Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler regarded III. (Germanic) SS-Panzer-Korps under SSObergruppenführer Felix Steiner as his favourite unit and Steiner as his favourite general of the Waffen-SS. III. SS-Panzer-Korps was intended to ideologically unite SS volunteers from Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Belgium and Switzerland into a Germanic brotherhood – to politically serve Himmler´s plan for a Greater Germanic Empire and the colonisation in the East.
Volume 2 covers the battles against the Red Army in the Baltic states, Pomerania and BrandenburgBerlin in 1944 and 1945; including the retreat from Estonia in autumn 1944, the violent positional battles in Courland in 1944-1945, the frantic fighting in Pomerania, and last but not least, the desperate battles of defeat in Berlin in 1945.
In addition to previously unpublished photographs, this volume contains a wealth of unique eyewitness accounts culled from decades of interviews and correspondence with Waffen-SS veterans, as well as detailed summaries of armoured corps operations, short biographies of important personalities, statistics and information about German and Soviet tanks and weaponry, in addition to coverage of lesser-known SS units, such as SS-Panzer-Abteilung 11 “Hermann von Salza” and schwere SS-Panzer-Abteilung 503. This content is supplemented by essays on key aspects on the Waffen-SS contributed by distinguished Scandinavian academic researchers on the Second World War as Professor Dr. Niels Bo Poulsen, Head of the Department of Strategy and War Studies at the Royal Danish Defence College in Copenhagen; Associate Professor Dr. Sigurd Sörlie at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo (Norway) and Professor Dr. Lars Westerlund, former researcher at the Finnish National Archives in Helsinki. The foreword for both Volume 1 and 2 has been written by Jens Westemeier, PhD, University of Aachen with the Institute for History, Theory and Ethics in Medicine.