From the Realm of a Dying Sun

During World War Two, the armed or Waffen-SS branch of the Third Reich’s dreaded security service expanded from two divisions in 1940 to 38 divisions by the end of the war, eventually growing to a force of over 900,000 men until Germany’s defeat in May 1945. Not satisfied with allowing his nascent force to be commanded in combat by army headquarters of the Wehrmacht, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, began to create his own SS corps and army headquarters beginning with the SS-Panzerkorps in July 1942. As the number of Waffen-SS divisions increased, so did the number of corps headquarters, with 18 corps and two armies being planned or activated by the war’s end. While the histories of the first three SS corps are well known, the IV SS-Panzerkorps – which never fought in the west or in Berlin but participated in many of the key battles fought on the Eastern Front during the last year of the war – has been overlooked. Activated during the initial stages of the defence of Warsaw in