27th SS Volunteer Division Langemarck - Pomerania - Oder Front

Oder Front

The new Langemarck division was to be designated 27th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division Langemarck.. While the influx of displaced Flemings meant that the division had a solid base to be formed on, it also meant that more training was required. It was not until 1 January 1945 that the division was ready to be sent back into the line. The Langemarck was once again attached to III. (Germanic) SS Panzer Corps, now a part of Steiner's newly formed XI. SS Panzer Army located on the lower Oder near Stettin.

On 16 February, the division was ordered on the offensive as a part of Operation Sonnenwende, the operation to destroy a Soviet salient and to relieve the troops besieged in the town of Arnswalde. The offensive had been conceived by Generaloberst Heinz Guderian as a massed assault all along the front, but had then been reduced by Hitler to the level of a local counterattack.

Despite initial gains, the attack soon bogged down after III. (Germanic) SS Panzer Corps, with Nordland Langemarck and Wallonie in the vanguard, reached Arnswalde. Heavy Soviet counterattacks threatened to encircle the corps, and so after evacuating all civilian survivors, Steiner canceled the operation and ordered the corps back to the area around Stargard and Stettin.

The Soviet offensive of 1 March pushed Langemarck along with the rest of the depleted III. (Germanic) SS Panzer Corps before it. In a desperate fighting withdrawal, the Langemarck along with the rest of III corps inflicted heavy casualties on the Soviets, but by 4 March, the division was falling back to the area around Altdamm, the last defensive position east of the Oder itself. During the next two weeks, Langemarck and the rest of the corps grimly held to the town, inflicting and suffering high casualties. On the 19th, the battered defenders fell back behind the Oder, the Langemarck had fought itself to virtual extinction. As a part of Steiner's XI SS Panzer Army, the Langemarck, now reduced to a Kampfgruppe, began falling back towards Mecklenburg where it surrendered to the Russians on 8 May 1945.