ϟϟ-Division „Wiking“ in Pursuit Across the North Caucasus

Commander of the Wiking SS-Gruppenführer Felix Steiner

Waffen-SS volunteers of the Wiking Division

Waffen-SS officer question Soviet POWs

Under the leadership of SS-Gruppenführer Felix Steiner, the SS-Division Wiking pushed its tanks and self-propelled guns south towards the Caucasus. The steppe country of the northern Caucasus offered the Soviets excellent opportunities for conducting a fighting delay. The countless large and small rivers which flow from the Caucasus watershed into both the Black and Caspian Seas were obstacles that the enemy could hold with comparatively weak forces. The Wiking was on its own in its pursuit of the retreating Soviets toward the Kuban River. They pushed hard and deep into the Caucasus against a much stiffer Soviet defense than the previous year. The enemy withdraw and regroup further west. It was very hot and dusty; so dusty that the only features recognizable through the thick layer of dust on the faces of the young European volunteers were their eyes. Despite this, that type of maneuver warfare appealed to them. Speed was the answer. Enveloping movements, outmaneuvering the Soviets; that is how the days passed. Top image: Waffen-SS commander Felix Steiner somewhere between the Kuban steppes and the Caucasus Mountains in 1942. Commons: Bundesarchiv. Middle image: youthful combat-ready SS volunteers of the Wiking, draped with ammunition belts and stick grenades Model 24 Stielhandgranate in the North Caucasus. Photo by war correspondent SS-Kriegsberichter Willi Altstadt. U.S. National Archives. Bottom image: a Waffen-SS officer interrogate recently captured Soviet soldiers. The information obtained was used on the battlefield, defining strategy and saving lives. The war against the Soviet Union fused ideological aggression with racial impetus and colonial aspirations that resulted in a conflict of unsurpassed brutality. The head of the Prisoner of War Office at OKW, General der Infanterie Edwin Reinecke told his audience: ‘The war between Germany and Russia is not a war between two states or two armies, but between two ideologies. The Red Army [soldier] must be looked upon not as a soldier in the sense of the word applying to our western opponents, but as an ideological enemy. Public domain.