A surprising number of German military units remained under arms after VE Day for a variety of reasons. Among them, Panza units still possessing fully operational tanks and assault guns. For example, the remnant of the 11th Panza Division officially surrendered after moving away from the Soviets coming up behind them and handing in its weapons and remaining vehicles on the 8th to 9th of May 1945 to the US 90th Infantry Division.
Another famous unit to lay down its arms on the 9th of May, this time to the Soviets, was the 511th Heavy Panza Battalion, formerly known as the 502nd. It handed over its last operational Tiger 1’s and twos and Hetsza tank destroyers and its crews went into an uncertain Soviet captivity. In fact, many of the army and SS heavy Panza battalions with King Tigers surrendered around the 9th of May 1945 along with the remnants of other Panza divisions.
You would think that was it for the fame panzas, but contrary to what the history books tell us, at least three Punanza units remained intact and underarms for quite a long time after the formal surrender of Germany. The third to last surrender of a German Panza force occurred in a part of Europe that had not seen any active military fighting since 1940 and had been occupied by the Germans until May 1945.
Norway. The Germans had maintained a massive garrison in Norway whose west coast formed part of Hitler’s much vaunted Atlantic wall and Hitler refused to transfer units out of Norway to more threatened sectors as he feared a British landing on the country’s coast. Norway was of course vitally important to the Germans because its occupation along with Denmark secured the supply of Swedish iron ore and ball bearings, both vital for the Nazi war economy.
The German garrison in Norway in May 1945 was a staggering 350,000 troops, including 192,000 army personnel. Following Hitler’s death on the 30th of April 1945, the forces in Norway came under the command of the Furer’s successor Reich President Grand Admiral Khal Dernitz whose headquarters was at Schlesvik Holstein in northern Germany.
The German commander-in-chief in Norway, Gennal France Burma, remained completely loyal to the new Nazi government at Fensburg. On the 5th of May, Denmark surrendered to the British. But with only 30,000 troops to spare, Field Marshall Sabernet Montgomery was not keen on trying to force 350,000 Germans in Norway to comply with the surrender.
On the 8th of May, an Allied military mission arrived in Oslo to present the terms of surrender to General Burma. >> Across the Skagarak to Oslo came the first British officers to receive the surrender of those Germans still in Norway. Oz Kash of the Vermar meets British air commoder Darl the RAF meet old comrades members of Norway’s underground army and the citizens of Oslo, as those of every other liberated country, went mad with joy to be rid at last of the German invader.
Norwegian flags reappeared from every window until late into the night, the people danced and celebrated in the streets. Air Comeer Daryl decorates a woman patriot of Oslo. The pent up emotions of 5 years now break their bounds. Norway again belongs to Norway. Norway is free. >> Detachments of Allied troops then began to arrive in Norway to start disarming the large German force.
30,000 British and Americans, 13,000 Norwegian troops that had been trained in Sweden during the war, assisted by some 40,000 members of the Norwegian resistance who had risen across the country. But due to the size of the occupying army and the size of Norway and the small Allied force, it took a lot of time to actually take the surreners and to disarm the troops there.
And one unit in particular was Panza Brigarda Noran, the occupier’s only tank unit. Despite its name, the unit was really a reinforced tank battalion. Formed in July 1944, it was commanded in May 1945 by Orbeest or Colonel Gorg Mitcher and consisted of a type of German tank that pretty much considered obsolete by 1945, the Panza 3.
The unit had 61 Panza 3s on strength broken down as 25 Afuhong H models armed with a 50 mm gun and 36 Alfuhong N variants with the 75mm gun plus an attached 10UG3 assault guns. Its units had seen no action during the war and had gathered all of their vehicles, equipment, and men to await the British, and members of Force 134 had arrived on the 14th of May, 1945 to take the unit’s surrender.
The British had absolutely no use for such equipment, so it was left to the newly liberated Norwegians. They would press these vehicles into Norwegian service, and the place where they surrendered became the Norwegian Army Tank School. These German vehicles served in the Norwegian Army into the early 1950s until replaced by US M24 Chaffy tanks.
The 75 mm armed Panza 3s were later dug in up to the turrets with concrete as permanent defensive positions in case of a Soviet invasion of Norway from 1953 onwards and were used until the 1980s. Some of the Panza 3s have been dug out and are currently being preserved. However, the surrender of Panza Brigardada Noran on the 14th of May 1945 was not in actual fact the last Panza unit still under German control.
The second to last is another contender from a forgotten corner of the Third Reich. When the Germans captured the Channel Islands in 1940, a collection of British crown dependencies just off the coast of northwest France, Hitler order the construction of very extensive defenses on the islands of Jersey, Gernzi, Alden, and Sark to guard against any British plan to snatch them back, integrating the Channel Islands into the wider Atlantic Wall defenses mentioned earlier.
One entire German infantry division garrisoned the islands for the duration of the war. And following the Allied liberations of Normandy and Britany in 1944, the Channel Islands became cut off from the German forces in Western Europe and isolated, though they refused to capitulate. In June 1941, Hitler had ordered that a tank unit be dispatched to the islands to stiffen their defenses, and Hitler himself had decreed that rather than sending German tanks, captured French tanks should be sent instead.
The Germans had captured thousands of French tanks and other armored vehicles in 1940, and many were reactivated in German units to help guard the extensive Third Reich, for example, in France to provide some extra muscle against the French resistance and to help maintain public order in places like Paris. The unit sent to the Channel Islands was Panza Abtailong 213.
It was equipped with World War I vintage French FT17 tanks, most of them, of course, built in the interwar period. The Germans had captured an astounding 1,74 FT17s and used a 100 of them for airfield defense and 650 for patrolling across Europe. They were of course hopelessly out ofd but they could be quite effective against irregular forces and partisans.
20 FT17s were dispatched by ship to the Channel Islands and doled out to the individual islands. Eight went to Jersey, eight to Gernzi, and four to Alden. Large numbers of FT17 turrets, either mounting a 37mm gun or an 8mm Hochkis machine gun, were also sent out to the Channel Islands and dug in by the Germans on top of bunkers to beef up the defenses.
In 1942, the Germans sent more tanks to the islands. This time, big but very slow Sha B1B French tanks. 36 were sent, four command tanks, 24 standard models, and 10 flamethrower equipped tanks. They were split evenly between the islands of Jersey and Gernzi, with none being dispatched to Alden. Interestingly, the tank museum at Bovington has a SHA B1B tank that was captured on Jersey by the British at war’s end.
Finally, a self-propelled gun type built on the chassis of the French R35 tank was also sent. The Pansa Jagger 35R731F armed with a 47 mm Czech anti-tank gun. It appears that nine of these vehicles were based on the largest island, Jersey. When Germany surrendered on the 8th of May 1945, the Channel Islands did not immediately follow suit.
Jersey and Gernzi surrendered the following day, 9th of May. Sark capitulated on the 10th of May, but Oldeny held out a bit longer. Into the harbor of St. Peterport on Gernzi in the Channel Islands steams a British warship with the white end sign flying. A tumultuous welcome awaits the liberators of the islands.
Incidentally, the oldest British possession and the only British territory to be occupied by the Germans during the war. The German guard marches out from the ancient castle. The German commander is marched away and all equipment is handed in. The proclamation of liberty is read and the Union Jack hoisted. With their rightful flag flying once again above them, the islanders give themselves over to Victory Day celebrations.
Old was the most heavily fortified of the Channel Islands, being the closest to Britain, only some 60 miles away across the sea. And it also contained the only SSR run concentration camp on British soil. It was only after further negotiations that the British took the Germans surrender on Old on the 16th of May 1945, a full 8 days after VE Day.
Incredibly though, it wasn’t the last surrender in the Channel Islands. That honor goes to an overlooked German garrison marooned on some inhabited rocks called the Minkies south of Jersey who were accidentally discovered by a French fishing boat and surrendered on the 23rd of May 1945, three full weeks after VE Day.
See my video about this fascinating topic link in the end screen. Returning to the subject of Alden, the surrender of the four FT17 tanks of Panza Abtailong 213 stationed on the island is in my opinion the second to last surrender of a Panza unit from World War II. Before we move on, the fate of the Oldin FT17s is a bit of a mystery.
It seems likely that they were dumped postwar in the 100 ft deep waters of Olden Quarry, which is also filled with German artillery guns, so may yet be found. I think I found the last German Punza unit that was still underarms after World War II, and it wasn’t in Western Europe, but in the Aian in southern Europe.
Though the Germans had evacuated mainland Greece in October 1944, heavily fortified fortress garrisons were left on certain Egypts such as roads and cit and they held out to the end and beyond. Though the British took these surreners of these island garrisons, it was in name only. The Germans were not disarmed and in fact continued fighting, not the British, but communist partisans in the mountains around their bases.
The British in fact lacked the forces to organize the disarming and removal of these Germans due to the fact that open fighting had broken out between British forces in Greece and communist Greek partisans. Less than a year later the Greek civil war would break out on captured at very heavy cost to themselves by German paratroopers in 1941.
A garrison of 16,300 German and fascist Italian troops were left in control of a strip of cit 65 km long encompassing Suda Bay, Chia, and Mallaymi airfield at war’s end and for some weeks afterwards. To have disarmed the Germans at the end of the war would have invited their massacre by angry locals and communist partisans.
So the British left them in place and in fact used them in their own war against the communists. The British sent in a small number of occupation troops to Cree on the 11th of May 1945. But famously the British commanding officer, a brigadier and his escort had to be rescued by German Panza troops when he was ambushed by Greek communist partisans.
German tanks of Panza Abtailong 212 Crater intervened and beat the communist back fighting alongside British troops. These little battles continued for weeks afterwards. Panza uptail crater consisted of at least 10 Panza twos, five Panza 3es, 10 Panza 4s, 15 French Hochkkins tanks, five Samura 35 tanks, and a few other armored vehicles.
On the 23rd of May 1945 with the arrest of Grand Admiral Dernitz by British forces at Fensburg and the dissolution of his government, the last Nazi flag was also hauled down on Cree. However, armed German troops remained in place even after this surrender, particularly in the area of Suda Bay until the end of June 1945 with 1,600 German troops involved in antipartisan warfare alongside the British.
In fact, the fighting was so bad that the German commanding officer on Cree radioed in a request to Grand Admiral Dernitz just a few hours before he was arrested for the award of five Nights Crosses to senior officers involved in antipartisan operations alongside the British and Dernets approved these awards backdated to the 10th of May.
So in all likelihood, a Panza unit continued underarms and fully staffed by Germans until at least the 23rd of May 1945, perhaps with some vehicles still operational until the end of June 1945, almost 2 months after VE Day, which is a pretty amazing factoid if you ask me. Many thanks for watching. Please subscribe and share and also visit my audio book channel, War Stories with Mark Felton.
You can also help to support both of my channels at PayPal and Patreon. Details in the description box below.
Some Panzers Didn’t Surrender on VE Day! Last Operational Units May-June 1945
A surprising number of German military units remained under arms after VE Day for a variety of reasons. Among them, Panza units still possessing fully operational tanks and assault guns. For example, the remnant of the 11th Panza Division officially surrendered after moving away from the Soviets coming up behind them and handing in its weapons and remaining vehicles on the 8th to 9th of May 1945 to the US 90th Infantry Division.
Another famous unit to lay down its arms on the 9th of May, this time to the Soviets, was the 511th Heavy Panza Battalion, formerly known as the 502nd. It handed over its last operational Tiger 1’s and twos and Hetsza tank destroyers and its crews went into an uncertain Soviet captivity. In fact, many of the army and SS heavy Panza battalions with King Tigers surrendered around the 9th of May 1945 along with the remnants of other Panza divisions.
You would think that was it for the fame panzas, but contrary to what the history books tell us, at least three Punanza units remained intact and underarms for quite a long time after the formal surrender of Germany. The third to last surrender of a German Panza force occurred in a part of Europe that had not seen any active military fighting since 1940 and had been occupied by the Germans until May 1945.
Norway. The Germans had maintained a massive garrison in Norway whose west coast formed part of Hitler’s much vaunted Atlantic wall and Hitler refused to transfer units out of Norway to more threatened sectors as he feared a British landing on the country’s coast. Norway was of course vitally important to the Germans because its occupation along with Denmark secured the supply of Swedish iron ore and ball bearings, both vital for the Nazi war economy.
The German garrison in Norway in May 1945 was a staggering 350,000 troops, including 192,000 army personnel. Following Hitler’s death on the 30th of April 1945, the forces in Norway came under the command of the Furer’s successor Reich President Grand Admiral Khal Dernitz whose headquarters was at Schlesvik Holstein in northern Germany.
The German commander-in-chief in Norway, Gennal France Burma, remained completely loyal to the new Nazi government at Fensburg. On the 5th of May, Denmark surrendered to the British. But with only 30,000 troops to spare, Field Marshall Sabernet Montgomery was not keen on trying to force 350,000 Germans in Norway to comply with the surrender.
On the 8th of May, an Allied military mission arrived in Oslo to present the terms of surrender to General Burma. >> Across the Skagarak to Oslo came the first British officers to receive the surrender of those Germans still in Norway. Oz Kash of the Vermar meets British air commoder Darl the RAF meet old comrades members of Norway’s underground army and the citizens of Oslo, as those of every other liberated country, went mad with joy to be rid at last of the German invader.
Norwegian flags reappeared from every window until late into the night, the people danced and celebrated in the streets. Air Comeer Daryl decorates a woman patriot of Oslo. The pent up emotions of 5 years now break their bounds. Norway again belongs to Norway. Norway is free. >> Detachments of Allied troops then began to arrive in Norway to start disarming the large German force.
30,000 British and Americans, 13,000 Norwegian troops that had been trained in Sweden during the war, assisted by some 40,000 members of the Norwegian resistance who had risen across the country. But due to the size of the occupying army and the size of Norway and the small Allied force, it took a lot of time to actually take the surreners and to disarm the troops there.
And one unit in particular was Panza Brigarda Noran, the occupier’s only tank unit. Despite its name, the unit was really a reinforced tank battalion. Formed in July 1944, it was commanded in May 1945 by Orbeest or Colonel Gorg Mitcher and consisted of a type of German tank that pretty much considered obsolete by 1945, the Panza 3.
The unit had 61 Panza 3s on strength broken down as 25 Afuhong H models armed with a 50 mm gun and 36 Alfuhong N variants with the 75mm gun plus an attached 10UG3 assault guns. Its units had seen no action during the war and had gathered all of their vehicles, equipment, and men to await the British, and members of Force 134 had arrived on the 14th of May, 1945 to take the unit’s surrender.
The British had absolutely no use for such equipment, so it was left to the newly liberated Norwegians. They would press these vehicles into Norwegian service, and the place where they surrendered became the Norwegian Army Tank School. These German vehicles served in the Norwegian Army into the early 1950s until replaced by US M24 Chaffy tanks.
The 75 mm armed Panza 3s were later dug in up to the turrets with concrete as permanent defensive positions in case of a Soviet invasion of Norway from 1953 onwards and were used until the 1980s. Some of the Panza 3s have been dug out and are currently being preserved. However, the surrender of Panza Brigardada Noran on the 14th of May 1945 was not in actual fact the last Panza unit still under German control.
The second to last is another contender from a forgotten corner of the Third Reich. When the Germans captured the Channel Islands in 1940, a collection of British crown dependencies just off the coast of northwest France, Hitler order the construction of very extensive defenses on the islands of Jersey, Gernzi, Alden, and Sark to guard against any British plan to snatch them back, integrating the Channel Islands into the wider Atlantic Wall defenses mentioned earlier.
One entire German infantry division garrisoned the islands for the duration of the war. And following the Allied liberations of Normandy and Britany in 1944, the Channel Islands became cut off from the German forces in Western Europe and isolated, though they refused to capitulate. In June 1941, Hitler had ordered that a tank unit be dispatched to the islands to stiffen their defenses, and Hitler himself had decreed that rather than sending German tanks, captured French tanks should be sent instead.
The Germans had captured thousands of French tanks and other armored vehicles in 1940, and many were reactivated in German units to help guard the extensive Third Reich, for example, in France to provide some extra muscle against the French resistance and to help maintain public order in places like Paris. The unit sent to the Channel Islands was Panza Abtailong 213.
It was equipped with World War I vintage French FT17 tanks, most of them, of course, built in the interwar period. The Germans had captured an astounding 1,74 FT17s and used a 100 of them for airfield defense and 650 for patrolling across Europe. They were of course hopelessly out ofd but they could be quite effective against irregular forces and partisans.
20 FT17s were dispatched by ship to the Channel Islands and doled out to the individual islands. Eight went to Jersey, eight to Gernzi, and four to Alden. Large numbers of FT17 turrets, either mounting a 37mm gun or an 8mm Hochkis machine gun, were also sent out to the Channel Islands and dug in by the Germans on top of bunkers to beef up the defenses.
In 1942, the Germans sent more tanks to the islands. This time, big but very slow Sha B1B French tanks. 36 were sent, four command tanks, 24 standard models, and 10 flamethrower equipped tanks. They were split evenly between the islands of Jersey and Gernzi, with none being dispatched to Alden. Interestingly, the tank museum at Bovington has a SHA B1B tank that was captured on Jersey by the British at war’s end.
Finally, a self-propelled gun type built on the chassis of the French R35 tank was also sent. The Pansa Jagger 35R731F armed with a 47 mm Czech anti-tank gun. It appears that nine of these vehicles were based on the largest island, Jersey. When Germany surrendered on the 8th of May 1945, the Channel Islands did not immediately follow suit.
Jersey and Gernzi surrendered the following day, 9th of May. Sark capitulated on the 10th of May, but Oldeny held out a bit longer. Into the harbor of St. Peterport on Gernzi in the Channel Islands steams a British warship with the white end sign flying. A tumultuous welcome awaits the liberators of the islands.
Incidentally, the oldest British possession and the only British territory to be occupied by the Germans during the war. The German guard marches out from the ancient castle. The German commander is marched away and all equipment is handed in. The proclamation of liberty is read and the Union Jack hoisted. With their rightful flag flying once again above them, the islanders give themselves over to Victory Day celebrations.
Old was the most heavily fortified of the Channel Islands, being the closest to Britain, only some 60 miles away across the sea. And it also contained the only SSR run concentration camp on British soil. It was only after further negotiations that the British took the Germans surrender on Old on the 16th of May 1945, a full 8 days after VE Day.
Incredibly though, it wasn’t the last surrender in the Channel Islands. That honor goes to an overlooked German garrison marooned on some inhabited rocks called the Minkies south of Jersey who were accidentally discovered by a French fishing boat and surrendered on the 23rd of May 1945, three full weeks after VE Day.
See my video about this fascinating topic link in the end screen. Returning to the subject of Alden, the surrender of the four FT17 tanks of Panza Abtailong 213 stationed on the island is in my opinion the second to last surrender of a Panza unit from World War II. Before we move on, the fate of the Oldin FT17s is a bit of a mystery.
It seems likely that they were dumped postwar in the 100 ft deep waters of Olden Quarry, which is also filled with German artillery guns, so may yet be found. I think I found the last German Punza unit that was still underarms after World War II, and it wasn’t in Western Europe, but in the Aian in southern Europe.
Though the Germans had evacuated mainland Greece in October 1944, heavily fortified fortress garrisons were left on certain Egypts such as roads and cit and they held out to the end and beyond. Though the British took these surreners of these island garrisons, it was in name only. The Germans were not disarmed and in fact continued fighting, not the British, but communist partisans in the mountains around their bases.
The British in fact lacked the forces to organize the disarming and removal of these Germans due to the fact that open fighting had broken out between British forces in Greece and communist Greek partisans. Less than a year later the Greek civil war would break out on captured at very heavy cost to themselves by German paratroopers in 1941.
A garrison of 16,300 German and fascist Italian troops were left in control of a strip of cit 65 km long encompassing Suda Bay, Chia, and Mallaymi airfield at war’s end and for some weeks afterwards. To have disarmed the Germans at the end of the war would have invited their massacre by angry locals and communist partisans.
So the British left them in place and in fact used them in their own war against the communists. The British sent in a small number of occupation troops to Cree on the 11th of May 1945. But famously the British commanding officer, a brigadier and his escort had to be rescued by German Panza troops when he was ambushed by Greek communist partisans.
German tanks of Panza Abtailong 212 Crater intervened and beat the communist back fighting alongside British troops. These little battles continued for weeks afterwards. Panza uptail crater consisted of at least 10 Panza twos, five Panza 3es, 10 Panza 4s, 15 French Hochkkins tanks, five Samura 35 tanks, and a few other armored vehicles.
On the 23rd of May 1945 with the arrest of Grand Admiral Dernitz by British forces at Fensburg and the dissolution of his government, the last Nazi flag was also hauled down on Cree. However, armed German troops remained in place even after this surrender, particularly in the area of Suda Bay until the end of June 1945 with 1,600 German troops involved in antipartisan warfare alongside the British.
In fact, the fighting was so bad that the German commanding officer on Cree radioed in a request to Grand Admiral Dernitz just a few hours before he was arrested for the award of five Nights Crosses to senior officers involved in antipartisan operations alongside the British and Dernets approved these awards backdated to the 10th of May.
So in all likelihood, a Panza unit continued underarms and fully staffed by Germans until at least the 23rd of May 1945, perhaps with some vehicles still operational until the end of June 1945, almost 2 months after VE Day, which is a pretty amazing factoid if you ask me. Many thanks for watching. Please subscribe and share and also visit my audio book channel, War Stories with Mark Felton.
You can also help to support both of my channels at PayPal and Patreon. Details in the description box below.
