In 1939, Poland was under German occupation, and a newly formed German unit was carrying out security tasks in the occupied territories. Its soldiers were not frontline troops or members of the Nazi paramilitary forces, but ordinary policemen from the regular order police of Nazi Germany. Over the next four years, these policemen followed the German war across Europe, fighting first in France and then in brutal battles on the Eastern Front. Along the way, they became soldiers in the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the SS.
By 1944, their journey had led them south into occupied Greece, where instead of conventional frontline warfare, they were fighting resistance groups through mountains and villages. Partisan attacks were followed by mass reprisals. Entire communities were destroyed, and civilians were punished for actions in which many of them had no part. The former policemen became responsible for a series of crimes against the civilian population, leaving villages devastated and hundreds dead.
The division was established in October 1939, just weeks after the outbreak of World War II, which began on September 1 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi paramilitary organization SS, wanted to expand the armed forces under his control. His problem was that the Wehrmacht, the regular German army, had successfully imposed strict limits on the number of men the SS could recruit into its units. To work around this obstacle, Himmler called up thousands of men from the Ordnungspolizei, the unified regular police force in Nazi Germany, which he also controlled, and created a new type of unit.
Initially, these men were not formally enrolled in the SS. They kept their police ranks and insignia, and the division was at first simply called the Police Division. At the time of its formation, it numbered about 16,000 men. The first commander was Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a professional police general who had served as a general staff officer in World War I.
The new division was initially equipped with captured Czechoslovak weapons and trained in the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. Training was combined with periods of internal security duties in German-occupied Poland. In the spring of 1940, during the German attack on France, the division remained in reserve in the Rhineland region of western Germany. It first entered combat on June 9, 1940, during the crossing of the Aisne River in northeastern France.
After the French surrender, the division remained in the country as an occupation force for about a year. In mid-June 1941, the division was transferred to East Prussia, then a German province on the Baltic coast, in preparation for Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on June 22, 1941. The Police Division was attached to Army Group North, which was advancing toward Leningrad, known today as Saint Petersburg, in northwestern Russia.
In August 1941, it was thrown into the battle for the city of Luga, about 140 kilometers south of Leningrad, where Soviet forces held a strong defensive line. Repeated frontal attacks across swamps and forests resulted in more than 1,000 soldiers killed and 2,000 wounded from the division by the end of August 1941. Among the dead was its commander, Arthur Mülverstedt, who was killed in action by artillery fire. In January 1942, the division was moved to the Volkhov River sector, southeast of Leningrad, and took part in fighting against the Soviet 2nd Shock Army.
On February 24, 1942, the formation was officially transferred to the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the SS, making the policemen SS soldiers in name and in fact. Over the following months, they gradually adopted Waffen-SS designations and insignia. The division’s personnel spent the rest of 1942 on the siege lines around Leningrad. In February 1943, the division fought south of Lake Ladoga before falling back toward the town of Kolpino on the southern approach to the city.
By the spring of 1943, the division was severely worn down, and most of its units were withdrawn from the front for rebuilding, while a small battle group remained near Leningrad. The main formation was reorganized as a mechanized infantry division, meaning infantry with motor transport supported by armored vehicles. From late 1943 to early 1944, what remained of the rebuilt unit, now under the name 4th SS Police Panzergrenadier Division, was transferred south to the Balkans, and its main combat formations soon began operating in Greece, which had been under German occupation since 1941. Their task was not traditional frontline warfare but fighting resistance groups, above all ELAS, the communist-led Greek People’s Liberation Army, which controlled large areas in the mountains.
German anti-partisan orders authorized mass reprisals, executions, and the destruction of villages suspected of helping the resistance. The division applied these methods without hesitation and with extreme brutality. One of the officers who shaped the unit’s brutal reputation in Greece was Karl Schümers, who commanded the division’s 7th Regiment and later the division itself. On April 5, 1944, his troops entered the village of Kleisoura in the Kastoria region of western Macedonia, in northern Greece, after German soldiers were ambushed outside the village, resulting in several deaths.
Around 280 people were shot, almost all of them women, children, and the elderly. Schümers later told a German internal investigation that armed fighters had been hiding in the village and that his men had had no other choice. He was acquitted, although postwar evidence proved the massacre could not be justified as a combat action. Later that month, soldiers from the same regiment, together with Greek collaborators, attacked the village of Pyrgoi in the Kozani region of northern Greece.
They killed 327 civilians, while many of those who survived the initial executions were burned alive when most of the village was set on fire. A few weeks later, on June 10, 1944, soldiers from the 2nd Company of the 7th Regiment, under the command of Fritz Lautenbach, destroyed the village of Distomo in central Greece. During the massacre, at least 218 people were killed, including 34 children, among them four infants. Survivors described soldiers bayoneting infants in their cradles, killing pregnant women, and beheading the local priest.
A Red Cross team that reached Distomo a few days later found bodies along the road leading into the village, some still hanging from trees. Lautenbach claimed his unit had come under fire from the direction of Distomo using mortars, machine guns, and rifles. The report was false and was almost immediately contradicted by Georg Koch, an agent of the secret German military police who had been accompanying the German troops. Koch reported that the ambush had taken place several kilometers away and that no shot had been fired from Distomo.
An investigation followed. Because the division was operating under Army Group E, Wehrmacht offices, not the SS, handled the case. Lautenbach admitted exceeding existing orders, but the court acquitted him of his crimes, ruling that his motive had not been negligence or ignorance, but a sense of responsibility toward his men. The killing operations carried out by division personnel continued through the summer.
On June 17, 1944, Schörner ordered the execution of 28 civilians and the destruction of the town of Ipati in central Greece, where most of the houses were burned down. The next day, German forces set fire to the neighboring town of Sperchiada and killed 35 more people. But while the division was still carrying out reprisals against civilians in Greece, the military situation in southeastern Europe was changing rapidly. Allied forces were advancing through the Balkans, and by September 1944, the Germans could no longer keep the division there.
It was withdrawn from Greece and sent north to defend the Danube near Belgrade, the pre-war capital of Yugoslavia. From there, it was pushed steadily back through Hungary, losing men at every stage. By early December, only about 800 men and 13 operational assault guns were available for defensive frontline combat. At the end of the month, the exhausted formation, having lost thousands of its men, crossed into Slovakia, where its most heavily damaged units withdrew toward Banská Bystrica, a city in the center of the country, while another group fought in the village of Cebovce, near the Hungarian border, where about 450 men and three heavy guns faced a force of three Soviet rifle divisions.
In early 1945, what was left of the division was moved north to Pomerania, a region on the Baltic coast, divided today between Germany and Poland. There, the formation was thrown back into combat against advancing Soviet forces. During February and March, the division was gradually pushed toward the city of Danzig, known today as Gdańsk in northern Poland. With the Soviet advance cutting off the area, surviving units withdrew toward the Hel Peninsula, a narrow strip of land extending into the Baltic Sea northwest of Gdańsk, from which they were evacuated by sea to the city of Świnoujście, in what is now Poland.
After reaching western Pomerania, the remnants of the division were placed under the command of SS commander Felix Steiner, whose forces were positioned north of Berlin. Adolf Hitler expected Steiner to launch a counterattack against the Soviet forces surrounding the capital, but the remaining German units were far too weak and lacked the heavy weapons needed for such an operation. The attack never happened. Instead, the survivors of the division retreated westward across northern Germany and surrendered to American forces near the town of Wittenberge in early May 1945, preferring that to falling into Soviet captivity.
The war was over for the division, but its crimes against civilians led to accountability for the men who committed them. Thousands of its soldiers died in combat, including many of the officers linked to its operations in Greece. Karl Schümers was killed in August 1944 when his car hit a mine in northwestern Greece. Fritz Lautenbach did not survive the war either, being killed during fighting on October 16, 1944, near the town of Törökszentmiklós in central Hungary.
Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, the founding commander of the division, was captured by the Red Army after the fall of Budapest and spent 10 years in Soviet captivity before returning to Germany, where he died in 1971. The 4th SS Police Panzergrenadier Division began the war as a formation of ordinary policemen and ended it as one of the Waffen-SS units whose crimes against civilians overshadowed its history. Its battlefield record achieved little of note. The division suffered heavy losses at Luga, was worn down in the fighting around Leningrad, and ultimately retreated across much of Europe as Germany’s military position collapsed.
But the division left its darkest legacy in occupied Greece. Its soldiers took part in the destruction of communities and the killing of civilians at Kleisoura, Pyrgoi, Ipati, and above all at Distomo. There, the consequences of the division’s actions have remained part of local memory, and descendants of the victims still gather every year at the memorial above the village to read out the names of those who were killed.