was mandatory that they be volunteers for this duty. They were also expected to be agile, capable of improvising, endowed with initiative and team spirit, highly competent in foreign languages and in their dealings with foreign nationals, and capable of the most demanding physical performance. Eventually, the early guiding principle that required members of the Division Brandenburg to be volunteers ended with their increasing use and integration with the regular army. Operations The night before the Invasion of Poland (Plan White) in September 1939, small groups of German special forces dressed in civilian clothes crossed the Polish border to seize key strategic points before dawn on the day of the invasion. This made them the first special operations unit to see action in the Second World War. Freikorps Ebbinghaus engaged in atrocities against Poland's population and its captured PoWs. On 4 September, members of the Freikorps Ebbinghaus executed 17 people at Pszczyna, among them Boy Scouts from the town's secondary schools. They also tortured 29 citizens of Orzesze before executing them. On 8 September 1939, in the upper Silesian city, Siemanowice, they executed 6 Poles and then on 1 October 1939, shot 18 people in Nowy Bytom. Larger massacres were carried out in Katowice, where hundreds of people were executed. Within two weeks of the invasion of Poland, Ebbinghaus had "left a trail of murder in more than thirteen Polish towns and villages". On 15 December 1939 the company was expanded and re-designated as the Brandenburg Battalion. After its formation, the soldiers of the new special unit were initially employed to protect the Romanian oil fields and later chrome ore supplies from Turkey. The battalion consisted of four companies, organised along linguistic lines: 1st company - men from Baltic/Russian territories 2nd company - Volksdeutsche from Romania; 3rd company - Sudeten Germans who spoke Czech, Slovak, and Ruthenian 4th company - Volksdeutsche from Yugoslavia In addition, the Battalion contained volunteers who had lived in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. A platoon of Brandenburgers took part in Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Scandinavia in April 1940, during which they secured strategic properties in Denmark and Norway. During the spring 1940 invasions of Belgium and the Netherlands, the Brandenburg units proved essential in seizing "vital points ahead of Guderian's panzers." Chronicling Brandenburger No. 3 Company's penetration into Belgium, Lahousen was gratified to report that, "forty-two out of sixty-one objectives were secured and handed over