Kursk: South Flank
The Death’s Head Division
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
February 2023

While every SS division stacked up a criminal record of some length, none of their names reek quite as strongly as that of the Death’s Head Division. Where other SS militia units routinely committed war crimes, at times on a massive scale, the Death’s Head Division was an integral part of the worst crime in human history.

Theodor Eicke, inspector-general of the concentration camps, began forming “Death’s Head Regiments” within the SS in 1936. Eicke, an SS fanatic who had personally murdered SA chief Ernst Röhm during the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, had organized the concentration camps into a machine for disposing of the Nazi regime’s political and racial enemies with industrial efficiency –- extracting as much labor as possible from the inmates before their murder. The Death’s Head units would take these practices outside the camps.

The Death’s Head units mimicked military structure, and in May 1939 Hitler approved an increase to 50,000 men and ordered the Army to provide the Death’s Head militia with weapons. When Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939, three of these infantry regiments plus a mounted regiment followed behind the German advance. They massacred at least 61,000 Jews, communists, Gypsies, Polish intellectuals, Polish government officials, and “rebels.” In October, Eicke received permission to combine the three regiments into a new SS division.

Eicke, a decorated veteran of the First World War but considered a dangerous lunatic by many even within the Nazi Party and the SS, received command of the division. His doctrine of “inflexible harshness” demanded hatred for all opposed to Nazi ideals. A camp guard showing compassion for inmates, for example, was subject to harsh penalties. Cruelty would become policy; the Geneva and Hague Conventions mere scraps of paper.

Death’s Head militiamen taking a break on the Eastern Front, 1944.

The new division formed at Dachau, drawing its manpower from the three infantry regiments, camp guards, and an SS “home defense” unit from the former “Free City” of Danzig. Throughout its existence the division maintained a close connection to the camps, with personnel transferring between the front and the camps, and some division troopers even spending their furloughs killing prisoners at concentration camps for their own enjoyment.

In the spring of 1940, the division reported for front-line service in the French campaign. “The combat readiness of the SS non-commissioned officers and troops is insufficient,” Col. Gen. Fedor von Bock reported after an April visit to the Death’s Head Division. “We will pay for that with unnecessary bloodshed.” As Bock predicted, when committed to battle the former camp guards suffered massive casualties due to poor small-unit leadership. Within three days it had to be re-assigned to rear-area security, and soon the division’s men showed the behavior that would characterize the unit’s entire existence.

On 19 and 20 May, Death’s Head militiamen massacred 200 prisoners of war from the 1st Moroccan Division. On the next day, Death’s Head militia panicked and ran from an attack by the British 1st Army Tank Brigade and 50th Northumbrian Infantry Division. On the 22nd Death’s Head militiamen murdered 92 French civilians in Aubigny-en-Artois, and 48 more in Berles-Monchel on the 24th.

On 27 May, troops of the 2nd Death’s Head Regiment fought an isolated company of the British 2nd Royal Norfolk Regiment at the village of La Paradis in northern France. Several SS men were killed before the Tommies ran out of ammunition and surrendered. The 2nd Company’s commander, Fritz Knöchlein, ordered the prisoners lined up against a wall and machine-gunned. SS troopers then enthusiastically finished off the wounded with bayonets –- all but two men, who feigned death and then escaped to surrender to a regular Army unit.

The Army command demanded a murder trial for Knöchlein, but Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, interceded with Adolf Hitler to quash any such proceedings. A new type of war was to be waged, Hitler and Himmler declared, one in which the Geneva Convention was but a quaint reminder of an earlier age. Even a reprimand from Himmler for Knöchlein, charging him with not promptly burying his own dead, was evaded by Eicke. The action at La Paradis had to stand without censure of any kind. Knöchlein would be hanged after the war for his crimes.

The Death’s Head Division returned to the front in June, suffering serious losses at the hands of French colonial troops near Lyon, and responding with the murder of 44 Black Senegalese prisoners and ten white French soldiers. On the 19th and 20th, Death’s Head militiamen murdered 100 more Black African prisoners. The division remained south of Bordeaux, near the Spanish border, until April, 1941, when it moved into Poland for the attack on the Soviet Union. The division was not placed in the front lines for the invasion, only joining 56th Panzer Corps about ten days after Operation Barbarossa began.

A Soviet-made T26 light tank deployed by the Death’s Head Division. May 1942.

It was still organized as an oversized motorized infantry division, with three infantry regiments, an artillery regiment, and reconnaissance, anti-tank and engineer battalions. The huge logistical tail of the SS militia divisions, along with their bloated organization, made it difficult to deploy them as they tended to jam the fragile road network.

Death’s Head suffered heavy casualties in its sporadic commitments to combat, its men gaining a reputation for preferring rape and plunder to battle. During the 1941 Soviet winter offensive the division became isolated in the Demyansk Pocket. It remained there until October, 1942, when the remaining 350 effectives were evacuated to France to re-form the division.

Access to the constantly-expanding concentration camp establishment’s manpower pool gave Eicke plenty of recruits from which to draw. A criminal background was no hindrance, and the Death’s Head organization did not have the same height requirement as the Armed SS militia. Eicke soon re-filled his division’s ranks with short, murderous thugs. Soon afterwards control of the division passed from the concentration camp establishment to the Armed SS; later in 1942 the whole of the concentration camp machinery came under Armed SS authority.

The division reorganized as a panzer grenadier division, losing one motorized infantry regiment but gaining a tank battalion (soon joined by a second battalion), and single battalions of assault guns, motorcyclists, and anti-aircraft guns. In February, 1943, it returned to the Eastern Front, fighting at Kharkov in the early spring. On 26 February 1943, just after his promotion to full SS general, Eicke died when Soviet infantrymen brought down his aircraft near Orella.

For the Kursk offensive, the Death’s Head Division picked up a Tiger tank company, and went into action slightly below its authorized strength. Personnel losses at Kursk came to 2,898, including 501 killed, or 15 percent of the division’s starting strength. The division started with fewer tanks than the other two SS divisions of its corps, and though it lost fewer of them in combat the former camp guards did a much poorer job of recovering and repairing damaged vehicles. The Death’s Head Division only had 63 percent of its armor strength when the battle ended, a much lower figure than the others, but those losses would soon be made good when the Life Guards left for Italy and gave many fo their tanks and other vehicles to the Death’s Head.

Failed chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler visits the Death’s Head Division. June 1943.

It would need them. Though it received an upgraded title in October 1943, becoming the 3rd SS Panzer Division, death had removed its political influence along with Eicke. The concentration camps had come directly under Armed SS control, and Death’s Head no longer received the same treatment as the other original SS divisions. While the “favored” divisions withdrew to France for refitting, Death’s Head remained at the front on the defensive through the rest of 1943 and into 1944. Death’s Head saw action in a series of intense battles around Korsun, Kirovograd and in May 1944 at Targu Frumos in Romania. It had continued to receive replacements from the camps, and new equipment including the most modern tanks and weapons, but not relief from the front.

In July, 1944, it rushed to Warsaw to meet a Soviet offensive, and participated in the brutal repression of the Warsaw Rising in August through October, once again indulging in an orgy of murder and destruction. Death’s Head did not participate in the Ardennes offensive lie the other two original SS militia panzer divisions.

At the turn of the year Death’s Head took part in the failed relief of Budapest, then fought in Hungary and Austria for the last months of the war. On 9 May 1945 the division’s remnants surrendered to the Americans near Linz, Austria; the Americans then fulfilled their commitments by handing the SS men over to Soviet custody to atone for their crimes.

Though sometimes called elite, the Death’s Head Division was not particularly good at fighting armed opponents, even compared to the Life Guards and Empire divisions. While part of the SS, much like the Police Division it was the armed branch of one element of the SS state-within-a-state, in this case the concentration camps.

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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 a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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