Wiking Volunteer Veteran: ϟϟ-Rottenführer der Waffen-SS Bergstrand

SS-Rottenführer Thord Bergstrand managed to avoid capture by the Soviets

Triumphant Soviet troops swarm on the streets of Budapest

Germans captured by the Soviets could expect severe treatment and even death

Soviet occupation troops openly harass a Leipziger woman

SS-Rottenführer Tord Bergstrand from Danderyd in Stockholm became the last remaining Swede with SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 9 Germania of the 5.SS-Panzer-Division Wiking. Before he joined the Waffen-SS, Bergstrand had fought in the Swedish Volunteer Battalion in Finland. He served with the Wiking Division from late fall 1942 till the end of the war in 1945. After the heavy fighting that followed when the German advance in the eastern Caucasus was halted, Bergstrand was sent to the SS-Junkerschule Klagenfurt where he graduated in 1943. Tord Bergstrand recollected life at the front in the Swedish Nazi Party's official organ DSNS under the pseudonym Röde Orm. His articles provide insight into the lives of Swedish combatants. He expressed sympathy for the helpless civilians whose suffering was blamed on communist rule. Bergstrand often described very vivid how the Russians were mutilating living Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS prisoners to death, and other gruesome events. On one occasion in early 1943, they had came across a German Red Cross train in Stalino, now Donetsk; all the trains transported wounded soldiers had been tortured and murdered and the nurses mutilated in the most vile way, their eyes had been gouged out and their breasts cut off. Tord Bergstrand fought the Soviet Red Army in Finland, in the Caucasus, Ukraine, Poland and in Wikings final major offensive of World War II, the Budapest relief efforts, were he was severly wounded. After having used his last bullets on, as he putted it, two Russians and a rabbit, Bergstrand was hit by shrapnel in the back and leg. Budapest was by then only 21 kilometres away. The wounded Bergstrand was transported into Austria, his Company Commander explained that the war was over, but urged his men to continue the struggle. In May 1945, Bergstrand fled American captivity in Austria in a horse-drawn cart with a comrade from the same regiment, the Dane SS-Scharführer Kristen Lorentsen. Bergstrand then tricked the American authorities in München to hire him as Military Police with Allied Forces before he returned back to Sweden with a fellow-countryman, named SS-Unterscharführer Frank Gustavsson. Gustavsson had been assigned to the ill-fated 38.SS-Grenadier-Division Nibelungen, formed on March 27 1945 as the last of the thirty-eight Waffen-SS divisions to be organized. Credit: Lars T. Larsson. Top image: the Germania veteran Tord Bergstrand avoided falling into Soviet hands. Bergstrand was born in 1919 and died aged 63 in 1982 in Stockholm. Second image: just like elsewhere in communist-occupied Europe, the Soviet occupation troops that arrived in Hungary and Austria were reportedly badly undisciplined. They committed horrendous acts of rape, violence, and humiliation against the residents of Budapest and Wien. All elite troops and volunteers who had fought the Soviet regime were, of course, in the greatest danger. Photo by Ukrainian-born Jewish officer and photographer Yevgeny Khaldei at Üllői út in Budapest in March 1945. Credit: Fortepan. All photos in the PD.