Putin's Wikings? Prez's call for volunteers evokes horrors of Hitler's 5th SS Panzer Division
To say that for Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine is not going according to plan would be the understatement of the decade. A stiff Ukrainian resistance — one that has surprised even the most optimistic outside observer — strategic and tactical incompetence, and a united Europe have thwarted what was surely planned as a lightning offensive and swift victory.
Now Putin's invading forces lie stuck in a quag, both literally and metaphorically. With harassed supply routes stretched to breaking point and morale ebbing fast, there are fears that the beleaguered and increasingly angered Russian president may resort to using chemical weapons and strategic bombing on Ukrainian cities.
In what must be the few shards of reality left in the mirror Putin looks into every day, it's becoming clear that Russia is heading into a war of attrition reminiscent of what it dragged the Germans into in WW2. Make no mistake, in Putin's mind, that scenario is akin to defeat, and defeat is one thing Putin's oversized ego will not allow. In that, comparisons with Hilter during the final years of World War 2, are beginning to look not as far-fetched as they were three weeks ago.
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And now, as if there weren't enough echoes of scrabbling WW2 dictators, Putin has revealed that Russia will welcome (and that word really says it all) foreign volunteers to fight the war in Ukraine. The volunteers will supposedly comprise Middle East veterans of the grim battles against ISIS. Battle-hardened they may be but hardly equipped to fight and win a European war against determined defenders fighting on home soil. Unless, of course, their main purpose is not so much victory as inspiring terror. And that thought brings us back to World War 2 and another dictator who created an elite division of 'volunteers' which would go down in history as one of the most brutal collection of soldiers ever assembled.
In 1940, Heinrich Himmler decided to expand the Waffen-SS to incorporate volunteers. The decision would see the creation of two regiments: Nordland (comprising Swedes, Danes and Norwegians) and Westland (comprising Dutch and Flemish), an Estonian battalion would later replace Nordland which would go on to form its own SS division. Together Nordland and Westland would form the vaunted and terrible 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking.
The Wiking division would — in what has to be one of the most cruel of ironies — emblazon its name in blood in the Ukraine. By early 1943, Wiking and remnants of the German army, shattered and demoralized after the catastrophe in Stalingrad, fell back on Kharkov (now Kharkiv) in a fighting retreat, as the huge Russian Stalingrad offensive ground to a halt largely due to supply issues. Wiking would go on to play pivotal if losing roles in the Third Battle of Kharkov, Battle of Kursk (the largest tank battle in history), and the Lake Balaton offensive. By May 1945, depleted and isolated from the First SS Panzer Corps, Wiking eventually surrendered to American troops in Austria.
But while Wiking's soldiers may have fought with steel on the battlefield, it was their brutality towards civilians and prisoners that truly etched their names on the crowded walls of wartime infamy. One of the first recorded atrocities committed by the Wiking division was in 1941, in none other than Ukraine. In Richard Rhodes's 'Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust', he documents how a group of Wiking soldiers rounded up Jews in Lviv and forced them to run through a gauntlet where they were struck with rifle butts and bayonets. When the Jews reached the end of the gauntlet they were shot dead by SS officers. Members of Wiking were also responsible for the cold-blooded killing of innumerable Jews in Austria.
In 2013 one former Wiking soldier, Olav Tuff, told NRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation): "In one instance in Ukraine during the autumn of 1941, civilians were herded like cattle— into a church. Shortly afterwards soldiers from my unit started to pour gasoline onto the church and somewhere between 200 and 300 humans were burned inside [the church]. I was assigned as guard, and no one came out. The episode at the church was terrible, but it was still just one of many episodes. I did not feel guilty about it, because we could not do anything. I just tell it the way I experienced it."
Wiking was not Hitler's only large-scale foray into the 'volunteer' programme. The 5th SS Panzer Division also spawned the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland which was involved in the blood-letting during the Battle of Berlin. It's possible that the last tank knocked out in the German capital belonged to the Nordland as it attempted to cross the Weidendammer Bridge. The Nordland division would surrender to the Soviets on May 1, 1945.
The thing about volunteers not fighting for their homes, loved ones or even an ideology, but rather for the spoils of war, and in many cases these days, a divine calling, is that instant brutality often takes precedence over the bigger picture. Putin's call for volunteers, especially those who have fought in some of the most atrocious conflicts in the last decade, smacks of a desperate man grasping at ever-shortening straws. The day these mercenaries set foot on Ukrainian soil could very well signal the moment Putin decided that the time for one last throw of the dice was nearing.