Fire & Sword:
Jaguar Commando
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2024

From the start of the Second World War, the German regular army’s intelligence branch organized specially-trained teams to seek out documents and other information behind enemy lines. By the time of the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, these had become formalized into Deep Recon Companies. Each army group had one or two such companies attached to them, with a varying number of personnel. These included German intelligence specialists and Russian volunteers (some of them former prisoners of war, and others recruited from the exile community in Germany).

The recon companies reported to Foreign Armies East, the “third branch” of the German General Staff, charged with providing intelligence on the Red Army and other opponents. Reinhard Gehlen, promoted to head the branch on 1 May 1942, wanted more results from his field agents. Previously his office had relied on reports passed on from Abwehr, the military intelligence service, but Gehlen wanted his own raw data.

“I do not want,” Gehlen told his scouts, “extraordinary actions or heroic deeds, but as regular and abundant a harvest as possible.”

Just how effective these companies proved in obtaining data seems open to question; while there are plenty of tales of heroic escapades, Gehlen oversaw repeated, egregious intelligence failures. He did not anticipate Operation Uranus, the offensive at Stalingrad in late 1942, or Operation Bagration, the massive 1944 offensive that destroyed the German Army Group Center. And he continually advised that the Red Army would soon exhaust its available manpower.

The Jaguar platoon command tank, code-named “Paula.” Paula broke down and was abandoned behind enemy lines during the December 1944 mission. Note the rather obvious German radio aerial.

As his prestige and standing crumbled, Gehlen turned to the standard tactic of Nazi barons seeking to shore up their status in the feudal structure of the Third Reich: armed action. He now ordered that the recon companies perform extraordinary actions and heroic deeds. Capt. Kurt Reinhardt of the 206th Deep Recon Company, attached to Army Group A fighting in Hungary, tapped Lt. Eugen Heinrich Simon Weyde and the 213th Deep Recon Platoon for just such a mission, both the unit and the operation taking the code-name “Jaguar.”

The mission had at first been assigned to the 202nd Deep Recon Company, which had drawn between 12 and 14 captured T34 tanks from Army Group Center’s repair depots and the Captured Armor Depot at Braunsberg in East Prussia. It’s not clear who moved the mission from Army Group Center to Army Group A, but Weyde and his men took over the tanks as well as trucks and other soft vehicles.

The group trained at Lamsdorf in Silesia, using its T34/76 tanks for training, and preserving its three or four T34/85 tanks for the mission itself. The Germans captured relatively few of the latter vehicle, and these could not be easily replaced if they broke down. The tanks received German communications gear (the aerials should have been a dead giveaway, but no Soviet seems to have noticed); one tank carried an air liaison officer and a special radio for his use, allowing him to identify targets behind enemy lines for air attack and warn off German planes attacking the infiltrators by mistake.

Jaguar commandos at the Lamsdorf training area with two of their T34/76 tanks.

Weyde, the 23-year-old son of a Baltic German architect, had been born and raised in Rostov, speaking both German and Russian from childhood. He understood not only the language, but Soviet society: knowledge that the émigrés usually recruited for such missions rarely possessed. Unlike most infiltrators, he didn’t avoid Red Army soldiers, rather seeking them out to engage in conversation, picking up not only order of battle and position information but also the attitudes of the front-line troops. In return, Weyde offered rumors and disinformation. Weyde, who used the code name “Pankoff,” been decorated twice with the Iron Cross, and served in the Abwehr’s Brandenburg commandos before shifting to Deep Recon in November 1941.

His team included a dozen Germans, 18 Russians and seven Hungarians, and three T34/85 tanks. The Germans crewed the tanks, along with four of the Russians. All wore Red Army tank crew uniforms. The remaining Russians dressed as Red Army infantry and rode the tanks; the Hungarians wore civilian clothing and played the role of sympathetic Hungarian Communists who had volunteered to serve as guides. They carried an arsenal of machine guns and rifles, plus silenced pistols and sub-machine guns.

Jaguar commandos show off one of their silenced MP40 submachine guns.

On 22 December 1944, the Jaguar force moved up to 1st Panzer Division’s front near Úrhida, about eight kilometers south-west of Székesfehérvár. Weyde had a great deal of latitude to choose his objectives and the time when he would cross over the front line. Weyde conferred in detail with the local commanders to make sure that his fake-Soviet tanks would not fall victim to friendly fire (German or Soviet).

Col. Helmut Huppert, the 28-year-old commander of the 1st Panzer Division battle group holding the area, told Weyde that he planned a strong armor-supported spoiling attack against Úrhida including Royal Tiger tanks and a regiment from 23rd Panzer Division, and perhaps the Jaguar commando could use the confusion to slip through the lines. Huppert attacked on the afternoon of the 22nd, creating the predicted chaos. Weyde started out at 0200 on the 23rd, crossing the front line at 0416. His Russian tank riders shouted at any Red Army troops they encountered, and the three tanks rolled past the front line unscathed.

And then things began to fall apart. Two of the three tanks suffered broken tracks, and Weyde’s men stopped to repair them. A succession of Soviet officers approached to check out the armor; including the deputy commander of a battalion of anti-tank guns, who mentioned that tank support had been expected. Weyde assured him that it had arrived and would enter battle as soon as the tracks had been repaired.

Jaguar commandos play with one of their T34/85 tanks.

When the commander of a Guards Rifle battalion angrily insisted that “Pankoff” assist his attack, Weyde asked for the loan of some men to help with the repair work. After four and a half hours, one tank had been repaired and the Guards launched their attack. Rather than accompany them, Weyde’s tanks opened fire on them from behind, killing between 20 and 60 men including the commanders of the rifle and anti-tank battalions, shot down with silenced sub-machine guns while trying to correct the “friendly fire” of the Jaguar tanks.

Weyde’s official report, filed a week later, claimed far greater successes, none of which can be confirmed by other sources. The Jaguar platoon did sow confusion and break up a Soviet attack, and did make it back to friendly lines without losing a single man killed or wounded. Was it worth the effort that went into its preparation? Likely not. But you can play it out in Scenario Thirty-Two of Panzer Grenadier: Fire & Sword and see for yourself.

“Pankoff” and his men made at least four more deployments behind enemy lines between January and March 1945, using captured Soviet tanks to infiltrate into the Red Army’s rear areas. Weyde survived the war to become an agent of the West German Federal Intelligence Service, dying in 1966 at age 45.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published an unknowable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children; he misses his dog, Leopold.

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