Foro Militar General

Spanish Volunteers in the Waffen SS
Spanische-Freiwillegen Kompnie der SS 101/102

Like the Spanish Blue Division and the Spanish Blue Legion, the Spanische-Freiwillegen Kompnie der SS was made up entirely of volunteers in the true sense of the word. As Franco wanted to withdraw all support for Germany in case the Allies saw fit to invade Spain, he decided to disband the Spanish Blue Division and shortly after, the Spanish Blue Legion. However, despite this there were still a number of Spaniards who were willing to fight alongside the Germans in their battle against the Soviets. With the disbandment of their unit in March 1944 they faced the option of either returning to Spain or volunteering for a new Spanish unit. Recruitment for this unit was to be as secretive as possible in order to prevent Franco from intervening and ordering a stop to it. How could they do this? Well much of the recruitment took place in Spain at Falange meetings and among Blue Division veterans.
Two Belgian légionnaires serving in the Wallonie, Alphonse Van Horembeke and Paul Kehren, both veterans of the Franquist armies during the Spanish civil war, were entrusted with the recruitment campaign among the Spaniards residing in the Reich.

After the Division Azul and the subsequent Spanish Legion had been disbanded , a number of Spaniards, for different reasons, did not to return to Spain. Some of them worked for the Sauckel or Speer organizations, others had joined the Wehrmacht, some had been imprisoned on grounds of unauthorized and illegal stay in Germany. Some Spaniards refused to be repatriated at all, though their numbers alone were too few to make a significant contribution to Germany's forces.

By the end of March 1944 Alphonse Van Horembeke, - at that moment a clerk in the Provincial Delegation of the Falange Youth Front at Vizcaya, Spain, - was asked to take care of the Spaniards scattered all over the Reich. The plan consisted in sending two confidential agents to Germany with the mission to contact as many Spaniards as possible with a view to enrolling them into the Waffen-SS, more particularly the Flemish 27.SS-Frw.Gr.Div. Langemarck. The Flemish formation had been chosen above any other unit because the Azul and the Langemarck had been engaged side by side on the Leningrad front from 1941 to 1943. Together with his companion, Juan Beltrán de Guevera, Van Horembeke arrived at Versailles/Paris where his comrade left him to join a group of Germans and Rumanians, leaving Van Horembeke in the lurch. Nevertheless the latter continued the mission on his own and reported at the Langemarck enlistment office in Lichterfelde West/Berlin. As he spoke neither German nor Flemish he was advised to enroll in the Wallonie.
The Spanish border was closely guarded and the potential recruits for this new SS unit had first to "escape" over the border to France. Border guards were under strict orders to shoot on sight any absconders and although many of these guards were sympathetic to their cause their duty came first for fear of their careers and families. Many recruits were shot as they attempted to cross the border into France. Those that made it were sent to a recruiting stations which had been specially set up for this task.

This new recruiting unit (Sonderstab "F") was set up with offices in Andorra, Puigcerdá, Port Bou, Hendaye and the Staff headquarters were situated at the holy town of Lourdes. From there they were translated to Stablack in Oriental Prusia, Truppenburgplatz in the south of Köenigsberg, and Hall Tirol, near Innsbruck.
This recruiting unit was headed by Dr. Edwin Haxel who had previously held a liaison position in the old Spanish Blue Division.
In one week in January 1944, over 100 Spaniards presented themselves at the German embassy in Madrid, attempting to volunteer for military service. As they dribbled across the border, alone or in small groups, these Spanish recruits were taken by train to a holding camp near Versailles, until they reached 300 in number by May 1944 .

The Foreign Ministry was also well aware that recruitment of Spaniards occurred in Spain as well as in occupied Europe. The Deutsche Arbeitsfront-DAF (German Labor Front) office in Madrid, which formerly had contracted workers openly, was responsible for much of this recruitment, providing papers, funds, and directions to Spaniards wishing to enlist in the Nazi cause. The Spanish Foreign Ministry also suspected that elements of the Falange were aiding Nazi recruitment efforts. In August 1944 one of the foreign minister's deputies sent a letter to Falangist secretary-general Jose Luis Arrese, asking if the party knew anything about a group of 400 young falangistas allegedly preparing to leave Spain for France to join German occupation forces there .
From April 1944 on, other Spanish clandestine volunteers crossing the Pyrenees gathered at Lourdes or St-Jean-de-Luz. A special unit was operating along the French-Spanish border. At La Reine barracks in Versailles, the volunteers were welcomed by Louis Garcia Valdajos, an Azul and Spanish Legion veteran, detached from Stablack training centre to coordinate and escort the first contingent to Stablack barracks.

Other source of volunteers came from Spanish workers already in Germany. At the beginning of the war, Franco had organized the travel for 25,000 volunteer workers to Germany. Others volunteers, still committed to the Nazi cause, joined the Organisation Todt, a militarized labor force, one of several units of the Waffen-SS, or a Spanish Legion within the Wehrmacht.
Valdajos took an administrative role in the military instruction of the recruits from April 20th to June 6 th 1944, Ezquerra being in charge of the drill and tactics. Valdajos then went back to Paris again to attend an SD course after which he was sent to the Normandy front with an officer's rank. Before retreating with the German troops from France he also participated in anti-partisan operations against Spanish republican maquis along the Pyrenees. In September 1944 Valdajos joined Dr Faupel's office to take care of Spanish affairs.

Those who managed to make it to Germany from Spain , along with dozens of other Spanish recruits from elsewhere in the III Reich teritories, were then sent to the training base of Stablack-Sud Steinlager in Eastern Prussia. By D-Day, just over 400 had been assembled at this center. At Stablack, the Spaniards were divided into two battalions and deployed to the outskirts of Vienna for eight weeks of training, led by officers who had been liaisons between the Blue Division and the German military. From 8 June to 20 July, another 150 Spaniards joined the Batallon Fantasma (Ghost Battalion), as the unit was called by its soldiers. The name signified two things: first, the unit's shadowy existence in defiance of official agreements between the German and Spanish government; and second, that knowledge of the unit spread throughout the Spanish communities of Europe through rumor and word of mouth rather than through official declarations. According to the Spanish police attache in Rome, who sent back a detailed report on the unit, the Spanish volunteers insisted to the Germans that they did not want Spanish officers over them; this would reflect unfavorably on the Franco regime, they feared, because Franco had promised the Allies that no Spanish nationals would continue to fight for the Axis. As the unit developed, it had a mix of Spanish and German junior officers, but even those who had held commissions in the Blue Division entered the 'Ghost Battalion' as mere enlisted soldiers, having to earn their rank through merit. The commander of the unit was a former German army artillery officer, SS Captain Wolfgang Graefe, who had been attached to the Blue Division .

Once the training finished, the soldiers were at first attached to Wehrmacht units such as the 357th Mountain Division and 3rd Gebirgs Division. The two training companies that were set up at Stablack Training camp were assigned to anti-partisan duties in Yugoslavia in August 1944, establishing their headquarters in Zalec. They were attached to 8th Company, 2nd Battalion 3rd Regiment Brandenburg Division which at the time was on anti-partisan duties in Italy. They took part in operations in Rome, Carsoli, Turni, Bevagna and at Cita da Castello before being withdrawn to France. A small contingent was left behind and was attached to 24th Waffen Gebirgs Division "Karstjäger". In September 1944, one of these companies was sent to the Oriental Carpathian Mountains, in the Bukovina region and were used as replacements for 3rd Gebirgsjäger Division, commanded by Leutenant Panther.


While these troops underwent weeks of training to prepare them for the front, other Spaniards were quickly committed to battle. Serving in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, these soldiers, some of whom had been recruited by the Germans from among Spanish Republican exiles, fought and spied against Spaniards in the French Resistance and against the Allies in Normandy. The Spanish embassy in Berlin estimated that in summer 1944 there were as many as 1,500 Spaniards working for German security services in France. By D-Day the Reich had recruited 450 Spaniards to serve in the Waffen-SS. Spanish diplomats in Germany warned Madrid about this recruitment effort repeatedly during the summer of 1944, but despite Spanish protests, German officials in Madrid claimed ignorance of the matter or an inability to do anything about it. While most recruits were Spaniards already living in occupied Europe, to these must be added the 150 Spaniards who crossed into France in June and July 1944.

About 50 Spaniards were attached to a special unit that operated around the Pyrenees mountains against the French resistance who were active in them until they were transferred to Otto Skorzeny's Jagdverbande 500 where it is thought they were used against the U.S 7th Army in the Black Forest. Near the end of the war in April, with the Reich collapsing they were earmarked for the defense of the Alpine Redoubt which was to be Hitler's headquarters in the mountains of Bavaria. This audacious plan never took place and the unit scattered and fled to the Austrian mountains.

The other Spanish company was sent to Kangfurt training camp in Austria and later to another training camp in Vienna. This unit eventually evolved in the Spanische-Freiwillegen Kompnie der SS 101 which was made up of four rifle platoons and one staff platoon. The entire company which consisted of about 140 men were sent to the 1st Battalion, 70th Panzergrenadier Regiment of the 28th Freiwilligen Panzergrenadier Division which at that time (February 1945) was in Pomerania.
One of these units, the 101st Company of Spanish Volunteers, fought a desperate rearguard action near Vatra-Dornei, Romania, defending the Carpathian mountain passes against the Red Army. Led by a German officer, this unit contained some 200 men, mostly veterans of the Blue Division and the Spanish labor force in Germany. During the last half of August 1944, these Spaniards fought doggedly until the defection of Romania on 27 August. Turning their backs to the advancing Soviets, on 31 August what was left of the 101st began a slow retreat northwest. Fighting against attacks from both Soviet forces and Romanian guerrillas, deserted by the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, the unit was caught between Soviet armies in Hungary and Romania. At the end of October, the few dozen survivors of the unit finally reached Austria. The 101st and its parallel unit, the 102d, were quartered together in Stockerau and Hollabrunn, north of Vienna. The 102d had fought Tito's Yugoslav Partisans in Slovenia and Croatia during the summer of 1944, where it was as mangled as the 101st.
After suffering serious losses against the Soviets the division was withdrawn to the River Oder where it formed a defensive line north of Berlin near Stettin. The Spanish 101st Company by some strange series of events ended up as part of the 11th SS Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadier Division "Nordland" and saw it last action fighting in the ruins of Berlin alongside the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division der SS

Some of the spanish of the german-croatian brigade, commanded by Colonel Klein, joined the SS forces of Leon Degrelle, the Valone Legion. They were 400 and were integrated in the 1st Battalion. of 70th Rgmt. under the command of Cap. Deniè. The spanish that continued in the german-croatian brigade pass to depend of the 357th Division, displayed in Eslovaquia at the East of Bratislava. Those that fought with Degrelle participated in the first combats of the division ( more particularly at Krüssow on Febr; 12th 1945 ) and took part in the battle of Stargard in Pomerania, in german territory . Only 60 Spaniards escaped the encirclement of Stargard ( March 4 th 1945 ). The survivors were regrouped at Scheune ( South of Stettin ).
The volunteers in the Otto Skorzeny's Jagdverbande 500 protected the SE front, in the german-french frontier

The Spaniards, among them Van Horembeke, were ordered to Berlin where they were to form an Einsatz Gruppe . Some other ones, dispersed, went to Berlin, joining the heterogeneous 'Ezquerra Unity' . The 21 of april they went to Berlin centre using the underground, as all the capital was full of rubbles, destroyed vehicles, smoky ruins... In the "apocalyptic atmosphere" of this brutal battle, Spanish accents could be heard from the small band of Iberians remaining in Germany . Berlin was a hell... Ezquerra conducted his Unity till the basement of Air Ministry and fought in strategic points: Anhalter Banhof, Moritz Platz, Potsdammer Platz, Ubhan Anhalter... The Lte. Ocaña was made prisoner in front of the Hotel Excelsior. They fought bravery in the siege of the Propaganda Ministry and in the Chancellor Office. Next to the Letonian of 15th Bon. SS they shouted his "panzerfaust" against the heavy JS-II tanks. There are testimonies of absolute credibility, as the one of the journalist Rodriguez del Castillo, that confirm the existence and fights of the Sturmabteilung "Ezquerra" in the last days of the III Reich.

On May 1st the remainder of the Einsatz Gruppe defended the Steglitz underground station and desperately tried to link up with the remainder of the Gross Deutschland Rgt holding the Alexander Platz underground station. They could not achieve this as Soviet infiltration blocked Friedrich Straße underground station.
Rodriguez del Castillo, the last representation of the Spanish Embassy in Hitler's Berlin succeed that thousand of Spanish could escape from the hell and soviets claws with false credentials of displaced workers. Other testimonies talk about the presence of Spaniards in the combats near Trieste and the Brennero, under the orders of Martínez Alberich.
These Spaniards were under the command of SS-Obersturmbannführer Miguel Ezquerra who had seen much service with the German armed forces.

He served on the Eastern Front as a part of the 250th Spanish 'Blue Division' in action in the Leningrad Area. With the disbandment of all Spanish units Miguel Ezquerra was one of the Spaniards who decided to stay on. As a soldier with no army, he volunteered for the Waffen-SS and was given a similar rank to that of his army service (SS-Obersturmbannführer).
Miguel Ezquerra led another small unit into the Battle of the Bulge. He and his men previously had served German counterintelligence in France. Later called the Einheit Ezquerra (Ezquerra Unit), this formation was closely linked to General Wilhelm Faupel, former German Ambassador to Spain, and his Ibero-American Institute, a research center in Berlin that promoted closer Hispano-German and Nazi-Falangist ties. In January 1945, Ezquerra was commissioned to enlist all the Spaniards he could find into one unit, which he would command as a Waffen-SS major. These enlistments greatly troubled the Spanish government, which viewed with alarm news of Spaniards serving in the SS and other Nazi organizations. Apart from the dangers confronting these men, the Franco regime was concerned that they were still wearing the emblem of the Blue Division, a shield with the colors of the Spanish flag, and the word word "España" on their uniforms, an obvious and visible compromise of Spanish neutrality. Franco ordered his diplomats remaining in Germany to dissuade Spanish workers from joining the Waffen-SS or German armed forces, but despite the dramatic changes in the European situation, as late as October 1944 some volunteers were still petitioning to be sent to work in Germany.
Even the Ibero-American Institute, long a stalwart ally, had turned against the Spanish party. Still under the direction of General Faupel, in early 1944 the Institute had taken over the publication of Enlace (Liaison), a newspaper for Spanish workers in Germany published by the Spanish embassy in Berlin from mid-1941 to late 1943.

In the last days of the Third Reich, his unit known as Sturmabteilung "Ezquerra", fought with great tenacity, Ezquerra himself claims to have destroyed 25 soviet tanks. He also claimed that he had a conference with Hitler himself who awarded him the Ritterkreutz although he never received it due to the war ending. He escaped from Berlin under the disguise of a Spanish worker, went to Paris and then to the Pirineos, in Spain.
We wrote a book called "A vida o muerte en Berlín" ( Fight to live or dead in Berlin) . Miguel Ezquerra survived, and became a schoolteacher after the war; many did not. Like the millions of Germans and others who laid down their lives to preserve the Third Reich, they did so in the hopes of building a better Europe than the one they had inherited. Whether Falangists or convinced Nazis, the Spaniards of the Ghost Battalion defied their own government to fight for a regime even as it collapsed around them in 1944-45.

Apart form Miguel Ezquerra, other Spanish SS members to highlight are: Lorenzo Ocañas, that was seriously wounded in Posad, in 1941. In 1944 we crossed the frontier and enlisted in the Waffen SS. He fought in Normandy, in the Ardennes and in the defence of Berlin d efending the neighbourhood of the Excelcior cinema-hall near Alexander Platz till April 28th 1945 , were he was made prisoner by the soviet troops and stayed ten years as prisoner in the communist concentration camps; Jose Trapaga Fernandez, that fought in the 'Blue 'Division' and later he crossed the frontier to enlist in the SS under the orders of Jose Ortiz, that commanded an anti-partisan unity in Yugoslavia, and died fighting against the communist of Marshall Tito;

One Spaniard who established a clear and indisputable record within the SS was Rufino Luis Garcia-Valdajos. Born in 1918, he enlisted in the Blue Division in late 1942, remaining as a volunteer until March 1944, when he remained in Germany rather than be repatriated to Spain. He gained a position with the SD in Paris and worked against the French Resistance until the Nazi retreat forced him to return to Germany in late 1944. There he joined Belgian collaborator Leon Degrelle's SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadierdivision-Wallonie (SS Wallonian Volunteer Grenadier Division) in November 1944, were he got the charge of Lte., commanding officer of the 3th Company of the 1st battalion of the SS Division "Wallonie" during the offensive in the Ardennes . He also fought under the command of Otto Skorzeny. In his service record Valdajos claims he participated in the batlles for the defence of Spandau, Tempelhof-Potzdammerplatz area . In February 1945, Garcia-Valdajos, now an SS first lieutenant, applied to the SS Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (RuSHA, Central Office for Race and Resettlement) for permission to marry a German woman living in Berlin, Ursula Jutta-Maria Turcke. After determining that neither Garcia-Valdajos nor his bride had any Jewish ancestry, this permission was granted.
He was made prisoner at the end of the war by the northamerican troops, what made him survive to the assassinations that the russian communist made to the foreign volunteers of the Waffen SS, and reached Spain in December 1945 after crossing Germany, Holland, Belgium and France
While the case of Garcia-Valdajos is better documented than others because of his request to marry a German, he was not alone in his enlistment. Many of those who left home to enlist in the German army and Waffen-SS were very young, some still in their teens, who essentially ran away from home to sign up with the Germans, much to the consternation of the Franco regime. The Spanish government's attempts to lobby the German government for the return of these men and boys were unsuccessful. As Franco's ambassador in Berlin informed the Spanish Foreign Ministry, Berlin was unlikely to surrender precious laborers and soldiers to an increasingly unfriendly Madrid, especially as these were volunteers who in many cases did not want to return to Spain.

Van Horembeke first served in the 4th Bandera and afterwards in the 67th Cie of the 17th Bandera and took part in the Bielsa pocket fights. Before the war Kehren had been a member of the right wing group Légion Nationale. He joined the Franquist armies during the Spanish civil war and served within the 'Talavera de la Reina'. End May 1940 he took a job in the German Reichsbahn ( railways ). He came back to Belgium to enlist in the Légion Wallonie in August 1941. As a result of friction with his superiors in general and Degrelle in particular, he was demobilized after the Caucasus campaign. He then took service in the Sipo-Sd of Liège and Ghent. He rejoined the Sturmbrigade at the beginning of the 1944. Van Horembeke was taken prisoner after the fall of Berlin. Seeing what happened to the Spanish volunteers (one of his comrades was shot for having declared he was Spanish), he declared himself to be Belgian. On transit from camp to camp he finally arrived at Kovno POW camp. After the visit of an Allied Commission Van Horembeke was sent back to Begium. He was tried by the Military Court of Brussels and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. In prison he taught his fellow prisoners Spanish. Liberated in the early fifties Van Horembeke returned to Spain and obtained Spanish citizenship.


In resume Spaniards were found within the Div. Wallonie (were they formed the whole 3 Co ,I Btl ,SS Rgt 70 ) ,the 24th SS Karstjaeger -where they formed the whole 5th Co of the II Btl ,SS Rgt 59 -, also within Einsatzgruppe Ezquerra in Berlin some SD antipartisans units, within the SS Polizei Freiwilligen Bataillon BOZEN (31 spaniards at last ) six of them within the 1 Co of the Dirlewanger Brigade, 20 of them within the 29.SS Italian division (under Oberscharfuehrer Camargo).

Also spanish volksdeutschen were found in many germanic SS units ,at an individual level (sons of mixed marriages) like for instance Federico Lux, born in Barcelona, who served within the 11th SS Nordland and died at the Narwa fron .

In all, during the years of 1944 - 1945 there were around 1,000 Spaniards who had served within the ranks of the German army but who officially did not exist due to Franco's order to disband all Spanish formations. There collective contribution during the last year of the war was minimal when compared to their former achievements with the Blue Division.