Totenkopf Infantry Regiment, in 1940 Simon participated in the campaign in France and in 1941 fought on the Eastern Front. He was one of the most important and respected officers in the Totenkopf Division, whose units were notorious for their excesses of violence.

  In Russia, the division’s fanaticism was expressed in a reckless, often even criminal form of warfare. At the same time, an evidently boundless readiness for self-sacrifice was also evident. In the battle of the Demyansk pocket, for example, the losses were extraordinarily high. 

  Simon combined excellent organizational capabilities with qualities prized by the SS such as hardness of character and unlimited ambition: qualities quickly making him one of the central figures in the Totenkopf units. Above all, his career was enabled by Eicke’s trust and favour, who described Simon as ‘a man of high value, the best type of SS leader, unencumbered and unspoiled’ and ‘an irreplaceable linchpin and the SS-T Div. inconceivable without him’ in his personnel evaluations. In such passages, Eicke left no doubt that Simon corresponded in every respect to his ideal picture of the ‘political soldier’ who tied ‘extraordinary severity’ with ‘inner heartfulness’. A mix of brutality with paternal care for the soldiers indeed constituted Simon’s personality. It guaranteed that his men would be prepared to ‘go through fire’ for him.

• With the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’ in Italy

  As leader of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’, Max Simon arrived in Italy in late May 1944; he then left the country on 1 Nov. to take over command of the XII SS-Army Corps. During the five months of his leadership in Italy, the division fought along the Tyrrhenian coast between Maremma und Lunigiana and then in the Apennines in the Bologna area. It fought doggedly on the front for every foot of ground; while ‘combating bandits’ - the Nazi term for battling partisans - it perpetrated numerous crimes against the civilian population. Simon’s role in both operations against American troops and the massacres was decisive. He gave Helmut Looß, former leader of a Sonderkommando on the Eastern Front, unlimited freedom of action in the anti-partisan fight. 

  Under Simon’s command, the division lost thousands of men at the front. For its part, the division murdered appr. 2,000 Italian civilians, mainly women and children; it is presently viewed as by far the most violent division among the occupying forces in Italy, as is clear from the number of its perpetrated massacres. These began in July and reached their highpoint in Aug. and Sept. 1944. The worst were in the Pisa area, in San Rossore, Lago di Massaciuccoli, Sant 'Anna di Stazzema, Bardine di San Terenzo, Valla, Vinca, Laiano di Filettole, Camaiore, Massa, Bergiola Foscalina, Fosse del Frigido, Monte Sole, Casalecchio di Reno, San Cesario sul Panaro, and Vignola.

  Portions of the German staff reacted to the massacres’ brutality with halting reconsideration of the approach being taken. After all, it involved brutalization of the troops and increased sympathy for the partisans among the civilian population. But this did not lead to any basic changes. 

  In the case of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’, the atrocities only abated – but did not fully cease – after Simon’s departure in Nov. 1944 and replacement as commander by SS Oberführer Otto Baum.

• After the Italian deployment

  Max Simon now took over command of the XII SS Army Corps in the area of Metz and Lorraine. In face of the American and French offensive, he initially staged a fighting withdrawal into the Saar region. In March 1945 he stood with his troops at the Rhine. In April 1945, his units finally fought, again doggedly, in Franconia and Württemberg. In the war’s last phase there were many executions of deserters and ‘defeatists’ by shooting and hanging. 

  In part because of the legal consequences, the case of the village of Brettheim in Württemberg has special symbolic weight. On 10 April 1945, on Simon’s orders a court martial sentenced a farmer to death by hanging for disarming members of Hitler Youth who were to be deployed against the Americans. The Nazi Party’s Ortsgruppenleiter for the village and its mayor were also executed for refusing to sign the farmer’s death sentence. The martial law-based execution of both German citizens and foreign workers was continued under Simon’s command until 27 April 1945. 

  Simon tried to organize defence of the Dachau camp around Munich. On 29 April, American troops from the 45^th Infantry Division reached the camp, where they discovered the corpses of 2,310 executed or starved to death prisoners in a freight train. Entering the camp, they found an additional 3,500 corpses: they had not been cremated due to a lack of fuel. In reaction, SS members at the camp were shot to death. Max Simon had meanwhile withdrawn to Tirol. He surrendered to the Americans on 6 May 1945.

The postwar years