CHAPTER 8

HELL'S OUTRIDERS

CAVALRY OF THE WAFFEN-SS

In the ideology of the Nazi regime, animals often featured prominently alongside blond-haired, blue-eyed exemplars of the Nordic man. Certain of these animals were considered to embody particularly “Nordic” characteristics. The horse was one such creature, as were hunting dogs, falcons, and eagles. Horses—or at least well-bred and well-groomed ones—possessed nobility and grace, martial strength and courage. In and of itself, such a view is nearly as old as humankind's connection with genus equus. Yet, under the Nazis, the aesthetic and practical use of the horse acquired a much more sinister purpose. Along with many other wholly innocuous symbols and objects, horses in the Nazi era came to project an increasingly ominous image, not least because they so frequently carried the paladins of the new regime in the endless parades so dear to Hitler and other Nazi functionaries. To note but one example, the parade celebrating “2000 Years of German Culture” in Munich on 18 July 1937 featured thousands of marchers and legions of horses, many of whose caparisons and armor-plated riders were suitably emblazoned with Nazi insignia. As with all other cultural expressions of the regime, the artistic mission celebrated in this particular instance demanded obeisance not only to lofty sentiment but also to fanatical devotion.1 In more literally concrete and metallic terms, horses featured prominently in the regime's architecture as well. For example, two monumental bronze horses by Josef Thorak, called “our greatest sculptural talent” by the Nazi government's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, adorned the garden entrance of Hitler's new Reich Chancellery that was completed just before war's outbreak in 1939.²

Such symbolism was perfectly in keeping with propagandistic agitation and the consequent radicalization of the German people by the Nazi government. To a very great extent, the regime relied upon slogans, monumental architecture, and evocative symbols to express itself and its aims. Of course, the most striking symbol remained the swastika. Though in the early days of the 1920s it served as a sort of “personal totem” for Hitler, the Hakenkreuz (hooked cross) soon became not only the party's emblem but also Germany's national insignia.³ Besides the swastika, however, there were other equally evocative, and often dreaded, symbols culled from both Germany's actual history and the fevered imaginations of Nazi mythmakers. To such long-established and honored symbols as the Iron Cross, later adulterated through the addition of swastikas, came many others. Neo-peasant clothing styles and domestic buildings were very often, though no less spuriously, cited by the regime as recalling the ideals of a Germanic past. There were oak leaves and eagles in profusion, all intended to evoke past imperial glories. But there was also terribly more sinister Nazi regalia, specifically intended to evoke “an older, darker Germany of forests and hunters.” These included “the broad-bladed daggers worn by [the Nazi Party's] men” and commonly seen on the uniforms of so many of its formations. However, the symbol that arguably came to be the most potent of all remained the double, silver-on-black lightning-flash of the SS runes. Adorning SS men's uniforms, their banners, and their units' heraldry, the runes called to mind “that twilight world of ferocious gods and desperate heroes [in] the German romantic imagination.”⁴ The SS runes also became perhaps the most feared symbol of Nazi Germany's minions, and by 1939 the men who wore them had earned a reputation of absolute obedience to Hitler. Theirs was obedience unto death as they proclaimed in their oath upon being sworn in as members of what their leader, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, envisioned as a new order of chivalry. Sometimes described as the praetorians of the Nazi regime, the SS were also its latter-day berserkers, men who took fierce pride in their self-perception of peacetime discipline and honor but who would also remorselessly and without compunction kill enemy soldiers, civilians, prisoners of war, other Germans, and even their own SS comrades. All the while they would glory in the deed and, as they saw things, draw strength from it.5

The horse-mounted unit that was eventually to become the 8th Waffen-SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer fully shared all of these traits. In that respect, it was hardly unique. It was unique, however, in being primarily a horse-mounted formation, even though it was not the only armed formation of the SS to employ horses. Notwithstanding the armed or Waffen-SS' reputation for typically receiving its full complement of tracked and wheeled vehicles, other SS units besides the SS cavalry also used horses.⁶ The SS Death's Head (Totenkopf) Division, for example, a unit eventually elevated to the status of an armored formation, had regular difficulties before 1939, as did other early Waffen-SS formations, obtaining equipment owing to the army's resistance. In the case of the Totenkopf Division, these difficulties resulted in, among other things, its having to use horse-drawn, World War I-era field bakeries. Given the then-paucity of horses and the fact that the bakeries weighed nearly two-and-a-half tons apiece (they had to be taken off their rail cars by cranes), the latter were practically useless. Only on the eve of the invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940 did these difficulties begin to abate for this particular unit. By that time, the German army's own requirements were filled out sufficiently to allow the Waffen-SS divisions to receive surplus gear.⁷ Nevertheless, another early Waffen-SS division, this one recruited from police personnel under Himmler's direct law-enforcement control as Chief of the German Police and therefore not subject to the army's recruiting demands, perennially found itself short of motorized and mechanized vehicles, at least until achieving its eventual rank as a Panzergrenadier division. As late as the invasion of France in 1940, this division, named Polizei because of its origins, “remained a marching unit, whose transport and artillery, like that of the bulk of the Wehrmacht, was horsedrawn.”⁸

Horses' employment in the SS beyond the draft-animal role, however, had a particular place in the plans of the SS' leadership. Himmler saw a mounted combat unit of the SS providing a useful armed addition to the Waffen-SS while embodying a certain social cachet. The latter consideration had significantly influenced Himmler's thinking since well before the war began. Such a cachet in wartime would, in turn, bolster Himmler's long-standing efforts to attract a more elevated social type into the SS, efforts he'd undertaken even before the Nazis' accession to power in 1933. As early as 1931, for example, he'd raised a mounted SS detachment in Munich, the so-called “Capital of the Movement” (i.e., birthplace of the Nazi Party). In the course of 1932, that detachment was expanded and redesignated as an SS Mounted Company (SS-Reitersturm). From this early period, and with this nucleus of a mounted arm in hand, Himmler assiduously cultivated the task of recruiting more refined members into the SS, not least to raise his organization's profile ever further away from the plebeian identity of the brown-uniformed, street-brawling elements among the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilungen; SA). Himmler found the prestige, leadership qualifications, and, not least, money that he needed to construct his Black Order in the worlds of commerce, finance, and the German nobility. Indeed, since 1933, the roster of new SS men's names sometimes read like a German version of Debrett's Peerage: the Prinz von Hohenzollern-Emden of the House of Sigmaringen; the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg; the hereditary Prince zu Waldeck und Pyrmont; the Princes Christof and Wilhelm of Hesse; Count von der Schulenburg; Count von Rödern; Count Strachwitz; and so on.9 Just before the war's beginning in 1939, some 20 percent of the SS' nominal senior leadership and about 10 percent of its lower ranks would consist of titled nobility. Of particular relevance to this recruitment but also to the prewar mounted SS and, later, the SS Cavalry was Himmler's success in persuading “all the most important German horse-riding associations, preserves of upper-class sportsmanship and snobbish socializing, to enrol [sic] in the SS, irrespective of their political views…so that SS riders regularly won the German equestrian championships.”¹⁰ The equestrian associations of Germany's most important horse-breeding regions—East Prussia, Oldenburg, Holstein, Westphalia, Hannover—“put on SS uniform.”¹¹

While such enforced enrollment was first and foremost a public-relations exercise, it nevertheless helped create an impetus within the prewar SS toward a sort of cementing of the equestrian image within the organization. That image, in turn, would have further impelled Himmler toward the creation of a mounted SS combat unit as war approached, a natural extension, as it were, of the SS' prewar horse-mounted formations. A mounted SS combat unit would also constitute, at least in Himmler's eyes, a clear parallel to what was at that date still the army's 1st Cavalry Brigade. By 1934 the first SS Mounted Regiments (Reiterstandarten or Reiter-SS) had been established as successors to the original Reitersturm. By 1939 they numbered twenty-four and were stationed across the length and breadth of the Reich. Furthermore, in an effort to increase the equestrian proficiency of the SS' mounted personnel, an SS Main Riding School (Hauptreitschule) was established in Munich. In 1936 then-SS major (Sturmbannführer) Hermann Fegelein was assigned to command the school that happened to be located on his parents' property near the suburb of Riem, eventually the site of Munich's first major post-1945 airport. Not of noble birth himself, Fegelein rose rapidly through the ranks and during the same period became a successful equestrian competitor. His own career and that of the mounted SS combat troops would soon converge.

These combat units arose from early decisions by the Nazi government to elevate selected units of the SS from their original, ostensibly unarmed status to that of full-time, armed formations. As early as 1933, the Nazi regime had begun to establish such armed SS units, and they multiplied with confusing rapidity. First called Special Detachments (Sonderkommandos), these units guarded local Nazi bosses and their headquarters. If one of these headquarters guard-detachments grew to more than one hundred men, it could then be redesignated as a Political Readiness Squad (Politische Bereitschaft) possessing a military TOE. By 1934 the nationwide network of Political Readiness Squads had effectively been recognized by the Reich Ministry of Defense as a full-time, armed State Police force answering solely to Hitler or, at his discretion, to Himmler. Emerging, in turn, from this force came the SS Special Duty Troops (SS-Verfügungstruppen; SS-VT). Essentially the Nazi Party's standing army, the SS-VT took orders directly from Hitler or his designated lieutenant and remained subject to his exclusive disposition, hence the name. Not regarded by Hitler as belonging either to the army or to the police, they became the immediate organizational ancestors of the Waffen-SS. Arising roughly in parallel to the SS-VT—but initially separate from them organizationally—were the SS Death's Head Units (SS-Totenkopfverbände; SS-TV). The SS-TV drew personnel from among veterans of the army, active-duty or retired policemen, guard-detachments of the regime's concentration camps, and the General SS (Allgemeine SS). According to Hitler himself, the Death's Head Units comprised a full-time armed force of the SS for the resolution of “special internal political tasks” of a policing or security nature. As usual, he reserved this force to himself alone or to his appointed subordinate. Regardless of their original tasking, for all practical purposes the SS-TV would be informally incorporated into the Waffen-SS after 1939. Formal amalgamation followed in 1941–1942. It was through these Death's Head Units that many pre-1942 replacements for the SS cavalry would find their way into the larger Waffen-SS structure. Before wartime losses really began to manifest themselves, however, SS cavalrymen came from the pre-existing SS-Reiterstandarten. In the invasion of Poland in September 1939, SS horsemen trained and led by Fegelein and drawn from Reiterstandarten 15 (Munich) and 17 (Regensburg) would serve as security forces behind the front lines in the form of the SS Death's Head Horse Regiment (SS Totenkopf-Reiter-Regiment or Reiterstandarte). They would also participate in “actions” against Jewish and non-Jewish civilians (i.e., summary killings). When this regiment was reorganized as the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment in November and December 1939, Fegelein would be named its commanding officer.12 When the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment was then assigned to serve as cadre (along with the 2nd Regiment that had been raised in the meantime) for a newly designated SS Cavalry Brigade in occupied Poland, Fegelein was once again assigned to command.¹³

As can be seen in Fegelein's case, as well as the cases of countless other SS men, non-noble birth meant little in terms of potential advancement. What really counted were fanatical loyalty, ruthlessness, and being a Nazi true believer. Still, noble status continued to carry weight in Himmler's and others' eyes. Of course, elevated social standing never really protected SS men, no matter their rank and background, from the murderous intrigue of the Nazi regime generally and within the SS as an organization. An early, aristocratic leader of the SS' mounted arm, Anton Freiherr (Baron) von Hohberg und Buchwald, presented a textbook example of extreme vulnerability despite his being of genuine noble birth. The leading SS horseman of East Prussia, von Hohberg was nevertheless cold-bloodedly gunned down in his own home by a rival in the purge known as the “Night of the Long Knives” in June 1934, ostensibly for having leaked SS secrets to the army.14 Though he could not know it at the time, Fegelein himself would ultimately share Hohberg's fate in being summarily shot on Hitler's personal orders in the regime's final days in April 1945. Not even Fegelein's marriage to the sister of Hitler's mistress could prevent it.

Cold-blooded murder notwithstanding, Himmler viewed the men admitted to the SS as biologically and, therefore in his view, morally superior. As the best of the “Nordic race,” they would be the supreme exemplars of that population's virtues. Like knights errant of old, the mounted SS units—indeed all SS units—were expected to uphold putative chivalric virtues. For his part, Himmler always remained convinced that they could and would do so, or at least could be made to. “Rectitude and chivalry,” he said in a wartime speech to new officers of the Replacement Army's grenadier divisions, “were always best bound together in the ‘germanic’ German [sic] man.”¹⁵ While he was not here specifically addressing SS personnel, the sentiment most certainly applied to them. “Our Volk,” he added emphatically, “has existed eternally, and the Aryan will go on into eternity…. As long as the Aryan lives, as long as our blood—Nordic German blood—lives, so long will there be order on the Almighty's globe.”¹⁶ When specifically addressing men of the Waffen-SS, he was even more emphatic; and Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941, would most effectively allow his SS men to exhibit their chivalric errantry.

In the first month of the invasion, Himmler spoke to reinforcements destined for the SS Kampfgruppe Nord fighting alongside the Finns on the northern extremity of the Russian Front. Though the men of Kampfgruppe Nord were not SS cavalrymen, their mission remained the same in Himmler's eyes. They were going, he said, to defend a Reich that was on the whole “a happy, beautiful world full of culture” whose essence was defined by a National Socialist ideology “based on the value of our Germanic, Nordic blood.” On the other side, he went on, “stands a population of 180 million, a mixture of races, whose very names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is such that one can shoot them down without pity or compassion. These animals…you will see for yourself. These people have been welded by the Jews into one religion, one ideology, that is called Bolshevism, with the task: now we have Russia, half of Asia, a part of Europe. Now we will overwhelm Germany and the whole world.”17 And, in a throwback (unwitting perhaps?) to the exhortations made to the German cavalry and other soldiers who'd fought the Russians in 1914–1918, Himmler added for good measure, “When you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying on the same struggle, against the same subhumans, the same inferior races, [as] at one time—1,000 years ago at the time of King Henry and Otto I—under the name of Magyars, another time under the name of Tartars [sic], and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banners of Bolshevism.”¹⁸

Facing this threat stood the SS man. In Himmler's fantasy world, the SS man, and the SS cavalryman most of all, was lofty of sentiment, knightly in carriage, and possessed of the grim, clear-eyed nature of the predator. As the Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte observed the preparations in Rumania for the invasion of the Soviet Union, he wrote that the German fighting man there “had the same clear, lustrous eyes. And there was in them a mysterious, timeless look—a look pregnant with a timeless, mysterious sense of the inexorable.”¹⁹ Though not describing the SS, Malaparte captured the precise ideal to which Himmler wanted his SS cavalrymen, indeed all SS men, to aspire. And in the east, the SS cavalrymen would find that domain whose rulers they of the Black Order would be: the same endless reaches from whose depths the feared invaders of World War I had come, the same eastern marches whose defense and expansion the German army had contested in 1914–1918. Those vast spaces, what one recent work has so tellingly called the “bloodlands,” would be at the SS' mercy.²⁰

In this respect, Himmler was evoking a tradition antedating by decades the beginnings of Nazism. Not merely during World War I but as early as 1879, the renowned journal Preußische Jahrbücher had declared that the east had been Germany's promised land (Land der Verheißung) for as long as there had been a German history. The still-largely peaceful nineteenth-century struggle between Germanizing and Slavicizing tendencies had subsequently become open warfare in 1914. That war, in turn, had led inexorably to demands by prominent interest groups and individuals that the “face of Russia be turned back by force [away from Germany] to the East.” Those same voices had demanded that Russia's Baltic provinces, along with Russian Poland and White Russia (Belarus), be partially or entirely absorbed into the Reich and Germanized, a process to be executed through the physical expulsion of the inhabitants if necessary.21 Now, in 1941, the conquest would be driven forward with a ruthlessness and terror perhaps never yet witnessed in history, a ruthlessness necessary, so the Nazis proclaimed, to defend the west against not merely Slavs but “Tartars [sic] from the Crimea, the remnants of the Golden Horde; Kurds from Turkestan; and Mongols from the banks of the Don and Volga, from the shores of the Caspian, from the Kirgizian steppes, from the plains of Tashkent and Samarkand.”²²

In the Nazi phantasm, at once self-consciously exotic and malign, these creatures would be driven from all those lands destined to be ruled by the new aristocracy (Hochadel) of the SS, the fearless knights (wehrhafte Ritter) of a new order of men literally bred to racial purity—just like Hanoverian horses, mused Reich Peasant Leader (Reichsbauernführer) Walther Darré several years before. These men would weld together the Germanic peoples, indeed the whole of Europe. The bringing of German Kultur that had recommenced with the war of 1914–1918 after a centuries-long hiatus, but that had been so cruelly ended, as the Nazis saw things, by the reviled Treaty of Versailles, had already been reinitiated in the conquest of Poland in 1939, a country whose very existence had been enshrined in that hated document. Some 900,000 Poles would eventually be driven from their homes in the country's western regions. These areas had been annexed directly into the “Greater German Reich,” while Stalin's Russia had gobbled up the eastern portion of the country at the same time under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939. With some of these lands having been part of Germany before World War I, the Nazi government and many ordinary Germans saw their incorporation as a matter of course. The unwanted Poles, and most of all Polish Jews, had subsequently been dumped into a reservation including both Warsaw and the ancient coronation-city of Krakow called the General Government. Now, with the invasion of Russia, the bringing of Kultur and Hitler's drive for living space (Lebensraum) in the east would be completed.23 Himmler's new chivalry would play its assigned part in this gigantic undertaking. “An idealized German Drang nach Osten was mentally spliced with an equally idealized [influence of the frontier]” in the view of many German nationalist writers and thinkers even before the racial ravings of Himmler and the Nazis took firm hold.²⁴ The result was “an emotion-laden narrative”²⁵ that had already overturned the verdict of World War I in the Treaty of Versailles, taken lands from Poland, sent the German army and the SS marching eastward, and set the stage for the extermination of whole peoples by the time Himmler unleashed his SS horsemen in Russia.

The SS Cavalry Brigade in Russia, 1941

As early as January 1941 the SS Reiterstandarten were in the process of yet another, and in this instance more overtly military-sounding, reorganization. In that month, orders came from Himmler's command that the old terminology of Totenkopf-Reiterstandarten would be dropped. Henceforth the SS' mounted regiments were to be officially designated as such, namely the 1st and, in the spring of that year, 2nd SS Cavalry Regiments. The change in designation indicated that the older, prewar SS nomenclature no longer quite fit Himmler's or the SS cavalry's own views of the mounted units.²⁶ The two regiments with all of their support elements continued to train throughout the period from January to the start of Operation Barbarossa in June. Unofficially they were apparently already being referred to collectively as the SS Cavalry Brigade (SS-Kavallerie-Brigade) in spring 1941. Orders from Himmler formally establishing the brigade, however, did not reach the regiments until August, by which time the SS cavalrymen had already been in Russia for some time. Depending on losses and other circumstances the brigade's combat-strength in 1941 averaged 3,300–3,500 men; 2,900 horses; and 375 vehicles of all types.²⁷ The principal maneuver elements of the brigade were the Reiter regiments and a Bicycle Reconnaissance Detachment (Radfahrer Auf klärungsabteilung; RAA). Essentially a battalion, the RAA consisted of three squadrons of bicycle-mounted infantry supported by several motorized reconnaissance vehicles. Other units organic to the brigade included a veterinary detachment, headquarters and headquarters platoon, logistics elements, and so on. Specifically, as of 3 August 1941, the brigade's combat-strength was 3,364. Its ration-strength was 4,114.28 Despite the occasionally fierce political differences between the army and the Waffen-SS, the brigade's organization mirrored almost exactly that of the army's earlier 1st Cavalry Brigade in 1939–1940.

In Himmler's initial thinking, the SS Cavalry Brigade was not intended to be a frontline fighting formation, a fact that was crucial to its operational history both initially in Poland and subsequently in Russia and elsewhere. Instead, along with certain other units such as the 1st and 2nd SS Motorized Brigades, he envisioned the Cavalry Brigade as a fully militarized reserve formation to be employed in rear areas for pacification missions. “He had in mind such activities as capturing disorganized Red Army men behind the German lines, combating partisans, and, especially, the shooting of Jews—all in the name of German security.”²⁹ These missions derived from the authority expressly granted to Himmler by Hitler in mid-July 1941 to conduct the “security policing of the newly occupied Eastern territories” (polizeiliche Sicherung der neubesetzten Ostgebiete).³⁰ For this mission, the SS cavalry were placed under the operational command of the Senior SS and Police Commander Center (Höhere SS und Polizeiführer; HSSPF) in the area behind Army Group Center or Russland-Mitte. At that time, the HSSPF Center was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.

The assignment of the SS cavalry to the HSSPF indicated what sort of actual duties the cavalrymen would have. The office of HSSPF had originated within the SS in 1937 with Himmler's intention to incorporate and further centralize the police and security functions of the SS into the overall defense of the Reich. By war's outbreak, the network of HSSPFs had spread across Germany. The number of HSSPFs had expanded with the invasion of Poland, and by the end of 1939 five additional HSSPFs had been assigned to the areas of Poland either annexed into Germany or otherwise occupied. Subsequently, three more HSSPFs, among them Bach, were appointed by Himmler to the occupied Russian territories as the invasion of the Soviet Union rolled forward in 1941.³¹ While under Bach's command that summer, the SS cavalrymen would be operating in the area of the Pripet Marshes at roughly the same time as the army's 1st Cavalry Division. Some indication of the ruthlessness with which the SS cavalrymen would carry out their mission may be judged by their previous behavior. In occupied Poland on 6 October 1939, for example, men of the 4th Squadron of the SS-Totenkopf-Reiterstandarte had been ordered to a “special assignment” around Kutno. The phrase already meant the summary killing of Jews and/or suspected partisans or “looters.” In November troopers of the 5th Squadron shot 440 of 1,000 prisoners, all of them “while trying to escape.” On 14 January men of the 3rd Squadron captured a band of four “well-known thieves” in the town of Stoczek. Three of them were summarily shot. On 15 and 18 January men of the same squadron shot three Poles “while trying to escape” during searches for arms in the villages of Rossa and Russastara.32 There were other such instances.

Specific orders concerning the SS Cavalry Brigade's mission in the context of Barbarossa arrived at the end of July 1941. On 28 July, over Himmler's signature, a Special Order spelled out which units would participate in the “combing through” of the marshes, those units' combat-performance expectations, and what specific actions those units were to take.³³ All arms would participate: mounted units, motorized detachments, and infantry. The brigade's mounted units were expected to cover twenty-five to thirty-seven miles per day (40–60 km) unless combat and/or local searches were being undertaken. The order acknowledged that the infantry would have a hard time keeping up with the horsemen. By contrast, motorized units might well range farther ahead of them. All villages were to be considered strongpoints, either for the enemy or for the Germans. As a consequence,

if the population serves as the enemy of Germany, is racially or humanly [sic] inferior, or indeed, as it often is in the marsh areas, made up of fleeing criminals, then all people that are suspected of helping the partisans are to be shot, while females and children are to be evacuated and cattle and food are to be apprehended and secured. These villages are then to be burned to the ground. Either the villages and settlements are a network of [friendly] strongpoints, whose residents kill partisans and pillagers and inform us of them, or they cease to exist. No enemy will be allowed to find support, food or shelter in these areas.³⁴

To reinforce the intent, Himmler evidently met with HSSPF Bach personally on 31 July at the latter's headquarters at Baranovichi lying midway on the route between Brest-Litovsk and Minsk along the marshes' northern fringe, presumably to reiterate at least the order's sense if not also its words. The next day, 1 August, further orders went out via radio that “all Jews must be shot. Drive Jewish women into the marshes.”35 The SS Cavalry Brigade's commander, Hermann Fegelein, later reported that his men had killed 15,000 people between the towns of Pinsk and Baranovichi in the western reaches of the Pripet Marshes but that the water proved too shallow to drown the women.³⁶ At almost the same date that these orders were going out regarding operations in the marshes, namely on 2 August 1941, the notification came to Bach's headquarters at Baranovichi officially establishing the SS Cavalry Brigade.³⁷

Between 29 July and 13 August 1941, the brigade was involved in its first clearing operation of the marshes in an area encompassing approximately the upper third of the triangle formed by the railways linking Brest-Litovsk, Minsk, and Gomel. Periodically, one element of the brigade, namely the Advance Detachment (Vorausabteilung), a sort of rapid-response unit, found itself attached to the army's accompanying 162nd ID. In these actions, the SS cavalrymen fought not only partisans but regular Red Army forces, both horse-mounted and infantry.³⁸ In one instance, for example—and in good cavalry fashion—an SS mounted patrol carried out a reconnaissance of more than 140 miles (230 km) in the four-day period of 28–31 July at the very beginning of the operation. On the basis of reports from the patrol's commander, a combat-engineer platoon leader (Obersturmführer) named Karl Fritsche of the 2nd Reiter Regiment, an encirclement of a large number of Red Army forces was accomplished by supporting German units. These included infantry from the 162nd ID, the SS Cavalry Brigade's Advance Detachment, and a German police unit. These troops successfully engaged the Russians, including Russian cavalry and infantry, and repeatedly prevented their breaking out of the pocket thus formed.³⁹ By the time the clearing operation ended on 13 August, the SS Cavalry Brigade's leaders were reporting great success. They indicated that their enemies had included two Red Army cavalry divisions (36th and 37th) and the 121st Rifle Division.

Further, they reported fully 15,878 enemy personnel killed in action and 830 taken captive at a cost of only 17 SS cavalrymen dead and 36 wounded. The brigade also listed 200 of its horses as having been killed. These, however, the brigade replaced from the haul of more than 800 horses captured.40 The brigade's summative reports about a month later also recognized the fighting qualities of its opponents. Particular note was made of the Soviet soldiers' and partisans' effective defensive techniques and the concomitant difficulty the SS cavalrymen had in prying them out of their field fortifications even in the face of the Russians' certain death.⁴¹ The relative lightness of the cavalry brigade's indirect-fire weapons might help explain these difficulties, a problem also faced by the army's 1st Cavalry Brigade/Division. The Soviet defenders' desperation might also be explained, however, by the SS men's already established reputation regarding the treatment of prisoners. Furthermore, the Red Army's own very harsh discipline almost certainly played a role in its soldiers' tenacity. It was at just this time, for example, that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin issued his famous order for the immediate execution of any soldiers of the Red Army who attempted to remove their insignia and surrender. The soldiers' families would be arrested for good measure, with all that such arrest implied for the latter's fate. In addition, any Soviet troops finding themselves encircled and preferring to surrender rather than break out “are to be destroyed by any available means, while their families are to be deprived of all state allowances and assistance.”⁴² To the extent that Soviet soldiers hiding in the Pripet Marshes had radio contact with command elements farther east, they would presumably have learned of Stalin's directive. If fear of the SS cavalrymen didn't motivate them to fight to the end, fear of Stalin might.

Whatever the principal reason for continued resistance by Red Army soldiers and partisans, the two SS mounted regiments along with other units of the Cavalry Brigade were once again ordered out on a clearing operation after only several days rest and refitting. Between 17 August and 5 September the SS cavalrymen worked their way generally south-southeast through the Pripet Marshes via the town of Starobin, almost dead center in the triangle of roads surrounding the marshes (Starobin was secured by the 1st Reiter Regiment on 22 August), toward the southeastern corner of the triangle. Fierce fighting occurred at Turov on the banks of the Pripet River when other troopers of both Reiter regiments stormed the place on 21 August supported by anti-tank guns, light field artillery, and automatic weapons. Partisans and regular Red Army soldiers fighting from prepared defensive positions responded with heavy small-arms fire, anti-tank guns, and machine guns.43 The towns of Petrikov and Mozyr, located farther east along the Pripet River, were occupied in the days leading up to 4 September.

In his comprehensive report written early in September, then-Colonel (Standartenführer) Fegelein noted that enemy forces were consistently “annihilated” when they comprised regular Red Army soldiers. Partisans posed a greater problem. Indeed, he wrote, they posed the greatest problem for German forces behind the front. They were “coldblooded, brave until annihilated and asiatically [sic] cruel.”⁴⁴ The SS men had to remain constantly on the alert because the partisans could appear anywhere, aided as they were by an apparently excellent communications network and their knowledge of the terrain. They exhibited calm in the difficult fighting in the marshes and continuously obstructed all roads and forest paths by laying mines, destroying bridges, and placing machine gun nests and bunkers at tactically important junctions.⁴⁵ Notwithstanding the irony of Fegelein's reference to Russian cruelty, it seems clear that the SS Cavalry Brigade and other German forces in the watershed of the Pripet knew clearly that their enemy was likely to stay there in spite of periodic “pacification” operations. They would have to fight that enemy again and again.

Between 7 September and 1 October, units of the brigade found themselves continuing to do just that. In this period operations were conducted in the marshes south of the road linking Brest-Litovsk and Gomel. The area of operations' western boundary was the Pripet River where that watercourse turned southeast at Mozyr. The River Dnepr formed the sector's eastern boundary. Throughout the period, the partisans' methods remained what they had been before: small-unit attacks on the SS horsemen; the mining and demolition of roads and bridges; and the disruption of German supply lines.⁴⁶ On 10 September, 38 Red Army soldiers were captured in fighting around the village of Krassnyi Ostrov. In that same engagement, however, 384 partisans were confirmed killed. Total losses to the SS Cavalry Brigade were 2 horses killed and 19 horses wounded.47 Given the record of the brigade's personnel to that date, this very disparity (not to mention a complete absence of reported Red Army fatalities) smacks not so much of numerical inflation of enemy casualties but rather an effort to hide the genuine likelihood that most of the partisans in question were innocent civilians. Certainly, losses of some sort were being suffered by the cavalrymen, as 96 replacements arrived on 19 September. Nevertheless, the striking numerical disparities continued in most of the brigade's fighting during the period. On 25–26 September, for example, 280 more partisans and 87 “criminals” were reported shot by the brigade's troopers south and west of Gomel and several ammunition dumps were destroyed.⁴⁸

As the clearing operation around Gomel came to end at the end of September 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade found itself being eyed for redeployment to the north and east for a rear-area security mission in the forthcoming Operation Typhoon. This operation, it was hoped both in Berlin and German Army Group Center's headquarters, would be the final, successful drive to Moscow. The assault had earlier been postponed in the wake of the destruction of encircled Soviet forces in and around Smolensk in late July and early August. Following that victory, Hitler had ordered Army Group Center's drive on the Soviet capital suspended. To the frustration of many of his commanders, Hitler had the OKW divert significant German armored forces to the south to assist Army Group South in the conquest of Kiev and the western Ukraine. It had been as a small part of that much larger, and spectacularly successful, operational redeployment that the SS Cavalry Brigade itself had moved into the lower southeastern reaches of the Pripet Marshes and crossed the Dnepr in late September.⁴⁹ Now, as the Russian autumn came on in earnest, the forces of Army Group Center began preparations for a renewal of the great strategic advance on Moscow. As it had since June, the advance would continue roughly along the axis of the highway running eastward from Brest-Litovsk via Minsk to Moscow. Whether German armies could breach Soviet defenses and reach Moscow before the onset of winter may have troubled the minds of senior commanders. For the SS cavalrymen, as for hundreds of thousands of other German rankers, such larger questions made no difference. They may well have fretted about becoming cold—they and their horses would certainly be cold, bitterly cold, in less than two months' time—but they and their army counterparts would go where they were told for as long as they were told.

On 29 September, the brigade received orders to move to the town of Toropets which lay 124 miles (200 km) north of Smolensk and just above the road running eastward from Velikiye Luki to Rzhev. The redeployment entailed transporting men, horses, and equipment by rail from Gomel to Vitebsk, marching the brigade a further 111 miles (180 km) northward to Nevel, and then entraining again eastward to Toropets. In all, the brigade covered about 310 miles (500 km) and was essentially in place by 15 October. It was subordinated to the 403rd Security Division in the operational area of the German Ninth Army.50 As the brigade moved closer to the front, operational command-authority for it shifted from the HSSPF to the army, even though the cavalrymen retained their own separate supply chains and replacement pools. By the time the brigade was ready to assume full operations, Typhoon had been under way for about a fortnight. The brigade's headquarters at Toropets and its area of responsibility lay not quite 100 miles (160 km) behind the front lines.⁵¹

As they had done in the Pripet Marshes, the brigade's troopers spread out in the region between Toropets and Rzhev and carried out security and anti-partisan operations. Rzhev had fallen to German troops on 14 October and was viewed as a likely staging point for a further German advance swinging to the north around Moscow as part of Army Group Center's massive projected encirclement of the Soviet capital. From time to time, the SS men were specifically assigned to guard the supply lines of particular units. In the second half of October, for example, the brigade's 1st Reiter Regiment received orders to guard the supply lines of the Army's 253rd ID while simultaneously executing anti-partisan missions.⁵² In the same period, the brigade's Bicycle Reconnaissance Detachment carried out numerous patrols along the road linking Toropets and Yetkino and the railway connecting Velikiye Luki and Rzhev, this corridor being roughly the boundary between Army Group Center and Army Group North. “During these patrols, a combined total of 2,120 partisans and suspicious people were taken prisoner. Fegelein [still the brigade's commander] reported that these prisoners were ‘handled in the general way,’ although that was not elaborated upon. It is generally assumed that they were executed.”53 Also at this time the autumnal rains fell heavily. Consequently, the brigade's mobility was significantly hampered both for the vehicular units and for the mounted formations. The 1st Reiter Regiment soon reported that its horses had become exhausted by their exertions, particularly in light of the brigade's difficulties with supply lines stretching back, as they did, all the way to Warsaw. Despite such difficulties, however, the brigade's mounts held up fairly well under the prevailing conditions. Brigade-level reports listed a total strength of 3,183 horses in October. Of those, only 4 died of exhaustion between 25 and 31 October. Fifty-one were reported sick and unfit for service. Unfortunately, the more general situation for the army's horses in Russia at this time went from bad to much worse. The standard of equine care and horses' rates of survival in the SS Cavalry Brigade (and the army's 1st Cavalry Division) would presumably have been higher than in the German armies collectively. For the latter, the overwhelming majority of horses were draft animals, and their handlers were not always trained well enough or sufficiently motivated to provide good care. Those animals began to die from exhaustion, poor feed, disease, and wounds at truly alarming rates—as many as one thousand per day—as cold autumnal rains quickly turned Russian roads to bottomless, glutinous sloughs of mud. This was the famed rasputiza, literally the “time without roads.” In a situation common to so many German units elsewhere in Russia in 1941, from 21 October all forward progress of the SS Cavalry Brigade as a whole completely stopped, albeit temporarily, owing to the mud, even though the first snows had already fallen before the brigade was actually in place in Ninth Army's area. Even if they weren't actually moving forward, however, the brigade's troopers continued unabated their wideranging security and anti-partisan patrols, sometimes reaching as far northwest as the city of Cholm.⁵⁴

Nevertheless, as winter approached, the nature of the combat facing the brigade's troopers began to change. In early November certain units of the brigade began to find themselves in increasingly heavy fighting with regular Red Army forces. This situation was coincidental with three factors affecting the German offensive generally. First and foremost, the weather was rapidly growing colder. Secondly even as the temperatures dropped, German armies were reaching, or had already reached, the limits of their supply lines. Finally, Russian resistance was stiffening as the invaders approached the region immediately around Moscow, Rzhev being only about 130 miles (209 km) to the northwest. Famed armored commander General Heinz Guderian noted that “the bitterness of the fighting was gradually telling on both our officers and men…. It was indeed startling to see how deeply our best officers had been affected by the latest battles.” The cavalrymen of the SS constituted no exception to Guderian's general assessment. They, too, were encountering ever stronger and more formal resistance, even in the rear areas. There also appeared a growing likelihood that they might be called upon by the army for frontline duty. Himmler, however, did not necessarily endorse such a development. As already indicated, the Reichsführer-SS had been entrusted by Hitler with ensuring the proper settling of the “special tasks” attending the “political administration” of the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, tasks recognized officially by the OKW as being entirely Himmler's own independent responsibility. In keeping with the views of the Reichsführer-SS noted earlier in his various addresses to SS men heading for Russia, these “special tasks” would “derive from the decisive struggle that will have to be carried out between the two opposing political systems [of Nazism and communism].”55 Himmler believed that the war to be waged against partisans, Jews, and other undesirables—whether in the Pripet Marshes or, now, in what OKW touted as the final drive on Moscow—was just as important as the one being fought on the front lines. If his cavalrymen, as well as other SS units, could be kept to their “special tasks,” that would be his and their signal contribution to Germany's victory and Europe's future. As early as 15 September, for instance, he had evidently rebuffed suggestions that the SS Cavalry Brigade be assigned to frontline combat.⁵⁶ The war's changing nature in late October and early November 1941, however, forced the SS Cavalry Brigade into ever-heavier fighting whether Himmler was comfortable with it or not. In the first week of November elements of the 1st Reiter Regiment fought in a major battle alongside the army's 102nd and 253rd IDs in stopping a Russian assault near the town of Yeltsy. The commander of the 253rd ID subsequently sent formal thanks to the brigade for the Reiter regiment's support.⁵⁷ Evidence also continued to indicate that larger and more competent Soviet forces were successfully infiltrating the brigade's area of responsibility. In mid-November, shortly after the 1st Reiter Regiment's battle, troopers of the RAA discovered a munitions dump at the rail junction of Olenino west of Rzhev. They secured almost 500 pounds of explosives, cases of detonators, more than 900,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, and 1,200 rifle grenades.58 Despite such localized successes, however, the SS cavalrymen might nevertheless have concurred with the views of Army Group Center's commander, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. In an entry dated 1 December he wrote in his diary: “The fighting of the past 14 days has shown that the notion that the enemy in front of the army group has ‘collapsed’ was a fantasy…. Halting at the gates of Moscow, where the road and rail net of almost all Eastern Russia converge, is tantamount to heavy defensive fighting against a numerically far superior foe. The forces of the army group are not equal to this, even for a limited time.”⁵⁹ Somewhat farther south than Olenino, on 4 December, General Guderian recorded that the temperature was minus 32 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote to his wife: “The enemy, the size of the country and the foulness of the weather were all underestimated, and we are suffering for that now.”⁶⁰ The SS cavalrymen would suffer right along with the rest.

The Soviet Counteroffensive—Winter 1941–1942

In the first week of December 1941, Soviet armies launched a massive counterattack against Army Group Center and the southernmost elements of Army Group North. Advancing pincer-like, in a negative mirror-image of the “C” formed by the arms of the Germans' farthest advance around Moscow, the offensive's objective was to blunt and, if possible, drive the invaders back from the metropolis. Red Army commanders envisioned a convergence of the arms of their reverse “C” on the highway running westward from the Soviet capital. North and west of Moscow, the Red Army's Kalinin Front (i.e., army group) smashed headlong into the German Ninth Army along a line roughly parallel to, but north of, the area of the SS cavalrymen's earlier security operations between Velikiye Luki and Rzhev. The principal objective of the Fourth Shock Army, Kalinin Front's main force, was to break Ninth Army's lines of supply, the very lines that the SS Cavalry Brigade had spent October and November helping to protect. This was the offensive about which the brigade's men had been getting apparent clues throughout November. An indication of the offensive's seriousness showed clearly in the directives that went out in mid-December to the brigade's rearechelon elements. The brigade's combat engineer company was ordered forward from Warsaw, though why it was still there remains unclear. Even the brigade's rear-area veterinarians were ordered to the front.61 As with the army at that desperate moment, the cavalry brigade was scouring its rear-echelon formations for all possible replacement personnel. Furthermore, the entire brigade was now placed under the direct operational control of Ninth Army. All security missions along Ninth Army's resupply lines were terminated, though some subsequently had to be resumed, and all available elements of the brigade found themselves in the front lines.⁶²

In the first weeks of December the Soviet offensive made good ground. In temperatures of minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit (–26° C) and with snow up to 3 feet (1 m) deep, the entire frontage of Ninth Army along a line east, north, and west of Rzhev gave way. As early as 7 December, Soviet forces overran the headquarters of the LVI Panzer Corps outside Klin on the railway running northwest from Moscow to Kalinin. For a time it seemed that the entire northern wing of Army Group Center might collapse. When Bock soon thereafter recommended withdrawal, Hitler relieved him (Bock was seriously ill with stomach ulcers in any case) and replaced him with General Günther von Kluge. Rather than countenance Bock's suggested retreat, Hitler ordered “fanatical resistance.” Gradually, in bitter fighting, the Germans succeeded in hanging on, but the Soviet offensive slowed only slightly. At the end of December elements of the SS Cavalry Brigade's Bicycle Reconnaissance Detachment, temporarily attached to the army's 253rd ID, were conducting patrols on the shores of Lake Volga to the northwest of Rzhev.⁶³ Attacked on 9 January 1942 by heavy Russian forces supported by tanks, the RAA fought its way out of the lakeside village of Peno where it had been assigned. For the next fortnight, the RAA fought and fell back to the southwest as part of a terrible defensive struggle by elements of Ninth Army trying to hold back the Red Army's attacks. On 17 January the detachment's survivors stumbled into the cavalry brigade's former headquarters town of Toropets. The RAA had suffered 75 percent casualties from its reported December combat-strength of more than six hundred officers and men. For all practical purposes, the Bicycle Reconnaissance Detachment had been destroyed.64

The RAA's destruction left the brigade with only two substantial, combat-effective elements, namely the two Reiter regiments. As was the case with the RAA, between 31 December 1941 and 20 January 1942, these regiments found themselves in almost constant combat with strong Russian forces advancing in the Red Army's larger attempt to encircle Rzhev from the northeast. Being forced to leave their horses behind in more sheltered rear areas, the men of the Reiter regiments fought largely as regular infantry during this period, a situation that would repeat itself in the winter of 1942–1943.⁶⁵ When they did employ their horses, losses could rise rapidly owing not only to the weather but also to the ferocity of the fighting. By the beginning of February, after nearly four weeks of continuous combat, the two mounted regiments had suffered almost 50 percent casualties in both men and horses.⁶⁶ Even as losses mounted alarmingly, the remnants of the brigade found themselves transferred to the XXIII Corps' 1st Panzer Division. They remained attached to that armored unit for most of March. During this period reinforcements of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) arrived and brought the brigade's strength temporarily back up to 1,500 men.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, by early April, the cavalry brigade's strength had been so reduced that the staff recommended to the Reichsführer-SS that its designation be changed from a brigade to a “weak Reiter regiment” in order to reflect its actual condition.⁶⁸

The designation soon became semiofficial. By April the brigade was being referred to as the SS Reiter Regiment. At about the same time, Ninth Army's new commander, General Walther Model, issued plans that the unit be refurbished (though not necessarily once again expanded to brigade-strength) with better horses to be brought forward from the remount depot at Warsaw. Himmler received notification of the proposal, but it could not be executed in part owing to the Russians' seizure in January of the brigade's principal forward supply base at Toropets. With the town's capture, the brigade lost its supplies of saddles and other equipment. A lack of adequately trained riders also put paid to the effort to re-establish the mounted units at that juncture.⁶⁹ By month's end, the SS Cavalry Regiment had been effectively reduced to battalion-strength, approximately seven hundred men. As Fegelein had already returned to Warsaw in anticipation of the unit's probable reorganization, the survivors' then-commander, Major (Sturmbannführer) Gustav Lombard, requested of General Model that the remaining elements also be entirely withdrawn from the front and returned to Warsaw. This process gradually occurred between the end of April and the end of May. Only a small, ad hoc battle group remained behind.70

As the fitful and rainy Russian spring began to take hold in April and May 1942, the worst of the winter fighting subsided. The SS Cavalry Brigade's former area of operations between Toropets and Rzhev had largely been lost to the Red Army. German forces, however, still held a deep bulge in the Russian lines. Shaped like a right-handed boxing glove, Rzhev lay at the knuckle and Olenino at the fingertips. The thumb was formed by a much narrower salient that German counterattacks had driven northeast from the town of Dukhovshchina to Belyy, which lay to the southwest of Olenino. Very large pockets of Soviet partisans and Red Army regulars, including paratroopers dropped earlier in the winter battles, lay cut off and surrounded east and southeast of Smolensk and stretching along the railway toward Bryansk.⁷¹

The winter battles had been ferocious, and the brigade's condition reflected in microcosm the exhaustion and losses suffered by the Ninth Army and other German forces. Reporting on the carnage along the Leningrad highway northeast of Moscow, CBS Radio's Larry Lesueur was one of a small group of American correspondents covering the war from the Soviet Union at that time. In his reportage, Lesueur depicted the scene on all the fields of what the Germans were calling the Battle of Rzhev, including those fought over by the SS cavalry: burnt-out villages whose buildings were “now only charred, smoking embers”; battered and blackened German and Soviet vehicles; forests literally stripped bare and blown down as though swept by vast hurricanes; and everywhere the dead—not only dead soldiers but their horses—occasionally covered with what Lesueur called the “merciful cleanliness” of newfallen snow. “The war,” he wrote, “was [particularly] hard on horses…. All along the roadside their frozen bodies lay in snow-covered blasted chunks.”⁷² In the wake of such destruction of man and beast, it remained to be seen how and to what extent the SS Cavalry Brigade would recoup its losses.