This notice in today's The Times caught my eye: In Memoriam – War LIEUTENANT WILLIAM FREDERIC NEWTON, 5th Royal Tank Regiment, treacherously killed in action at Ristedt, Germany, by the SS on 9th April 1945, aged 22. Beloved elder son of Katie and Frederic and brother to Owena and Cecil. In proud and loving memory, always remembering your great sacrifice for peace and freedom. I had heard of this incident but as it took place a few days before my coverage of 5 RTR's actions on the Aller at Rethem it is not included in Theirs the Strife. The background to Lt Newton's tragic death is as follows. 5 RTR, as part of 22 Armd Bde within 7 Armd Div, had been ordered on 8 April to advance northwards from the positions it had reached on the Weser in the Hoya area and cut the withdrawal routes of 1. Fallschirm-Armee, which was conducting an effective fighting withdrawal back towards Bremen. On 8 April the regiment and I Company 1 RB had captured the villages of Syke and Barrien and the Recce Tp had reached the outskirts of Ristedt. Fierce resistance was met and the war diary records that 35 x SS PoWs were taken. The next day Recce Tp, still operating in the Ristedt area, encountered strongpoints and in clearing the first of these took 15 PoWs. It would seem that C Sqn 5 RTR (Newton's squadron) was in the area supporting Recce Tp and for some reason Lt Newton went forward to collect two German PoWs who had their hands up. At this point he was shot and killed. Although the war diary mentions the presence of SS troops, and presumably that is why it is also mentioned in the In Memoriam notice, I am not aware of any Waffen-SS in this precise area of NW Germany at this time. The nearest Waffen-SS were SS-Panzer Grenadier Ausbildung und Ersatz (A.u.E.) Bataillon 12 'Hitlerjugend' well to the south on the Weser near Nienburg, and SS-Panzer Grenadier A.u.E. Bataillon 18 'Horst Wessel' with its companies in Bremen. In a very real sense it doesn't matter in the slightest as to which unit the soldiers responsible for Lt Newton's unnecessary and tragic death belonged to. However, as a point of historical accuracy, I think it unlikely that the Waffen-SS were involved and that those responsible probably belonged to 1. Fallschirm-Armee. Equally they could have been Volkssturm or even civilians. We will never know. Some other snippets of information I gleaned about Lt Newton: 1. He joined 5 RTR on 17 June 1944 on transfer from the Westminster Dragoons. 2. While the commander of a Cromwell in C Sqn he was wounded on 21 August 1944. However, he remained on duty. 3. He was 22 years old at the time of his death and he now lies in Becklingen CWGC cemetery (grave 15.C.7). A very sad story; one of many of gallant men who died in sight of peace.
One mistake that was often made was to refer to soldiers in camouflage clothing as SS. I know this from numerous eyewitness accounts. The black uniforms of the Panzer crews were also often confused There was no real organized resistance in the Syke-Bassum area because the entire front from Cloppenburg to Verden was collapsing But there were some officers who waged a kind of private war Here is a rough overview of the situation on the ground from a German perspective at the time: War Diary: 15 PANZER GRENADIER DIVISION, 9 April 1945 - 7 May 1945
Thanks Olli and you are right with regard to uniforms and misidentification. I suspect also that there was a tendency, not without justification, to dump unpleasant incidents on the SS.
In this final phase, more than a few Wehrmacht officers proved to be die-hard Nazis who were not far behind the SS in terms of fanaticism: murdered PoW, foreign labourers, alleged deserters - the list is long An interesting point here: the foreign Waffen-SS members still remaining in the West made their way to Berlin in case of doubt: they had sworn an oath to fight against Bolshevism - not for Nazi-Germany.
