SS Charlemagne: The 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the SS

When the fighting stated at the barricade on the Tempelburg road, I left my command post and went forward. Half an hour later, when the fighting had died down, I went back to my command post and found only my liaison staff. The machine-gun section and the mortars that had been kept in reserve had disappeared in the direction of Bad Polzin. There was no one at all at Lieutenant Auphan’s command post!

I therefore went to the command post of the German colonel in charge of the defence of the town, where I learnt that the Flak and Tank-Hunting Companies had left their positions to retreat to Bad Polzin.

Not knowing exactly what had happened, and as the encirclement had been completed and the noise of fighting coming from the southwest and the west, and that the road to Bad Polzin was cut five kilometres from Neustettin, I went back to my men.

Being the last of the Division with 60 men of the 4th Company, the commander under whose orders it had been placed having retired, and Brigadier Puaud having said on the previous day that this was only a retarding action and not an outright defence, I ordered my men to leave their positions.

Between 1800 hours on 27 February and 1100 hours on 1 March, Lieutenant Auphan’s 4th Company of the 1st/58th Regiment had to march 63km to reach Bad Polzin, being obliged to make several detours to avoid the Russian vanguards. At Bad Polzin the 4th Company was fed and supplied with ammunition at the local command post and rested for 40 hours. Having been rejoined by Lieutenant Auphan, the company then left for Belgard at 0600 hours on 3 March, rejoining the Division at Körlin at 1600 hours that day.

Meanwhile, those elements of the Division that had left Neustettin directed by Captain de Perricot, the acting Chief-of-Staff, continued their retreat to Belgard via Bärwalde and Bad Polzin, a distance of 72km. On the way they discovered that the much-lauded fortified position known as the Pommern Stellung was, at least around Bärwalde, unmanned.

At about 1400 hours on 27 February they came under serious machine-gunning from enemy aircraft, but losses were minimal, despite the dropping of 10kg bombs, followed by a miscellany of missiles no doubt recovered from a Tsarist arsenal, that included boxes of glass grenades crammed with darts and incendiary devices. The Ruskoné section of Lieutenant Wagner’s 7th of the 58th, which was marching at the tail of the column, managed to shoot down one of the aircraft with an automatic rifle.

In the middle of the night of the 27th/28th an hour’s rest was taken in Bad Polzin in falling snow and a glacial wind. After marching for the rest of the night and having passed on the way several meagre armoured elements, towards 0600 hours the vanguard of the column reached an area several kilometres south of Belgard, where regrouping and reorganisation were to take place.

28 February 1945

Various elements of the Charlemagne kept arriving all day on the 28th, including SS-Major-General Krukenberg, who had come from Elsenau via Flötenstein and Köslin.

It had originally been intended that the reorganisation of the Charlemagne would take place at Köslin, an important town on the edge of the Baltic, but this town was already being threatened by Marshal Rokossovsky’s tanks, which had been advancing along the axis Baldenburg–Bublitz–Köslin since the fighting at Hammerstein. Köslin was in fact taken by the Russians on the evening of 2 March, thus shutting off the immense pocket of Danzig-Gothenhafen held by the German 2nd Army. The Soviet tanks then turned off east along the Baltic coast via Stolp and Neustadt.

1 March 1945