CHAPTER 9

PALE HORSEMEN

THE 8TH WAFFEN-SS CAVALRY DIVISION FLORIAN GEYER, 1942–1943

As early as March 1942, even before the final cessation of the bitter winter fighting around Rzhev, the SS Operations Main Office (SS-Führungshauptamt) was considering the re-establishment of the now badly depleted SS Cavalry Brigade at its bases in occupied Poland. That idea, however, was stillborn. Instead, and in keeping with the expansion of the Waffen-SS as a whole throughout the war, the Main Office decided to enlarge the brigade while rebuilding it. The result was to be a full-fledged SS Cavalry Division. Cadre would be provided by the remnants of the SS Cavalry Brigade as they transferred off the line following the Battle of Rzhev. As so often happened in the German armed forces during World War II, the brigade commander's name had by now become attached to the unit. Thus, cadre was sometimes referred to as coming from the SS Cavalry Brigade Fegelein. Beginning with the shattered remnants of the RAA, the brigade's survivors began returning from Russia as early as January. In the spring months, what remained of the Reiter regiments also found their way back. As the units arrived, they were ordered to the SS training area at Debica, about seventy miles (112 km) due east of Krakow. There they were augmented by substantial numbers of replacements. In fairly short order but without much actual training time, the cavalry brigade's remnants incorporated the new arrivals. The new organization would be officially designated the SS Cavalry Division (SS-Kavallerie-Division) effective 21 June 1942.1

As the reorganization took place, the combat power of the division grew apace. In place of the earlier brigade's two Reiter regiments the division would now have three, though standing up the third evidently took considerable time and effort. Each of the three regiments received an extra staff platoon in addition to four mounted squadrons, a combined machine-gun and mortar squadron, and a motorized heavy squadron. A full artillery regiment was also added, including both horse-drawn and motorized batteries. Further punch was added through the inclusion of a mechanized assault-gun battery and an anti-tank “detachment” (i.e., battalion). The assault-gun battery was later expanded to battalion-strength but was eventually disbanded, its guns being incorporated in the anti-tank battalion. A fully motorized divisional logistics train was also established, along with smaller elements such as bicycle companies, motorized signals platoons, and the all-important veterinary company.² As it turned out, these paper arrangements were subject to extraordinarily frequent alteration during the division's lifetime. Just as in the case of the earlier SS Cavalry Brigade, however, subsequent experience saw various elements of the division repeatedly seconded for temporary duty with other formations.

Unfortunately for the new division, most of the incoming replacements were Volksdeutsche from Hungary. Deemed “racially acceptable” from the SS' point of view, they nevertheless brought with them certain problems. Divisional staff found that the new recruits spoke German only haltingly or not at all (mangelhaft oder überhaupt nicht). They had had little or no paramilitary training with Nazi formations such as the Hitler Youth, SA, or SS, and the bulk of them had not served with any foreign armed forces.³ Therefore, even if they could understand their orders, they might not be able to execute them. Consequently, both enlisted men and their NCOs had to be trained simultaneously not only in the German language but also in their military duties. This dual training continued in the field right through the end of 1942 and included, for veterinary personnel, everything from equine first aid, diagnosis, and medicinal treatment to farriery, tacking up, and saddling.4

Regardless of the training they conducted, however, the division's officers and NCOs were strongly cautioned not to treat the Volksdeutsche as inferior to Germans from Germany proper (Altreich). This was an enduring problem, and the division's commander in April 1943, Colonel (Standartenführer) Fritz Freitag, would still be alluding to it more than a year after the division had been formed. Since Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler continued to put great emphasis on ideological indoctrination along with SS cavalry troopers' regular training,⁵ the replacements' treatment assumed greater significance than might otherwise have been the case. Thus, for example, the division's leaders were ordered to avoid insulting the Hungarian Volksdeutsche by calling them “gypsies.” That would offend their honor, affect their morale, and lessen the ideological indoctrination's impact because gypsies were considered grossly inferior in the Nazis' racial hierarchy. Officers and NCOs using the term would be punished. On the other hand, if it were necessary for disciplinary purposes, a Volksdeutsch recruit could be criticized expressly as a “dirty pig” (Dreckschwein) or even a “sad sack of shit” or “limp dick” (Schlappschwanz), just not as a gypsy. All personnel from the Altreich were to be instructed in this regard so as to ensure that no mistakes were made.⁶

Seriously complicating the difficulties of incorporating ethnic German replacements was the matter of the new division's horses. Cadre at Debica discovered that the horses shipped to the division had not been sufficiently schooled in the remount system, a fact that could have direct, adverse operational consequences. To expedite the replacements' equestrian training, as well as to further the conditioning of remounts, an SS Cavalry School was established for the division at Zamosc, about fifty miles (80 km) southeast of Lublin. Nevertheless, divisional staff reported that the horses themselves remained “raw,”⁷ a fact evidently made worse by difficulties in getting enough feed. On 19 September the division's operations section reported to LIX Corps' chief of staff that there were insufficient oats for the horses and no independent means of acquiring any in what was by then the autumnal rainy season. The operations section further reported that the division was short three hundred mounts in any case and warned about the impending likelihood of heavy losses among those horses the division did have. Training difficulties thus multiplied considerably even as the division's units began their deployments. Troopers not yet trained to ride (reiterlich nicht vorgebildete Männer)—and who might not understand their commanders anyway—were mounted on horses that were not yet trained themselves and that might well have been improperly nourished.8 Given the urgency of the division's anticipated anti-partisan mission and the short time of only some two-and-half months allotted for the entire training process, this situation remained a recipe for incomplete operational results, not to mention occasional cracked skulls and broken arms and legs.

As it turned out, when the 1st and 2nd Reiter Regiments and the Bicycle Reconnaissance Detachment began their movement earlier than planned, on 27 August 1942, they shipped out not only to fight partisans as they'd been told they would but also to help plug a gap in the German front lines near Vitebsk. They were placed under the command of the 330th ID of LIX Corps. As the last maneuver element to be raised, the 3rd Reiter Regiment, along with the anti-aircraft artillery detachment and the division's combat engineers, remained behind to complete its training. For the 3rd Regiment, this training included squadron versus squadron combat exercises.⁹ In the meantime, between 7 and 19 September, the 1st and 2nd Reiter Regiments engaged in regular anti-partisan missions in the 330th ID's area of operations. Their war diaries recorded numerous caches of munitions and other supplies seized, but despite what was occasionally reported as heavy fighting earlier in the month, they recorded only low numbers of casualties inflicted and sustained before the last two weeks of September. The numbers, however, rose fairly significantly in that last fortnight.

Losses of horses were also rather light during the period to 30 September though they, too, rose as the month ended. By that date, divisional veterinary staff recorded 36 horses killed in action and 6 dead from exhaustion or sickness. A further 82 had to be sent to rear-area veterinary hospitals, while another 107 were transferred from the 1st Reiter Regiment to the veterinary company because the horses had become superfluous (überzählig) as a result of unspecified reductions, presumably combat casualties, in regimental personnel (Mannschaftsausfall).

These horses would be followed a month later by another 203 when, this time specifically on the basis of casualties sustained in October, the 1st Reiter Regiment's 1st Squadron was actually disbanded.10 While it remains unclear how many of these transferred horses were subsequently sent back to combat units, the veterinary detachment reported to LIX Corps headquarters on 4 October that a total of 118 horses had been treated between the start of the division's operations and 30 September, that is, over a period of about four weeks.¹¹ Such rates of activity remained constant throughout the period to the end of 1942, with horses being shunted continuously back and forth through the division's veterinary system in numbers ranging from twos and threes to scores and hundreds. The pace of these veterinary transfers persisted well into 1943 and would prove a significant hindrance to the division's operational capability.

Nevertheless, whatever difficulties the troopers were encountering with their supplies of horseflesh, the 330th ID's staff reported that the SS cavalrymen executed their tasks with what it called “noteworthy passion” (mit bewundernswerter Passion).¹² Whether that passion was in any way inspired by the fact that the division was now an officially enumerated unit, formally designated as the 8th Waffen-SS Cavalry Division, remains unrecorded. It also remains needless to speculate, though the speculation is unavoidable, about what sort of malevolent excesses might be subsumed under that phrase. Equally chilling was the reported “cleansing” (Säuberung) of lines of advance and rear areas at about the same time in the division's area of operations east of Vitebsk, missions undertaken again later, in November 1942, in the region south and west of Smolensk. By that date, the division had been transferred to VI Corps, and that corps' headquarters ordered the division's troopers to clear out (räumen) all civilians from an area approximately two miles deep behind the front lines. If necessitated by numbers, the division was to evacuate them to rear areas. Accompanying the directive was the admonitory instruction from VI Corps' staff that proper accommodation would have to be planned in advance of any such evacuation. Otherwise, the “further growth of guerrilla bands (Banden) would be unavoidable.”¹³ The SS men's response to the admonition was not recorded. On the basis of their earlier behavior in Poland and Russia, however, their response may be imagined.

One of the problems encountered by the division in that early autumn of 1942 was the notorious condition of the Russian roads. As in 1941, the division's troopers struggled in the biannual rainy season. Repeatedly, divisional war diaries bemoaned the fact that units, and especially the motorized detachments, simply could not move in the sodden, pudding-like tracks that passed for Russian roads. On 22 September 1942, for example, the divisional war diary recorded that the movements of combat elements were being badly hindered by continuous rain and bottomless mud. Minefields and blown bridges only made matters worse.14 For the division's supply columns, too, conditions often made motorized movement literally impossible. On 25–26 September, the division's quartermaster was reporting that one brigade had to bring gasoline forward in confiscated Russian panje wagons, presumably drawn by confiscated panje horses, because the supply column's trucks couldn't move in the mud.¹⁵ At one point during the period to 30 September this particular panje-wagon column grew to as many as seventy-six vehicles. Shortly thereafter the tally fell to only thirty-five wagons, but only after the attached veterinary company determined that no more than 50 percent of the draft horses pulling them were deemed fit for service.¹⁶ Initial war-diary entries for the period did not specify whether the division's horse-mounted units made better headway than motorized and mechanized elements. Nevertheless, part of the rationale for retaining horses at all in the Russian campaign was precisely the adverse climatic conditions in which these motorized and mechanized SS detachments were finding themselves forced to operate in 1941 and now again in 1942.

Of course, the difficulties in movement were only beginning; and insofar as the horse-mounted elements of the division were concerned, the coming of the Russian winter would once again make matters much more serious even though lower temperatures made for hardened footing. As early as 7 October, well before the real winter weather had even set in and before the cavalrymen's transfer to VI Corps, the division's veterinary unit had already requested that 80,000 horse-shoe cleats from LIX Corps' logistics be made ready (bereitgestellt) for the division's horses.¹⁷ The threaded cleats were screwed into the horse' shoes for added traction in ice and snow. In addition, panje horses continued to be viewed as an increasingly important source of replacements for the approaching winter. A potential requisition of some 200 of them, for example, was discussed with VI Corps veterinary officers in mid-November. Of these, 182 were eventually requested for the formation of an ad hoc battalion of ski troops, most of whom were transferred from the Cavalry Division's artillery but who were further augmented with men from the Reiter regiments. Furthermore, in light of the increasingly severe winter weather, the division's troopers were being warned to ensure that exhausted horses of whatever sort, and specifically those affected by apparently widespread bacterial ailments, be transferred to the veterinary company early enough so that they didn't actually die in transport or immediately upon arrival at the hospital.18 Though the divisional veterinary staff couldn't foresee it, these steps for the SS men's mounts were being taken mere days before the launching of the massive Russian counterattack far to the southeast at Stalingrad where so many former troopers of the army's 1st Cavalry Division, now 24th Panzer, would find their graves.

For the SS Cavalry Division's men, as well as for their horses, the winter of 1942–1943 would once more pose the fierce challenge that had confronted German troops on the Eastern Front in 1941–1942. Nevertheless, with that first season's experience already under their belts, VI Corps' headquarters confidently pointed out that further weather-related difficulties could be avoided. Experience, winter uniforms, training, and constant supervision by all commanders and among all troops themselves could ward off winter's effects. By contrast, if numerous cases of frostbite did occur, then corps-level commanders would have to draw “certain conclusions” about the effectiveness of the division's training and the level of its morale.¹⁹ Despite the implicit threat of such questions being raised, the division continued to suffer losses to frostbite, combat, and illness. Things could hardly have been otherwise, and by mid-November 1942, the division had been designated as Army Group Reserve with the mission of conducting anti-partisan sweeps and countering any airborne landings. In these missions it operated in support of the 197th ID and the 2nd Luftwaffe Field Division. At that time, the divisional adjutant reported that while the Cavalry Division's ration-strength stood at 10,204 officers and men, its combat-strength was only 5,214.²⁰ The adjutant's report made no mention of the status of the division's horses.

In mid-December, the division was assigned to yet more antipartisan operations, this time in the region around the town of Baturino about sixty-two miles (100 km) north-northwest of Smolensk. Given the winter conditions and the resulting difficulties of supply, the division's operations officer (the billet's German designation was Ia) reported on both 19 and 26 December that most of the division's horses had been placed in unspecified winter quarters. Consequently, and at least temporarily, the SS Cavalry Division was now only as mobile as a regular army infantry division. It would move for the time being on foot. The Ia also reported that while the division was only “conditionally capable” (bedingt geeignet) of offensive operations, it remained “fully capable” (voll geeignet) on the defensive. As it turned out, at the very moment when the division was essentially without its horses, its units also received orders to begin painting the division's newly assigned insignia on divisional vehicles: a horse's head in profile facing the viewer's left with a drawn sword crossing the neck from lower left to upper right, point uppermost.21

For the rest of the month of December, in temperatures falling from freezing to about 15 degrees Fahrenheit (–9° C), the troopers of the SS Cavalry Division engaged in sporadic combat with partisans employing not merely small arms but artillery. Divisional reconnaissance elements estimated the combined strength of the partisan Banden to be nearly three thousand. Normally, however, the latter appear to have operated in much smaller groups against both the SS cavalrymen and other units in the area, the latter now including the army's 52nd ID and, once again, the 2nd Luftwaffe Field Division. Divisional daily reports also indicated that these partisans, who had come into the division's area of operations from the north, not only communicated with other Red Army forces via two clandestine radio stations but also had command of an airstrip through which supplies flowed and from which wounded were evacuated. Though the daily reports recorded no specific indication of the partisans' success with the evacuation of their own sick and wounded, the same documents did note at some length an “extraordinary number” (ausserordentliche Fülle) of cold-induced illnesses in the division's own three Reiter regiments. As had already occurred so frequently in Russia, these units had occasionally been seconded to other echelons during this period for anti-partisan operations, as had the division's artillery regiment. Ill or not, however, the cavalrymen could not be taken out of the line. Instead, they were treated in place owing to the division's reduced strength.22

Notwithstanding its depleted state, the division continued with its grim work of hunting down, capturing, and killing anyone considered a partisan. Some measure of the viciousness of the business is recorded in a “Special Directive to the Forces” (Besondere Weisungen an die Truppe) dated 24 December 1942. No civilians were to be “evacuated” from their homes and/or expelled from the division's area of operations without the responsible officers first notifying the divisional Enemy Intelligence Detachment (Ic), implicitly because such unauthorized action would simply create more partisans. More directly sinister ran the following warning: “Any arbitrary killing of partisan prisoners does not serve the interests of the division.” Clearly they were being killed arbitrarily, and not only by Waffen-SS units. If for no other reason than to ensure a continued flow of useful tactical and operational intelligence, the Special Directive expressly ordered that prisoners be sent to the divisional Ic for interrogation.²³ What happened to them afterward was another matter.

Orders or no orders, however, the killings went on just as they had since the invasion of Poland in 1939. Indeed, Hermann Fegelein's report from 1941 regarding Himmler's order to shoot or drive into the marshes all the Jews the earlier SS Cavalry Brigade came across clearly bears out the fact that the SS cavalrymen had long been killing persons out of hand, in vast numbers, and on a regular basis. The division's daily activity reports, and occasionally the division's war diary, for the period throughout the first quarter of 1943 are replete with references to prisoners and civilians being shot while trying to escape, wounded prisoners dying after interrogation, and suspected partisans and civilians being shot when found carrying arms. Representative of all of these individual reports was the divisional summary that was eventually compiled in early February 1943 for these continuing anti-partisan operations (code-named Operation Sternlauf). Concerning prisoners taken, the report noted 34 “bandits”; 153 presumably male “civilians”; and 547 women and children, a total of 734. Of persons killed, the report listed 580 “bandits”; 119 “civilians”; and 32 women, a total of 731.24 The report recorded no figures indicating children who might have been killed during the period. As with all soldiers on the Eastern Front at this time, the SS cavalrymen were being encouraged from the highest levels to be cruel. Hitler himself made this perfectly clear in an Order of the Day of 1 January 1943. It was evident, he said, that the consequence of a victory by Germany's enemies in the east would be Germany's destruction. German soldiers and men of the Waffen-SS already knew that. What German armies were prepared to do to prevent that outcome, he countered, those enemies would soon learn to their sorrow.²⁵ In Russia, Germany's enemies were already learning it. This kind of encouragement, coming from the führer himself, would obviously override any orders such as the one mentioned above from a mere divisional staff officer urging restraint in the matter.

The bitterness of the resulting anti-partisan warfare was matched by the bitterness of the cold. By January 1943, true winter weather had settled in on the SS cavalry. Temperatures recorded that month in the division's war diary routinely hit as low as minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit (–25° C).²⁶ Yet the vicious, usually small-scale combats continued. The SS cavalrymen grimly acknowledged the Russian partisans' skill not only in effective daylight cover and concealment but also night fighting. In the vicinity of Simonowo near Baturino, for example, a small scouting party of one officer and twenty-four men from the 1st Reiter Regiment was ambushed and surrounded in the failing afternoon light of 17 January by as many as 180 partisans. In badly cut-up terrain covered in dense brush, the scouting party was smothered with heavy automatic weapons fire and overrun. Only six men, three of them wounded, escaped the hand-to-hand fighting that followed. Upon reaching their own lines, the survivors reported that many of the badly wounded SS men who'd been left behind shot themselves so as to avoid falling into Russian hands.²⁷ This result, said the division's war diary, was further proof that the 1st Regiment simply could not maintain security across its assigned front of nearly eleven miles (17 km), while at the same time confronting strong partisan bands who were not only fighting to cut the Germans' supply lines but who were also widely supported by the civilian population. Therefore it was imperative that all logistics elements of the division be better trained to resist the partisans' rear-area attacks on the division's supply columns.

Those supply columns, in turn, were at the same time being ordered to make greater use of horse-drawn vehicles because an expected delivery of fuel for the division's vehicles had not arrived. Orders to that effect went out to all units on 23 January 1943.28 Indeed throughout the entire area of the Army's XXX Corps, to which the division was at that time assigned, horse-drawn vehicles were only to be driven at the walk unless transporting the wounded. This would have to be done in order to spare the horses. Empty horse-drawn vehicles were allowed only one or two passengers besides the driver. Loaded vehicles were not allowed to carry any personnel at all nor were any horses pulling such vehicles to be ridden.²⁹

These prevailing winter conditions and the almost constant contact with the enemy resulted in a steady stream of casualties suffered by the division in the first quarter of 1943, a situation reminiscent in its own way of the German cavalry's campaign against francs-tireurs in the bitter French winter 1870–1871. Now in 1942–1943, however, the figures for the numbers of casualties the division's troops inflicted on the enemy—whether partisans, “bandits,” or mere civilians—were much higher for the simple reason that the SS cavalrymen had been trained to a level of fanaticism unknown in the German cavalry not only in 1870–1871 but also in 1914–1918. Comparing the numbers cited above, as well as the nature, of Russian prisoners of war and those killed, and even including the last ten days of December 1942, the division's own losses in the period to 4 April 1943, though steady, were relatively minor. They included 154 killed, 498 wounded (74 of whom were not evacuated), and 54 missing.³⁰

Of course, whatever losses the division did suffer had to be replaced. The Reiter regiments were given first priority for replacements after the more or less continuous contact with the enemy since the preceding fall and winter. However, insufficient numbers of replacements were available from the division's supply units to bring the Reiter regiments up to their 100 percent wartime establishment (Kriegssollstärke).³¹ Consequently, only 70 percent of the wartime establishment could be maintained. This stark fact dictated a reduction in the number of mounted squadrons in each Reiter regiment from four to three. Similar conditions also prevailed in several other divisional units. As they had in the winter fighting of 1941–1942, commanders again reached all the way back to the divisional supply detachment based in Warsaw to find the required personnel. In addition, command staff scoured the division's NCO training program for possible replacements. All possible sources found themselves culled of men for the Reiter regiments, the division's anti-tank company, and the pioneer battalion. As a result, the 1st and 3rd Reiter Regiments received some 788 replacements. At 70 percent strength, this meant, for example, that the total number of officers and men in the 1st Regiment fell from 1,416 to 991. By 1 April 1943, the entire division's combat-strength was listed as only 4,585 officers and men, its ration-strength 6,809.32 Curiously, however, the relevant documents list no horses at all, though the instructions for filling the forms out specifically stated that a unit's horses were always to be included in the reported ration-strength.

Divisional Anti-Partisan Operations—April to August 1943

From early April until the first week of August 1943, the now officially designated 8th Waffen-SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer was once again assigned to anti-partisan operations under the overall supervision of the same man who had supervised the then-SS Cavalry Brigade's operations in the summer of 1941, HSSPF Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Under the circumstances, the moniker Florian Geyer seemed fitting. The Franconian knight who was the division's namesake had been a leader in the Peasants' War (1522–1526). That association fit neatly the crude “blood and soil” ideology of the SS. So too did the fact that Geyer's sixteenth-century followers had traditionally been referred to as the “Black Bands” (schwarze Haufen). Black featured very prominently in the SS' uniforms and regalia. As it turns out, when possible divisional names were being solicited, at least one of the division's units, the 3rd Reiter Regiment, suggested that the name of the eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry commander Hans Joachim “Papa” von Ziethen be used. Ziethen's victorious exploits were very widely known, and he'd introduced a death's-head cap-badge similar to, but much larger than, the one worn by the SS.

The cruel, condottiere-like nature of the original Florian Geyer, however, seemed more appropriate than that of a Prussian aristocrat in the conditions prevailing in that perilous spring of 1943 on the Eastern Front. Stalingrad had been lost along with the German Sixth Army in one of the war's greatest battles. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian, Italian, and Rumanian troops who'd fought the Red Army along the Volga had also been killed or captured. In the retreat that followed, the 2nd SS Panzer Corps had rallied brilliantly and had retaken Kharkov in bitter, close-quarters combat after having been earlier driven out of the city. Further withdrawal would occur only in September in the wake of the Germans' defeat at Kursk in July, Hitler having forbidden such a withdrawal before then. The eventual projected stop line would be the Dnepr. This major north-south waterway was expected to provide a defensible barrier for German forces. The river also happened to be part of the large drainage basin through which flowed the rivers Pripet and Berezina, along whose banks the SS Cavalry Brigade had hunted partisans in 1941. As in that year, so now in 1943 the SS cavalrymen would be under Bach's control. Serving until the end of 1942 as HSSPF-Russland-Mitte, Bach had in the meantime been appointed Chief of Anti-Partisan Combat Units. As such, he now had responsibility for all such tasks on the entire Eastern Front outside of the army's immediate operational areas.33 Bach had always willingly served his Reichsführer-SS. Now on an even larger scale than in 1941, his primary concern was fulfilling Himmler's orders to ensure that no partisans operating behind German lines hindered the successful retention of the occupied territories or assisted the Red Army.

Unlike 1941, however, Soviet partisans were now better organized, outfitted, and logistically supported by rear-echelon Red Army forces. At this point in the war, Soviet partisans numbered about 250,000 at any given moment. They were potentially capable of severely disrupting German lines of communication and supply in a much more serious way than during the invasion's first year. In addition to appearing for the first time after Stalingrad in the northern Ukraine, large numbers of partisans infiltrated the vast forested areas around Bryansk. They also once again took up station in the middle reaches of the Dnepr watershed and reassembled in the eastern Pripet Marshes.³⁴ Most importantly, by 1943 partisans had much wider and committed popular support. This support derived not only from the partisans' own brutally successful coercion of Soviet civilians but also because of the invaders' own frightful record of oppression. Consequently, the SS Cavalry Division's efforts entailed an even more intensive effort than in 1941 at rooting out any real or suspected partisans in a given area. In early 1943 that area once more included the region of the eastern Pripet Marshes, but the division also operated far to the east of the River Dnepr in the forests approaching Bryansk as well as southward in the direction of Kursk and Kharkov. As the division's troopers had already experienced (and as had the army's 1st Cavalry Division), the Soviet Union's vast swamps and forests continued to prove, if not an unassailable redoubt, then at least a recurrent refuge for Soviet partisans. Despite recurrent security sweeps, the partisans destroyed rail lines with “clockwork regularity,” and, as the German withdrawal began in late summer, in many places they successfully “anticipated the routes…and systematically destroyed every bridge” in the rear areas.35

These conditions made the division's anti-partisan operations even grimmer than before, if that were possible. In the view of the division's then-commander, Fritz Freitag, they also required a mental adjustment from the earlier frontline combat around Rzhev. Freitag issued his orders accordingly, even before the Battle of Kursk was fought (and lost) and the German tide in Russia began to run out.³⁶ All personnel had once again to be aware of the special malice of the partisans so as to avoid unnecessary losses. This was especially the case among troops seizing loot that could be booby-trapped or otherwise wired with explosives. Freitag therefore ordered trophy-hunting strictly prohibited. At the same time, a fundamental suspicion of all persons and places was required. Every civilian could be a “bandit.” He cautioned his troopers that once again there would be no recognizable front lines. Partisans could appear anywhere, even in pacified areas. Consequently, precaution and attention to detail would be critical in all things at all times. The combing through of forests and villages would have to be undertaken with the greatest possible care, and even apparently impassable terrain would have to be controlled. The cavalrymen would have to reckon with ambushes everywhere, all the time. The division's personnel would therefore have to respond in kind. They did, and they would continue to do so for the rest of the division's time in Russia and, later still, in the Balkans.

The division's command center for the operations of spring 1943 lay initially at Staryye Dorogi in what is now Belarus about thirty-seven miles (59 km) west of the city of Bobruisk. The latter city was located on the railway linking Minsk and Gomel. The division's three Reiter regiments, as always the principal partisan-hunting units, were based at the village of Lapichi, slightly north and east of the same railway about midway between Minsk and Gomel.37 Divisional staff reported that the entire area, implicitly all the way from Minsk to Gomel, was infested with “bandits” and that all roads could be traveled only under armed escort. The road linking the divisional headquarters at Staryye Dorogi and the regional SS supply command at Bobruisk, for example, was reported to be so badly threatened that staff orders went out mandating a standing escort of at least twelve riflemen (Karabiner) and three vehicles.³⁸

Besides the immediate threat posed to the division's mobility by partisan activity, recurrent problems with the division's horses further complicated matters. Always critical to effective anti-partisan warfare in Russia, sound horses were lacking in the division in the spring of 1943. Quite apart from operational implications, for a unit such as the SS Cavalry Division whose honorific title Florian Geyer was now gaining wider circulation and whose commanders really did think of themselves as cavalrymen, lack of sound horses was a very serious problem.³⁹ It was discovered, for example, that those horses the division did possess had to be treated regularly for scabies-induced mange. Evidently common in Russia at that time, this debilitating ailment had first appeared among the division's mounts in October 1942.⁴⁰ At that time in the division's operational area north of Smolensk, mange had been reported as being widespread among civilian livestock. Stabling had been inadequate, and the division's troopers hadn't been able to build proper accommodations owing to constant relocations. Because the mass of the division's personnel had been ordered deployed as infantry that winter, too few qualified personnel had remained to look after too many horses. The situation worsened with the occasional impressment of divisional mounts into regular army units, many of whose men didn't know how to care for them. Horses not properly and regularly groomed were particularly susceptible. Dirty blankets or tack, matted coats left too long uncurried, close exposure to infected animals: all of these could contribute to a major outbreak among the division's horses and evidently did. In early spring 1943, as the division's parent unit, Ninth Army, moved to the rear, provisionally treated horses became reinfected so that by April the majority (die Masse) of the division's horses were unfit for service. In the 1st Reiter Regiment fully half of the assigned horses were deemed incapable of operational employment. In the 2nd Regiment every single one fell into that category. For each regiment's horses, the treatment and recovery time was estimated to be at least six weeks. To make matters worse, all three of the division's Reiter regiments were already below strength in horseflesh. Each one carried 1,453 horses on the division's TOE. In reality, the numbers were 1,201 and 933 for the 1st and 2nd Regiments, respectively.41 Consequently, commanders determined that a fully “cavalry capable” operation at that moment was impossible. Troopers would instead have to be truck-mounted and therefore more or less confined to the region's poor roads. Crew-served weapons, ammunition, and other equipment would be brought along in pack-columns of requisitioned panje horses.⁴² Only one full squadron in the 1st Reiter Regiment could remain horse-mounted for the time being. None could be in the 2nd Reiter Regiment. Horses left behind on these operations would be cared for by local volunteers (Hilfswillige). The veterinary company would remain at Lapichi to look after the horses but would designate a veterinary squad (Staffel) to accompany the troopers forward. Divisional commander Freitag understood the importance of horses in the anti-partisan mission: “It must be guaranteed,” he ordered, “that by incorporating every means and making every effort the horses be made operationally effective as soon as possible.”⁴³ Capturing Russian horses was also given a high priority, despite the earlier outbreaks of mange and the fact that panje horses were likely to be infected. Freitag's successor, Hermann Fegelein, who had once again assumed command after a stint in the rear, ordered that the division at least double the number of horses on its TOE through the simple expedient of having “every cavalryman take every horse he sees.” This, he said, was a given.⁴⁴

In this reduced condition, the SS Cavalry Division undertook antipartisan operations between 9 and 17 May and between 13 and 16 June 1943 in Operations Weichsel I and II in the roughly triangular area north and south of the town of Rechitsa on the Berezina River extending to the confluence of the Pripet and Dnepr Rivers. For the purpose, it was incorporated in a battle group (Kampfgruppe) with the 10th and 11th SS Police Regiments and Assault Battalion “South.” Orders indicated that the encirclement and total destruction of partisan bands constituted the standing operational objective. Simply driving them away would accomplish nothing because they would just reappear elsewhere. Partisans' escape through SS lines, especially to the north, was to be avoided under all circumstances.45

Until the beginning of June the division's elements operated both east and west of the Pripet River, fighting mostly small engagements and capturing and/or killing many suspected partisans. However, the division's reinforced reconnaissance detachment also fought a sustained, three-hour battle on 17 May near the village of Novoselki. At a cost of 3 dead and 18 wounded, the SS cavalrymen killed more than 150 members of a partisan band armed not only with small arms but also with anti-tank guns and mortars. Despite the heavy rains that followed in the second half of May—rains that, as usual, made the marshes impassable for vehicles—the operations continued until the first week of June. Once again, most engagements were small and losses to the division few. Recorded enemy dead were also relatively few, though numbers of those who were killed were often reported, yet again, as “shot while trying to escape,” or, in the case of at least one woman, shot for refusing to answer interrogators' questions. In order to prevent the partisans from re-establishing themselves in the region, the division and its supporting elements “evacuated” all civilians and sent them to unspecified “labor duties.” All livestock that could be rounded up was also confiscated. Finally, every village and all individual habitations were burned to the ground (restlos niedergebrannt).⁴⁶ Between 8 May and 4 June 1943, the division suffered thirty-five casualties, of whom only eleven were killed in action.⁴⁷ From the last week of June to the last week of July, similar operations occurred in the old area of activity from 1941 around the city of Mozyr. Interestingly, this latter operation, code-named Seydlitz and occurring between Weichsel I and II, took its name from one of the most famous Prussian cavalrymen of the eighteenth century, Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz. As usual, the division's Reiter regiments and the reconnaissance detachment were the principal partisan hunters. Though riding and marching as much as thirty-seven miles (60 km) per day, the division's units fought only one major battle. Just as it had always done, however, the terrain proved a great difficulty, especially since the partisans had destroyed all the bridges and mined most of the tracks. Consequently, at one point during the operation the 2nd Reiter Regiment had to be resupplied entirely by air—using an airstrip captured from the partisans no less—because motorized logistics vehicles couldn't reach it in the “immense marshes and forests.” Combat engineers and even air strikes had to be called in to destroy heavily fortified bunker complexes. All civilian habitations were once again burned down. In keeping with established practice, those civilians who could be rounded up were again dispatched to “labor duties,” and all of their livestock was taken.48 In the period between 25 June and 17 August, the division suffered 26 killed and 56 wounded.⁴⁹ The division's strength, not including the 3rd Reiter Regiment or the combat-engineer battalion, stood at 8,890 officers and men on 20 August. The division's horses were not included in the count, and records for the period do not indicate what the number of mounts was.⁵⁰

The End in Russia—September to December 1943

It was at this stage, in the late summer of 1943, that the Florian Geyer Division's time in Russia began to approach its end. In the wake of the fierce fighting at Kursk in early July, German forces began a slow withdrawal to the Dnepr, the same river along whose upper reaches the division had periodically operated for some two years. In the second half of 1943, the division found itself transferred to the Ukraine for anti-partisan and defensive operations in the area south of the city of Kharkov and subsequently around Kremenchug on the lower Dnepr some 140 miles (225 km) to the southwest.⁵¹

Even as these operations continued, another reorganization of the SS cavalry was impending, one that would eventually and significantly increase at least the nominal strength of the division to some 13,000 men. The Reiter regiments were renumbered and a fourth one was added, so that their designations simultaneously changed from 1st through 4th to 15th through 18th. Furthermore, the assault-gun detachment was expanded to give the division greater punch.52 This reorganization and expansion featured as part of the much larger expansion of the Waffen-SS as a whole in the war's last two years. Of the thirty-eight Waffen-SS divisions officially established during the war (thirty-nine if one counts an SS mountain division that was subsequently disbanded and its number reassigned), fully thirty of them, starting with the SS Cavalry Division's numerical follow-on, the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen, were raised after December 1942.

This vast accretion of strength reflected several important factors. Firstly, Himmler's personal importance to Hitler had grown enormously. Because the SS remained the most ideologically committed arm of a Nazi regime now fighting a purely defensive and increasingly bitter war on all fronts against rising Allied power after July 1943, Himmler could successfully make ever-greater demands for men and equipment. Hitler didn't call Himmler his “Loyal Heinrich” for nothing. Nowhere was this more the case than on the Eastern Front. Secondly, the Waffen-SS constituted some of the most effective combat forces still at Germany's disposal, and it seems clear that the Florian Geyer Division saw itself in that light. Expanding the division would also fit the nature of the war in the region to which it would be transferred in 1944, namely the Balkans. There the war had been nothing but an anti-partisan campaign since the initial German and Italian victories in the spring of 1941. As an experienced and utterly ruthless anti-partisan force, the SS Cavalry Division would be a natural choice for assignment there; and until the division's eventual destruction in Budapest between December 1944 and February 1945, it would see no genuine large-scale combat against regular forces as it certainly had in Russia. Then, too, the extermination of Jews in the Balkans really only occurs during this same period, particularly in Hungary. The division could demonstrate its evil expertise in that enterprise as well. Finally, as a third factor explaining the Waffen-SS' large-scale expansion after December 1942, it should also be noted that the nature of the organization as a whole was fundamentally transformed in the course of 1943–1944 quite aside from numbers. That transformation encompassed the recruitment of very large numbers of personnel who earlier were regarded as strictly off-limits for ideological reasons. Danes, Norwegians, Dutchmen, Flemings—these had always been recruited as racially acceptable SS men. Now, however, in 1943 and 1944, the manpower pool was expanded to include not only “borderline Aryans” such as Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians but even Ukrainians and Bosnian Muslims. Hang-dog units these new SS formations may well have been. Evidently, most were. Nevertheless, they represented a radical departure from the perceived racial superiority that certainly still existed in the Waffen-SS when the Florian Geyer Division was established in early 1942, even if many of the division's veterans may have thought less than good things about Volksdeutsche as replacements. This larger environment thus further serves to place the SS Cavalry Division's service in 1944 in a light different from its earlier campaigns between 1939 and the end of 1943.

Ultimately, the Florian Geyer Division did not represent a continuation of any German cavalry tradition between 1939 and the end of 1943 insofar as its racially charged mission is concerned, even though its equipment and organization did actually place it well within the framework of what a German cavalry unit of the time was supposed to look like. Throughout its deployments in Poland in 1939–1940 and in Russia between 1941 and 1943, its primary task always remained rear-area security and anti-partisan warfare. This mission came to it from the very highest levels of the regime. Occasionally, of course, it fought pitched battles with those same partisans. Then, too, it participated in the fierce defensive battles of winter 1941–1942 against the Red Army near Rzhev and 1942–1943 near Smolensk. Nevertheless, the division's Reiter regiments and reconnaissance battalions hunted Jews and other civilians just as often, if not actually more often, than it fought organized enemy formations, whether partisans or otherwise.

This orientation arose directly from the Waffen-SS' origins in the internal security apparatus of the Nazi Party and reflected one of Himmler's most important concerns. Unlike certain other Waffen-SS divisions, that, for all of their murderous excesses, became primarily frontline combat units (e.g., the 1st and 2nd SS Panzer Divisions Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler and Das Reich), the 8th Waffen-SS Cavalry Division never shed the original security function of its organizational antecedents. Those antecedents had been, and the division always remained, the mounted arm of a Nazi Party formation the enemies of which, real or imagined, were to be ferreted out and exterminated without mercy. Fegelein, Freitag, and others may well have seen themselves as chivalric mounted warriors, but that fact is immaterial. The SS cavalrymen executed few of the modern horse-cavalry's missions that were still being actively trained for in the Heer in the late 1930s and some of which the army's 1st Cavalry Division itself undertook: long-range reconnaissance; turning the enemy's flank; the interdiction of the enemy's logistics and lines of communication; and force protection through screening. On the contrary, the SS cavalrymen, like all SS men, were very much “Hitler's army” to a degree that even the markedly politicized army was not.53 As in Poland in 1939 and 1940, so too from first to last in Russia, the Florian Geyer Division participated in a war of extermination against largely civilian populations. In stand-up battles against regular troops of the Red Army or well-organized formations of partisans, its men appeared to have fought as tenaciously as any. That fact was in keeping with the cavalrymen's self-perceived warrior's ethos. It was also not uncommon in most units of the Waffen-SS raised before the end of 1942. Nevertheless, most of the division's operations, as well as those of its predecessor, the SS Cavalry Brigade, were conducted against persons who could offer little or no resistance. None of the mounted arm's tradition of true chivalry remained, notwithstanding Fegelein's and the division's aping of those same traditions. To that extent, Florian Geyer's troopers manifested the distinct reality of the Waffen-SS as political soldiers, ever willing to serve the murderous ideological imperatives of the Nazi dictatorship.