They feared and feared wherever they went. Their crimes fill the darkest pages of the history of World War II. These ruthless killers have thousands of lives on their conscience. Where did the most infamous division in history come from - the Dirlewangiers?
During the Second World War, many crimes were committed that are unparalleled in the history of mankind. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia have the most lives on conscience. Of the many bestial formations created by the former, the 36th SS Dirlewanger Grenadier Division stood out with particular cruelty.
This unit was part of the Waffen-SS, armed units of the German Nazi paramilitary formation. The Dirlewanger troops were not intended to fight regularly at the front, but to fight the Resistance in areas that had been conquered by the Wehrmacht.
Poachers and recidivists
Formation members were initially recruited from among prisoners serving sentences for poaching. Later, it was strengthened by recidivists who were imprisoned for robberies, rapes, beatings or desertion. German political prisoners with anti-Nazi views were also incorporated into it, a even people who landed in concentration camps in Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, or Dachau .
Oskar Dirlewanger was himself a doomed sexual predator. There were degenerates similar to him in the unit he commanded.
Oskar Dirlewanger, born in 1895 in Würzburg, was headed the criminal unit. From an early age, he was interested in the military. He already fought in World War I - he was wounded many times during it. He was awarded the Iron Cross for his actions.
Dirlewanger - The Sexual Deviant
Even before the outbreak of World War II, the future commander of the unit showed a tendency to sexual deviations. He was known for his love of very young ladies. In 1934, in the period from February to July, he raped several times 13-year-old Annaliese, a member of Bund Deutcher Madel - Hitler Youth women's youth section. There is an annotation in party notes that Dirlewanger was also having sexual relations with many other girls at the time, including the 20-year-old president of the organization in Heilbronn.
When the case came to light, the war veteran was imprisoned. He was also expelled from the NSDAP, to which he had previously signed up. In a penitentiary he served a two-year sentence. In addition, after leaving the bars, he ended up in a sexual offenders prevention center.
Disgraced and with a terrible opinion, Dirlewanger decided to buy back the favors of the NSDAP and the German authorities. He did so through his friend - Gottlob Berger - a high-ranking member of the SS, one of Heinrich Himmler's chief race selection advisers.
Thanks to the intercession of the latter, in April 1937 the army of the Third Reich sent a compromised officer to Spain, where he participated in the civil war and trained soldiers of the Condor Legion, the German unit supporting General Franco. On the Iberian Peninsula he proved to be a seasoned, exemplary soldier, and his attitude deserved - at least according to his superiors - to return to the country and several decorations . Three years later, apparently sufficiently rehabilitated, he became the commander of a remarkable new division.
Degenerates deprived of moral boundaries
The idea of creating a special unit of poachers and prisoners was apparently conceived by Adolf Hitler himself, who passed his idea on to Heinrich Himmler. He wanted to use this unique unit in the fight against partisans. The Führer was especially interested in supporters of illegal hunting, as they had experience in moving in forests.
After being organized and trained, the formation was sent to occupied Poland. The people of Dirlewanger - as its members came to be called - particularly took their toll on the inhabitants of Lublin. As he writes in the book "Nazi beasts. Executioners of the SS ” Jesús Hernández, the commander and his men were particularly cruel towards the Jewish population:
Dirlewanger has arrested several people. In the case of several young Jewish women, he did the following:he placed them in the center of the circle formed by himself and some of his men and the auxiliary Wehrmacht unit. He then conducted what he called a "science experiment" which, in this case, consisted of ripping the victims' clothes and injecting them with strychnine. Then Dirlewanger lit a cigarette and smoked it quietly, watching with the rest of the slow agony of naked girls .
Dirlewanger's torturers committed many crimes against the Jewish population of Lublin ..
Death Trap
After the stay on the Vistula River, the unit was directed to Belarus. There, the typical "way to fight" division members against civilians was to surround the countryside, capture all residents - including women and children - and lock them in one barn. Then the building was set on fire. Anyone who tried to escape this death trap was shot by a machine gun burst.
It is worth noting that the brutality of the 36th SS Dirlewanger Grenadier Division aroused fear and loathing even among the Germans themselves. This is evidenced by the accounts of witnesses, such as a certain civilian reporter sent to the front by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. He wrote in his notes that one time he saw the Dirlewanger soldiers roast detained partisans alive, and then threw their bodies to a herd of hungry pigs . The news of the murder reached Berlin itself ... but Gottlob Berger assured Himmler that the branch's operations were "fairly decent." That ended the matter.
In turn, a certain officer of the Wehrmacht reported that his troops locked the inhabitants of a village of 2.5 thousand in barns. At dawn, Dirlewanger himself arrived and gave the order to kill the population. The division commander personally opened the doors of the buildings, and his soldiers killed those gathered inside with bursts of machine guns. Then straw was removed from the roofs and set on fire - so that those who by some miracle managed to survive had no chance to escape.
Sexual degenerates
The 36th Division, like its leader, was also notorious for numerous sexual crimes and rapes. In the conquered territories, its members showed particular cruelty towards women .
Fighting the Soviet partisans in Belarus, the Dirlewanger soldiers murdered, burned, raped and robbed. In the photo from 1943, members of the Soviet resistance movement.
One of them later told about the crime in Łahojsk near Minsk in 1944. He saw completely drunk officers raping and beating 8 naked women there. The next day he noticed the corpses of the victims of these soldiers' games next to the camp.
After the war, Mathias Schenk, a Belgian who belonged to the unit, decided to report on the terrifying actions of his colleagues from the unit. “When we stormed a cellar where civilians were taking refuge, they raped women. Often several of the same, they did it quickly without letting go of their weapons "- said . He also remembered the tragic fate of a woman who was first raped and then killed by her tormentor by cutting her belly to neck with a bayonet.
Slaughter of Wola - extermination of Varsovians
Perhaps the greatest bestiality was shown by the Dirlewanger soldiers during the Warsaw Uprising, by slaughtering Wola. It happened when the Germans went on the offensive after the insurgents' initial successes. Their activities culminated between August 5 and August 7, 1944. With complete ruthlessness they implemented Hitler's plan that he wanted all the inhabitants of the Polish capital to die .
The article was written based on, among other things, the book by Jesús Hernández entitled "Nazi Beasts. Executioners of the SS ”(Bellona Publishing House 2019).
As Jesús Hernández writes in his book "Nazi beasts. Executioners of the SS ” , the deaths of the members of the 36th Division did not pass by anyone:
They raided hospitals and murdered patients on their beds, sometimes with flame throwers. Nurses and nuns suffered, if possible, an even worse fate: were flogged, gang-raped and hung naked (...).
Dirlewanger soldiers poured gasoline on prisoners and burned them alive, hung women from balconies, stabbed babies with bayonets or threw them through windows. Women were always raped before being murdered. The desire to loot the Dirlewanger men was so great that they cut off the fingers on which they noticed rings so as not to waste time, they gouged out gold teeth with bayonets, and during the plundering they killed each other out of greed .
Up to 65,000 people could have died during the Wola massacre. Most of them were victims of the criminal unit. For comparison, it is estimated that 200,000 people died in the entire uprising.
They disgusted the Nazis themselves
The crimes of the unit aroused disgust and resentment among soldiers of other formations of German troops. Some, meeting them on their way, even tried to stop them. Members of the division often fought with themselves as well - a large part of the losses of Dirlewanger's men were the result of shootings in the unit itself.
Civilians murdered during the Warsaw Uprising by Dirlewanger soldiers in Wola.
The Dirlewanger people have never been tried for their crimes. Neither the Polish People's Republic nor the USSR strove for it. The post-war fate of their commander is not fully known. It is assumed that he was captured by the French who put him in the Altshausen camp. There he was allegedly guarded by Polish guards who, hearing about his crimes, beat him so badly that he died. It most likely took place on June 7, 1945.
It is impossible to estimate exactly how many human lives the division led by Dirlewanger had on their conscience. It is estimated that this could be as much as 60,000 civilians . For several years of their activity, they sowed terror, bringing torture and death. They will be remembered as one of the most criminal squads in history.