SS-Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger"
In mid-20th century Europe, the Dirlewanger Brigade was an anti-partisan unit of the Nazi army, reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler. Nazi Germany was notorious for the Dirlewanger Brigade, comprised of inmates of Nazi concentration camps and prisons. The brutal and barbaric methods used by Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger, known as the 'Butcher of Warsaw,' against partisans appalled even some SS commanders. SS-Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" was originally manned by convicted poachers, however as the war progressed replacements were found by emptying prisons and filling the ranks with more hardened criminals.
The divisions of the Waffen-SS were the elite of Hitler's armies in World War II, but the most fanatical of them were not even German. The foreign Waffen-SS formations included well-known divisions such as Wiking, Nord, and Prinz Eugen, notoriously brutal units such as the Kaminski Brigade and the British-recruited Britisches Freikorps. Some, like the British and Indian volunteers, were used for propaganda purposes only, while others like the notorious Dirlewanger Brigade, which helped brutally suppress the Warsaw Rising in 1944, were nothing more than murderous criminals in uniform.
Oskar Dirlewanger was one of those degenerates who, in saner days, would have been court-martialed out of the German army. Born in Wuerzberg in 1895, he served in the German army in World War I, after which he went on to earn a doctorate in economics. Though intelligent, he was a liar, an alcoholic and a pervert who molested children. Convicted of a sexual assault upon a minor in 1935, he spent two years in prison.
When released, he was arrested again on the same charge, but thanks to his mentor, Gottlob Berger, an SS general, he was released and served with the Condor Legion in Spain. The German Army had refused to accept Herr Dirlewanger for service: under an old German law, certain criminal acts precluded service in the Wehrmacht (the armed forces).
In July 1940, he took over a unit of composed of game poachers [Jagdvergehen = hunting offense]. Once upon a time, impoverished peasants poached wild game to feed their families. They were poaching for their subsistence. The governing nobility owned all the land and began illegal hunting and the illegal wildlife trade. As forests fell to development and farming, new laws to benefit the remaining landowners and their greedy families saw to it that exclusive rights stayed with the rich.
In modern Germany large-scale poaching appears to be rare. Only a little more than 1,000 cases of poaching are registered by police each year. That's next to nothing compared with the more than a million deer and nearly 900,000 wild boar that are legally hunted in Germany every year. Every type of poaching is a criminal offense in Germany. In modern Germany some assume that there are at least 80,000 hunting offenses in Germany every year. Only two percent of the more than 380,000 hunters have to kill ten animals during parental or closed periods or otherwise not shoot them in a way that is not fair to the grazing community.
Poaching has been defined as the illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights. Poaching was performed by impoverished peasants for subsistence purposes and a supplement for meager diets. Poaching was as well set against the hunting privileges of nobility and territorial rulers. While Germanic law allowed any free man including peasants to hunt, especially on the commons, Roman law restricted hunting to the rulers.
In Medieval Europe feudal territory rulers from the king downward tried to enforce exclusive rights of the nobility to hunt and fish on the lands they ruled. Poaching was deemed a serious crime punishable by imprisonment. Hunting was used in the 18th century as a theatrical demonstration of aristocratic rule of the land and had a strong impact on land use patterns as well. Poaching interfered not only with property rights but clashed symbolically with the power of the nobility.
Those poachers who were released to Dirlewanger from prisons and concentration camps were believed to have the skills necessary for hunting down and capturing partisan fighters in their camps in the forests of the Eastern Front. Their numbers were soon increased by others who were eager for a way out of imprisonment-including men who had been convicted of burglary, assault, murder, and rape.
The Group Dirlewanger SS unit received their education in Oranienburg and were used for special purposes. At one time 200 German political inmates in this group were transferred to Russia. All persons who were forced to join this group were very disgusted at being forced to join the SS and fight for them. They considered being selected to join the SS as the very worst disgrace. The Dirlewanger special commando group was assigned to the most dangerous spots.
By army regulations, dating back to the days of empire, those convicted of poaching received not only prison terms, but also “loss of honor” and loss of citizen rights, such as voting, holding public office, and serving in the armed forces. Yet those ineligible to serve in the Wehrmacht found homes—and fancy uniforms—in the Waffen-SS, the armed services of the regular SS: Hitler’s uniformed henchmen. This was where Dirlewanger found his home.
In 1941 the members of the Gestapo [The Secret State Police], Kripo and SD [Security Service] who are attached to Action-Group A were active mainly in Lithouania, Latvia, Esthonia, White-Ruthenia and to a smaller part in front of Leningrad. The forces of the uniformed police and the Armed SS were active mainly in front of Leningrad, in order to take measures against the returning population and under their own officers. This was so much easier because the Action detachments in Lithouania, Latvia and Esthonia have at their disposal native police units.
A heavy destruction of the population was expected. If only 492 rifles were taken from 4,500 enemy dead, this discrepancy shows that among these enemy dead were numerous peasants from the country. The battalion Dirlewanger especially had a reputation for destroying many human lives. Among the 5,000 people suspected of belonging to bands, there were numerous women and children. The political effect of this large-scale operation upon the peaceful population was simply dreadful in view of the many shootings of women and children.
Dirlewanger was a sadist who treated his own men as brutally as he treated the Poles. Beating them with clubs to maintain discipline was not uncommon. He even casually shot men he did not like. Little wonder that many of his soldiers deserted to the Russians when they had a chance. After 1942, hardened criminals were drafted into his unit, which gave and expected no quarter from the enemy. The inmates who later were forced to transfer to the Group Dirlewanger thought that this was the worst thing that could happen to them.
All inmates had certain squares with letters; the political inmates had red squares; the German political inmates had a plain red square; the Poles had a red square with a “P” marked on it; the Russians with an “R”; all nationalities could be identified by the first letter of their country. The red square with a yellow star was the Jew. The green square, on the other hand was the sign of the so-called professional criminal. Here it must be said that there were quite a number of people with green squares who did not fall under the classification of professional criminals, but who were sent to the camp with that square since the Gestapo could find no excuse to send them into the camp as political prisoners.
Clearly, this sometimes did not work out well, as many of them engaged in petty or serious crimes, and there were large-scale desertions to the Russians - especially from 'politicals' who were communist in orientation and for some bizarre reason were suddenly released from camps and trusted with membership in the SS and weapons and all merely to quickly fill gaps in the strength rosters. Dirlewanger was generally quite brave, fair and just, but had his own methods of keeping the men in line and punishing their frequent transgressions - policies which although brutal, tended to be very effective.
Most of the responsibility for the crimes in the Warsaw uprising was leveled against the infamous Dirlewanger Brigade and the Russians in Kaminski's Brigade. Though this was true to a large extent, there were also regular, SS, and police formations who were involved in the degraded activities in early August 1944. Later, the group swelled to battalion strength and was sent to fight Polish partisans as the SS Special battalion Dirlewanger.
The Germans knew through informants that an uprising was coming, but were still caught off guard when the action actually started. The German garrison was in a panic. Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler was not pleased, and was given permission from Adolf Hitler to gather a force to “erase” Warsaw. It was composed of the entire Posen police force, augmented with some artillery and two brigades (Dirlewanger and Kaminski Brigades, named after their commanders). The units were put under the command of SS Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth. His instructions were to: “...destroy Warsaw completely...[s]et fire to every block of houses and blow them up,” according to Toczek. On August 5, Reinefarth’s units entered Warsaw. The plan was to split the city in two, attacking from the west through Wola and southwest through Ochota. The fighting was brutal, especially among the two SS units.
The Dirlewanger group was used for its special "talents" to help put down the Jewish uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, killing an estimated 35,000 men, women, and children in a single day. Even by Nazi standards, the brigade was considered unduly violent and an investigation of its activities was opened. The Nazi hierarchy was eager to distance itself from the behavior of the brigade and eventually exiled many of the members to Belarus.
As a double insurance against another defeat by the Israeli Army, the Nasser regime formed an Arab Foreign Legion to fight against the Jewish State. Its nucleus consisted of 400 former Nazis and Gestapo veterans, who were recruited by Arab League agents in Germany. The entire project came to light when in September 1959 the authorities in Hamburg arrested Herr Wilhelm Adami, one of the principal German recruiting agents. Adami was a Gestapo Storm Trooper and served in Poland with the Dirlewanger Extermination Brigade. Nasser's State Security Cadre was under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Al-Nasher, whose real identity is Leopold Gleim, chief of Hitler's personal guard and Gestapo Security Chief of German-occupied Poland, who was sentenced to death for war atrocities.
Like many other German war criminals, Oskar Dirlewager soughtto evade responsibility by attempting to blend in with the crowds of refugees. Itappears that his destination of choice was Switzerland. Te attempt to solve themystery of the last weeks of Dirlewanger’s life poses a further challenge for a fullclari??cation of the uncertainties related to the Polish episode near the end of theearthly existence of the German war criminal.Te ??nal fate of the injured Dirlewanger, afer he had lef the military hospital,is shrouded in mystery. possible explanation that Dirlewanger hadfound himself in a town with strong with a strong possible presence of deported Polish Jews or Poles who knew or remembered him and accidentally passed onthis information Apart from the instances of French retaliation, the Germans were also targetedby concentration camp prisoners, venting out years of intimidation and humilia-tion Dirlewanger himself was massacred and beaten to death as a result of an“investigation” conducted by “Polish guards” during the nights of 4–5 June 1945Te brutal torture by Polish guards [Polnischen Wachmannschafen] underunclear circumstances led to the death of the German war criminal OskarDirlewanger.
Some people suspected him of success-fully escaping to Egypt, where he was supposed to be training the local police forcein cooperation with Otto Skorzeny. Bonn officials accused Adami of recruiting the S.S. veterans for duty as "cadre” and "specialists” in the plotting of any new war against Israel. Three well-known Hitler-era figures have been mentioned in connection with the recruiting. Oskar Dirlewanger, Johannes Daemling and Wilhelm Voss were reportedly in Cairo working for Nasser. Dirlewanger a top Himmler aide is now advising Nasser on "guerrilla warfare.”
But Dirlewanger had been killed in the town in Württemberg, at the Detention Center Altshausen.
In 2022, according to video and photos published by anti-Russian media, multiple Ukrainian troops arriving in Kherson bore the logo of the SS Dirlewanger Brigade. As one reporter noted, the notorious Nazi formation was “arguably one of the most horrific SS units of the war, made up of convicted murderers, rapists and pedophiles and committed innumerable brutal war crimes.”
The movie "Come and See" is a 1985 Soviet anti-war film directed by Elem Klimov and starring Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova. Its screenplay, written by Klimov and Ales Adamovich, is based on the 1971 novel "Khatyn" and the 1977 memoir I Am from the Fiery Village, of which Adamovich was a co-author. The depiction is based on the Dirlewanger Brigade, led by the psychopathic Oskar Dirlewanger and composed mostly of temporarily released criminals who disgusted even other SS units with their behavior. A brutally realistic depiction of the invasion of Belarus by the Nazis, filmed entirely on location, that leaves nothing to the imagination. Excellent acting, by an all amateur cast, riveting direction and haunting music, and all the raw violence of a war of attrition such as the Great Patriotic War was...A punch in the gut sort of movie, not very likely to be forgotten any time soon, if only because of its realism and aftertaste, and a whole new concept in war movies, when it was made. THE most depressing movie ever made.
