From the Realm of a Dying Sun

During World War II, the armed or Waffen-SS branch of the Third Reich's dreaded security service expanded from two divisions in 1940 to 38 divisions by the end of the war, eventually growing to a force of over 900,000 men. Not satisfied with allowing his nascent force to be commanded in combat by army headquarters of the Wehrmacht, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, began to create his own SS corps and army headquarters beginning with the SS-Panzerkorps in July 1942. As the number of Waffen-SS divisions increased, so did the number of corps headquarters, with 18 corps and two armies being planned or activated by the war's end. The histories of the first three SS corps are well known-the actions of I. , II. , and III. (Germanic) SS-Panzerkorps and their subordinate divisions, including the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, Hitlerjugend, Hohenstaufen, Frundsberg and Nordland divisions, have been thoroughly documented. Overlooked in this pantheon is another SS corps that never fought in the west or in Berlin but did participate in many of the key battles on the Eastern Front during the last year of the war-the IV. SS-Panzerkorps. Activated during the initial stages of the defense of Warsaw in late July 1944, IV. SS-Panzerkorps, consisting of both the 3. SS-Panzer Division Totenkopf and 5. SS-Panzer Division Wiking, was born in battle and spent the last ten months of the war in combat. It was renowned for its tenacity, high morale and, above all, its lethality, whether conducting a hard-hitting counterattack or a stubborn defense even when outnumbered. The corps commander, Herbert Otto Gille, was often embroiled in heated disputes with the corps' immediate Wehrmacht higher headquarters over his seemingly cavalier conduct of operations, but his corps remained to the bitter end one of the Third Reich's most reliable and formidable field formations.