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| Junkers Ju 52 in the Demyansk Pocket |
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| Festung Demjansk or Kessel von Demjansk |
The German defense was throttled by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's standing orders against tactical retreat, leaving the forward divisions little choice but to hold on to their initial positions even when penetrated or overrun. The deft counterattacks by the Waffen-SS repeatedly exploited speed, surprise, and shock action to destroy or scatter numerically superior Soviet forces. The task of providing the surrounded soldiers at Demyansk and Kholm with everything necessary fell on the wings of Luftwaffe. Without the airport, on which, on the average 400,000 kg of supply were landed daily, the defenders of the cauldron could have hardly held on. The men of the Danish Volunteer-Corps Frikorps Danmark and the German Luftwaffe came into the cauldron, the wounded went out. The supplies were delivered through over 100 flights of Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft per day. Everything went in by air: Swedish tent quarters made of pressed millboards, ammunition, food, petrol, mail and recruits. The success of the Luftwaffe convinced both Reichsmarsall Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler that they could conduct effective airlift operations on the Eastern Front. However, the cost was significant. The Luftwaffe lost 265 aircraft, including 106 Junkers Ju 52, 17 Heinkel He 111 and two Junkers Ju 86 aircraft. After the siege was broken, the brutal and violent commander of the SS-Division Totenkopf Theodor Eicke secured a private audience with Hitler at the
Wolfsschanze east of the Ostpreußen town of Rastenburg, in present-day Poland. Eicke bluntly described the situation to him. The Führer promised Eicke that he would withdraw the division in August if the situation south of Lake Ilmen remained stable. When he finally brought the remnants out of the salient in October, it had repulsed several more major Soviet attacks. By then the Totenkopf had been bled white holding Demyansk. Credit: the author Patrick W. McTaggart. Top image: the Führer with members of his personal bodyguard unit, the Führerbegleitkommando, at the Wolfsschanze or the Wolf’s Lair: August Körber, Adolf Dirr,
Erich Kempka, Adolf Hitler, Bruno Gesche and Franz Schädle. Credit: Marina Amaral. Fair use. Middle image: a Junkers transport aircraft bringing supplies to the German 16.Armee in Demyansk 1942. Bottom image: a German soldier tries to stay warm in the shelter of a demolished building somewhere in Demyansk in 1942 while keeping a eye out for Soviet attacks. Commons: Bundesarchiv.
The German victory in Demyansk paved way for a horrible German miscalculation less than a year later, when 300,000 German soldiers were encircled in Stalingrad, and based on the experiences from the Demyansk Hitler thought that the Luftwaffe would keep German forces supplied until such time as Manstein could make a crushing advance. Great site by the way!
ReplyDeleteThe man on Hitler's right, Erich Kempka, was also his private chauffeur. Kempka was born to a family of half-Polish descent. His paternal grandparents were Ruhr Poles. He had joined the Nazi Party as early as in 1930 and retained his association with the Führerbegleitkommando by attending reunions until the year before his death 1975. I recommend his autobiography as an excellent read. At the 2008 military trial for Osama bin-Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, the defense argued for his innocence, noting that Kempka was not tried as a war criminal for being a chauffeur for Hitler :)
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