civilians were killed by the RONA SS men during the events known as the Ochota massacre; many victims were also raped. In the following weeks, the RONA unit was moved south to the Wola district, but it fared no better in combat there than it did in Ochota; in one incident, a sub-unit of the RONA brigade advanced to loot a captured building on the front line, but was subsequently cut off from the rest of the SS formation and wiped out by the Poles. Following the fiasco, SS-Brigadeführer Bronislav Vladislavovich Kaminski, the unit's commander, was called to Łódź to attend a SS leadership conference. He never arrived; official Nazi sources blamed Polish partisans for an alleged ambush that killed the RONA commander. But, according to various other sources, he was arrested and tried by the SS, or simply shot on the spot by the Gestapo. The behaviour of the RONA during the battle was an embarrassment even to the SS, and the alleged rape and murder of two German Strength Through Joy girls may have played a part in the eventual execution of the brigade's commander. Vistula River line In late August 1944, 5 SS Wiking was ordered back to Modlin on the Vistula River line near Warsaw, where it was to join the newly formed Army Group Vistula. Fighting alongside the Luftwaffe's Fallschirm-Panzer Division 1 Hermann Göring, they were faced against the Soviet 3rd Tank Corps. The advent of the Warsaw Uprising brought the Soviet offensive to a halt, and relative peace fell on the front line. The division remained in the Modlin area, grouped with the 3 SS Totenkopf in the IV SS Panzer Corps. Heavy defensive battles around Modlin followed for the rest of the year. The Ardennes Offensive (popularly known as the "Battle of the Bulge"), between 16 December 1944 and 25 January 1945, was a major German offensive through the forested Ardennes mountains region of Belgium. The Waffen-SS units included the 6th Panzer Army under Sepp Dietrich. Created on 26 October 1944, it incorporated the I SS Panzer Corps (1 SS , the 12 SS Hitlerjugend and the SS Heavy Panzer Battalion 101). It also had the II SS Panzer Corps (2 SS Das Reich and the 9 SS Hohenstaufen). Another unit involved was Otto Skorzeny's SS Panzer Brigade 150. The purpose of the attack was to split the British and American line in