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The record · Battle of Kursk, 1943
The II SS Panzer Corps
The strongest German corps on the southern face of the Kursk salient was built from three divisions of Heinrich Himmler’s SS. It appears in this collection for its battles at Kharkov and Prokhorovka, and for what its men did to villagers and prisoners from 1940 to 1944.
Illustration A neutral marker made for this site, not a unit emblem.
Three divisions, three origins
In July 1943 the II SS Panzer Corps was the armored spearhead of Col. Gen. Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army. Its commander, Paul Hausser, was a retired army lieutenant general who had joined the SS in 1934 and built its officer schools. Its divisions, the Leibstandarte under Theodor Wisch, Das Reich under Walter Krüger and Totenkopf under Hermann Priess, were officially panzergrenadier divisions, but each had a panzer regiment, a company of Tigers and an assault-gun battalion (Chapter 4; Chapter 6).
Each came from a different part of the SS. The Leibstandarte began on 17 March 1933 as the SS-Stabswache Berlin, 117 men under Sepp Dietrich chosen to guard the Reich Chancellery. Das Reich grew from the SS-Verfügungstruppe, the armed “special-purpose troops” Himmler raised outside the army in the 1930s. Totenkopf was formed in the autumn of 1939 by Theodor Eicke, the former commandant of Dachau and Inspector of Concentration Camps, from about 6,500 men of the camp guard units. Men, money and equipment kept passing between the division and the camp system through the war (Sydnor; Stein).
Himmler, who commanded these divisions as Reichsführer-SS, also commanded the police, the Einsatzgruppen and the concentration and death camps. The record does not show that the corps as a formation took part in the mass shootings of Jews behind the front; those were carried out by the Security Police and SD, Order Police battalions, Himmler’s own Waffen-SS brigades, army units and local auxiliaries (Chapter 8). What it shows is a pattern of killing prisoners and civilians that followed these divisions from Poland and France to Kharkov and Belgium.
Yefremovka and Semyonovka, February 1943
The corps reached Kharkov in early 1943 to hold the city against the Soviet winter offensive. On 15 February Hausser pulled his divisions out against Hitler’s explicit order, and the Red Army entered Kharkov the next day (Chapter 1). In the same days the Leibstandarte was holding a front south and southwest of the city.
On 12 February men of the division occupied the villages of Yefremovka and Semyonovka, southwest of Kharkov, after Soviet troops withdrew; two SS officers had been wounded in the fighting there. On 17 February Leibstandarte troops came back. According to survivors’ accounts gathered by Ukrainian researchers and cited by the historian Danny Parker, they killed 872 men, women and children in the two villages, and about 240 of them were burned alive in the church at Yefremovka. One of the survivors who described what happened, Ivan Kiselev, was 14 years old (Parker, Hitler’s Warrior, pp. 356–357; Westemeier).
The unit named in these accounts is the armored half-track battalion of the 2nd SS Panzergrenadier Regiment, commanded by SS-Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper. A former sergeant of the battalion, questioned by the Western Allies in November 1944, said that after the battalion’s rearguard was found killed and mutilated at Krasnaya Polyana, Peiper had ordered a village burned and its inhabitants shot. Within the division the battalion was called the “blowtorch battalion,” which several historians connect with the burning of villages in this period, and Peiper wrote in a letter in March 1943 that the unit’s reputation for terror went ahead of it (Parker; Westemeier). He received the German Cross in Gold for his battalion’s actions around Kharkov. The trials described in this collection did not deal with the two villages; when Peiper was tried in 1946, it was for Malmedy.
Kharkov retaken, March 1943
Manstein’s counteroffensive opened on 19 February, with the SS corps striking south from the Krasnograd area. In March Hausser sent the Leibstandarte and Das Reich straight into Kharkov over the objections of Hoth and Manstein; the city was announced as taken on 14 March, and the fighting at the tractor works ended on the 16th. The occupiers renamed the central square “Platz der Leibstandarte” (Chapter 1).
After the final liberation in August, Soviet investigators reported that SS troops had killed several hundred wounded Red Army soldiers in a Kharkov military hospital in March 1943, and Western histories of the Leibstandarte report the killings too (Ripley). The number of victims, the date and the units responsible have not been fixed: no German document describing it is known, Soviet figures were sometimes inflated, and accounts differ on whether the patients were shot or the building was set on fire. The charge is well supported in outline and uncertain in detail. The shooting of captured Soviet political officers was German policy under the Commissar Order of 6 June 1941.
Kursk, July 1943
On 5 July 1943 the corps attacked astride the Belgorod–Oboyan highway against the 52nd Guards Rifle Division, and within two days it was through the first two Soviet defensive belts. On 9 July Hoth turned it northeast toward Prokhorovka. On the evening of 11 July it reported 294 serviceable tanks and assault guns. On 12 July it held its ground against the 5th Guards Tank Army with few tanks written off, but lost 842 men killed, wounded or missing that day and 2,672 in 12–16 July (Zetterling and Frankson; Chapter 6).
For the battle itself the evidence of specific crimes is thinner. Soviet wartime reporting accused German troops, including the SS, of shooting prisoners and wounded men on the southern face, but the operational histories this collection relies on do not document a specific mass shooting by the corps between 4 and 11 July, and this page does not assert one (Chapter 4). The Soviet soldiers it captured went into a prisoner-of-war system in which, of about 5.7 million Red Army men taken in the whole war, about 3.3 million died (Streit).
The same divisions in the West
The record before and after Kursk is clearer. On 27 May 1940 men of Fritz Knöchlein’s Totenkopf company machine-gunned 97 surrendered soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment, at Le Paradis; two survived to testify, and a British military court had Knöchlein hanged in 1949. In the same campaign about 80 British and French prisoners were murdered at Wormhoudt by men of the Leibstandarte. In September 1943 Peiper’s battalion burned the Italian village of Boves and killed about two dozen civilians (Chapter 6).
In June 1944 Das Reich, rebuilt in southern France around veterans of the Eastern Front, hanged 99 men in Tulle on the 9th. On the 10th a company of its Der Führer regiment under Adolf Diekmann killed 643 people at Oradour-sur-Glane, shooting the men in barns and burning the women and children in the church. A French military court at Bordeaux tried 21 of the men in 1953; under an amnesty passed during the trial most were soon free, and the division commander, Heinz Lammerding, was never extradited from West Germany. An East German court sentenced one officer, Heinz Barth, to life imprisonment in 1983 (Chapter 8).
On 17 December 1944 men of Kampfgruppe Peiper shot American prisoners of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion in a field at the Baugnez crossroads near Malmedy; 84 were killed. A U.S. Army court at Dachau tried 73 men of the Leibstandarte from May to July 1946 and sentenced 43 to death, Peiper among them. None was executed. After a Senate investigation into the pretrial interrogations the sentences were commuted, and Peiper was paroled in December 1956.
Judgment and the myth
On 30 September and 1 October 1946 the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared the SS, including the Waffen-SS, a criminal organization, excepting only men drafted into it who had committed no crimes. Hausser appeared at Nuremberg as a witness for the SS’s defense and spent the next two decades arguing the opposite of the verdict; in 1966 he published a book whose title, Soldaten wie andere auch, means “soldiers like any others.” The veterans’ association HIAG, founded in 1951, made the same case in memoirs and unit histories that found a large readership in West Germany and the United States (Chapter 8).
The argument met its sharpest public answer in 1985, when it emerged that 49 of the roughly 2,000 soldiers buried in the German military cemetery at Bitburg, which President Reagan had agreed to visit, were members of the Waffen-SS. Historians since Stein and Sydnor have concluded that not every man in the Waffen-SS was a murderer, but the organization was built for a racial war, its divisions were trained in that ideology, and their record of crimes against prisoners and civilians was worse than that of the army as a whole. Kursk does not change that picture. It shows that the same men could fight skillfully and kill prisoners in the same campaign.
That place, Mr. President, is not your place.
Timeline
- The SS-Stabswache Berlin, 117 men under Sepp Dietrich, is formed; it becomes the Leibstandarte.
- Le Paradis: a Totenkopf company shoots 97 surrendered men of the Royal Norfolk Regiment.
- Hausser pulls the SS Panzer Corps out of Kharkov against Hitler’s order.
- Yefremovka and Semyonovka: 872 villagers are killed, about 240 of them in a burning church, by survivors’ accounts.
- The corps retakes Kharkov; wounded Soviet prisoners are reported killed in a military hospital.
- The corps attacks the southern face of the Kursk salient astride the Oboyan highway.
- Prokhorovka: the corps holds its ground and loses 842 men killed, wounded or missing.
- Oradour-sur-Glane: a company of Das Reich kills 643 people.
- Malmedy: men of Kampfgruppe Peiper kill 84 American prisoners.
- The Nuremberg tribunal declares the SS, Waffen-SS included, a criminal organization.
Read the full story
- Chapter 1: After Stalingrad: Kharkov, the Salient and the Decision for Citadel
- Chapter 4: The Southern Face: Panthers, the SS and the Road to Oboyan
- Chapter 6: Prokhorovka, 12 July 1943: The Battle and the Legend
- Chapter 8: Behind the Front: The Waffen-SS, the Einsatzgruppen and the Occupied East
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
The record of the II SS Panzer Corps by the numbers
The victims
People killed in massacres by men of the corps’ three divisions, 1940–1944. Yefremovka–Semyonovka rests on survivors’ accounts; Wormhoudt and Boves are approximate.
Source: Parker, Hitler’s Warrior (2014), pp. 356–357; Westemeier, Joachim Peiper (2007); Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction (1977); the chapters of this collection.
Justice, as it was done
Men tried and punished for the Malmedy and Oradour killings
Source: U.S. Army war crimes trial records as summarized in Chapter 8 of this collection; Wikipedia, “Malmedy massacre trial” and “Oradour-sur-Glane massacre.” Most Oradour defendants were freed under a 1953 amnesty; division commander Heinz Lammerding was never extradited.
Soviet prisoners of war
Red Army soldiers captured by Germany, 1941–1945, and how many died (millions)
Source: Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden (1978).
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Charles W. Sydnor Jr., Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933–1945 (Princeton, 1977); George H. Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler’s Elite Guard at War, 1939–1945 (Cornell, 1966).
- Danny S. Parker, Hitler’s Warrior: The Life and Wars of SS Colonel Jochen Peiper (2014), pp. 94–96, 356–357; Jens Westemeier, Joachim Peiper: A Biography of Himmler’s SS Commander (2007).
- Tim Ripley, Steel Storm: Waffen-SS Panzer Battles on the Eastern Front, 1943–1945 (2000), p. 73; Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden (1978).
- Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson, Kursk 1943: A Statistical Analysis (2000); George M. Nipe, Blood, Steel, and Myth (2011); Valeriy Zamulin, Demolishing the Myth (2011); David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (1999).
- International Military Tribunal, judgment on the criminal organizations, 30 September–1 October 1946; Paul Hausser, Soldaten wie andere auch (1966).
- Wikipedia, “Malmedy massacre,” “Oradour-sur-Glane massacre” and “Bitburg controversy” (citing the New York Times), as used in Chapter 8 of this collection.