The final Panzer Brigade
It happened 80 years ago this week:
Panzer IIIs of the intact “Panzer-Brigade Norwegen” surrendered around 14 May 1945 to the British of Force 134 at Trandum Leir. The rest of the German Army and Waffen SS’s panzer units had already either been wiped out or surrendered to the Allies by the time in Norway had been diverted for front-line service.
“On the left, the nearest of the two officers in the berets is the lieutenant colonel of the British army, O.J. O’Connor, who accepted the surrender of the Germans.” (Note: I can’t find any details on a British Army officer with that name)
Panzer III Ausf. N of Panzer-Brigade Norwegen with single-piece hatch, smoke grenade dischargers, Vorpanzer & full Schürzen. The type was already rarely seen in the West in 1945, long before the British landed in Norway.
Despite its grand name, a cover designation, the unit was only about the size of a reinforced tank battalion, and the total strength corresponded only to that of a circa 1942 motorized grenadier brigade. The unit had been formed in July 1944 from Panzer-Abteilung Norwegen, which in turn had morphed from I./Panzer-Regiment 9 in 1943, a unit left behind by the Rhineland-Westphalia 25th Panzer Division when it had deployed to the Eastern Front to be badly mauled at Kursk. Its commander was Oberstleutnant Prinz Maximilian Wilhelm Gustav Herman of Waldeck and Pyrmont, followed by Oberst Georg Maetschke, the latter of whom had entered the trenches in 1914 as a Gefreiter.
Consisting of 61 Panzer IIIs (25 Ausf. H models with 5 cm KwK 39 L/60s and 36 Ausf. N variants with 7,5 cm KwK 37 L/24) along with 10 StuG IIIs (a mix of Ausführung F/8 and the Ausführung Gs), Panzer-Brigade Norwegen never fired a shot in anger.
All was not roses, however. A total of 194 bodies were found in mass graves in the woods of Trandum, including 173 Norwegians, six British, and fifteen Soviet citizens. They had been executed between 1942-44.
Many of the brigade’s PzKw IIIs and StuG IIIs were employed by the Norwegian Army into the 1950s, renamed Stridsvogn KW-III and Stormkanon KW-III respectively. The Panzers didn’t even have to go anywhere, as Trandum became the Norwegian Army’s Tank School.
Royal Norwegian Army Panzer III/Stridsvogn KW-III of the former Panzer-Brigade Norwegen in June 1950. The Norwegians replaced them with American-supplied M24 Chaffees after 1954.
The 75 mm-armed variants were later dug in as static defense points at Fort Bjørnåsen in 1953, lingering into the 1980s.
A number have been freed from their concrete escarpments and are in assorted states of preservation.
While bloodless in terms of combat, post-VE Day air accidents resulted in the loss of 40 British and Australian troops in the liberation of Norway as part of Operation Doomsday.