Notorious SS unit 'traced' - Telegraph

Prosecutors attached to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the body charged with investigating crimes committed during the war, have announced that they intend to bring the men to justice for their apparent involvement in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising while serving with the SS Dirlewanger Brigade.

The unit, named after its leader Oscar Dirlewanger, comprised of criminals, the criminally insane and volunteers from Nazi-occupied Europe, and developed a reputation for rape, torture and murder, vicious even by the Nazi's bloody standards.

The three, who live in Germany, were found after the Austrian Red Cross gave a Polish museum a card index containing the names and address of those who served in the unit.

Investigators claim to have tracked them down, but the ex-soldiers refused to speak on the phone about the war.

Boguslaw Czerwinski, a prosecutor with the IPN, said that they had now asked for German assistance in bringing the three men to justice and were awaiting a reply.

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How many could be left? I thought the Soviets massacred the unit at the end of the war. Of any survivors given their criminal propensities most probably died in prison already due to new charges / crimes committed after the war.
But, more power to the Poles....

Don't know how many are left but towards the end when Dirlewanger was seriously injured and command was transfered, there were a high number of desertions. Perhaps these are alive because of that?

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I recently skimmed through a new book on the Warsaw uprising and the D unit was not only depraved, but pretty fanatical (but recklessly unskilled) in combat. They took significant losses against the Polish Home Army.

The man looked like the devil too..

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Dirlewanger himself ended his days in a German military hospital after being wounded. He died of "complications." No doubt a bad case of lead poisoning......

I think we can all agree that Dirlewanger and his boys were the kind of animals that Nazi military disciplinarians had nightmares about. Those people pillaged, raped and murdered--and enjoyed every bit of it. Even to the detriment to the mission at hand.

Remember how we had a heated discussion over how detatched or impersonal were the Nazi killings of civilians in the East? If Einsatzgruppen operatives, efficient executioners trained to kill as many people as quickly as possible with complete disregard to the suffering of the victims represent the cold, impersonal extreme of the spectrum, Dirlewanger lands squarely on the other end. He was convicted of raping a pubescent girl, and would have rot in jail if he did not have friends in high places.

I was reviewing a paper I wrote a year ago for revisioning and publication. I am reminded of some of the research I had done on German Security Divisions; while they were not as horrendous as Dirlewanger's criminals, the security untis as a whole represented the dumping ground were the Wehrmacht get rid of its scum and assorted lowest quality personel. Almost anyone who showed promise was quickly transferred out; high performing security divisions were often upgraded to infantry divisions and sent to the front.

In my own research, I found an incidnet in Ben Shephard's War in the Wild East where a private the 286th Security Division wrote in his diary with pride that he and his battalion slaughtered 1,000 Jews in Minsk. This operation did not occur on the logs of his division at all. Yet why would anyone falsely report a terrible crime in his diary, if he was responsible for it?

His death was due to 'complications'. He was jailed by the French at Altshausen under Polish guards. Well, lets just say he died under interrogation.

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I take exception to the comment that Dirlewanger was a born soldier, and any inference that, by nature, all soldiers are killers. It appears that Dirlewanger was a born killer, not a soldier. Furthermore, "war rape, torture, murder on innocent civillians, even killing children" are not tactics of war. They are criminal acts.

Psychopath might be a better description.....

agreed with Terry the man a fool, grown evil. A sort we would call worthless to society

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