We establish strong uniqueness for a class of degenerate SDEs of weak H{ö}rmander type under suitable H{ö}lder regularity conditions for the associated drift term. Our approach relies on the Zvonkin transform which requires to exhibit good smoothing properties of the underlying parabolic PDE with rough, here H{ö}lder, drift coefficients and source term. Such regularizing effects are established through a perturbation technique (forward parametrix approach) which also heavily relies on appropriate duality properties on Besov spaces. For the method employed, we exhibit some sharp thresholds on the H{ö}lder exponents for the strong uniqueness to hold.