SS Fallschirmjäger Question

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panzerIV
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SS Fallschirmjäger Question

#1

Post by panzerIV » 14 Mar 2005, 16:51

Hello, I wonder if the SS fallshirmjäger wore their SS eagle on teh breast of ther LW smock(the army paras wore the army eagle so...). I think I have seen a pic somewhere...

Cheers, Magnus

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#2

Post by eindhoven » 14 Mar 2005, 19:37

The consensus in the collector community is that they wore the Luftwaffe eagles or non at all. Examples exist showing the SS eagle of different design on the right breast in the same manner of the Luftwaffe. This is from collectors smocks taken unissued and not from photographic evidence though. The eagle is not the standard EM arm eagle and is sort of a guarded secret among those in the know.

Also, there is a majority rule among veteran collectors that they did not wear runed Fallschirmjägerhelm contrary to the examples out there. Some appear to be authentic decals but the vast majority believe they are postwar as no 'photographic evidence' or veteran accounts relate decaled FJ lids.

Can you dig it?


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#3

Post by Milorg » 14 Mar 2005, 21:52

I in the James Lucas book Komando there are pictures of the 500 SS FJ Bn Zbv. where they wear FJ helmets with helmet nets.
I have also seen pics from german wartime propaganda from the rescue of Mussolini, and the paras wear FJ helmets, but not all of them.
James Lucas also states that the 500s not consisted of penal soldiers at all, and that this only was allied bad intelligence.

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#4

Post by tommy303 » 15 Mar 2005, 03:00

A close friend of mine, who served in the unit at the time of the Drvar operation, confirms that at that time at least the battalion was partly made up of soldiers who had been courtmartialled for various offenses, so it was in part a penal battalion. He was an NCO and had been secundered to the battalion from the 10 SS Panzerdivision as a communications specialist and to enforce discipline. It is possible that following Drvar, during which operation the battalion suffered heavy casualties, it ceased being any kind of penal unit leading to a certain amount of confusion regarding its status.

thomas

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#5

Post by Hans Reichmann » 15 Mar 2005, 03:21

i know this is a dumb question but what was the point of SS fallschrim.?

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#6

Post by Milorg » 16 Mar 2005, 16:27

Hans Reichmann wrote:i know this is a dumb question but what was the point of SS fallschrim.?
Well... on one side why do Britain, US and others field units who on the paper can do the same things?
On the other side the third reich had huge rivalry betwen the different arms. In the begining of the war the heer and luftwaffe where the stronge ones but, after BoB, El Alamein, Stalingrad and others, the SS became stronger and stronger.
Raids like the ones "saving" Mussolini, Trying to capture Tito, and others, could have been carried out by other units. But by that time Skorzeny(sp?) had taken control of most SF units and the regular paras had few reminding members with combat jumps, so why not make a new unit from Skorzenys own SS, not the distrusted Luftwaffe.
Moste of the late war jumps where also more political than military, give pr to the SS(lives on today). Mussolini opr. vs. Eben Emael.
Just my two cent's
Sorry as always for my inexcusable bad spelling and English :)

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#7

Post by Paddy Keating » 20 Mar 2005, 23:57

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 6:37 pm
The consensus in the collector community is that they wore the Luftwaffe eagles or non at all. Examples exist showing the SS eagle of different design on the right breast in the same manner of the Luftwaffe. This is from collectors smocks taken unissued and not from photographic evidence though. The eagle is not the standard EM arm eagle and is sort of a guarded secret among those in the know.

Also, there is a majority rule among veteran collectors that they did not wear runed Fallschirmjägerhelm contrary to the examples out there. Some appear to be authentic decals but the vast majority believe they are postwar as no 'photographic evidence' or veteran accounts relate decaled FJ lids.

Can you dig it?
It's not so much a "consensus" but merely the result of looking at the numerous photos of the battalion in action and speaking with the dwindling number of veterans of SS-Fallschirmjäger-Btl 500 and 600. Some of them unpicked the LW eagles from their standard-issue smocks. Some didn't. Some of them removed the LW decal from their M38 jump helmets. Some didn't. Many received helmets without decals.

Regarding the question of the SS-pattern eagles on the right breast of the handful of smocks known to exist in Waffen-SS camouflage material, the one I examined appeared to be a perfectly normal eagle machine-embroidered on black wool. This gives weight to the feeling amongst those of us who've studied this unit in depth that the eagles were added after WW2 as one would have expected the Dachau clothing works to attach the BeVo eagles in general use by that late stage of events. There is, however, a photo of an SS-Fallschirmjäger MG crew in the Memel sector, in which the gunner has clearly sewn what appears to be a BeVo arm eagle to the sleeve of his LW-issue splinter pattern smock.

Not a single photograph amongst the thousands taken by SS and LW Kreigsberichter and members of the unit shows a jump helmet with the runic decal. I am not aware of any veteran saying that he ever saw one. In fact, they tend to be quite emphatic that nobody decorated their jump helmets in this manner. Moreover, no factory would have supplied any jump helmets thus-adorned for the simple reason that the High Command had banned decals months before the SS Para Bn was even conceived.
A close friend of mine, who served in the unit at the time of the Drvar operation, confirms that at that time at least the battalion was partly made up of soldiers who had been courtmartialled for various offenses, so it was in part a penal battalion. He was an NCO and had been secundered to the battalion from the 10 SS Panzerdivision as a communications specialist and to enforce discipline. It is possible that following Drvar, during which operation the battalion suffered heavy casualties, it ceased being any kind of penal unit leading to a certain amount of confusion regarding its status.
Penal cases were not invited to apply to join. The recruits in question were Bewährungs-Schützen - aka B-Soldaten convicted in the main of fairly minor offences against the draconian SS penal code. The idea was that they could redeem their honour on the battlefield. The kind of offences in question included being late on duty. One fellow who applied to join but was sent off to the Dirlewanger Brigade because he was unfit for parachute training had been sentenced to death for listening to the BBC! His sentence was commuted to fifteen years with hard labour in the quarries of Mauthausen. Another was a young Norwegian who got ten years for shooting himself in the hand to get away from the front. One man was a former LSSAH officer busted for being homosexual.

Theh there was an officer who kept his rank in return for transferring to the paras because he'd had an affair with a brother officer's wife! That file is hilarious, especially with Himmler's tight-assed little annotations about the episode. Then there was a sergeant who was done for stealing from comrades' lockers, a heinous crime in Waffen-SS circles where locking your locker was frowned upon. Some of them were officers and other ranks who blotted their copybooks politically-speaking but the weirdest case was the NCO who didn't get ahead in the Wiking because he was a Nazi! As soon as he buckled and put in for a transfer, he was commissioned. And so the list goes on. But hardly the rapists and murderers evoked by the use of the term "penal". The last of the disciplinary cases removed his blank collar patches as the handful of survivors from SS-Fallschirmjäger-Btl 500 were told that they were being transferred from active service to the newly-forming SS-Fallschirmjäger-Btl 600.
I in the James Lucas book Komando there are pictures of the 500 SS FJ Bn Zbv. where they wear FJ helmets with helmet nets.
I have also seen pics from german wartime propaganda from the rescue of Mussolini, and the paras wear FJ helmets, but not all of them.
James Lucas also states that the 500s not consisted of penal soldiers at all, and that this only was allied bad intelligence.eindhoven
The Waffen-SS commandos at Gran Sasso under Skorzeny were not paras but they were issued with Luftwaffe topical kit and jump smocks and helmets for the operation, which was planned and executed by Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger. Skorzeny and his SS-Jagdverbände contingent were not slated for the gliderborne phase of the operation and they got to go by throwing some very unhappy LW Fallschirmjäger out of their gliders just before take-off. Lucas is good but perhaps took too much of Onkle Otto's version of history at face value. Not that I am suggesting that Skorzeny was other than a brave soldier and skilled commander but he was also an inveterate self-publicist and bullshitter.

PK

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#8

Post by Panzerfaust XxX » 22 Mar 2005, 23:17

Was the SS Fallschirmjäger a kind of "super-elite"? I think Otto Skorzeny was one. I don't know to much about them. from what I have read on this forum they sound pretty tough. What kind of missions did they do?

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#9

Post by Paddy Keating » 23 Mar 2005, 01:23

Do a Google.

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#10

Post by panzerIV » 23 Mar 2005, 11:45

Found this pic on Google: http://www.chakoten.dk/images/ss-fsj500_404.gif

Seems like he has the SS eagle on his sleeve(but it's a painted pic so...)

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#11

Post by Paddy Keating » 23 Mar 2005, 22:33

Here's a photo of some NCOs of SS-Fallschirmjäger-Btl 500.
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#12

Post by Texas Kubelwagen » 09 Apr 2005, 16:52

Antonio Munoz's "Forgotten Legions: Obscure Combat Formations of the Waffen-SS" has about 100+ pages devoted JUST to the SS-Fallschirmjager Bataillon 500/600.

The point of the unit was essentially Hitler's wish that it be created. It was part of his belief that, as the war started to wane, that the Heer was full of the 'defeatist germ' and only the Waffen-SS units could be fully relied on. In his belief, the SS units were winners because they were politically indoctrinated to the cause...nevermind of course that the SS got the best men and materials as replacements, and quickly, whereas their Heer counterparts had to scrape theirs up from the remnants.

However, the SS Parachute Battalion started more as a penal unit for the SS, but one where the men so assigned could distinguish themselves enough to clean up their record. They would then have the choice of returning to their original unit, or remaining with the Parachute Battalion. Few of its members ever opted to return to their unit once given the choice.

Exerpts from Munoz's excellent book:

"The men who made up the SS Parachute Battalion had to pay a high price. A total of 3,000 to 3,500 men served in the battalion from one time to another. When the war ended, 180 had survived unscathed. What better indivator of how heavily engaged the battalion was during its brief existence than these heavy losses?"

"The newly created SS_Fallschirmjager-Bataillon 500 received only court-martialed officers and men who hoped to distinguish themselves enough to have their sentences commuted and their former ranks restored...The disciplinary cases were overseen by Section-III, an integral part of the SS Parachute Battalion, which contained an SS lawyer with a clerical staff for keeping records on the probationary cases."

"Initial formation of the battalion was carried out at Chlum in Czechoslovakia. Command of the battalion was at first given to SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Herbert Gilhofer. The thirty-three-year-old Gilhofer had been the commander of SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 21 (10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg). After failing to carry out an order, he was removed from his command and sent to the SS Parachute Battalion. His tour with the battalion lasted until mid-April 1944. In 1945, he returned to the Frundsberg Division - this time as commander of the III/SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 22."

"It is interesting to note that the SS Parachute Battalion was organized quite differently from a regular Luftwaffe parachute battalion. The main difference was the relatively self-contained structure of this SS unit. The SS Parachute Battalion had its own training company, which the Luftwaffe battalion did not, and while the table-fo-organization (T/O) strength of the Luftwaffe battalion headquarters listed 138 men on paper, the SS equivalent was around 267 men - almost twice as many."

Organization of thie unit:

-Battalion Staff Company
One supply company
One reporting squad
One signals platoon
One motorcycle dispatch squad
One maintenance platoon
One parachute maintenance platoon
-1st Parachute Rifle Company
Three parachute firle platoons, plus a communications squad
-2nd Parachute Rifle Company
Same as 1st
-3rd Parachute Rifle Company
Same as 1st

Note - Each parachute rifle platoon contained three rifle squads, three light submachine-gun squads, and a mortar squad.

-4th Heavy Weapons Parachute Company
One machine-gun platoon
One mortar platoon
One flamethrower platoon
One antitank platoon



I haven't read the entire selection, but I believe I read that the unit made one combat jump in Yugoslavia, in an operation against Tito's headquarters. I could be wrong, I need to read the whole thing. As I said, it's a LOT of information. I've tried to provide a few snippets above. Hope it's interesting!

-Michael E.

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#13

Post by Miha Grcar » 09 Apr 2005, 18:14

Texas Kubelwagen wrote:I haven't read the entire selection, but I believe I read that the unit made one combat jump in Yugoslavia, in an operation against Tito's headquarters. I could be wrong, I need to read the whole thing. As I said, it's a LOT of information. I've tried to provide a few snippets above. Hope it's interesting!

-Michael E.
Interresting stuff.
About the parashute jump: The Battalion made the jump on 25th May 1944 in operation Rosselsprung, with which they hoped to kill or capture Tito on the island of Drvar with support of other units.

best,
Nibelung

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#14

Post by Paddy Keating » 09 Apr 2005, 20:13

Texas Kubelwagen wrote:Antonio Munoz's "Forgotten Legions: Obscure Combat Formations of the Waffen-SS" has about 100+ pages devoted JUST to the SS-Fallschirmjager Bataillon 500/600.

The point of the unit was essentially Hitler's wish that it be created. It was part of his belief that, as the war started to wane, that the Heer was full of the 'defeatist germ' and only the Waffen-SS units could be fully relied on. In his belief, the SS units were winners because they were politically indoctrinated to the cause...nevermind of course that the SS got the best men and materials as replacements, and quickly, whereas their Heer counterparts had to scrape theirs up from the remnants.
Not quite true.
However, the SS Parachute Battalion started more as a penal unit for the SS, but one where the men so assigned could distinguish themselves enough to clean up their record. They would then have the choice of returning to their original unit, or remaining with the Parachute Battalion. Few of its members ever opted to return to their unit once given the choice.
Again, not quite true. A proportion of the recruits in the first few intakes were B-Schützen. SS-Fallschirmjäger-Btl 500 was not a penal unit. Quite a few members of the battalion returned to their original units or transferred to new units after service with the paras.
Exerpts from Munoz's excellent book:

"The men who made up the SS Parachute Battalion had to pay a high price. A total of 3,000 to 3,500 men served in the battalion from one time to another. When the war ended, 180 had survived unscathed. What better indivator of how heavily engaged the battalion was during its brief existence than these heavy losses?"
Fair comment, although some would disagree with the estimated figures of men who served with the battalion.
"The newly created SS_Fallschirmjager-Bataillon 500 received only court-martialed officers and men who hoped to distinguish themselves enough to have their sentences commuted and their former ranks restored...
Not true.
The disciplinary cases were overseen by Section-III, an integral part of the SS Parachute Battalion, which contained an SS lawyer with a clerical staff for keeping records on the probationary cases."
True.
"Initial formation of the battalion was carried out at Chlum in Czechoslovakia. Command of the battalion was at first given to SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Herbert Gilhofer. The thirty-three-year-old Gilhofer had been the commander of SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 21 (10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg). After failing to carry out an order, he was removed from his command and sent to the SS Parachute Battalion. His tour with the battalion lasted until mid-April 1944. In 1945, he returned to the Frundsberg Division - this time as commander of the III/SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 22."
This is true of Gilhofer. However, while Chlum was given as the battalion's initial location, the training company actually set up in Kraljevo, with Fallschirmschule 3 down the road at Matarushka Banja and it was to Kraljevo that new recruits started reporting in October and November 1943.
"It is interesting to note that the SS Parachute Battalion was organized quite differently from a regular Luftwaffe parachute battalion. The main difference was the relatively self-contained structure of this SS unit. The SS Parachute Battalion had its own training company, which the Luftwaffe battalion did not, and while the table-fo-organization (T/O) strength of the Luftwaffe battalion headquarters listed 138 men on paper, the SS equivalent was around 267 men - almost twice as many."
Yup. True.

Organization of thie unit:

-Battalion Staff Company
One supply company
One reporting squad
One signals platoon
One motorcycle dispatch squad
One maintenance platoon
One parachute maintenance platoon
-1st Parachute Rifle Company
Three parachute firle platoons, plus a communications squad
-2nd Parachute Rifle Company
Same as 1st
-3rd Parachute Rifle Company
Same as 1st

Note - Each parachute rifle platoon contained three rifle squads, three light submachine-gun squads, and a mortar squad.

-4th Heavy Weapons Parachute Company
One machine-gun platoon
One mortar platoon
One flamethrower platoon
One antitank platoon
This is how the ORBAT looked at one time but the battalion underwent various administrative changes so this is not definitve.
I haven't read the entire selection, but I believe I read that the unit made one combat jump in Yugoslavia, in an operation against Tito's headquarters. I could be wrong, I need to read the whole thing. As I said, it's a LOT of information. I've tried to provide a few snippets above. Hope it's interesting!

-Michael E.
The combat elements of the battalion carried out a parachute and glider assault with attached arms against Tito's headquarters in the Bosnian town of Drvar on 25.5.1944. It was their only airborne operation althought they were scheduled for others, which were cancelled.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking Munoz's work, which should be part of any library of books about German airborne and commando warfare in WW2. But a former CO of SS-Fallschirmjäger-Btl 500 and 600, the late Siegfried Milius, described Munoz rather disdainfully as a writer of fiction presenting dramatised accounts as if they were fact. It's quite a damning critique from the former CO of the battalion. Other former members with whom I have spoken have expressed gratitude that Munoz wrote about their unit but regret that he got various things wrong. One way to seriously annoy a former Waffen-SS paratrooper is to describe his unit as a penal battalion!

Nibelung,

Drvar is not not an island. It's a landlocked Bosnian town. Perhaps you are thinking of Vis, where Tito established his HQ afterwards?

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#15

Post by Miha Grcar » 09 Apr 2005, 20:23

:oops: YES Paddy! God, I'm such an IDIOT!

best,
Miha / Nibelung

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