Hitler's Baby Division

SS NCO schools. Additional NCO candidates were selected at Beverloo and
trained within the division. Many NCOs were therefore barely a year older or
even the same age as the young soldiers they commanded. 23 In July and
August the first 10,000 boys arrived to commence basic training, while
various units were gradually formed and shaped into battle condition. The
Commanding General of the lst SS Panzer Division, Sepp Dietrich, had already
gotten Hitler's permission to provide these boys with food rations normally
reserved for combat soldiers, but August Pohl, the chief of the SS Economic
and Administrative Office, arranged to give them special rations much more
substantial than those allotted to workers in heavy industry. 24
By the end of July most top officers had been assigned. Almost all of
them were in their early thirties. To have two battalion commanders merely
26 years old (Bremer and Olboeter) and three other top commanders in their
late twenties (Wünsche, Ford, and Lintz) is unusual enough, but those below
battalion level were nearly all in their early twenties and the bulk of the
enlisted men were seventeen during training and eighteen at the time of their
first combat engagement. It was indeed the “Baby Division”! 25
18