Spaniards in Waffen-SS

[Mattlander]

I have a question regarding the Spanish SS volunteers in Berlin.
In several sources the name "Einsatzgruppe Ezquerra" or "SS-Einsatzgruppe Ezquerra" are used. And I have also seen the names "SS-Sturmbataillon Ezquerra" and so on. What is the proper term? Are there any WW2 documents where this unit is named? Or is the "Einsatzgruppe Ezquerra" term made up by researchers or veterans to give the unit a name?
I do have the "True Belivers" and there the unit is called the "Einsatzgruppe Ezquerra"

Best Regards,
Dan

Ive heard it as SS battalion Ezquerra. Im not sure exactly what the designated unit name was.

[panzertruppe2001]

In the book "Spanish Civil War 1936-1939/Germany's Spanish Volunteers 1941-1945" by Patrick Turnbull, John Scurr and Richard Hook (in spanish) Ediciones del Prado 1995 is it named as Unidad Esquerra (Esquerra Unit)

[Rob - wssob2]

In several sources the name "Einsatzgruppe Ezquerra" or "SS-Einsatzgruppe Ezquerra" are used. And I have also seen the names "SS-Sturmbataillon Ezquerra" and so on. What is the proper term?

Einsatzgruppe = replacement group

Sturmbattalion = assault battalion

Are there any WW2 documents where this unit is named?

None that I've seen. Ezquerra claimed in his postwar memoirs that he commanded a unit of Spanish SS men during the Battle of Berlin. I have never seen any mention of his supposed unit in any book on the Berlin battle, and the W-SS unit index Die Waffen-SS und Polizei doesn't list his unit either.

A unit which is well documented is the Spanische-Freiwilligen-Kompanie der SS 101 - a company of Spanish volunteers who wished to continue fighting for Germany even after the withdrawal of Spanish governmental support for Nazi Germany. They were originally formed by the Heer but absorbed by the SS in March 1945. The volunteers, never more than perhaps 300, were former Blue Division & Blue Legion veterans who stayed behind in Germany and perhaps plus an additional 150 Spaniards who crossed the sealed borders into France and onward to Waffen-SS recruiting stations.

However, there's no definitive proof that the unit ended up in Berlin. Spanische-Freiwilligen-Kompanie der SS 101 may have been assigned to the 3rd Company, I Battalion, 70th Panzergrenadier Regiment of the 28th SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadier Division Wallonien. Spanish historian Fernando Vadillo in his book Los Irreductibles: La Gran Cronica de la Division Azul (Garcia Hispan, Editor: Granada, 1997) lists the 101st Company in Hron, Slovakia in early 1945.

The Soviets released the 21 surviving Spanish Waffen-SS POWs in 1954.

Esquerra himself seems a bit of a fraud, with all his accounts of battlefield promotions and meeting Hitler, etc.

[Mattlander]

there are many books that reference Spanish SS men fighting during the Berlin battle. To name a few well known books: "Armor Battles of the Waffen SS 1943-1945" , "Fall of Berlin 1945", "Die SS".

[Kurt_Steiner]

IIRC, the Spaniards are also mentioned -briefly- in Ernst-Günther Schenck's Ich sah Berlin sterben, but, as Rob states, I don't think we can know for sure where their last stand took place.

[Mattlander]

IIRC, the Spaniards are also mentioned -briefly- in Ernst-Günther Schenck's Ich sah Berlin sterben, but, as Rob states, I don't think we can know for sure where their last stand took place.

I know i have read it somewhere before. apparently SS Captain Henri Fenet even came under the command of a few small elements of that group in his mixed unit at one point in the battle... Somewhere in between defending Neukölln/HermmanPlatz and Belle-Alliance Platz near the Reich Chancellery sector (with all forces in sector under command of Mohnke if i remember right).

[panzertruppe2001]

Marcus site mentioned two Spanish Waffen SS companies in Berlin. The 101 and 102.

http://www.axishistory.com/index.php?id=2022

http://www.axishistory.com/index.php?id=2023

Panzertruppe2001

[florecita36]

Hello! about SS Brigadeführer Hansen,any book or more information of him?i cannot find nothing about his rol in Waffen-SS?!

Thank you

[Dan E. Moe]

Thank you for the reply. According to "True Believers: Spanish Volunteers in the Waffen-SS 1944-45", the 101 and 102 company was a part of the Heer and not the Waffen-SS. This is the first place where I have seen it listed as an Heer unit. Any thoughts?

Dan

[Mattlander]

ive heard that 102 was not, but they are listed as so in other sources. Plus i once saw a picture of a German Stalhelm dug up during Maintenance work in Berlin a few years ago. It was a stalhelm with the SS runes on it with Spanish flag colors.

[Rob - wssob2]

SS-Brigadeführer Peter Hansen - a brief summary:

* Born 1896 Chile (volkdeutsche)
* Career soldier, served WWI, then Freikorps, then Reichwehr
* 1939-41: served in SSVT
* 1943: Commanding Officer, 15th SS Division
* 1944: CO, 29th SS Division (Italian)
* Chief of Staff, XVIII SS-Korps

[Rob - wssob2]

Hi Mattlander,
Where specifically is Ezquerra mentioned in Fey’s book Armor Battles of the Waffen-SS? I just reread the chapter “The Final Battle for Berlin – Konigstigers in Their Last Action”, which include accounts by SS-PzAbt503 members SS-Obersturmfuhrer Fritz Kauerauf, SS-Unterscharfuhrer Georg Diers and French SS volunteer Henri Fenet on the fighting in the Berlin city center. None of these guys, who fought right where the Ezquerra unit was supposedly fighting, mention the unit, and Fenet only makes a passing reference to “Spaniards” fighting in Berlin.

Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle (Simon & Schuster, 1966) makes no mention of Ezquerra or his unit. Nor does John Toland’s The Last 100 Days (Random House, 1965)

Here is specifically what John Scurr’s Germany’s Spanish Volunteers 1941-45 (Osprey, 1980) says about Ezquerra and his unit on p. 30:

”…In April 1945 a former Blue Division Captain, Miguel Ezquerra, who was now an SS Colonel, commanded three companies of Spaniards plus some survivors from Belgian and French SS Divisions. The men of the “Unit Ezquerra” were amongst the last troops fighting the Russians in the rubble around Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin. Though taken prisoner, Ezquerra made a miraculous escape all the way home to Spain.

Tony Munoz has a brief chapter about Spanish SS volunteers in his opus Forgotten Legions (Axis Europa, 1991) , which includes this excerpt about the April – May 1945 period:

The story of the Waffen-SS Spanish contingent now gets hazy. There is less corroborating evidence as to the sequence of events. The Spanish 101st Company (its remnants) ended up in Berlin for that city’s defense under the 11.SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadier Division Nordland. It fought especially hard in the defense of Moritz Platz, the large plaze surrounding the German Air Force Ministry and the Ministry of Propaganda. The Latvian 15th Fusilier Battalion of the Waffen-SS fought alongside the Spaniards towards the end of the battle for Berlin. What is definitely known is that Waffen-Obersturmfuhrer Miguel Ezquerra took command of these die-hard Spaniards during Berlin’s final agony.

Christopher Ailsby in his book Hitler’s Renegades: Foreign Nationals in the Service of the Third Reich (Brassey’s, 2004) makes a passing reference to the 101st Company fighting in Berlin but nothing about Ezquerra or his unit.

Here’s an excerpt from Wayne H. Bowen’s internet essay THE GHOST BATTALION: SPANIARDS IN THE WAFFEN-SS, 1944-1945

”… Miguel Ezquerra, a veteran of the Blue Division and then a captain in the Waffen-SS, led another small unit into the Battle of the Bulge. He and his men previously had served German counterintelligence in France, fighting against Spanish exiles in the Resistance.(41) Later called the Einheit Ezquerra (Ezquerra Unit), this formation was closely linked to General Wilhelm Faupel, former German Ambassador to Spain, and his Ibero-American Institute, a research center in Berlin that promoted closer Hispano-German and Nazi-Falangist ties.(42) In January 1945, Ezquerra was commissioned to enlist all the Spaniards he could find into one unit, which he would command as a Waffen-SS major.(43) These enlistments greatly troubled the Spanish government, which viewed with alarm news of Spaniards serving in the SS and other Nazi organizations. Apart from the dangers confronting these men, the Franco regime was concerned that they were still wearing the emblem of the Blue Division, a shield with the colors of the Spanish flag, and the word word "Espana" on their uniforms, an obvious and visible compromise of Spanish neutrality. Franco ordered his diplomats remaining in Germany to dissuade Spanish workers from joining the Waffen-SS or German armed forces, but despite the dramatic changes in the European situation, as late as October 1944 some volunteers were still petitioning to be sent to work in Germany.(44) ....

The Red Army launched its final offensive against Berlin on 16 April, sending into battle hundreds of thousands of men, tens of thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, and an air force that owned the German skies. The city was a fortress, surrounded by five rings of fortifications guaranteed to make the Soviet assault a costly one. Rejecting the pleas of his military and political advisers to fly out of the Berlin pocket, Hitler decided to remain and personally lead the defense of the city, entrusting Joseph Goebbels to embolden the last defenders of Nazism.(49) The Battle of Berlin was an international struggle, pitting Stalin's multiethnic Soviet Army against the outnumbered and outgunned remnants of Hitler's New Order. While the vast majority of Berlin's defenders were Germans in the regular army of the Wehrmacht, Frenchmen, Norwegians, Danes, Italians, Dutch, Romanians, Belgians, Hungarians, and other nationalities, mostly in the Waffen-SS, also defended the dying capital of the Third Reich.(50) In the "apocalyptic atmosphere" of this brutal battle, Spanish accents could be heard from the small band of Iberians remaining in Germany.(51) “

Former forum member “Ostuf Charlemagne” claimed to have met Ezquerra in 1976 and brought up some interesting points – a couple of which I will elaborate on further – at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=12190


The first published sources about “Gruppe Ezquerra” are Ezquerra’s own biography Berlin, A Vida o Muerte (San Martin, Madrid, 1975) and the aforementioned Blue Division veteran Francisco Vadillo’s Los Irreducilibles )republished 1997)

Boiling down Ezquerra’s claims (or at least claims later authors made about him) would look something like this:

1. He served with Skorzeny’s commando unit during the Battle of the Bulge.

2. He commanded an unit of Spanish SS troops fighting in the center of Berlin circa April 30, 1945

3. He claimed to be a Lt. Col. (SS-Obersturmbanfuhrer), personally promoted by Hitler

4. He claimed to have met various Third Reich major personalities, including Goebbels, Bormann, etc. during the last days of the bunker.

5. He claims to have been personally awarded the Knight’s Cross by Hitler

Putting these claims under scrutiny:

1. There is absolutely not a shred of evidence that links Ezquerra or any Spaniard with Skorzeny’s 150. Panzerbrigade during the Ardennes offensive. Michael Schadewitz’s masterful unit history The Meuse First and Then Antwerp: Some Aspects of Hitler’s Offensive in the Ardennes, for example, makes no mention of it.

2. There is no mention of Gruppe Ezquerra in postwar compilations of SS-FHA unit indexes such as Kurt Mehner’s Die Waffen-SS und Polizei. General-history accounts of the battle of Berlin (e.g. The Last Battle make no mention of it. SS tank veterans such as Fritz Kauerauf and Georg Diers, both of whom fought in exactly the same spots that Ezquerra supposedly fought make absolutely no mention of Spanish SS troops but do mention events and personalities that can be successfully cross-referenced with other sources. French SS veteran Henri Fenet makes only a passing reference to “Spaniards” fighting in Berlin but nothing specific about Ezquerra or his unit. (BTW his account in the Fey book does NOT mention his serving UNDER Ezquerra)

3. I have never seen any corroborating evidence in any account of Hitler’s bunker in the final days of the Reich that Hitler met Ezquerra, or even promoted Ezquerra (supposedly the last promotion the Fuhrer ever made). Ezquerra’s promotion history while serving with the Heer/SS in late 1944/45 could be charitably described as murky. Ezquerra claimed all his promotions – including the ones made by Heer officers – were oral. Even “Ostuf Charlemagne,” as unabashedly pro-fascist and pro-Nazi that he was, admitted in his post above that Ezquerra’s promotion history was “a big mystery,” that they were not officially recorded and speculated that maybe his “Lt.-Col.” Stature was a honorary postwar “promotion” by the SS veterans organization HIAG.

4. Again, I’ve never seen a shred of evidence in any account of the Bunker that mentioned Ezquerra

5. Again, no shred of evidence in any account of the Bunker that mentioned Hitler bestowing a Knight’s Cross on Ezquerra. Given the pedantic minute-by-minute accounts of the final days of Hitler, if this event did happen, then it’s a glaring omission made by not only survivor’s testimony but by postwar researchers.

[Mattlander]

i never said Fenet mentions Ezquerra directly. I only said that he clearly references Spanish soldiers during the fighting at a certain point.

and as for a bunch of specific information and direct references on such a small group of soldiers. It's very unlikely that you would find much information. Its almost like asking what happened to a specific company from RAD Gruppe 100, or a small Hitler youth tank hunting echelon. Asking about the actions/descriptions of anything less than one specific company is like asking about a needle in a haystack if you see what i'm getting at....Doesn't necessarily mean that there was no small Ezquerra battle group.

Thanks for sharing those references.

[Kurt_Steiner]

When the 28. Wallonien is fighthing in Unternehem Sonnenwende, the Spanish volunteers of the 3ª Komp./I 70 SS Reg. are there, too?

[Parsifal]

Sorry for the necropost. Any new information on Latinamericans in the WSS? I know Mexico had a sizeable population of german descent that sympathized with the nazis back then.
Doesn't one of the officer characters in Das Boot claim that he's from Mexico?