He ordered Steiner to attack the northern flank of the huge salient created by the 1st Belorussian Front's breakout. īy 21 April Adolf Hitler, ignoring the facts, started to call the ragtag units that came under Steiner's command "Army Detachment Steiner". Heinrici ordered the III SS Panzer Corps, reduced to three battalions and a few tanks, to scrape together whatever forces it could find to set up a screening line along the Finow Canal to protect the southern flank of the Third Panzer Army from an attack by the Soviet Marshal Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front, which had broken through the Seelow Heights' defences and was encircling Berlin. The Nederland Division was sent south-west of Frankfurt (Oder) and assigned to the V SS Mountain Corps, where it was destined to be destroyed in the Battle of Halbe. The Nordland was sent to join Helmuth Weidling's LVI Panzer Corps defending the Seelow Heights, to stiffen the sector held by the 9th Parachute Division. He placed them under the command of General der Infanterie Theodor Busse, commander of the Ninth Army, as Busse had most of the other units in the III Corps. On the second day of the Battle of Berlin, 17 April, Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula, stripped Steiner's III (Germanic) SS Panzer Corps, (the Army Group's reserve), of its two strongest divisions, the SS Nordland Division and the SS Nederland Division. In the event, Steiner realised that the forces under his command were inadequate, and refused to attack. Hitler hoped that the units assigned to Steiner would be able to stage an effective counterattack against the northern pincer of the Soviet assault on Berlin.
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