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

The senior French officer was still Colonel Puaud, who had expected to be appointed to the same rank as Krukenberg, but the Germans did not want to have a French SS-General among their ranks, and only accorded him the rank of SS-Oberführer (Brigadier). However, in an interview with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler at the SS Main office in Berlin, Puaud was given the following assurances:

1. The Brigade would fight under the French flag.

2. One would avoid, as far as possible, engaging it on a front where it would find itself exposed to fighting other Frenchmen.

3. Although the Brigade was an SS unit, the practice of Christian religions in it would be absolutely free of restraint.

4. Finally, the capital point, in case of a German victory, the integrity of French national territory and its colonies would be scrupulously guaranteed.

The Vichy Government had been compulsorily removed to the German town of Sigmaringen on the Danube in August, causing both Marshal Pétain and Laval to refuse to continue to function in their roles. However, they had appointed Fernand de Brinon, who had been Vichy’s official Delegate in the Occupied Zone, to exercise his authority on behalf of the French citizens on German soil (POWs and workers) as head of the so-called French Governmental Delegation in Sigmaringen.

Krukenberg suspected that the French Governmental Delegation was considering fielding the Charlemagne on the Western Front, which would have been totally against the volunteers’ terms of enlistment. Krukenberg later wrote of Puaud that:

…when he was nominated commander of the Charlemagne in September 1944, the latter had told the OKW in the name of both units that their volunteers agreed to their transfer to the new Division. It was impossible to verify to what extent he was justified in making such a declaration. In any case, on the day of arrival of the newly appointed Inspector, a certain number of volunteers opposed the transfer, upon which Puaud, without authority and without the knowledge of the new Inspector (Krukenberg), sent the opponents to a concentration camp. Next day the Inspector had them brought back by his intelligence officer and demobilised them.

The OKW had forbidden the Inspector all contact with Sigmaringen. Should the need arise, contact would be conducted in either direction by the OKW. The SS Main Office alone remained competent on all questions of enrolment or assignment of volunteers and for all units formed from foreigners.

The unification of the various comprising units gave rise to much debate and friction as a consequence of the different aims of the volunteers in each of these units from the outset. The opposing views of the various political parties were fortunately more artificial than realistic and all these volunteers were agreed on the absolute necessity of the fight against Bolshevism.

The principal component remained the LVF, which had the distinction of having been first in battle. Purged by its long campaign in Russia, it no longer contained any of the doubtful elements or arrivistes of 1941–1942. The LVF, despite its revised appellation as Wehrmacht Grenadier-Regiment 638, regarded itself with pride as an exclusively French unit, part of the French Army, commanded in French by French officers under the French flag, representing France on the Russian Front according to the instructions of the legitimate head of the French state, Marshal Pétain.