XVth Cossack Cavalry Corps
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The XVth Cossack Cavalry Corps was a German cavalry corps during World War II.
[edit] History
Over a million men with ancestral roots in the Soviet Union fought together with the German armed forces against Joseph Stalin's government. Of all eastern volunteers, the Cossacks were allowed to muster the largest single concentration within the German Army. A great part of the Cossacks were former Soviet citizens who elected to fight not so much for Germany as againstStalin. Cossacks had, in fact, been operating as part of the Wehrmacht from virtually the start of Operation Barbarossa.
The summer of 1942 marked the high tide of German success in the East. In October 1942 the Germans established in the Kuban a semi-autonomous Cossack District and were now in the position to recruit Cossacks from these “liberated” areas, the POW camps, and defectors from the Red Army. Of the last, the most significant had been the desertion of an entire Red Army regiment (Infantry Regt. 436) which, with all officers, went over to the Germans on August 1941. Its commander, Major I.N.Kononov, was a Don Cossack. He had a distinguished career in the German service, ending the war as Major General in the XVth Cossack Cavalry Corps under the command of the German General Helmuth von Pannwitz.
Already in May 1943 Pannwitz was given authorization to create a first Cossack Division consisting of two brigades which trained throughout the summer in Mława (Mielau), north of Warsaw. The division was then not, as it had hoped, sent to fight the Red Army, but instead it was ordered, in September 1943, to proceed to Yugoslavia and fight Josip Broz Tito's partisans. The Cossacks took part in several major offensives against the Partisans including Operation Rösselsprung, the attack on Tito`s headquarter in Bosnia from which Tito evaded capture only by the narrowest of margins. During the summer of 1944 the two brigades were upgraded to become the 1st Cossack Cavalry Division and 2nd Cossack Cavalry Division. From the beginning of 1945, these divisions were combined to become XVth Cossack Cavalry Corps.
By the end of the war, the S.S. attempted to gain control of the Cossack Corps and transfer the Cossacks under their structure. Despite the refusal of General Helmuth von Pannwith to enter the S.S., his Corps was placed under SS administration in terms of replacements and supplies without actually making the Cossack units a part of the Waffen-SS. The Himmler file in the Imperial War Museum contains a record of a conversation which occurred on August 26, 1944, between Himmler and General von Pannwitz and his Chief of Staff, Colonel H.-J. von Schultz. An agreement was reached that the Cossack divisions, soon to be the Cossack Corps, was only placed under S-S. administration in terms of replacements and supplies. Although the Corps was to be under the jurisdiction of the Waffen-SS, it never was. The Corps retained its status as a formation of the Wehrmacht, with the Waffen-SS responsible only for logistics.
True to the men he loved, General von Pannwitz chose to accompany the Cossacks when they were repatriated by the British to the Soviet Union after the surrender, and was executed in Moscow in 1947. With him most of the Cossack officer corps who also went to the gallows or would disappear into the labour camps. The mass of the enlisted members of Cossack Corps were also repatriated and sent to the bleak camps of the Soviet Union, muting their testimony.
[edit] Further reading
- François de Lannoy. Pannwitz Cossacks: Les Cosaques de Pannwitz 1942 - 1945
[edit] References
- Samuel J. Newland "Cossacks in the German Army" U.S.Army War College, Frank Cass and Co. Ltd 1991, ISBN 0-7146 3351-8
- David Littlejohn, M.A.,A.L.A. Foreigh Legions of the Third Reich. R.James Bender Publishing, 1987. ISBN 0-9121138-36-X
