Table Of ContentAchtung Panzer, Marsch!
st
With the 1 German Panzer Division:
Formation to the Fall of France, 1935-40
by
Gary Schreckengost
Das Panzer Lied
Ob’s stürmt oder schneit,
Ob die Sonne uns lacht!
Der Tag glühend heiß,
Oder eiskalt die Nacht!
Bestaubt sind die Gesichter,
Doch froh ist unser Sinn, ja unser Sinn!
Es braust unser Panzer im Sturmwind dahin!
The Armor Song
Whether it storms or snows,
Whether the sun smiles upon us!
The day burning hot,
Or the night freezing cold!
Dusty may be our faces,
But happy we are in heart! Oh yes we are!
Our tanks roar ahead into the heavy action no matter what!
Preface, 4.
Chapters
1. The Beginning, 7.
2. Hitler and the Nazis Come to Power, 22.
3. I Join the Panzerwaffe, 32.
4. The Empire Grows, 44.
5. War with Rump Poland, Sept, 1939, 67.
6. We Attack, 82.
7. Sitzkrieg, 119.
8. We Take Sedan! 155.
9. The Weygand Line, 173.
10. Our Big Tank Battle, June 10, 1940, 186.
About the Author, 206.
Preface
For most of World War II, 1939-45, Germany’s
armored forces or Panzerwaffe ruled the battlefields of
Europe through superior tactics, training, and will
power. Their primary function was to break through
enemy lines along a narrow front “hitting with fist
and not feeling with the fingers,” encircle the enemy,
cutting him off, and setting up their subsequent
annihilation by regular infantry and artillery units.
Speed and shock were the Panzerwaffe’s friends.
In 1935, the first four Panzer divisions were
formed and developed under the watchful eyes of
officers such as Heinz Guderian, Ewald von Kleist,
Erich Höpner, and Hermann Hoth. By 1939, on the
eve of the war with Poland, Das Deutsches Panzerwaffe (German Armored Forces) had
grown into ten
divisions, spearheading the German assault into
several surrounding countries.
This is the historically accurate but fictional
story of Gunter Prehm, a young Saxon who joined
Panzer Division 1 in 1935. Read what training and life
was like for him and his buddies in Kompanie 5,
Panzer Reglement 1, about their uniforms and
equipment, about the Panzerkampfwagons (armored
fighting vehicles—tanks) that they operated and
lived in, about the new Panzer tactics that they
learned, practiced, and honed, and about their first
campaigns in Poland in 1939 and in France in 1940,
which proved to the world the decisive punch of
revolutionary Panzer division concept, elevating the Panzerwaffe to become the
undisputed champions of
the battlefield.
The Federal Republic of Germany ( Bundesrepublik Deutschland) after the Treaty of Versailles, 1919-1935. Also called
the “Weimar Republic” because that’s where the capital was. Several traditional German provinces were taken and given
to France, Belgium, and the new rump states of Czechoslovakia and Poland. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, our
borders were eventually restored.
Chapter 1
The Beginning, 1919-1932
I am Gunter Prehm and I was born in the Saxon city
of Dresden in 1913, the year before my father went
off to fight the Russians in World War I with the 3rd
Saxon Infantry Regiment. In 1918, when the
Russians dropped out of the war, my father’s
regiment was transferred to the Western Front to
fight the British in Belgium.
By October 1918, with the failed German
offensives to drive the British into the sea and to
whip France before the greasy Americans arrived,
Germany was starving. Our once stalwart allies,
Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey had already
dropped out of the war and all of our colonial possessions had been stripped by the British,
the
French, or the Japanese. Even worse, British,
French, American, and Belgian armies had driven us
back almost to our borders in the west and we were
standing alone against them.
Faced with internal insurrection, led mostly by
anti-war and anti-German Communists (the Red
Front) or Social Democrats, our beloved emperor,
Wilhelm Hohenzollern II, the King of Prussia,
vacated the thrown and turned the government over
to the babblers of the German Congress, led by
Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democratic Party.
The traitor Ebert immediately began cease fire
negotiations with the Allies and on November 11,
1918, he agreed to an armistice with them that were based on U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson’s
“Fourteen Points,” most of which I have shared
here:
-Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas,
outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war,
except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part
by international action for the enforcement of
international covenants. This was in reaction to our
almost-successful U-Boat campaign against the British and the
Americans.
-The removal, so far as possible, of all economic
barriers and the establishment of equality of trade
conditions among all the nations consenting to the
peace and associating themselves for its
maintenance. Sounds good.
-Adequate guarantees given and taken that national
armaments will be reduced to the lowest point
consistent with domestic safety. As long as it applies to
all sides; which it didn’t.
-A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial
adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict
observance of the principle that in determining all
such questions of sovereignty the interests of the
populations concerned must have equal weight with
the equitable claims of the government whose title is
to be determined. In other words, we Germans lose all of
our colonies.
-The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a
settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will
secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her
an
unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the
independent determination of her own political
development and national policy and assure her of a
sincere welcome into the society of free nations
under institutions of her own choosing; and, more
than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that
she may need and may herself desire. The treatment
accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months
to come will be the acid test of their good will, of
their comprehension of her needs as distinguished
from their own interests, and of their intelligent and
unselfish sympathy. This is outrageous! The Russians
already surrendered to us and gave us everything west of Brest
Litovsk! And now the Western allies, who fought nowhere
near here, want it back!? No way!
-An independent Polish state should be erected
which should include the territories inhabited by
indisputably Polish populations, which should be
assured a free and secure access to the sea, and
whose political and economic independence and
territorial integrity should be guaranteed by
international covenant. Ah-ha! See above. What they
want are our ancient provinces of Posen and West Prussia to
be taken away and be given to an entirely new state. No way!
-Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be
evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit
the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all
other free nations. No other single act will serve as
this will serve to restore confidence among the
nations in the laws which they have themselves set
and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this
healing act the whole
structure and validity of international law is forever
impaired. Okay, you cry babies can have Belgium back. Our
occupation was payback for their rape of the Congo.
-All French territory should be freed and the invaded
portions restored, and the wrong done to France by
Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine,
which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly
fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may
once more be made secure in the interest of all. Saw
that one coming. Fine, they can have them back, they’re no
good anyway!
-A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be
effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality. In other words, Austria will lose
some of its
Tirolian counties in the south.
-The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place
among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and
assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity
to autonomous development. No way! Bohemia and
Moravia were always part of the German Empire and now
they are to be stripped away!? Why? For what!?
-Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be
evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia
accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the
relations of the several Balkan states to one another
determined by friendly counsel along historically
established lines of allegiance and nationality; and
international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial
integrity of
the several Balkan states should be entered into.
Who cares?
-The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman
Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but
the other nationalities which are now under Turkish
rule should be assured an undoubted security of life
and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of
autonomous development, and the Dardanelles
should be permanently opened as a free passage to
the ships and commerce of all nations under
international guarantees. Who cares?
-A general association of nations must be formed
under specific covenants for the purpose of
affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and
small states alike. Will never work.
When Ebert agreed to these egregious terms
and much more with the infamous Treaty of
Versailles in 1919, my entire generation was set on a
course to inevitable National Socialist revolution and
a subsequent defensive war to regain what we had
unjustly lost to the traitor Ebert and his communist
confederates.
In short, the Treaty of Versailles pushed
Germany to the breaking point and humiliated her.
In the treaty, we were treated like a conquered nation
in that we had almost a third of our country taken
away from us, our army and navy was laid low, and,
to add insult to injury, we had to pay France and Britain large sums of money, which
hurled us into an
economic depression of Biblical proportions. My
father, who had served on the front, could not
believe it! He felt so betrayed by the wealthy bankers
and war profiteers who not only refused to serve in
the war and made money from it, but who then sold
us out to the allies.
My earliest recollections of Ebert’s so-called
Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of
Germany) or the “Weimar Republic” (where the
national capital was), the lap-dog government that
we lived under from 1918-33, were the massive
street brawls between the left-wing Communists
(“Cozis”) and Social Democrats (“Sozis”) who
basically ran the new government, and a bunch of
right-wing radicals, the largest being the National Socialist German Workers Party, or
“Nazis” for
short. I also remember that my father was without a
job and some nights, we didn’t eat.
My childhood was therefore pretty tough and
was wrapped in political intrigue, economic distress
and dealing with my angry, shell-shocked, and heart
broken father who became a member of the Nazi
Party in 1925 along with millions of other war
veterans. His job was to protect local Nazi-owned
businesses from fat capitalists, criminals,
communists, or Jews, people who we now saw as
foreign enemies living in Germany. I wouldn’t call
him a hard-core Nazi, but he was Nazi enough. And
because he was a Nazi, I was raised to become one,
too. Nazis basically believed that all Germans
were equal—that there should not be an extreme
upper or lower class in Germany—that all Germans
should be solid middle class people, all working
together toward a common goal: a better Germany
(that’s the socialist part). Nazis believed that the
Social Democrats, led by the Jewish internationalist
communists, betrayed the German people when they
freely gave West Prussia, Posen, Bohemia, and
Moravia to the new “Rump” or “fake” states of
Poland and Czechoslovakia (which we spelled
Tschechoslowakei). Nazis believed that Germany
needed a strong leader to staunch the stupidity,
corruption, and inaction of the German Congress
and that the Congress was useless. Nazis also
believed that Communists and Jews were a threat to Western civilization and that
“undesirables” such as
Jews, gypsies, Communists, Social Democrats, and
the mentally and physically infirm should be
removed from German society.
They especially hated the Jews who were
equated with vermine. Personally, I didn’t have a
problem with Jews (Juden) but I also didn’t have a
problem with them being deported either, especially
if our country got better under the Nazis. And it
did—at first.
My father was especially drawn to the Nazi
ideal that all Germans were equal, that the emperors,
kings, dukes, and fat capitalists who had kept us
down for so long, had to go. He was also for
regaining the lost parts of our country and outright despised the Slavic people of the east
who he saw as
being less-than-human (called Untermensch). As a
future member of the Panzerwaffe, being a Nazi
actually wasn’t a large part of my life because I
wasn’t into politics much nor was I an elected party
member. After 1933, however, when the Nazis took
total control of the government, they blended the
party with the state—making it one and the same.
Therefore, my eventual actions in the Panzerwaffe,
which increased the boundaries of Germany, spread
Nazi Party control. My entire generation, therefore,
lived under the shadow of our fathers and my life in
the Panzerwaffe was a direct result of it.
Chapter 2
Hitler and the Nazis Come to Power
By 1931 Adolf Hitler, a decorated enlisted veteran of
the Great War, finally led his Bavarian-based
National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) to
national victory, winning the majority of the seats in
the German Federal Congress (Bundestag), Hitler
himself becoming elected as the Federal Chancellor
(Bundeskanzler), second only to the German
president. In 1932, as Bundeskanzler, Hitler ran
against President Paul von Hindenburg, an army
field marshal, Prussian duke, and World War I hero
for the office of German President. Hindenburg was
the incumbent. Running on the platform of the common
man, of modernity, of economic recovery, and of
returning Germany to greatness, Hitler almost beat
the popular Hindenburg. Fate would intervene in
1933, however, when Hindenburg died in office. In a
series of cunning and unconstitutional moves that
were actually supported by most of the people, who
were at this point quite desperate, Hitler combined
the offices of the president and prime minister,
declaring himself the benevolent Leader (Führer) of
the new Third German Empire (the first was from
