March 1940, Nazi Germany. After consulting with the Reich's SS leader Heinrich Himmler,
Adolf Hitler approves the creation of a special combat unit composed exclusively
of people serving a prison sentence for poaching and related crimes. This combat unit is recruited
to fight partisans in mountainous areas. Soon, psychopaths, sexual deviants and murderers of
the worst degree will become members of this unit which will terrorize the civilians and
commit unspeakable atrocities mostly in Poland and Belarus. Its commander becomes Oskar Dirlewanger.
Oskar Dirlewanger, the son of a merchant,
was born on the 26th of September 1895 in Würzburg, then part of the German Empire.
The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914. Dirlewanger took part in the German
invasion of Belgium and later fought in France. He was wounded 6 times and even though he was
classified as 40 percent disabled, he reported back to the front. He received the Iron Cross 2nd
and 1st Class and in November 1918, at the time of Germany's surrender, he held a rank of lieutenant.
However, the front experiences had a damaging effect on Dirlewanger’s personality.
When the First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918,
Oskar Dirlewanger was described as a mentally unstable, violent fanatic and alcoholic.
In the new Weimar Republic, which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933,
Oskar Dirlewanger joined various Freikorps right-wing paramilitary militias. Freikorps
were ostensibly mustered to fight on behalf of the government against the Communists attempting
to overthrow the Weimar Republic. They acted with particular brutality and violence and many of its
units proved to be rebellious and difficult for the German government and military to control.
In 1921 while serving with one of the Freikorps units, Dirlewanger was shot in the head.
In the meantime he studied at the university and in
1922 received his doctorate in political science.
In October of the same year, Dirlewanger joined the Nazi Party and from 1928 to 1931
he was managing director of the textile company which belonged to a Jewish family. However,
he was accused of several cases of embezzlement and then worked
as a self-employed tax consultant until July 1933.
However, Dirlewanger was not only a thief but also a pedophile and rapist. In 1934,
one year after Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power,
he raped a 13-year-old girl from the League of German Girls which was the female section
of Hitler Youth. He was also convicted of driving and damaging a government vehicle
under the influence of alcohol and as a result, he lost his doctorate in political science,
was expelled from the Nazi party and SA, and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
After his release, between 1936 and 1939 he fought in the Condor Legion which was a German military
unit sent to Spain to support General Franco's Nationalist movement during the Spanish Civil
War. It was a great opportunity for Nazi Germany to test and develop methods of strategic bombing
which were soon used during the Second World War. Dirlewanger was wounded 3 times and after his
return, he was again allowed to join the Nazi Party and regained his doctorate.
The Second World War started on the 1st September 1939 and in July of the following
year Dirlewanger was admitted to the SS. He created and trained a special criminal unit
named the Dirlewanger Brigade which at that time consisted mostly of convicted poachers.
They were recruited thanks to their tracking and shooting skills to fight partisans. Later,
his unit recruited mostly convicted German criminals.
At first, his unit was sent to Nazi-occupied Poland where Dirlewanger became a commandant
of a camp at Stary Dzików which was set up for the Jewish slave labor. They committed atrocities
here as well as at the Lublin Ghetto. They used to undress the young Jewish female prisoners,
then they whipped them and injected them with strychnine. They were laughing as the poor
victims were convulsing to death in front of them. There were even rumors that they
used to cut up Jewish women and boiled them with horse meat to make soap out of them.
Heinrich Himmler as well as Dirlewanger’ s patron and friend Gottlob Berger knew
about these atrocities and tolerated them. They needed men like Dirlewanger
in their fight against the so called “non-aryan subhumans”.
After the war, Berger said: “Dr. Dirlewanger was hardly a good boy. You can't say that. But he was
a good soldier, and he had one big mistake that he didn't know when to stop drinking.”
The SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen accused Dirlewanger of wanton acts of murder and
corruption. The dissolution of the unit was considered and Dirlewanger himself was
supposed to stand before the SS court in the case of so called "race defilement" for rapes
against Jewish "women" but ultimately none of this came to fruition. Instead, in February 1942 the
Dirlewanger Brigade was sent to Belorus where they not only raped and tortured young women,
but also killed at least 30,000 Belarusian civilians. Their specialty was to cram the
local population inside a barn and then set it on fire. Whoever tried to escape from the burning
barn, was shoot with a machine gun. In some villages, they murdered all their inhabitants.
As with the Einsatzgruppen which were Nazi mobile death squads operating behind the front
line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, Dirlewanger’s unit made their victims,
often naked, kneel down on the edge of a mass grave and then shot them in the back
of the neck with an automatic pistol. Then the bodies dropped straightly into the pit.
Rounded-up civilians would be also routinely used as human shields and marched over minefields.
According to the reports sent to Berlin, Dirlewanger's unit had "destroyed 15,000
bandits" and captured 1,100 rifles and recorded 92 dead in their own ranks.
On the 1st of August 1944 the Warsaw Uprising began when the Polish Home Army,
a non-Communist underground resistance army with units stationed throughout German-occupied Poland,
rose against the German occupation authorities in an effort to liberate Warsaw. The impetus for the
uprising was the appearance of Soviet forces along the east bank of the Vistula River. The
Soviets however failed to intervene. Dirlewanger led his 4,000 butchers,
rapists and looters into action against the Warsaw Uprising, and quickly committed such
unspeakable crimes that both Army and SS commanders demanded the unit's withdrawal.
During the uprising, they also took part in the Wola massacre during which more than
40,000 Poles were murdered in the Wola district of the Polish capital.
This massacre was ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, who requested to kill "anything that
moves" in order to stop the Warsaw Uprising. Dirlewanger’s unit used women and children as
living shields when attacking enemy positions. They burned 3 hospitals with patients inside;
the nurses were whipped, gang-raped and hanged naked together with the doctors.
He did not have any mercy even with children. When they found a daycare with 500 children inside,
Dirlewanger ordered his man to kill every one of them but because he wanted them to save their
ammunition, they beat and stabbed the defenseless children to death with rifle butts and bayonets.
Later, they drank, raped and murdered their way through the Old Town,
slaughtering civilians and fighters alike without distinction of age or sex.
In the Old Town – where about 30,000 civilians were killed – several thousand wounded in field
hospitals overrun by the Germans were shot and set on fire with flamethrowers.
The Germans eventually crushed the revolt and razed the center of the city to the ground in
October 1944. Though they treated captured Home Army combatants as prisoners of war,
the Germans sent thousands of captured Polish civilians to concentration camps
in the Reich. 166,000 people lost their lives in the uprising, including perhaps as many as
17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the Polish Home Army or had been discovered in hiding.
For his merits in the suppression of the uprising, Oskar Dirlewanger was promoted
to the rank of SS-Oberführer - equivalent to a British Army brigadier - and was awarded
the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. On the 16th of October 1944, head of
the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland Hans Frank hosted a dinner in
honor of Dirlewanger at Wawel castle, where he expressed his "gratitude and appreciation for
the exemplary operations carried out by his group in the course of fighting in Warsaw".
In October 1944, Dirlewanger and his men played a crucial role in a brutal suppression of the
Slovak National Uprising. On the 30th of October the same year, Jozef Tiso,
president of the Slovak state, personally decorated German soldiers in Banská Bystrica
in Slovakia, who had fought in the uprising. One of the decorated was Oskar Dirlewanger.
He later took part in fights against the advancing Red Army in Hungary and in Germany.
In February 1945, the unit was expanded again and re-designated as the 36th Waffen Grenadier
Division of the SS. That same month, Dirlewanger was shot in the chest while fighting against
Soviet forces and sent to the rear. It was his twelfth and final injury in the war. He
had himself taken care of and then tried to bring looted goods stored by his parents to
safety before the end of the war. On the 22nd of April 1945, he went into hiding.
After the end of the war, Oskar Dirlewanger was arrested on the 1st of June, 1945. Although he was
wearing civilian clothes and using a false name, he was recognized by a Jewish former concentration
camp prisoner and brought to a detention center. According to the testimony of Luftwaffe Lieutenant
Anton Füssing, his cellmate and German prisoner of war, Dirlewanger was pulled
out of the cell into the corridor every night and brutally beaten by the Polish guards.
Füssing later testified: “I have heard blows and terrible screams. In daylight, I would see
bleeding open wounds on Dirlewanger’s face and his entire body was covered with bleeding welts.”
On the 7th of June, 1945, after days of immense torture and suffering,
Dirlewanger was savagely beaten to death by Poles in revenge
for his brutality in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising. He was 49 years old.
Officially, he died of a heart attack. After the war, there were rumors that Dirlewanger
was alive and later served in the Egyptian army which led to the exhumation of his remains in
November 1960. Examination of the corpse confirmed that the remains belonged to Dirlewanger.
There were no tears shed for Oskar Dirlewanger.
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