Oscar Dirlewanger head of the eponymous Waffen SS brigade, also known as the 36th SS Volunteer Division, was a real bastard whose connections with Himmler landed him instead of prison, at least in command of a combat unit … of cleansing.
Dirlewanger fought in World War I and was one of the first to join the Nazi party in 1923, although he was an alcoholic. In 1934 he was convicted of raping a minor. He was later arrested again for a sex crime and sent to a concentration camp and expelled from the party.
He was released through a friend of Himmler's associate and sent to Spain where he fought for Franco. He returned in 1939 and joined the SS with the rank of second lieutenant. After the conquest of Poland he undertook the formation of a unit that would pursue partisans. It was initially joined by those convicted of poaching.
The unit was formed in June 1940 and initially had a strength of only 55 men. He was later reinforced with four non-commissioned SS officers with a "heavy" record and 20 more men. Gradually the unit was reinforced with additional men from the prisons and disciplinary battalions, "murderers, rapists, robbers, knife pullers, sadists" and generally the worst that the human species can display.
By September 1940 the unit had a strength of 300 men and was initially known as the "Dirlewanger Special Force" and later the "Dirlewanger Special Battalion". By the beginning of 1942 the battalion had a strength of 700 men.
A story of blood
The action of Dirlewanger and his henchmen began in occupied Poland in August 1940. Murders, beatings, rapes were the order of the day. In 1942 the unit was sent to Belarus to fight the partisans. There he committed horrific crimes. Dirlewanger's favorite method was to lock villagers in a house and burn them alive. In Belarus the unit was responsible for at least 30,000 deaths.
For the first 15,000 people it killed the unit lost just 92 of its men, many from friendly fire due to alcohol. In September 1942 the unit murdered 8,350 Jews in the Baranovici ghetto and another 2,000 locals "for robbery". The behavior of Dirlewanger's purges even caused the SS to intervene!
In the meantime, Soviet citizens, prisoners of war, or anti-communists began to be assigned to the unit, alongside criminal law criminals. Thus a second battalion was formed and the unit was upgraded to a regiment. In May 1943 another battalion was formed of criminals burdened with the worst crimes. The regiment participated in the anti-partisan "Operation Gottbusch", again committing horrific crimes. 20,000 people were murdered during the operation.
In November 1943 the regiment was called to fight at the front where it was disbanded, remaining with 259 men. By the end of February 1944, however, it had been regrouped, numbering around 900 men, literally with whatever dregs existed in German prisons. The enlistment of Soviet nationals in the regiment was now prohibited.
Levelling Warsaw
At the beginning of the uprising in Warsaw the unit was sent there to suppress it together with the also infamous Russian Kaminski's cleaning brigade. By order of Himmler, Dirlewanger was free to satiate his every sadistic instinct on the Poles.
Together with Kaminski's ilk, Dirlewanger's bastards, led by him, burned, looted, raped, stole, cut open the bellies of pregnant women, stabbed babies with bayonets or threw them into the fire...Only in the Warsaw suburb of Wola did they murder over 40,000 people (Vola Massacre), including the patients and staff of the hospital there.
"We blew up the door and saw many children, about 500, all with their little hands up. Dirlewanger ordered his men to kill them all and to save ammunition he ordered them to be killed with stocks and bayonets. Blood and spilled brains were flowing on the road," said Belgian (Flemish) eyewitness Matthias Senck, a volunteer in a German engineering unit.
During the Warsaw Uprising the unit numbered 3,400 men. But her losses were extremely heavy – as the Poles showed no mercy to the killers – losing 2,733 of her men. For his "action" in Warsaw, Dirlewanger was nominated for the Knight's Cross.
The end
The unit soon regrouped and numbered 4,000 men. At the same time it was renamed "2nd Assault Brigade SS Dirlewanger". The brigade was sent to Slovakia to suppress the Slovak uprising which it succeeded in its usual way. He was then sent to Hungary where he fought the Soviets.
In February 1945 it was decided to convert the brigade into a division. Apart from the title, however, little has changed. The unit never reached division level, although it was reinforced with army divisions, an engineer division, and a tank destroyer division.
On April 16, 1945, when the final Soviet offensive against Berlin began, the unit retreated under pressure. The next day Dirlewanger was seriously injured. By April 25, the unit had ceased to exist, while there were no shortage of disciplinary incidents, such as the lynching of a battalion commander by his own men. Part of the unit was annihilated by the Soviets in the Halbe enclave and only a few of its men managed to surrender to the Americans on May 3.
A total of 700 men of the unit were rescued, most of them in hiding. Dirlewanger was arrested by the French in June 1945. But his arrest became known and Polish soldiers killed him with their own hands on June 8.
Oscar Dirlewanger.