The Dirlewanger SS Brigade; the worst of the worst

Dirlewanger The massacre/ atrocity specialists-120,000 civilain murders in Belarus alone?
Interesting that several political prisoners applie for the unit and were accepted-AND that they defected to the Soviets en masse. The author then supposes they were all shot because the Russians shot all men in SS uniforms. Then there was a regimental commander who was lynched by his own men. Here is a link to the unit's doings during the Warsaw uprising; http://stosstruppen39-45.tripod.com/id6.html
JeffINMNUSA

 

a bunch of war criminals. No wonder the poles tortured him to death. Thnaks for posting the world shold know about these scumbags, may they rot in hell.

 

Yes,

we did have a pretty long chat on this a while back....

http://www.ww2f.com/wwii-general/9985-oskar-dirlewanger-ss-sturmbrigade-dirlewanger.html

 

Good morning Kai;
Great thread-but what seemed to be missed was the fact that this unit was created to BE a force that strikes terror-and that is precisely why Himmler sent it into Warsaw. That they thought it a great joke to be tying up Jewish girls and injecting them with strychnine says something about the type of personalities they were recruiting. Normal human beings get sickened by such behavior and it really says somthing that in the most brutal war in history units around the Dirlewangers could be disgusted and demanding their withdrawal.
JeffinMNUSA

 

This henious and infamous unit came about because of Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger himself. A rapist, pedophile, and alcoholic he was a drinking buddy of Göttlieb Berger head of SS recruiting. This made him something of a real nightmare for the Berlin police department.
To solve everyone's problems Dirlewanger was given an SS commission and authority to recruit "suitable" men from the German penal system for anti-partisan duties. These were supposed to be types like poachers or white collar criminals. But, what actually happened was Dirlewanger emptied the prisons of anyone who would sign up.
Most of the unit's NCO's and officers were cashiered / convicted from regular service and sentenced to Dirlewanger's unit as pennance or in lieu of being hung or shot.
The battalion became a brigade, then a "division" as the war progressed. It was a convienent unit for getting rid of political liabilities and embarrasments as well as military convicts.
The unit served on the Eastern Front exclusively where it had a brutal reputation and was frequently transfered between sectors due to higher commands demanding it in exchange for not just outright shooting the lot!
During the Warsaw uprising the unit, as one author put it, "..brought seens to the streets of Europe not seen since the Middle Ages." Even the commander of the supression of the Warsaw Ghetto was so appauled by their brutality that he too demanded their transfer!
Dirlewanger himself ended his days in a German military hospital having been wounded. He died there of "unexplained complications" (eg., most likely a severe case of "lead poisoning"). His unit was captured by the Soviets at the end of the war. When they found out who they were the Soviets massacred them to the last man on the spot.
A fitting end to one of the blackest units in any military in WW 2.

 

The Warsaw battle was depicted with some detail in City Fights. If memory serves, the commander overseeing the suppression, an SS man, was some what of a specialist in antipartisan operations himself and came to realize that the type of tactics Dirlewanger reprsented not only swelled partisan ranks with more enraged recruits but also infected surrounding German units with riotous indisicipline. By and large Nazi antipartisan activities made an exhaustive list on what not to in counter-insurgency operations.