Felix Steiner

Felix Martin Julius Steiner (23 May 1896 – 12 May 1966) was a German SS commander during the Nazi era. During World War II, he served in the Waffen-SS, the combat branch of the SS, and commanded several SS divisions and corps. He was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords. Together with Paul Hausser, he contributed significantly to the development and transformation of the Waffen-SS into a combat force made up of volunteers and conscripts from both occupied and un-occupied lands.

Steiner was chosen by Heinrich Himmler to oversee the creation of and then command the SS Division Wiking. In 1943, he was promoted to the command of the III SS Panzer Corps. On 28 January 1945, Steiner was placed in command of the 11th SS Panzer Army, which formed part of a new Army Group Vistula, an ad-hoc formation to defend Berlin from the Soviet armies advancing from the Vistula River.

On 21 April 1945, during the Battle for Berlin, Steiner was placed in command of Army Detachment Steiner, with which Adolf Hitler ordered Steiner to envelop the 1st Belorussian Front through a pincer movement, advancing from the north of the city. However, as his unit was outnumbered ten to one, Steiner made it clear that he did not have the capacity for a counter-attack on 22 April during the daily situation conference in the Führerbunker.

After the capitulation of Germany, Steiner was imprisoned and investigated for war crimes. He faced charges at the Nuremberg Trials, but they were dropped and he was released in 1948. In 1953, Steiner was recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to found the Gesellschaft für Wehrkunde ("Society for Defense Studies"), composed of former German military officers, as a propaganda tool and a military think tank for the rearmament of West Germany.

Along with other former high-ranking Waffen-SS personnel, Steiner was a founding member of HIAG, a lobby group of negationistic apologists formed in 1951 to campaign for the legal, economic and historical rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS. He had two daughters and one son.

Steiner was born on 23 May 1896 in Stallupönen in Prussia, (in East Prussia) German Empire. He joined the Royal Prussian Army as an infantry cadet. During World War I, he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class. In 1919, Steiner joined the paramilitary Freikorps in the East Prussian city of Memel during the German Revolution and was later incorporated into the Reichswehr in 1921. In 1933, he left the army having attained the rank of major.

Steiner first joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) (membership number: 4,264,295) and the Sturmabteilung (SA). In 1935 he enlisted in the SS. He took command of a battalion of SS-Verfügungstruppen (SS-VT) troops, and within a year had been promoted to SS-Standartenführer; and later was put in command of the SS-Deutschland Regiment.

At the outbreak of World War II, he was SS-Oberführer (senior leader) in charge of the Waffen-SS regiment SS-Deutschland. He led this regiment through the Invasion of Poland and the Battle of France, for which he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 15 August 1940. Steiner was introduced to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, to oversee the creation of, and then command the new SS Division Wiking. This division was militarily successful but also very barbaric in the invasion of the Soviet Union, for example killing 600 Jews in Zboriv, Ukraine. At the time of its creation, the division consisted mostly of German volunteers, with only around 1,141 non-German volunteers (roughly 6%) when it entered Operation Barbarossa.