History
During the later parts of the war, the task of guarding the V-2 launch sites was seen as vital. To perform this task, the best and most experienced soldiers were 'gleaned' from the German panzer divisions. However, by March 1945, the V-2s were all but gone, and every available combat soldier was needed to halt the Red Army drive on Berlin.
Three companies of V-2 guards arrived at the German Ninth Army HQ on the Oder river in early March, 1945. Simultaneously, three companies of Hetzer panzerjägers from the 560th SS Tank Destroyer Battalion, which had been used for training purposes, were sent to join Army Group Vistula on the Oder front. The crewmen were some of the best-trained and most-experienced tank destroyer crews left in the Wehrmacht. General Theodor Busse, Ninth Army's commander, decided to form these veteran troops into a kampfgruppe which could be used as a mobile fire-brigade to halt enemy breakthroughs.
Veteran panzer leader Gustav-Adolf Blancbois was placed in command. Unusually, the kampfgruppe was not named after its commander, instead receiving the peculiar title Kampfgruppe 1001 Nights. The reason for this is unknown. Soon after its formation, a motorcycle company and several anti-tank guns, armoured cars and a depleted company of StuG III assault guns from the 27th SS Volunteer Division Langemarck were added to the kampfgruppe. The kampfgruppe's strength was about 500 infantry and forty-three serviceable armoured vehicles.
The kampfgruppe was divided into three combat formations, named Suleika, Harem and Sultan.
On 27 March, the kampfgruppe was ordered into action near the town of Genschmar, in an attempt to reduce the Red Army's bridgehead over the Oder. The attack was repulsed, and the kampfgruppe suffered heavy losses. Despite this, many of the Hetzers were repaired, and the arrival of a company from the 600th SS Parachute Battalion rebuilt the kampfgruppe's strength.
On 16 April, the battle of Seelow Heights began as the Red Army assaulted the German defensive lines on the Oder. The kampfgruppe was sent with the 25th Panzergrenadier Division and 111th StuG-Lehr Brigade to support the 606th Infantry Division near the town of Wriezen. In the ensuing battle, it inflicted heavy losses on the attacking Soviet 47th Army and 9th Guards Tank Corps. After severe fighting the Germans were eventually driven back, with the kampfgruppe being reduced to only eighteen functioning armoured vehicles and fifty men.
The kampfgruppe was eventually dissolved near Müncheberg during the withdrawal to Berlin. Its remnants were encircled and destroyed in the Halbe pocket; few of its men survived the war. One exception was Blancbois himself, who, along with a small number of his men, escaped to the west and surrendered to the Americans on the Elbe.
Read more about this topic: Kampfgruppe 1001 Nights
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)