The 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” on the Eastern Front – Rise and Fall (Documentary)

This documentary examines the military development of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, the Reich on the Eastern Front, from the first weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union to its final surrender in the spring of 1945. The focus is on the tactical and operational decisions of its leadership in the decisive campaigns, the development from an initially rapid advance to progressive exhaustion, and the question of why certain tactical procedures, the concentration of forces, the mobility, and the determined counterattacks proved effective in the years 1941

to early 1943, but later only resulted in heavy losses without altering the overall strategic picture. We examine this development objectively and without embellishment, because only in this way can one understand how a military formation functioned and why it ultimately failed.  It is necessary to clearly define the historical context .

  The Division das Reich was one of the first formations of the Waffen SS, emerging from parts of the SS Verfügungstruppe, ideologically aligned and embedded in the National Socialist war of aggression against the Soviet Union.  This war had the character of a war of annihilation from the very beginning. His goals were the conquest of so-called living space in the East, the destruction of the Jewish Bolshevism propagated by the regime, and the subjugation, exploitation, and partial extermination of the population living there.  The division not

only fought on the front but was also involved in operations in the rear area , including supporting repressions against the civilian population and prisoners of war. This connection between combat and crime is not a marginal aspect, but is inextricably linked to the history of this troop.

  What understanding will we ultimately arrive at?  We will see that even a relatively well- equipped and ideologically motivated unit could not escape repeated heavy losses and eventual disbandment as a combat-ready formation .  The reason for this was not an alleged lack of craftsmanship.  It lay in the strategic miscalculations of the National Socialist leadership, in the numerical and material superiority of the Soviet side, in its growing adaptability, and in the fundamental instability of an aggressive campaign aimed at conquest that

overextended itself.  To understand this path , we begin with the division’s position on the eve of Operation Barbarossa and with the roots from which it had emerged.  The common thread of this analysis is that tactical success and strategic failure can coexist, indeed, that one cannot cancel out the other .

  The division, the Reich, was undoubtedly capable of achieving considerable results on the battlefield , forcing local breakthroughs and launching counterattacks with great force.  However, no sum of such individual successes could reverse a balance of power that shifted more and more towards the German Reich with each year of the war .

  Anyone who wants to understand the history of this group must keep both levels in view simultaneously.  The commander’s specific actions in the field and the overarching calculation of people, materials, space and time that ultimately determined the outcome. The following illustration takes place precisely within this field of tension .

  The association’s origins date  back to 1939 and 1940.  A division was formed from various regiments of the SS Verfügungstruppe, which was initially led under changing names and later received the name “Das Reich” .  Its core consisted of the regiments Deutschland and the Führer, as well as other units that shaped the character of the association.

  This unit was part of the Waffen SS structure and differed from the regular army in one essential point. Their training combined military instruction with systematic ideological indoctrination. The men were not only trained in the use of weapons and in the cooperation of the troop units, but also politically molded in a spirit that   emphasized obedience, toughness, and the belief in their own racial and ideological superiority.

  This combination of combat training and ideology explains part of the later determination of these associations, but also their willingness to participate in crimes . In April 1941, the division participated in the Balkan campaign, in the attacks on Yugoslavia and Greece.  The advance was rapid, and in one well-known episode, a small advance unit of the division managed to penetrate the Yugoslav capital Belgrade and achieve its surrender before the main forces had arrived.

  This rapid success was highlighted for propaganda purposes. But even in these early weeks, the dark side revealed itself.  In the Alibuna area, there were attacks and killings of the civilian population, an early sign that this force was not acting solely according to the rules of combat.  The Balkan campaign also served as a kind of operational test before the much larger undertaking that was to begin only a few weeks later.

  In June, Operation Barbarossa marked the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union.  The Reich division was part of the Heres Group Central, which advanced along the central axis towards Moscow.  This was followed by heavy fighting in the Smolensk area near Yelnia and finally as part of Operation Typhoon, the attack on the Soviet capital in the autumn and early winter.

The advance was relatively successful in the first few months, and it is worthwhile to  specify the reasons for this.  The attack caught the Soviet leadership by surprise, and the Red Army suffered heavy losses in the border battles . Furthermore, their leadership structures were weakened by the repressions of 1937 and 1938 , in which a large part of the experienced officer Chor had been eliminated .

On the German side, there was a tactical superiority in troop command at the lower levels during this phase.  Well- established cooperation between tanks, infantry and artillery, plus support from the air force and a temporary advantage in mobility.   At the same time, one must guard against idealizing these early successes.

   The German numerical superiority was not an expression of a superior race or a superior worldview, as propaganda claimed, but the result of specific and temporary circumstances: the surprise of the attack, the still incomplete Soviet defense, the better cooperation between the branches of the armed forces, and the experience that many German units had already gained in the campaigns in Poland, the West, and the Balkans.

As soon as these circumstances ceased to exist, as soon as the Red Army gained time, organized its reserves and learned from its defeats, the picture changed rapidly.  The division, the Reich, benefited in the first few months from an advantage that was not permanent and that had to be bought at a higher price with every kilometer gained , because the supply lines became longer and their own units thinner.

  But this success came at a high price, which was  reflected early on in the division’s loss figures.  The regiment and its leader, which had gone into the field as a fully-fledged unit in the summer , dwindled to a few dozen combat-ready men as the fighting progressed and it approached the vicinity of Moscow. The division’s total losses by the end of this year reached approximately 60% of its original fighting strength.

  These figures are crucial for understanding the entire campaign.  They show that the successes of the first few months did not come without a price and that the association’s substance was already dwindling before the actual crisis began.  The advance on Moscow ultimately stalled in the mud of the autumn rains and the cold of the onset of winter, just a few kilometers from the goal.

Then came the Soviet winter offensive at the turn of the year 1942, and with it a completely changed situation. The division became embroiled in heavy defensive battles, including in the Erchef area, a section of the front that would become a symbol of costly positional warfare in the following months  .

  This showed why the previous tactic had lost its effectiveness. The aggressive counterattacks and the emphasis on mobility had worked under the summer conditions .  But now they encountered fresh Soviet reserves brought in from deep within the country .  In addition, there were extremely severe weather conditions, deeply snow-covered and icy landscapes, overstretched supply lines, and a serious shortage of winter clothing and fuel.

  A force designed for rapid advance found itself in the role of an exhausted defender , having to pay for every kilometer with blood .  The specific loss figures for this period speak for themselves .  By February, the division had lost more than 10,000 men .  This is a number that exceeded the original strength of many regiments and shows the extent to which the unit had been bled dry.

  The decisions of the commands at the tactical level often consisted of a tenacious defense and localized counterattacks to  contain Soviet units that had broken through.  Taken individually, these decisions may have been technically justifiable.  However, in a state of strategic exhaustion, they ultimately only led to a further depletion of one’s own resources.

The bravery or tenacity of individual units could not change the fact that the entire campaign had reached its limits and that the conditions for a quick victory, on which the German planning had been based, no longer existed. This military image is inextricably linked to the crimes committed in the rear area.

  Parts of the division participated in measures that had nothing to do with combat .  A documented example is the participation in the shooting of 920 Jewish people in the Minsk area in September 1941 in cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen, those murder squads that systematically murdered the Jewish population, communists and other groups defined as enemies in the rear of the advancing front .

This policy of terror in the occupied territories also had military repercussions.  It provoked the growth of the partisan movement, it forced forces to be used for security and rear operations, and it increased the bitterness of the fighting because it gave the Soviet side every reason to wage the war with extreme brutality and without any prospect of leniency .

  The destructive nature of the war, in a sense, returned to the attacking troops and exacerbated their own situation.  This connection deserves closer examination because it is often presented separately from the military events , even though the two were intertwined. The terror against the civilian population, the shootings, the treatment of prisoners of war, a large proportion of whom died in German captivity from hunger, cold and mistreatment, all this destroyed any possibility of permanently pacifying the conquered territories .  Where an occupying power

systematically treats the population as inferior and murders entire groups , resistance grows naturally. For the fighting troops, this meant that they never had a secure position, that supply lines remained threatened, and that forces were constantly tied down, forces that were then needed at the front.

  The ideology that  conceived of this war as a war of annihilation thus created the very conditions under which it became increasingly difficult to wage militarily .  The division, the empire, was part of this system and carried its contradictions with it.  At this point, it is worthwhile to ask some questions that will make the further course of events more understandable .

  What enabled the division  to maintain its fighting strength in the first few months, despite already suffering considerable losses ?  The answer lies in the well- established leadership at the lower level, in the initial surprise, and in the weakness of the opposing defense, which had not yet had the time to organize itself and mobilize its reserves .

  And why was the Soviet side, which had suffered a catastrophe in the summer, able to deliver such a sensitive blow in the winter?  Because it possessed strategic depth, huge reserves of manpower and materiel, the ability to raise new armies behind the front, and because the weather and the overextended German lines played into its hands.

  These two questions already point to the basic pattern that would repeatedly emerge in the following years .  By the middle of 1942, the badly damaged division was finally withdrawn from the front to be refreshed and reorganized , subsequently becoming a Panzergrenadier division. This step in itself was already a clear signal.

  He showed the limits even for those associations that were intended for the most demanding and toughest tasks. A force intended as a spearhead had to be so thoroughly rebuilt after only one year on the Eastern Front that only a skeleton remained of the original unit, around which a new division was built.

  Looking at this first phase as a whole, a pattern emerges that is characteristic of the entire subsequent course.  The division was able to achieve considerable success in both offense and defense , but each of these achievements took its toll on a core that was becoming increasingly difficult to replace.  Experienced junior leaders and teams were unavailable, and refresher courses rarely brought the same level of training.

  Thus, in the first year of the war, the process began that characterizes the entire course of events: a repeated bleeding out, always followed by a new build-up , without the lost quality ever being fully restored .  This marks the end of the first phase of this process, which spanned from the rapid advance of summer to the bitter winter crisis.

  It leads us directly to the phase in which the division  was to achieve another remarkable tactical success, without this  changing the strategic fate of the entire campaign.  At the beginning of 1943, the newly formed division returned the Reich to the Eastern Front at a moment when the entire situation in the south had changed dramatically.

  The Stalingrad catastrophe had occurred; an entire German army had been destroyed, and the Soviet forces were pushing westward on a broad front.  In this critical situation, the division was  incorporated into the newly formed second SS Panzer Corps, together with the Leibstandarte and Totenkopf divisions under the command of Paul Hauser.

  This choir was to be deployed in the area around Sharkov to  halt the further Soviet advance.  The situation was serious, as the German front in the south threatened to break apart in several places, and the question was whether it would be possible to build a new defense from the movement or even launch a counterattack.

In February and March, the operation that later became known as the Kharakov counterattack took place, bringing the division one of its few undeniable tactical successes .  It is worth examining closely why this operation succeeded, because the reasons are more revealing than the success itself. After the victory at Stalingrad and the rapid advance to the west, the Soviet units were far outfetched and overstretched.

  Their supply lines were long, their armored forces were battered, their infantry was exhausted, and the leadership overestimated its own situation at that moment because it believed German resistance was largely broken.  It was precisely in this situation that the German leadership under Field Marshal von Mannstein succeeded in creating a local superiority in forces and resources and concentrating them at a crucial point .

Here, the principle of the center of gravity was evident in its classical form. Instead of distributing forces evenly across the entire front, the armored divisions were concentrated in a narrowly defined section to create a superior force there.  The mobility of the armored units, the well-coordinated cooperation with the air force, and the ability to quickly  strike the flanks of the overextended Soviet spearheads led to a mobile battle in which the German units temporarily regained the initiative.

The Reich Division participated in these battles and contributed to the recapture in March of the city of Kharkiv, which had been taken by Soviet troops shortly before  .  For German propaganda, this was a welcome success after the humiliation of Stalingrad, and it was accordingly highlighted. But the price of this success was high, and it is easily overlooked in the triumphant portrayal.

  The fighting around Kharkiv was bitter and costly, both in terms of men and materiel.  The recapture of a major city through direct house-to-house fighting cost the SS units numerous dead and wounded, and the number of tanks and armored vehicles lost was also considerable.  Furthermore, the fighting in this region was accompanied by further attacks , which once again revealed the true nature of this troop .

  The tactical success was therefore real, but it came at a high price and its effects remained limited to the local area .  He stabilized the German southern front for a few months, but he did  not reverse the fundamental trend of the war, and therein lies the crucial lesson of this episode. This raises the question that will determine the entire section.

  Why did the local success at Scharkov not lead to a turning point in favor of the German side?  The answer lies in the overall balance of forces.  The counterattack was able to succeed because the Soviet side had overextended itself and been careless at that one moment .  However, as soon as the front solidified and the Soviet leadership reorganized its units, the fundamental imbalance returned.

  The Soviet Union had far greater reserves of manpower and equipment.  Their arms industry, which had been relocated to the east of the country, was now running at full capacity, and the Red Army was learning with every campaign .  A single successful counterattack could not negate these factors .

  He provided a brief respite, nothing more . The success of Scharkov was followed in the summer by the biggest and most consequential miscalculation of this phase, Operation Citadel, the Battle of Kurkskerbogen in July.  The decision to launch this attack was made at the highest level and is indicative of the state of the German leadership.  Hitler pushed through the offensive despite several general objections and despite indications that the Soviet side was expecting an attack at precisely that location.

  The basic idea was to create a salient extending far to the west, in order to cut off Kursk from the north and south and to encircle the Soviet forces gathered there . But this intention was so obvious that it could hardly remain hidden, and the repeated postponement of the attack, partly to bring in new tanks, gave the Soviet side valuable time.

The Red Army used this time in a way that foreshadowed the outcome of the battle .  She recognized the direction of the impending attack and built a deeply layered defense, the likes of which the war had never seen before.  Over a depth of many kilometers, several successive defensive belts were created, riddled with dense minefields, tank ditches, dug-in artillery and anti-tank positions.

 Strong reserves were positioned behind this defense, including the units of the Steppe Front, which were held back specifically in case of a German breakthrough .  When the second SS Panzer Corps, with the Reich Division, launched its attack on the southern edge of the arc, it encountered not a surprised enemy, but a prepared and deeply echeloned one .

Every gain in territory had to be fought for against fierce resistance and through several defensive lines .  Within this context, the tank battle in the Proschorovka area also took place, which occupies a special place in the memory of the battle .  In the southern part of the salient, large armored formations from both sides clashed, and the German divisions among them, the Reich, fought here with extreme ferocity.

  However, without forcing the decisive breakthrough.  Waves of attacks and counterattacks alternated.  The area was littered with burning vehicles and charred wrecks, and at the end of this long, bloody day, neither side had achieved the success that would have justified its own losses. The division’s actual material losses during this campaign amounted to dozens of tanks and assault guns, and the losses in personnel and experienced crews were also heavy.

  The picture that was long painted of a single, decisive tank battle has since been differentiated by research , but it remains undisputed that the German offensive reached its limit here and that the forces expended were disproportionate to the small territorial gain .  The analysis of this battle leads to a clear result.

  At the tactical level, the division’s units acted decisively and aggressively. They broke through individual positions and inflicted significant losses on the opponent .  However, strategically, the company was doomed to failure from the outset, for several reasons at once. The German leadership underestimated the Soviet potential in terms of manpower, equipment, and prepared depth of defense.

  The new Panther tanks, on which great hopes had been placed, suffered from technical teething problems and broke down in large numbers before they could even reach their full potential.  There was a lack of infantry to secure and expand the breaches achieved with heavy losses  .  And with the failure of the attack, the initiative passed definitively and permanently to the Soviet side, which immediately launched its own large-scale counter-offensives.

  What followed was a transition into a grueling defense, in which the division was thrown from one threatened section of the front to the next.  Heavy fighting ensued on the Mius River, where Soviet units put the German front under intense pressure, and renewed defensive battles took place in the Scharkov area during the summer and autumn.

  The city, which had been recaptured in the spring at great cost, could no longer be held and was lost for good.  Each of these defensive battles resulted in new losses of men and equipment, and the unit was worn down in a series of deployments as a so-called fire brigade, used wherever the front threatened to break.

  This role may have averted crises in the short term, but it relentlessly eroded the division’s resources .  To properly understand these events, one must  keep the broader context of the era in mind.  By the middle of this year, the balance of power had fundamentally shifted.  Soviet industry, which had been relocated to the east of the country at enormous effort at the beginning of the war, was  now producing more tanks.

  more guns and more ammunition than the German armaments industry was able to provide.  The Red Army had learned from the defeats of 1941 and 1942 .  Their leadership had become more experienced, their units were better coordinated, and their operational skills had developed considerably.

  In contrast, after Stalingrad the German Reich was in a state of strategic exhaustion, finding it  increasingly difficult to replace losses in men and materiel, and each offensive further depleting its already scarce capital.  This also answers the second major question in this section. How had the nature of the battles  changed compared to 1941?  In the first year of the war, the German side had benefited from surprise, mobility and an advantage in troop command, and the enemy had been caught unprepared.

  Now the Red Army was prepared, deeply echeloned and materially superior, and it increasingly dictated the pace.  The German associations switched from the role of attacker, dictating the conditions, to the role of reacter, responding to the blows of the opponent and constantly losing substance in the process.

  The division, the Reich, was still able to achieve considerable results at the level of individual battles .  However, the context in which these achievements took place had completely changed, and this change could no longer be stopped by tactical skill.  Thus, the second phase of this career path concludes with a bitter realization.

The year had begun with a considerable tactical success, yet it was the year in which the strategic shift finally took place.  The Kharkiv counterattack showed what this force was still capable of achieving under favorable circumstances , while the Kursk failure revealed how narrow the margin had become and how little even a high-quality unit could do against the growing power of the enemy .

  Towards the end of the year, the division was once again exhausted.  Their stocks of tanks and experienced soldiers had dwindled, and it was becoming clear that they would have to be withdrawn from the front and rebuilt.  This paves the way for the final phase, in which the gradual exhaustion would ultimately lead to decline and dissolution as a combat-ready organization .

  The immediate consequences of Kurger’s Battle determined the division’s path in the second half of 193 and the following winter.  Ten defensive battles on Ukrainian soil ensued, along with heavy fighting on the Dener River and a constant retreat under the pressure of the Soviet offensives, which were now being waged in ever rapid succession.

  The division continued to lose men and equipment, and its resources were so depleted that remaining at the front was no longer an option.  At the beginning of year 4, it was therefore transferred to France to be re-equipped and this time  reorganized into a fully-fledged armored division.  This transfer from the Eastern Front to the West was also an admission that, after the battles of the previous year, the unit was only a shadow of its former self and required thorough restoration .  What followed in the West is

not the main focus of this discussion, but it fits into the overall picture of progressive disintegration.  After the Allied landings, the division fought in Normandy, where it again suffered heavy losses under the pressure of overwhelming enemy air superiority and a superior battle of attrition .

  Later, it was used in the Ardennes Offensive, the last major attack attempt in the West, which also failed and  revealed the same fundamental problems. Delays caused by enemy air attacks, significant losses, a crippling lack of fuel, and a lack of sufficiently experienced personnel. These battles revealed that the difficulties were not limited to a single theater of war , but arose from the general state of the German Reich, which could no longer adequately replace its losses on any front .

  The main focus of this last phase, however, lies in the return to the Eastern Front in 1945. As part of the Sixth SS Panzer Army, to which the Second SS Panzerkorb also belonged, the division was transferred to Hungary and deployed in Operation Spring Awakening in March. The objectives of this operation were dual in nature.

  Firstly, the last oil reserves still accessible to the German Reich in the area of Lake Balaton and in the Hungarian oil region to the southwest of it had to be secured , because the fuel shortage had become so dramatic at that time that it paralyzed the entire conduct of the war. Secondly, a significant blow should be struck against the Soviet troops of the Third Ukrainian Front in order to further improve one’s own situation in the south .

  It was an attempt to    bring about a turning point in an already hopeless overall situation through one last concentrated effort. However, the course of the operation brutally demonstrated how much the German side’s capabilities had diminished.  The attack initially gained momentum and achieved some early successes in certain areas.

  But he soon faltered and then quickly collapsed.  Several factors contributed to this.  The onset of the thaw and mud season transformed the terrain into a virtually impassable sea of ​​softened soil, in which the heavy tanks got stuck and completely lost their mobility, which had once been their greatest strength .

As with Kursk, the Soviet side had also prepared a deeply layered defense with dense minefields , in some places where several thousand mines were packed into a single kilometer.  In addition, there was a strong and well-managed defense as well as a clear superiority in artillery and air power, against which the attacking units no longer had an effective means.

  The specific battles taking place these days illustrate the pattern.  The division launched attacks in the area of ​​Sakarest’s Tour and in the surrounding villages, where it  attempted to fight its way through deep defensive zones without achieving the hoped-for breakthrough.  When the offensive finally failed and the Soviet side switched to its own powerful counterattacks, the division’s role shifted from that of the attacker to that of a desperate covering force.

She was now trying to keep corridors open for the withdrawal of other units and to prevent a complete collapse of the front .  At the tactical level, individual departments still showed remarkable tenacity, but strategically the operation was doomed to failure from the start.   Operation Spring Awakening was the last major offensive operation of the German Wehrmacht in the entire war, and it ended in a complete failure, finally exhausting the remaining forces .

What followed the failure in Hungary was a long, drawn-out retreat.  The German units were driven from their positions and, under constant pressure, tried to stabilize the front, but repeatedly found themselves in danger of being encircled and had to retreat step by step to the west.  The Reich division retreated towards Austria , where it finally met its end in May as part of the general capitulation of the German Reich.

  By this time, it no longer possessed the fighting strength of earlier years.  Their ranks were filled with young and inadequately trained reserve teams. There was an acute shortage of fuel, vehicles and heavy equipment, and the experienced commanders and non-commissioned officers who had once shaped the unit had largely been killed or wounded.

  Isolated attempts to regain ground through counterattacks could not change the overall picture of a complete defeat .  At this point, it is worthwhile to take a look at the human reality behind these events .  The men who had filled the ranks of the division in recent weeks had little in common with the experienced soldiers of the early years .

  Many of them were very young, trained in great haste and thrown into their units without having had the time to really learn how to work together in combat.  They lacked the experienced junior leaders who had formed the core of each unit in previous years , as    a large proportion of them had fallen in the long battles between 1941 and 1944.

In the end, the division existed only in name as the unit that had once  gone into battle as the elite of the regime.  Their fighting strength had not been broken by a single defeat , but by the sum of countless losses that had accumulated over years and which no reinforcements could compensate for.   When one considers this final phase in the context of the entire career path, the central lesson becomes clear.

The period from summer to spring 1945 shows that even a unit intended for the most difficult and demanding tasks, and possessing high motivation, good training and at times considerable equipment, could not escape repeated depletion in a long war of exhaustion and strategic collapse  .

  Heavy losses were repeatedly followed by recovery, and the newly rebuilt unit was repeatedly depleted again in a short time .  The tactical competence of individual units stood in increasingly stark contrast to the hopelessness of the overall situation.  And the further the war progressed, the more clearly it became apparent that no matter how determined the fighting, nothing could change the overarching equation of people, material and space .

  This allows us to draw a line from the successes of the early years to the catastrophe of the end, and the comparison is as simple as it is relentless. What  had still yielded results in the years up to 1943 – the concentration of forces, the mobility, the surprise counterattack – lost its effectiveness as soon as the enemy was prepared, materially superior, and staggered in depth .

  Mobility was of no use when fuel was lacking and mud held the vehicles in place.  The surprise attack was no longer possible once the intention had long been seen through, and the concentration of forces dissipated when the assembled units encountered deeply layered defense zones and overwhelming reserves.

  The true story of this association lies precisely in this reversal of once successful methods into ineffectiveness,  and it simultaneously reflects the broader collapse of the entire aggressive campaign.  At the end of this journey is the sobering assessment of a unit that, in less than four years on the Eastern Front, went from being the spearhead of a campaign of conquest to a mangled heap of rubble .

  By the spring of 1945, the second SS Panzer Division had covered a distance in the Reich ranging from participation in the attack of summer 1941 to the desperate fighting in Hungary.  During these years, it was repeatedly rebuilt after suffering heavy losses , with more than 10,000 men being rebuilt in the first year of the war in the East alone.

  This resulted in significant material losses at Kursk and in the subsequent defensive battles. Tactical decisions by their commanders, such as the actions of the second SS Panzercore at Tarkov in 1943, sometimes allowed for local successes through the concentration of forces and mobility. However, these successes remained temporary and did not change the overall strategic picture.

  The strategic miscalculations of the National Socialist leadership, the underestimation of Soviet military and industrial potential, the ongoing problems with supplies and replacements, and the nature of the war of annihilation itself with its policy of terror, which provoked resistance and tied up enormous forces for rear operations, led to the listing of disproportionately well-equipped units .

  Operation Spring Awakening in March 1945 was the last attempt at a major offensive and failed due to the natural conditions, the deep defenses and the superiority of the Red Army.  In May, following the general capitulation of Nazi Germany, the division ceased to exist as a combat-ready unit.  Their story on the Eastern Front is the story of a progressive, bloody annihilation,  reflecting the further collapse of an aggressive campaign in which the numerical, material and organizational superiority of the Soviet side, combined with the mistakes of the German leadership,

determined the outcome from the outset.  M.