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On Christmas Eve 1944, the men of the IV SS-Panzerkorps were
preparing to celebrate the occasion as best they could. Taking
advantage of the pause in the fighting around Warsaw, they looked
forward to partaking in that most German of holidays, including the
finest Christmas dinner their field kitchens could still prepare in
this fifth year of the war. They had earned it too; after five
months of unrelenting combat and the loss of many of their friends,
troops from the corps headquarters, headquarters troops, and its
two divisions - the 3rd SS Panzer Division “Totenkopf” and the
5th SS Panzer Division “Wiking” - were eagerly anticipating
what the holiday would bring, including presents from home and
perhaps sharing a bottle of schnapps or wine with their comrades.
This was not to be, for that very evening, the corps commander,
SS-Obergruppenführer Herbert Otto Gille, received a telephone call
notifying him that the 35,000 men of his corps would begin boarding
express trains the following day that would take them from the
relative quiet of the Vistula Front to the front lines in Hungary,
hundreds of kilometers away. Their mission: Relieve Budapest! Thus
would begin the final round in the saga of the IV SS-Panzerkorps.
In Hungary, it would play a key role in the three attempts to raise
the siege of that fateful city. Threatened as much by their high
command as by the forces of the Soviet Union, Gille and his troops
overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their attempts to
rescue the city’s garrison, only to have their final attack
called off at the last minute. At that moment, they were only a few
kilometers away from the objective towards which they had striven
for nearly a month. After the relief attempt’s failure sealed the
fate of hundreds of thousands of Hungarians and Germans, the only
course of action remaining was to dig in and protect the Hungarian
oilfields as long as possible. face=Calibri>
During World War Two, the armed or Waffen-SS branch of the Third
Reich's dreaded security service expanded from two divisions in
1940 to 38 divisions by the end of the war, eventually growing to a
force of over 900,000 men until Germany's defeat in May 1945. Not
satisfied with allowing his nascent force to be commanded in combat
by army headquarters of the Wehrmacht, Heinrich Himmler, chief of
the SS, began to create his own SS corps and army headquarters
beginning with the SS-Panzerkorps in July 1942. As the number of
Waffen-SS divisions increased, so did the number of corps
headquarters, with 18 corps and two armies being planned or
activated by the war's end. While the histories of the first three
SS corps are well known, the IV SS-Panzerkorps - which never fought
in the west or in Berlin but participated in many of the key
battles fought on the Eastern Front during the last year of the war
- has been overlooked. Activated during the initial stages of the
defence of Warsaw in late July 1944, the corps, consisting of both
the 3. and 5. SS-Panzer Divisions (Totenkopf and Wiking,
respectively) was born in battle and spent the last ten months of
the war in combat, figuring prominently in the battles of Warsaw,
the attempted Relief of Budapest, Operation Spring Awakening, the
defence of Vienna, and the withdrawal into Austria where it finally
surrendered to American forces in May 1945. Herbert Otto Gille's IV
SS-Panzerkorps was renowned for its tenacity, high morale and,
above all, its lethality, whether conducting a hard-hitting
counterattack or a stubborn defense in situations where its
divisions were hopelessly outnumbered. Often embroiled in heated
disputes with its immediate Wehrmacht higher headquarters over his
seemingly cavalier conduct of operations, Gille's corps remained to
the bitter end one of the Third Reich's most reliable and
formidable field formations.
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