10 Battles That Wiped Out Hitler's Elite SS Divisions

[00:00:00]Number 10, the Demiansk Pocket, 1942.

[00:00:04]It is February of 1942. The snow is so deep that a man can vanish into it up to his chest. The temperature drops far below freezing, and the wind carries ice that cuts the skin like glass. Somewhere south of Leningrad, in a wilderness of frozen swamp and black pine forest, roughly 100,000 German soldiers are about to be trapped. Among them is the most feared division in Hinrich Himmler's army, the SS Toten Cop, the Death's Head Division. To understand why this matters, you have to understand what the Toten Cop was. This was not a normal fighting unit. It had been built from the guards of concentration camps.

[00:00:45]Its first soldiers came from the men who had run Dhau. Its commander was a man named Theodore Ike. The same Ike who had organized the camp system and who had personally murdered a rival of Hitlers years before the war. Aki had told his officers before the invasion of the Soviet Union even began that the coming war would be a death struggle and that they were to be fanatical and merciless.

[00:01:09]The Toten Cop carried that message into Russia. By the time it reached Demian, it had already left a trail of massacres behind it in France and in the East.

[00:01:19]These were among the most committed, most brutal, and most ideologically loyal soldiers Hitler possessed. And in the winter of 1942, the Red Army was about to wrap a noose around all of them. The Soviet plan came out of the great counterattack that had thrown the Germans back from the gates of Moscow.

[00:01:37]The Red Army was not finished. In January, a general named Parlville Krokin launched an offensive south of Lake Ilman. His soldiers pushed through the gaps in the thin German line through forest and snow. The Germans believed no army could move through and they began to close in behind the German 16th Army's second corps. On the 8th of February 1942, the ring snapped shut.

[00:02:01]Six German divisions were sealed inside, about 90,000 fighting men and another 10,000 support troops. Among them holding the western and northeastern edges of the pocket was the toten cop.

[00:02:14]Now Hitler made the decision that would define the rest of this story and that he would make again and again until it destroyed his armies. He refused to let them retreat. Field Marshall von Leeb, the commander of army group north, asked permission to pull some of his men back before they were cut off. Hitler said no. Leeb was removed from command for even asking. The men in the pocket were ordered to hold their ground and wait to be rescued, no matter the cost. But how do you supply 100,000 men who are completely surrounded in the dead of a Russian winter with no road and no railway reaching them? The answer came from Herman Guring, the head of the Luftwaffer, the German air force. Guring promised Hitler that his transport planes could carry everything the trapped army needed. 300 tons of supplies every single day flown in over enemy lines and landed on two small airfields inside the pocket. This was something the world had never seen before. An entire encircled army kept alive entirely from the air. The transport planes, the lumbering three-engineed junkers flew in waves through Soviet anti-aircraft fire and Soviet fighters. Over the months of the siege, the Luftvafer flew more than 32,000 sorties into Demi. They brought in tens of thousands of tons of food, ammunition, and fuel. They flew in over 30,000 fresh soldiers to replace the dead. They carried out tens of thousands of wounded men. It was an astonishing feat of flying, and it cost the Germans hundreds of aircraft and hundreds of irreplaceable air crew. Losses they would feel for the rest of the war. But here is the part the planners did not understand at the time. The airlift never actually delivered the 300 tons a day it had promised. Not even close. The men inside the pocket were always hungry, always short of shells, always cold. And every single day the Red Army attacked for the toten cough. The pocket became a slaughter house that never ended. The division was given the role of what the Germans called the fire brigade. Wherever the Soviet attack threatened to break through, the Totenkov was rushed to plug the hole.

[00:04:27]Day after day, week after week, month after month, Ikey's men fought in the snow, in the swamp, in positions that were little more than holes scraped out of frozen ground. There was a saying about the division at Demiansk. No toteen cop position was taken by the Soviets until every toteen cop soldier in it was dead. That was not propaganda.

[00:04:49]That was simply how they fought and it was why they died in such enormous numbers. The men lived in conditions that are almost impossible to describe.

[00:04:58]The wounded could not always be evacuated. Frostbite took fingers, toes, whole feet. Disease spread through the cramped, filthy positions. The spring thored the frozen swamp into a sea of mud that swallowed men and machines alike. There is a photograph of Toten Cop soldiers, many of them wounded, dragging themselves through that mud toward the rear. They look less like an elite division and more like the survivors of some terrible shipwreck. EK himself was nearly killed several times.

[00:05:30]He sent desperate messages to Himmler, begging for replacements, begging for more supplies, begging for the Luftvafer to fly more missions, warning that without help, his division would simply cease to exist. The replacements that did arrive were poured into the line and chewed up almost as fast as they came.

[00:05:47]The relief operation finally began in March. German forces outside the pocket attacked toward it, trying to punch a corridor through the Soviet ring. The fighting was savage. Across rivers and swamps, the Soviets defended every step of the way. It was not until the 21st of April 1942 that a battle group with the Toten Cop at its core finally broke through and reoped a thin land link to the outside world. They called it the Ramusheo corridor, a narrow, blood soaked strip of ground that the Germans would have to defend for another year.

[00:06:22]The siege was lifted. But for the Death's Head Division, the victory was meaningless. Look at what was left of it. The division had gone into the east as a powerful formation. By the time it staggered out of Demians, it had been reduced to around 6,700 men, and the histories record that almost none of them were truly fit for duty. Around 80% of the division's strength had been killed, wounded, or lost. Four out of every five men. An entire elite division had been ground down to a battered remnant of frostbitten, exhausted survivors. The toten cop was so completely wrecked that it could not be patched up at the front. It had to be pulled out of the line entirely, taken off the eastern front, shipped first to Germany and then to France and rebuilt almost from scratch. When it returned to battle nearly a year later, it was effectively a different division wearing the same name. And there is a darker legacy to Demian, one that reached far beyond this one pocket. The airlift had appeared to work. The men had been kept supplied from the air and they had survived. Guring and Hitler looked at this and drew exactly the wrong lesson.

[00:07:35]When a far larger German army was surrounded at Stalingrad less than a year later, Goring promised Hitler that the Luftvafer could supply them from the air just as it had at Demiansk. He pointed to this very battle as proof.

[00:07:49]But Stalingrad was many times larger.

[00:07:52]The weather was worse and the Soviet air force was far stronger. The airlift failed completely and an entire German army of around 300,000 men was destroyed. The false lesson of Demi helped lead Germany into one of the greatest military disasters in history.

[00:08:08]So the destruction of the Toten Cop in the Demians pocket sits at number 10 on our list. One of the most fanatical SS divisions ever raised reduced to a fraction of its strength in a frozen swamp. And a battle whose hollow success would help doom an entire army the following winter. Number nine, the siege of Budapest, ending February 1945.

[00:08:30]Now we move forward almost 3 years to the very end of the war and to a beautiful old European capital that was about to be turned into a graveyard. By the winter of 1944, the war was clearly lost for Germany. The Red Army had pushed the Germans out of the Soviet Union, out of most of Poland, and was now driving deep into Hungary, Germany's last major ally. The great prize in Hungary was its capital, Budapest, the elegant city that straddles the Danube River. On the eastern bank lay the flat district called Pest. On the western bank rose the hills of Buddha, crowned by an ancient castle. Hitler declared Budapest a fortress. It was to be held to the last man and the last bullet. No retreat, no surrender. And among the troops trapped inside when the Red Army closed the ring on the 26th of December 1944 were two divisions of Hinrich Himmler's Waffen SS. Both of them cavalry divisions. The 8th SS Cavalry Division named Florian Gia after a German nobleman who had led peasant rebels centuries before and the 22nd SS Cavalry Division named Maria Teresia after the old Habsburg Empress who had once ruled Hungary. These two divisions had a grim history behind them. The Florian Gaia division had spent much of the war not in open battle but in what the Germans called bandit fighting, hunting partisans behind the lines in the Soviet Union. In practice, this meant the killing of huge numbers of civilians. In one set of operations alone, the division and units alongside it killed an estimated 3,000 people, the great majority of them unarmed, while recovering only a few hundred weapons.

[00:10:14]The numbers tell the story of what kind of fighting it really was. The Maria Theresia division had been built up from a core of Florian Gaia veterans filled out mostly with ethnic German conscripts from Hungary. Many of them taken into the SS whether they wanted to go or not.

[00:10:30]Now both divisions were sealed inside a dying city along with other German units and the Hungarian troops who fought beside them. In total, the trapped garrison numbered tens of thousands of soldiers, and behind them, packed into cellers and ruined buildings, were around 800,000 terrified civilians. The siege of Budapest was one of the most horrific urban battles of the entire war. Some historians have called it a second Stalingrad. The Red Army did not try to storm the whole city at once.

[00:11:02]Instead, it ground forward street by street, house by house, room by room.

[00:11:07]The fighting moved up through buildings and down into the sewers. Soviet assault teams and German defenders fought each other underground in the dark in the filth of the tunnels beneath the streets. At one point, a handful of Soviet marines made it all the way to Castle Hill through the sewers, grabbed a German officer, and dragged him back through the tunnels to their own lines.

[00:11:31]Supply collapsed almost immediately. The main airport was lost at the very start of the siege. After that, the only way in was by transport plane landing on improvised strips and on a park beside the castle, all under constant Soviet shellfire or by glider. Food ran out.

[00:11:49]The defenders began to starve. Soldiers ate their own horses. The cavalry divisions, which depended on those horses, watched them slaughtered for meat. The cold was merciless. The wounded lay in cellers with no proper care. The Germans tried three times to break in from the outside and rescue the garrison. In a series of attacks cenamed Operation Conrad, powerful SS Panza forces from outside the city hammered at the Soviet ring trying to punch a corridor through to the trapped men.

[00:12:20]Each time they were stopped, the city was simply too far inside Soviet held territory, and the Red Army was too strong. The garrison was on its own. By February of 1945, the situation inside Budapest was beyond hopeless. The defenders had been compressed into a shrinking pocket in the hills of Buddha.

[00:12:40]They were out of food, nearly out of ammunition, surrounded on all sides. The German commander, an SS general named Carl Fefa Vddenbrook, faced a terrible choice. Surrender against Hitler's orders or attempt a breakout through the Soviet lines. On the night of the 11th of February 1945, the garrison tried to break out. What followed was a massacre. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians poured out of the German positions and tried to fight their way through the Soviet encirclement toward the German lines many miles to the west. The Soviets were ready. They knew the breakout was coming. They had set up their machine guns and their artillery to cover every escape route. As the columns of desperate men surged forward through the darkness and the snow, the Soviet guns opened fire into the packed masses, the streets and the hillsides of Buddha were turned into killing grounds.

[00:13:35]The breakout shattered into thousands of small groups, each trying to slip through the gaps, most of them cut down or captured. The numbers are staggering.

[00:13:44]Of the tens of thousands who tried to break out, only a few hundred ever reached German lines. For the two SS cavalry divisions, the result was annihilation. The histories of the Florian Gaia division record that of around 30,000 men in the wider SS Corps, only about 800 made it out. For the Maria Terasia Division, the figure was even worse. Only around 170 men escaped the encirclement.

[00:14:10]170 out of an entire division. The commander of the Florian Gaia division, Yuakim Rumor, was wounded in the breakout and took his own life rather than be captured. The two SS divisions did not retreat, did not regroup, did not rebuild. They simply ceased to exist. They were struck from the German order of battle. The handful of survivors and the men who had been left out of the city were eventually swept into the formation of yet another doomed unit, and the city itself was destroyed.

[00:14:40]More than 80% of Budapest's buildings were damaged or wrecked. All five bridges across the Danube lay in the river, blown up by the retreating Germans. Tens of thousands of civilians had died in the siege from starvation, from the fighting, and from massacres carried out by the Hungarian fascist Arocross gangs who used the chaos to murder thousands of the city's Jews. The siege of Budapest takes number nine. two SS cavalry divisions with a record of brutality behind the lines, trapped in a beautiful city and then wiped out almost to the last man in a single night of slaughter when they tried to escape.

[00:15:18]Number eight, Operation Spring Awakening at Lake Balaton, March 1945.

[00:15:24]We stay in Hungary and we stay in the final months of the war because the destruction of Hitler's SS in the east was reaching its climax. After Budapest fell, Hitler turned his eyes to one of the last things keeping his war machine moving at all, oil. By 1945, Germany was running out of fuel. The bombing of its synthetic oil plants, and the loss of the Romanian oil fields had left the German military gasping for every drop. In western Hungary, around Lake Balaton lay some of the last oil reserves and refineries that the Germans could still reach. Hitler became fixated on holding them and he decided that he would not just defend them, he would launch a great offensive to drive the Red Army back from them all the way to the Danube. For this final gamble, Hitler reached for his most prized weapon, the sixth SS Panza army, commanded by Sept Dietrich, an old and devoted follower of Hitler who had once been his bodyguard and driver. This army contained the cream of what was left of the Vaffan SS. The first SS Panza division, the Libstande, Hitler's own bodyguard division. The 12th SS, the Hitler Youth Division, the second SS Das Reich, the 9inth SS, Hoen Stalin. These were the famous names, the divisions that had been at the heart of every great battle in the west and the east.

[00:16:47]But there was a problem. These same divisions had just come from the failed battle of the bulge in the Ardens where they had been badly mauled. They were worn out. Many of their tank crews were dead. Their ranks were filled with replacements who had little training.

[00:17:02]The proud names remained, but the divisions behind those names were shadows of what they had once been. The Lstande, the histories tell us, was by now seriously degraded by constant fighting and heavy losses. Hitler did not care.

[00:17:17]He ordered the offensive, cenamed Spring Awakening, to go ahead. 10 armored divisions and five infantry divisions, including a large number of the powerful new King Tiger heavy tanks, would smash into the Soviet defenses north and south of Lake Balaton, race to the Danube and turn the tide of the war in the east. It was, in the cold light of 1945, a fantasy. The Red Army was now overwhelmingly powerful, and Berlin itself was barely a 100 miles from the Soviet front lines in the north. But Hitler believed there were two more enemies the SS would have to fight, and neither of them carried a rifle. The first was the ground. The offensive was supposed to begin in early March, just as the Hungarian winter was breaking.

[00:18:02]The frozen earth thawed into a sea of thick, sucking mud. The heavy tanks, the very weapons the Germans were counting on, bogged down again and again. Tigers and panthers, machines of enormous power, sank to their hulls in the mire and sat helpless. The Panza grenaders, the armored infantry, often had to attack without their tanks because the tanks simply could not move. A King Tiger weighed nearly 70 tons. In that mud, it was a prisoner of its own weight. The second enemy was Soviet intelligence. The Germans had tried to move the sixth SS Panza army into Hungary in total secrecy. Hitler even forbade reconnaissance before the attack so as not to give the plan away. But the Soviets noticed the buildup of German tank formations in western Hungary.

[00:18:49]Anyway, they knew an offensive was coming and drawing on everything they had learned at the great battle of Kursk 2 years before. They prepared a defense in enormous depth. They built 66 anti-tank ambush points across more than 50 mi of front. They massed their artillery, putting nearly 2/3 of all their guns into the threatened sector.

[00:19:09]They dug defensive zones up to 20 or 30 mi deep. They built a wall the SS would have to grind through layer after layer.

[00:19:17]The attack began before dawn. On the 6th of March, 1945 with a thunderous artillery barrage and the advance of the Lidand Dartates Panza Grenaders. At first, the SS made some progress. They cleared lanes through the minefields.

[00:19:33]They broke into the first Soviet trench systems. The Lich Dandate and the Hitler Youth Divisions pushed forward, but the mud and the deep Soviet defenses bled the momentum out of the attack almost from the start. The tanks crawled where they should have raced. The new heavy tanks proved as much a burden as a blessing in that terrain. For 10 days, the SS hammered at the Soviet lines. In some places, they pushed forward 15, 20, even up to 40 km. But it was never enough. The Soviet anti-tank guns took a steady toll. Every yard of advance cost more men and more machines that could not be replaced. The southern arm of the offensive made even less progress. The whole grand plan was strangling in the mud and the wire. Then on the 16th of March, the Soviets struck back in full force and the moment they counterattacked, the entire German effort collapsed. Within a single day, the Red Army began driving the SS back.

[00:20:32]The Germans were soon retreating not just to where they had started, but well beyond it. The first SS Panzer Corps, scrambling to escape encirclement, got out of the trap, but lost huge amounts of equipment in the process. By the 20th of March, that core had only around 80 tanks and assault guns left. All of the SS divisions had been hit so hard that most were below half strength with no real hope of reinforcement. The last great offensive of the German army in World War II had failed utterly in barely 10 days. And now comes the moment that makes this battle famous. And that shows just how far the bond between Hitler and his SS had broken. When Hitler learned that his elite divisions, including his own lived, had failed, he flew into a rage. He claimed that the troops had not fought as the situation demanded and he issued one of the most extraordinary and humiliating orders of the entire war. The Vafan SS soldiers in these divisions wore special cuff titles, narrow bands on their sleeves bearing the names of their units. For the Lipstand Darte, that band carried the name Adolf Hitler himself. These cuff titles were a mark of pride and honor, the proof that a man belonged to the elite. Hitler now ordered these men to remove their cuff titles, to strip the armbands bearing his own name from their sleeves as a badge of disgrace. He was telling the men who had fought and bled for him for years that they were no longer worthy to wear his name. The order is remembered as the armband order and it landed like a slap in the face.

[00:22:08]Sept Dietrich, the loyal old SS general who commanded the sixth SS Panzer army, was disgusted by it. According to the accounts that survive, Dietrich refused to pass the order onto his troops. He is said to have told a subordinate that the armbands would stay on and that he would not deliver the telegram to the men.

[00:22:26]There is even a story hard to confirm that some furious SS soldiers gathered up their decorations and cuff titles, put them in a chamber pot, and sent them back toward Berlin as their answer to the furer. Whatever the exact truth of those final gestures, the meaning was clear. The relationship between Hitler and the elite he had built was finished.

[00:22:48]The men he had called the best of the best had been thrown into an impossible battle, ground up in the mud and then insulted for failing. Morale collapsed.

[00:22:58]Soldiers began to desert. Many could now see plainly that the war was lost and that the man they had followed had nothing left to offer them but disgrace.

[00:23:08]Operation Spring Awakening takes number eight. The last great attack of Hitler's army, spearheaded by his finest SS divisions, broken in the Hungarian mud in 10 days, and followed by an order so insulting that even his most loyal SS general refused to carry it out. Number seven, Operation Lutic at Mortain, August 1944. Now we leave the east and go back to the west to the green farm country of Normandy in the summer of 1944 where another of Hitler's gambles fed his best divisions straight into a death trap. By early August, 2 months after the D-Day landings, the situation in Normandy had finally cracked open.

[00:23:49]For weeks, the Germans had managed to hold the Allies bottled up in the hedge.

[00:23:53]But then the Americans under an offensive called Operation Cobra smashed through the German line near the town of Salo and broke out into open country.

[00:24:03]American tank columns began pouring south and then east, threatening to swing around behind the entire German army in Normandy. The key to this breakout was a narrow corridor of ground near the coastal town of Avranches.

[00:24:17]Through that corridor, the Americans were funneling their forces. If the Germans could cut it, they could trap the American spearheads and slam the door shut. A sensible commander looking at the map in early August would have ordered the German army to retreat east toward the same river before it was cut off. The German generals on the spot wanted exactly that. But Hitler, hundreds of miles away in his headquarters, saw it differently. He ordered a counterattack. He would gather his Panza divisions, drive west to the sea at Avanches, cut the American corridor, and trap the breakout. The operation was cenamed Lutic, the German name for the city of Learge. The spearhead of this attack was made up of his armored divisions, including the second SS Panza division, Das Reich, and elements of the first SS Panza division, the Libstande. The blow was to fall on the town of Morta and the high ground around it, which was held by a single American division, the 30th Infantry Division, nicknamed Old Hickory. But the Germans were walking into trouble before they even started, and they did not know it. The Allies had broken the German secret codes. Through the intelligence system known as Ultra, the Americans were reading German radio messages. They knew before the attack came that a German counteroffensive was being prepared at Morta. They did not change their overall plans, but they quietly put their air forces on alert and made sure the men at Morta were ready. The attack began in the early hours of the 7th of August, 1944.

[00:25:54]To keep the element of surprise, the Germans did not fire a preparatory artillery barrage. In the darkness and a heavy pre-dawn fog, the panzas rolled forward in classic Blitzkrieg style. SS battle groups slammed into the American positions, in some places infiltrating quietly, in others charging head-on. One SS battle group attacked a key piece of high ground called Hill 314. The men shouting, "Hile Hitler!" as they came forward behind their machine gun fire.

[00:26:24]The Germans took the town of Morta itself and cut off a battalion of American infantry on top of hill 314.

[00:26:31]For a few hours in that fog, it looked like the German plan might work. But the high ground was the key, and the Americans on it would not let go. On Hill 314, a few hundred American soldiers surrounded and cut off, dug in, and held. From the top of that hill, they could see the whole battlefield spread out below them. and among them were artillery observers with working radios.

[00:26:57]As the German tanks and trucks tried to push west through the valleys below, these surrounded Americans on the hilltop called down artillery fire on them with deadly precision. The Germans tried again and again to take the hill.

[00:27:09]They could not. The men on top, running low on food, water, and ammunition, held for days. At one point, the Americans even tried to drop supplies to them by air, though German anti-aircraft fire made it nearly impossible. And then, around midday on that first day, the fog burned away. The sky cleared and the German attack was doomed. When the fog lifted, the Allied air forces came.

[00:27:34]American P47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers and British Hawker Typhoons armed with rockets fell on the German columns. The panzas were caught out in the open, jammed onto narrow roads with no cover.

[00:27:48]The Luftvafer had promised to protect them with around 300 fighters, but the Allied fighters swarmed the German airfields and duled them far from the battlefield, so almost no German air cover ever reached Morta. The skies belonged completely to the Allies. What followed was a slaughter of armor.

[00:28:06]Rockets and bombs and cannon fire tore into the tank columns. Vehicles burned.

[00:28:11]Tanks were knocked out, abandoned, set on fire. The German advance, which depended on speed and surprise, simply stopped dead under the weight of the air attack. The fighter bombers claimed dozens of tanks. Even where their actual kills were fewer than the pilots believed, the effect was overwhelming.

[00:28:29]German crews abandoned their vehicles and ran for cover whenever they heard the aircraft coming. The attack toward the sea ground to a halt, only a few miles from where it had started. Within a couple of days, Operation Lutic had completely collapsed. The Germans never came close to reaching of Ranches or the sea. The American 30th Division held its ground, and the men on Hill 314 were finally relieved. The 30th Division paid a heavy price, losing around 1,800 men killed and wounded in the battle, with hundreds of those falling on Hill 314 alone. But they had stopped Hitler's counterattack cold. And here is the part that makes Mortain so important and so deadly for the SS. The attack did not just fail, it made everything worse for the Germans. By driving his Panza divisions west toward the branches, Hitler had pushed them deeper into the very trap that was forming around them.

[00:29:24]While the SS armor was battering itself to pieces at Morta, the Allies were swinging their forces around to the north and south, closing a giant ring behind the entire German army in Normandy. Every tank Hitler fed into the Mortine attack was a tank thrown into the mouth of that closing trap. The German generals had seen it coming. They had wanted to retreat. Instead, on Hitler's orders, the cream of the German armor in the west had driven in exactly the wrong direction, away from safety and toward destruction. The failed counterattack at Mortain fed the divisions directly into the catastrophe that was about to follow. A catastrophe with a name, the filet's pocket. We will come to it. Operation Lutic at Mortine takes number seven. Hitler's last throw of the dice in Normandy. Spearheaded by his SS panzas, smashed by American infantry on the high ground and Allied aircraft in the clear sky and then swallowed by the trap it had only deepened. Number six, the Corsoon Chassis pocket, winter 1944.

[00:30:29]We return to the east, to Ukraine, to the deep winter at the start of 1944, and to one of the most desperate escapes of the entire war. The story of how a famous SS division crawled out of a frozen trap and left almost everything it owned behind. By January 1944, the German army in the southern Soviet Union was in full retreat. They had fallen back to the line of the Great Neper River and beyond. But along that line, a bulge of German-h held ground stuck out toward the river near the towns of Corsune and Cherokees. Two German core held that bulge, and among them was one of the most famous divisions in the Vofan SS, the fifth SS Panza division.

[00:31:11]Wicking. Wicking was unusual. It had been built partly from volunteers from across northern and western Europe. Men from Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, and elsewhere who had been drawn into Hitler's cause. Alongside it, in the pocket fought a brigade of French-speaking Belgian volunteers, the Woons, led by a notorious fascist named Leon Degrell. These were among the most committed foreign fighters in Hitler's army. And in late January, the Red Army was about to bury them in the snow. The Soviet plan was a classic pinser. Two massive armored thrusts, one from the north and one from the south, would drive toward each other behind the German bulge and meet, cutting off everyone inside. The Soviets had learned how to do this with terrible efficiency.

[00:31:59]On the 28th of January 1944, the two Soviet spearheads met. The ring closed.

[00:32:06]Around 60,000 German soldiers were trapped inside the Corsun Cherkasi pocket, wicking and the woons among them. What followed was weeks of nightmare. The pocket was deep inside Soviet- held territory in the middle of a Ukrainian winter that swung between bitter frost and sudden Thor. The trapped men were supplied like a Demian, mostly by air. And like at Deiansk, the airlift never delivered enough. The German headquarters calculated that the men needed around 150 tons of supplies a day. The Luftvafer managed only about half of that. The soldiers grew hungry, short of ammunition, and exhausted. The Soviets attacked the shrinking pocket from all sides, squeezing it smaller and smaller until it was only a few miles across. Outside the pocket, the Germans launched a furious effort to break through and rescue the trapped men. A relief force built around powerful Panza divisions, including heavy tanks, attacked toward the pocket through the mud and snow. The fighting was brutal.

[00:33:09]The relief tanks ground forward mile by mile against fierce Soviet resistance, but they could not quite reach the trapped army. They got close, agonizingly close, establishing a small bridge head across a stream called the ginaloy tick, but they could go no further. The men inside the pocket would have to come to them. it would have to break out on their own. The breakout was set for the night of the 16th of February 1944. The plan was for the trapped divisions to smash through the Soviet ring in the dark and run for the relief force. Wicking, as one of the strongest units left, was given the job of spearheading and covering this last desperate escape. The password whispered among the men was fry, freedom. In the freezing darkness, tens of thousands of men surged out of the pocket towards safety. At first, in the confusion in the night, some of them got through. But then the breakout began to unravel. The Germans had hoped to march out over a ridge dominated by a piece of high ground called Hill 239. But when their scouts reached it, they found it occupied by Soviet tanks. The high ground was blocked. The escape route had to bend away to the south toward the ginaloy tick river and there at that river the disaster reached its peak. The early Thor had swollen the Giloy Tikich into a roaring icy torrent around 30 yards wide and deep enough to drown a man. There was no proper bridge where the fleeing columns arrived. As thousands of desperate men piled up on the bank, Soviet tanks appeared in the distance and opened fire into the packed mass. While Soviet aircraft and cavalry hunted the fugitives across the snow, panic took hold. Men plunged into the freezing river to escape the shellfire.

[00:34:56]They tried to swim across in their heavy winter clothing. Many drowned. Horses and men were swept away in the current.

[00:35:02]Soldiers used the bodies of those who had gone before and abandoned equipment to try to build a crude crossing. Some accounts described men climbing over a bridge made partly of drowned horses and dead comrades. The water was so cold that men who made it across collapsed on the far bank, their legs numb and useless, unable to walk. To get across that river, the trapped army had to abandon everything heavy. Every tank, every gun, every truck, all of it was left behind on the eastern bank, blown up after the last round had been fired or simply abandoned in the mud and the snow. The men who reached safety came across with little more than their personal weapons and often not even those wicking. A powerful armored division came out of the pocket with no armor at all. All its tanks and heavy equipment were gone. The cost was enormous. Of the roughly 60,000 men trapped in the pocket. Around 35,000 fought their way out, though many of those were wounded and broken. Some 19,000 were dead, captured, or missing.

[00:36:06]The relief had failed to save the equipment and only saved the men by the narrowest of margins. The Walloon Brigade had gone into the pocket with around 2,000 men and came out with only a few hundred. Wicking was wrecked. As an armored fighting division, it had effectively been destroyed. It had to be pulled out of the line entirely and sent to the rear to be rebuilt from the ground up. Both sides claimed Corsune Czechassi as a kind of victory, but for the SS it was a hollow one. Yes, the bulk of the men had escaped, which is why some German accounts treated it almost as a triumph of survival. But the cost was the loss of an entire elite division as a fighting force. Along with all its precious tanks and guns in a paddic flight across a frozen river, the wicking division that crawled out of the Corsoon pocket was a shadow, an army of frozen weaponless survivors who would have to be rebuilt before they could fight again. The Corsun Chassi pocket takes number six. A famous SS division and its foreign volunteers trapped in the Ukrainian winter, then forced into a desperate breakout across an icy torrent that cost them every tank they owned and left the division shattered. Number five, Elsenborn Ridge, December 1944.

[00:37:23]Now we go back to the west one more time, to the snowy forests of Belgium, and to the great German surprise attack of the winter of 1944, the Battle of the Bulge, and to one ridge of high ground where Hitler's most important SS army was stopped dead in its tracks. In December 1944, Hitler launched his last great gamble in the West. He gathered the best forces he could find and threw them in a surprise attack through the dense Arden's forest, aiming to split the Allied armies in two and drive all the way to the port of Antworp. If it worked, he believed he might force the Western Allies to make peace. The attack created a huge bulge in the American lines, which is why we remember it as the Battle of the Bulge.

[00:38:07]The main effort of the whole offensive, the heart of Hitler's plan was given to the sixth Panza army, an SS-led army commanded once again by Septitrich. This army contained the elite SS Panza divisions, including the 12th SS, the Hitler Youth Division, and the first SS, the Livstande.

[00:38:27]Their job was the most important of all.

[00:38:30]They were to break through on the northern part of the front, seize the road network, and race for the Moose River and beyond. Everything depended on them punching through quickly. And standing in their path on the northern shoulder of the offensive was a long, low ridge of high ground near the Belgian town of Elenborn. Whoever held that ridge controlled the good roads the SS Panzas needed to get moving. The Germans had to take it. The Americans had to hold it. When the attack exploded out of the fog and snow on the 16th of December 1944, the German plan called for their infantry and armor to smash through the American front, capture the villages in front of the ridge, and open the roads for the panzas. But the Americans defending this sector did something the Germans did not expect.

[00:39:18]They fought, and they would not break.

[00:39:20]In the first days, much of the burden fell on a green American division, the 99th Infantry Division, nicknamed the Battle Babies, because they had only just arrived in Europe. They were outnumbered in places by as much as 5 to one, and they had little armor to support them. But they held. They fought with machine guns, rifles, mortars, and at times with their bare hands in close combat in the snowy woods. They were pushed back, surrounded in places, battered, but they slowed the Germans down, and they bought time, and time was everything. Behind and alongside them was a veteran formation, the Second Infantry Division, a tough, experienced division under a skilled commander. As the line bent, the Americans conducted a fighting withdrawal back onto the high ground of Elenborn Ridge itself. pulling out of the forward villages of Crinkle and Rosherath, the so-called twin villages where the fighting had been savage, a true graveyard of German tanks. Once they were up on the ridge, dug into prepared positions, they became almost impossible to move. And now the Americans played their greatest card, artillery. The high ground of Elenborn Ridge gave the American gunners a perfect field of fire over the ground the Germans had to cross. The Americans had masked an enormous concentration of artillery behind the ridge as the SS attacks came in across the open snowy slopes. The American observers called down storm after storm of shellfire. The German official accounts and the soldiers who survived remembered it as a dreadful decisive rain of fire. Old German attacks were broken up before they could even reach the American foxholes. The American gunners had carefully registered the ground in front of their infantry, which meant they could drop shells exactly where the attacking Germans were while their own men stayed safe in their covered holes.

[00:41:15]The SS divisions threw themselves at this ridge again and again. On one day alone, the Sixth Panza army launched all-out attacks at 9:00 in the morning, at 11:00, and again in the late afternoon, committing tanks, infantry, self-propelled guns, and tank destroyers. Every one of them failed.

[00:41:35]The SS Panza Grenaders penetrated the American lines in places only to be thrown back every time by American infantry, tank destroyers, and that overwhelming artillery. The fighting around the villages and the ridge was some of the most intense of the entire battle. Through it all, the Americans on Elsenborn Ridge never broke. This was in fact the one sector of the entire American front during the Battle of the Bulge where the Germans failed to gain any significant ground at all.

[00:42:06]Everywhere else, the German attack created its great bulge. Here on the vital northern shoulder, the line held firm like a wall. The cost to the Americans was high with the divisions defending the area losing several thousand men. But they had done the one thing that mattered most and the consequences for the whole German offensive were fatal. Remember the sixth Panza army was the main effort, the heart of the plan. The northern shoulder at Elsenborn was the key to the roads it needed. When the SS could not break through there, the entire timetable of the offensive fell apart. The good northern roads stayed in American hands.

[00:42:45]The SS Panzas were left strung out and tangled up. With the main effort stalled, the Germans were forced to shift the weight of their attack south toward the town of Baston, which only spread their strength thinner and led to more famous fighting there. The elite SS divisions had been stopped cold by dugin American infantry and the massed American guns. The 12th SS, the Hitler Youth Division, hammered itself bloody against this ridge and got nowhere. The failure on the northern shoulder doomed the whole offensive from the very start.

[00:43:17]By holding Elsenborn Ridge, the American soldiers in those frozen foxholes had ensured that Hitler's last great gamble in the west could never succeed.

[00:43:27]Elsenborn Ridge takes number five, the one place the Germans could not crack.

[00:43:32]Hitler's prized SS Panza army, the main effort of the entire Battle of the Bulge, broken against American infantry and an avalanche of artillery on the snowy Belgian Ridge, dooming the whole offensive before it could ever reach the MS. Number four, the Broady Pocket, July 1944.

[00:43:51]We returned to the east to the summer of 1944 to one of the most catastrophic months in the entire history of the German army and to a young untested SS division of Ukrainian volunteers that was about to be almost completely destroyed in a matter of days. In the summer of 1944, the Red Army unleashed a series of titanic offensives all along the eastern front. In the center, an operation called Bagration tore the heart out of an entire German army group. But to the south in western Ukraine and eastern Poland, the Soviets launched another massive blow. The Lavau Sander's offensive aimed at the city of Lav. And caught in the path of this offensive was a German core holding a salient, an exposed bulge in the line near the town of Broady. Among the divisions in that core was one of the most unusual in the entire Waffan SS, the 14th Waffen SS division called Galesian or Galysia. It had been raised from volunteers among the Ukrainians of Galatia, the western part of Ukraine.

[00:44:54]Many of these men had joined, hoping that by fighting the Soviets, they might somehow win an independent Ukraine. They were enthusiastic, but largely untested.

[00:45:03]The division had only been formed the year before. Most of its enlisted men had little military experience, and its German cadri of officers and sergeants was, by some accounts, not the best the army had to offer. It had been thrown into the line to plug a hole in the front, facing a Soviet force several times stronger with armor and air support the division simply did not have. The Soviet offensive opened on the 14th of July 1944.

[00:45:29]The Red Army punched through the German line both north and south of the Broady Salient, leaving the German core, including the Galysian Division, dangerously exposed in the bulge. The German commander on the spot recognized the danger and wanted to pull his men back before they were trapped. But higher command still believed the line could be held and the order to retreat in time never came. The core was condemned to its fate. On the 18th of July, the two Soviet pincers met behind the salient. The ring closed. Around 45,000 men of the German corps, including the bulk of the Galysian division, were trapped in the Brody pocket. What happened next was swift and merciless. Unlike Demians Corson, there would be no monthsl long siege and no carefully organized breakout here. The Soviet forces simply crushed the pocket.

[00:46:22]The trapped Germans and Ukrainians were pounded relentlessly by Soviet artillery and by waves of attacks from Soviet armor. Soviet ground attack aircraft, the dreaded Illusian Sturmovix, swept over the trapped men, raking the packed columns. The German relief attempts from outside made by Panza divisions that were themselves worn out and under strength failed just as they had failed at other pockets. For the men inside, it became a chaos of horror. One account of the breakout attempts describes wave after wave of soldiers rushing forward without order. Columns of unmanaged men and remaining officers trying to escape in a desperate surge.

[00:47:02]supply units, the wounded, horse carts, and trucks all mixed together, struggling to push through the crowd under artillery and rocket fire. The killed and the wounded fell while those still alive rushed forward over them.

[00:47:16]The ground was strewn with dead horses, overturned carts, and destroyed vehicles. In a hellish storm of fire that one account says lasted 3 and 1/2 hours, many German and Ukrainian combat groups were completely wiped out. For the Galesian division, the result was something close to annihilation. The numbers vary somewhat between sources, but the scale of the disaster is clear and consistent. The division had gone into the battle with somewhere around 11 to 12,000 men. When the survivors finally trickled back to German lines after fighting their way out around the 21st and 22nd of July, only about 3,000 of them remained. The great majority of the division had been killed, captured, or scattered in a matter of days. Some of those who escaped did not return to the division at all, but instead slipped away to join the Ukrainian insurgent partisans, who continued their own war against the Soviets for years afterward.

[00:48:13]The division's German commander, a man named Fritz Frightag, did not cover himself in glory. By several accounts, he resigned his command in the middle of the battle. And during the breakout, he was largely concerned with saving himself. Reportedly having to be physically dragged up a slope by two of his own Ukrainian soldiers using their belts. The men he was supposed to lead were left to fight their way out as best they could. The Galysian division had effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force. It was so completely shattered that it could not simply be reinforced. Like so many of the units on this list, it had to be disbanded in its old form and rebuilt almost entirely from scratch, using the few survivors as a core along with reserve units and a flood of new recruits. The rebuilt division would fight on later in the war in Slovakia and elsewhere and would eventually surrender to the Western Allies in 1945. But the original division that had marched to Broady full of hope was gone, swallowed in a few days of fire in a Ukrainian pocket. It is worth pausing on the darker history of this division in keeping with telling the truth about these formations. Like other SSUs, parts of the Galesian division and the police regiments tied to it were involved in atrocities against civilians before they ever reached Broady, including the destruction of Polish villages and the massacre of their inhabitants. After the war, all SS organizations were condemned as criminal. The men of Galizen were caught in one of the war's most bitter and complicated tragedies. Volunteers for a cause that never came, fighting under a flag that committed terrible crimes, and then nearly destroyed in a single battle. The Broady Pocket takes number four. A young SS division of Ukrainian volunteers thrown into a collapsing front, encircled, and almost completely annihilated in a matter of days, losing the great majority of its strength and having to be rebuilt from nothing. Number three, Procarovka and the Kursk offensive, July 1943. Now we go back further to the summer of 1943 to what many people call the greatest tank battle in history and to the moment the German army on the Eastern front lost the initiative forever. This one requires us to be careful and honest because the popular story and the historical truth are not quite the same.

[00:50:37]By the summer of 1943, the Germans had recovered somewhat from the disaster of Stalingrad. Hitler wanted to seize back the initiative on the Eastern Front. He looked at the map and saw a huge bulge in the Soviet line around the city of Kursk sticking out into the German front. His plan, cenamed Operation Citadel, was simple in concept. Attack the bulge from the north and the south at the same time. Pinch off its base and trap the enormous Soviet forces inside.

[00:51:05]It would be a classic German encirclement battle on a gigantic scale.

[00:51:09]The armored spearhead of the southern attack was Hitler's elite. The second SS Panza Corps commanded by Paul Houseer.

[00:51:16]It contained three of the most famous SS divisions in the army. The first SS the Livestande, the second SS Dar Reich, and the third SS Toten rebuilt after its near destruction at Deiansk. These were the cream of the Vaffan SS armor equipped with the best tanks Germany had, including a number of the powerful new Tiger tanks. But Hitler had made a fatal mistake before the battle even began. He kept delaying the attack again and again, partly because he wanted to wait for more of his new tanks to arrive. The delays gave the Soviets time. And the Soviets, who knew the attack was coming, used that time to build the deepest, most powerful defensive system the world had ever seen. They dug belt after belt of trenches, minefields, and anti-tank gun positions. Layer upon layer stretching back for miles, they massed enormous reserves of armor and artillery. When the German attack finally came on the 5th of July, 1943, it was driving straight into a fortress.

[00:52:20]The second SS Panza attacked with great power and skill. Day after day, the SS divisions ground their way forward through the Soviet defenses. Taking heavy losses, but pushing on toward their objectives, they drove toward a town called Procarovka. And it was there on the 12th of July 1943 that the most famous clash of the battle took place.

[00:52:42]On that day, the Soviets launched a massive armored counterattack at Procarovka. The fifth guard's tank army with hundreds of tanks charged headlong into the second SS Panza. The result was a swirling chaotic battle of tanks at close range fought across the fields southwest of the town in dust and smoke and fire. Soviet tanks raced in close to neutralize the longer range of the German guns. The fighting was savage beyond description. For decades, the story was told that the German SS Panzas were shattered at Procarovka, that hundreds of German tanks were destroyed, and that the cream of Hitler's armor was bled white in a single day. Now, here is where we must be careful and honest, because modern research has changed this picture, and getting it right matters.

[00:53:29]Recent studies drawing on newly discovered German archival records of their exact tank strengths have shown that the popular story of the German armor being crushed at Procarovka is largely a myth. In terms of tanks actually destroyed, the second SS Panza core lost only a modest number on the 12th of July. In fact, because of their excellent repair services, the core had nearly as many running tanks a few days after the battle as it had before it. It was the Soviet tank army that suffered the truly catastrophic tank losses that day, charging into the German guns. So if you measure the battle only in burned out German tanks, Procarovka was not the graveyard of the SS Panzas that legend claims. But and this is the crucial point, this does not mean the SS1 and it does not change the real outcome because the German offensive failed completely anyway. The whole purpose of Citadel was to break through and trap the Soviet armies and it never did. The Soviet defenses held. The German attack, even where it pushed forward, never achieved the breakthrough it needed. And on the very day of the Procarovka clash, two things happened that sealed the offensive's fate. In the north, the Soviets launched their own great counteroffensive against the German positions there. and far away. The Western Allies had just landed in Sicily, threatening Italy and forcing Hitler to think about pulling forces away to the Mediterranean. The very next day, the 13th of July, Hitler called off Operation Citadel. The greatest offensive the Germans would ever launch in the East was over, and it had achieved nothing. The second SS Panza core was pulled out, and its divisions were soon sent off to deal with crises elsewhere. One of them eventually shipped all the way to Italy. So what really happened to the SS at Kursk? They were not annihilated in a single afternoon, the way the legend says. But over the whole course of the offensive, the elite SS divisions and the German army around them were bled. They lost men they could not easily replace.

[00:55:29]Killed and wounded in the savage fighting through the Soviet defensive belts. They expended irreplaceable strength on an attack that failed. And far more important than the exact tank count, they lost something they could never get back. The initiative. This is the true meaning of Kursk, and it is why it belongs near the top of this list.

[00:55:50]Before Kursk, the Germans could still choose where and when to attack on the Eastern Front. After Kursk, they never launched another major offensive there.

[00:55:59]From that summer onward, the German army in the east was always retreating, always reacting, always being pushed back. all the way to Berlin. The strategic initiative on the entire Eastern front passed to the Soviets and it never came back. Hitler's elite SS spearhead had been thrown against the Soviet wall. The offensive had collapsed and the long road of German defeat in the east had begun. Procarovka and the Kursk offensive take number three. Not the simple tank graveyard of legend, but something more important. The battle where Hitler's elite SS Panza forms the tip of his last Great Eastern offensive failed completely against the deepest defenses ever built was bled in the process and lost the initiative on the Eastern front forever. Number two, the destruction of the 12th SS Hitler Jung Kong summer 1944.

[00:56:52]Now we return to Normandy to the summer of 1944 and to one of the most chilling and tragic divisions in the entire German army. A division made of children led by fanatics that fought with terrible savagery and was ground to dust in barely 2 months. The 12th SS Panza Division was different from any other division on this list. Its nickname was Hitler Jugand, the Hitler Youth, and that name was literal. By 1943, Germany was desperate for manpower after the catastrophe at Stalingrad. So the SS created a new division built almost entirely from teenage members of the Hitler Youth Organization, boys born around 1926, which meant most of them were just 17 or 18 years old when they went into battle.

[00:57:39]In one battalion, around 65% of the men were under 18. Only a tiny fraction were over 25, and almost all of those older men were the officers and sergeants.

[00:57:50]These boys had been raised entirely under the Nazi regime. Fed propaganda from childhood, trained to believe that dying for Hitler was the highest honor a man could achieve. To lead them, the SS brought in hardened veteran officers and sergeants from the Eastern Front, men like the famous and ruthless Kurt Meer.

[00:58:08]The combination was frightening.

[00:58:10]Fanatical, fearless teenagers led by experienced, brutal veterans. The division went into Normandy around 20,000 strong, well equipped with tanks and burning with a willingness to sacrifice itself that shocked even other German units. The Hitler Youth Division first went into action on the 7th of June 1944, the day after D-Day, thrown into the defense of the city of K against the British and the Canadians.

[00:58:36]And from the very first hours, it fought with a savagery that became notorious.

[00:58:41]That savagery had a dark and criminal side. Almost immediately, the division began committing war crimes. Between the 7th and the 17th of June, members of the division, including men under Curt Meers's command, murdered groups of Canadian prisoners of war, shooting them after they had surrendered, including at a place called the Arden Abbey near Kon.

[00:59:02]Even before reaching Normandy, the division had been involved in the killing of French civilians. These were not the actions of honorable soldiers.

[00:59:10]They were the actions of a unit poisoned by fanaticism, and Maya would later be tried for these crimes. On the battlefield, the young soldiers fought with a reckless courage that made them deadly opponents. In their very first action, attacking the Canadians near the car airfield, the division's young soldiers knocked out around 28 Allied tanks while losing only a handful of their own men. Again and again over the following weeks, the teenage Panza grenaders and tank crews threw themselves at the British and Canadian forces fighting from the ruins, the hedge, and the villages around Kong with a ferocity that astonished their enemies. One Canadian unit's war diary describing the fighting in August recorded that few prisoners were taken because the enemy preferred to die rather than give in. The boys fought like that. They did not break. They did not surrender easily. And they died in droves. And that is the tragedy and the horror at the heart of this story. The fanaticism that made them such fierce fighters also made them easy to destroy because they would not give up ground and they would not stop attacking no matter how hopeless the odds. The British and Canadians with their massive advantages in artillery, in tanks, in supplies and in air power simply ground the division down without mercy. For 2 months around K, the battle went on. The British launched offensive after offensive with names like Totalize and Tractable, hammering the German lines with thousands of bombers and masses of artillery. The Hitler Youth Division was at the center of the fighting, holding, counterattacking, bleeding. Its tanks were destroyed. Its young soldiers were killed and wounded in numbers that mounted day after day. By the 9th of July, the British had taken much of K and the division had been nearly shattered down to only a fraction of its tanks and having suffered enormous casualties. Some accounts citing a casualty rate of around 60% in just the first month. Then came the encirclement at Filelets which we will reach in a moment and the division was caught in the trap along with the rest of the German army. As the pocket closed in August, the Hitler Youth Division, or what was left of it, was given the job of holding open the northern edge of the escape route. The boys, by now joined by every cook, clerk, mechanic, and gunner who could carry a rifle, fought on amid the wreckage to keep the gap open while other Germans fled through it. When the battle for Normandy finally ended, the numbers told the whole terrible story.

[01:01:45]The 12th SS Panza Division had gone into the campaign with around 20,500 men. By the 22nd of August 1944 after barely 2 1/2 months of fighting, it had lost roughly half its men with the figures often cited around 8 to 9,000 casualties, and it had lost the overwhelming majority of its tanks and almost all of its artillery. Some accounts describe the division at the end as a shattered remnant reduced to a comparative handful of survivors with almost no armor left. An entire division of 20,000 had been ground down to a broken fragment. Think about what that really means. This was a division of teenagers, boys of 17 and 18 sent into the worst fighting on the Western Front.

[01:02:29]Told that dying for Hitler was glorious.

[01:02:32]led by men who murdered prisoners and then fed into a battle that destroyed them almost completely in a matter of weeks. The fanaticism that had been poured into them from childhood did not save them. It killed them. The very thing that made the Hitler Youth Division so fearsome, its refusal to ever yield, was exactly the thing that ensured its destruction. The survivors were pulled out and the division was rebuilt with new recruits. It would fight again in the Battle of the Bulge and later in Hungary, where, as we have seen, it was bled white once more at Lake Balaton. But the original division, those 20,000 fanatical boys of the summer of 1944, was gone, consumed in the fighting around Con. The destruction of the 12th SS Hitler Jujent takes number two. A division built from children and fanatics, fighting with notorious savagery and committing terrible crimes. ground down without mercy from 20,000 men to a shattered remnant in barely two months. One of the most chilling and tragic stories of the entire war. Number one, the file's pocket, August 1944.

[01:03:40]And so we come to number one. The greatest catastrophe to befall the German army in the west and the battle that more than any other marked the destruction of Hitler's army in France.

[01:03:51]The filet's pocket, the killing grounds.

[01:03:54]We have already touched the edges of this story. We saw how the SS Panzas drove west toward Morta deeper into a trap. We saw how the Hitler Youth Division was caught in the closing pocket. Now let us see the whole disaster. By the middle of August 1944, the German army in Normandy was in mortal danger. The American breakout had swung wide around the German southern flank. The British and Canadians were pushing down from the north toward the town of Filets, and Hitler's failed counterattack at Morta had pushed the German armor even deeper into the developing trap. The Allied commanders, Montgomery and Bradley, saw the opportunity. If they could close the jaws of their pinsers, the Canadians and British coming down from the north and the Americans and French coming up from the south, they would trap virtually the entire German army in Normandy in one gigantic pocket. Inside that forming pocket were the remnants of 14 or 15 German divisions, including some of the most famous in the army. Several SS Panza divisions were caught in or around the trap. Among them, the 12th SS Hitler Youth Division, the second SS Hoen Stafen, and others. The cream of the Waffen SS Armor in the West. The divisions that had been fighting since D-Day were now packed into a shrinking pocket of ground with the Allies closing in on every side. The Germans realized the danger and tried to escape eastward through the narrowing gap between the Allied pincers. And for several days in mid August, a desperate, terrible race took place. The Germans struggling to keep the gap open and pour their forces through it. The Allies struggling to slam it shut and trap them all. The fighting at the edges of the gap was savage. On the northern shoulder, Polish and Canadian forces fought to seal the trap. A force from the first Polish armored division seized a piece of high ground called Montreal, which the Poles nicknamed the mace. Looking down over the German escape route, from that hill, the Poles called down fire on the fleeing Germans below. The Germans, both from inside the pocket and from outside, it launched furious attacks to try to dislodge the Poles and keep the corridor open. The second SS and 9inth SS Panza divisions threw themselves at the Polish positions in coordinated attacks on the 20th of August. The fighting was hand-to- hand, close, and merciless. The Poles, running desperately low on ammunition, held on against everything the SS could throw at them. A final attack by SS troops on the morning of the 21st, was beaten back in close quarters combat. But while that battle raged on the shoulders, the real horror was happening inside the pocket and along the escape route itself. Because once the Allies controlled the high ground around the gap, the only roads out of the pocket became a corridor of death. The Germans trying to escape were funneled onto a few narrow roads and river crossings. Packed bumperto-bumper, tanks and trucks and guns and horsedrawn wagons and men on foot all jammed together. And over this packed mass came the Allied air forces and the Allied artillery. From above, the fighter bombers swept down the length of the columns, hitting the front and the rear to block the road, then working over everything trapped in between. The artillery fired into the corridor without pause. There was nowhere for the Germans to go. The roads were blocked by burning wreckage in front and behind, hemmed in by Allied fire on either side.

[01:07:23]The destruction was almost beyond imagining. The escape route, especially around the crossings of the Dives River, became a corridor of burning and shattered wreckage. The river itself, in places, was said to be choked with the bodies of men and horses. Tanks, trucks, guns, and vehicles of every kind were destroyed or simply abandoned where they stood, their crews fleeing on foot.

[01:07:45]After the battle, when Allied investigators went through the pocket, they counted the wreckage. They estimated that the Germans had lost around 500 tanks and assault guns in and around the pocket. The roads were lined with the burnedout hulks of hundreds of armored vehicles, thousands of trucks and wagons, and hundreds of guns. When the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, walked the battlefield afterward, he described a scene of such carnage that he said it was possible to walk for hundreds of yards stepping on nothing but the dead. The men who fought there remembered the file's pockets simply as the killing grounds. On the 19th and 20th of August, the jaws of the trap finally snapped shut as the Canadians, Poles, Americans, and French linked up. The pocket was sealed. Tens of thousands of German soldiers were killed or captured. The figures vary between sources, but the scale is consistent and enormous. Something like 10 to 15,000 Germans were killed in the pocket and around 40,000 to 50,000 were taken prisoner. An entire German army, the seventh army, had effectively ceased to exist. Now, in keeping with telling the truth, we should be honest about one thing. The trap was not perfectly sealed before the jaws closed completely.

[01:09:02]Somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 German troops managed to slip out through the gap to the east. Many of the men of the SS Panza divisions, the leadership carders, escaped even as their divisions equipment was destroyed.

[01:09:16]Some historians have criticized the Allied commanders for not closing the gap faster and trapping everyone. But here is the crucial point. Even those who escaped left almost all of their heavy equipment behind. They got their bodies out, but not their tanks, their guns, or their trucks. And much of what did escape the pocket was destroyed in the further retreat across the same river. The men who got away came out as the survivors of broken divisions.

[01:09:42]Stripped of the weapons that made them an army. For the elite waffen SS armor files was the end of the road in the west. The famous Panza divisions that had fought through Normandy were wrecked. Their tanks lay in burning rows along the roads of the pocket. The heavy tank battalion attached to the first SS Panza core equipped with mighty Tiger tanks lost virtually all of its remaining Tigers in the pocket and the retreat that followed. Division after division came out of Normandy as a shattered shell fit only to be pulled back to Germany and rebuilt from the ground up. The Battle of Normandy was over and it had ended in one of the most decisive victories the Western Allies ever won. The German army in France had been destroyed. The road to Paris and beyond it the road to the German border lay open and the cream of Hitler's waffen SS armor in the west the proud Panza divisions that had tried to throw the allies back into the sea had been smashed in the burning corridor of the file's pocket. That is why the file's pocket sits at number one. It was the grave of the German army in the west.

[01:10:47]The place where Hitler's elite SS Panza divisions, fed into the trap by his own stubborn orders, were caught and crushed under a hail of bombs and shells, leaving behind a landscape of burning steel and the wreckage of an entire army. So there it is, 10 battles that wiped out Hitler's elite SS divisions.

[01:11:05]From the frozen swamp of DemiNansk, where the death's head division was reduced to a frostbitten remnant, to the massacre at Budapest, where two SS cavalry divisions died in a single night. From the muddy failure at Lake Balaton, where Hitler tore the armbbands from his own bodyguards in disgrace, to the burning corridor of Filets, the killing grounds where the German army in the west met its end. Different fronts, different years, different enemies. But the same lesson written again and again in fire and snow and blood. The divisions Hitler called the best of the best, the elite he poured his faith and his fanaticism into were not invincible.

[01:11:46]One by one on battlefields from Normandy to Hungary to the heart of Russia, they were surrounded, broken, and destroyed.

[01:11:54]These men fought with skill and ferocity, and that is exactly why their destruction matters. They were not weak soldiers beaten by luck. They were among the most dangerous formations of the entire war. And they were ground to nothing all the same, often by the very fanaticism that was supposed to make them unstoppable. And we should never forget that many of these same elite divisions left behind them a trail of murdered prisoners and slaughtered civilians. Their reputation as soldiers is forever stained by their crimes.

[01:12:25]Their end on these battlefields was the end of some of the most brutal instruments of one of the most evil regimes in human history. Now I want to hear from you. Which of these 10 battles surprised you the most? Did you know the legend of Procarovka was so different from the truth or that Hitler ripped the armbands off his own SS? Drop a comment right now and tell us which story hit hardest and tell us where in the world you are watching from. Our community stretches across the entire globe and you are part of what keeps this channel alive. If this video taught you something new about the Second World War, smash that like button because every single like tells the algorithm to show this to more history fans like you.

[01:13:07]Hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications so you never miss our next deep dive into the battles, the soldiers, and the stories that history books leave out. Thank you so much for watching and we will see you in the next