There are VERY FEW photos of Sonderbattallion Dirlewanger, but here is one. 
Posted on 10/30/2009 8:13:48 AM PDT by Arec Barrwin
Notorious SS unit 'traced'
Polish authorities claim to have identified three survivors of an infamous SS unit that garnered a reputation for brutality that shocked even German wartime commanders.
By Matthew Day in Warsaw Published: 5:47PM BST 17 Apr 2009
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
This is what ultimately happens when you have a “civilian” security force with the same funding as the military. They end up being unaccountable.
How do you get more vicious that vicious?
“they were using the pseudonyms Obama, Reid, Pelosi....”
Oscar Dirlewanger was a beast. He was kicked out of the SS and locked in a loony bin. Himmler got him out and gave him command of a unit of convicted poachers. To say they behaved extremely brutally is quite an understatement.
.
World War TWO is definitely not over.
Good for the Poles!
Many many Greeks are still waiting for reparations (or an apology perhaps) from both Nazis and Commies.
Haven’t read about these guys in a while...
They were drawn from the 999 penal battalions, and the SS Prison Camp at Matzlau, near Danzig/Gdansk.
General Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger, a real piece of work, liked raping young girls. VERY young girls....
He was imprisoned at Dachau for rape in 1934. He gained conditional release by having a high-up SS friend recommend him for the Condor Legion, the German Volunteer group in Spain, where he was wounded 3 times in combat.
His actions in Spain, and his High SS contacts, earned hima commission in the SS.
From Military History.Com:
In June 1940, when an idea came to fruition to form an anti-partisan security unit from all of the convicted poachers sitting in German prisons, the man chosen was Dirlewanger.
The 2000 imprisoned poachers were only able to scrounge 84 physically fit volunteers so Dirlewanger was instructed to recruit condemned men from the SS’s penal units to flesh out the unit.
By July the unit was dubbed after its already infamous commander, SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger and numbered 300 or so troopers. The unit was sent to the eastern front held the worst record for atrocities possibly in modern history. Expanded to a battalion in September and then to a full three battalion regiment in 1943, it combed concentration camps, POW centers, and every black hole in Hitler’s Germany and attracted the worst of the worst.
During the war Dirlewanger was wounded seven times from 1940-45, always leading his band of criminals from the front. He received the clasp (second award) to his Iron Cross II on May 24, 1942, and that to his Iron Cross I on September 16, 1942. Twice the unit was all but wiped out, only to be rebuilt from scratch. In December 1944 it was doubled in size and formed into a brigade of some 4000 men.
On 14 February 1945, the brigade was renamed 36.Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS. Although upgraded to divisional status, it never reached above brigade strength. Dirlewanger would never have the chance to command this division, however.
On the February 15th, Dirlewanger was seriously injured in combat for the twelfth time. Oskar Dirlewanger was recovering from his last wound at a hospital in Althausen, Bavaria, at the end of the war.
On June 1st, 1945, French occupation forces used Polish soldiers in their service to forcibly bring him to the Althausen jail. Dirlewanger was beaten and tortured over the next several days. He died under torture from the Polish guards during the night of June 4-5.
This information was suppressed at the time, and this led to many fantastic stories of sightings of him all over the world.
He was something of a Nazi version of Bigfoot with sightings of him everywhere. He was said to have served in the French Foreign legion at Dien Bien Phu, or spotted in Paraguay teaching at the military academy, or even as an advisor to the CIA-backed dictator General Mohammed Naguib in Egypt.
These stories however were put to an end when his remains were exhumed at Althausen and identified in 1960. His troubled soul is buried there in a plainly marked grave.
This is what ultimately happens when you have a “civilian” security force with the same funding as the military. They end up being unaccountable.
There are VERY FEW photos of Sonderbattallion Dirlewanger, but here is one.
this is for some odd reason a steady favorite of history's worst barbarians...i cannot imagine...if a butcher simply must have such bloodlust would it not be sufficient simply to kill women, children and babies more efficiently and humanely..
i read a slave trading narrative a few years ago about that African slaver tribes did the same thing with unwanted male babies at slave barracoons they had up and down west African coast after they had raided inland tribes for commerce chattel...they kept the female babies for concubines and local home slavery but used the male babies in a sort of spear sport...history is rife with brutal behavior and no one escapes it...I think Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism probably eased such atrocities but hardly erased them...
Don't think the kind of depravity described in this article could not happen here. It could happen anywhere.
Was this the division used during the Warsaw uprising who’s advance was abruptly halted when they captured a vodka distillery?
There is a lot of legend associated with NAZI atrocities, much of it propoganda.
The Einsatz Commandos get all of the press because they concentrated mainly on Jewish extermination.
But these guys were THE REAL DEAL....
And the worst of the lot were the Eastern European VOLUNTEERS who joined them, and the Ukrainian, and Cossack Police that worked with them.
Good buddies with Gottleb Berger another psycho monster who lived a life after he was let out of prison in 1951!
we could see such behavior here one day down the road if things continue to fall apart culturally
Might be, but they were the primary butchers of the uprising, but suffered extreme casualties themselves.
On 5 August, Dirlewanger had sixteen officers and 865 men in Warsaw. While the fighting was in progress the unit received 2,500 troops of which 1,900 came from the SS Prison Camp at Matzkau near Danzig. At the end of the uprising Dirlewanger had only 648 men left.
From Feldgrau:
On 5 August Dirlewanger’s SS barbarians advanced about 1,000 yards – in every single street in the Wola district of Warsaw. In every single street in Wola recaptured by the Germans, far behind the frontline, the inhabitants were ordered to leave their homes, induced by promises of evacuation.
As soon as large groups of civilians assembled on the streets, they were not taken to evacuation points but were herded together in cemeteries, gardens, back yards, factory forecourts or squares, soldiers then fired machine gun bursts into the human mass until there were no further signs of movement.
On the 5 August no one was spared – everyone perished innocents, old men, women and children, as well as members of the Polish AK - the soldiers piled the corpses in large heaps, poured petrol over them and set them on fire.
Hospitals in the Wola and Ochota areas suffered worst of all that day. The “good fellows” as Himmler called them, with Dirlewanger at their head, stormed into the wards, shot the sick and wounded where they lay. Nurses, nuns, helpers and doctors suffered the same fate.
Berger was his guardian angel in the SS, and they shared similar.... “tastes”, shall we say.
While technicly his superior, Berger served as Dirlewanger’s 2nd in the field several times.
Too bad this didn’t happen a few months ago, before Marek Edelman died. Edelman was the last living commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And later a member of Solidarity. And later a supporter of the war against Saddam.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2354113/posts
Interviewer: But there are people who say it’s not our business.
Edelman: And whose business is it? Every war with fascism is our business. In 1939 there were also many people who said that the war in Poland was not their war, and what happened? Great nations fell because politicians listened to those who were saying that it’s not worth dying for Gdansk [Danzig].
The SS was hardly “civilian” in nature.
His story ought to put an end at least to the notion that cowards and evil men are always cowards.
How bad is it when even the SS is horrified? BTT
Thats the point, it wasn't part of the actual German army it was a seperate entity. I always thought it was a continuation of the SA which were basically Hitlers street thugs. They were "funded like the military" complete with weapons uniforms and a chain of command.
As an interesting side note, Oskar Dirlewanger is the person that the movie character of Hannibal Lector is based on.
He was the most promoted person in the German Army. In four years he went from being a “person unworthy of life” to a General in the SS on April 20, 1945.
There was also know question of his personal bravery. He led his units from the front, and had the wounds to prove it.
Another note on Dirlewanger:
He is the guy (And his unit) credited with (The September Miracle), stopping the unstoppable Soviet Advance of Bagration, dead in it’s tracks. The level of brutality exhibited during this counter-attack shocked even the Russians, whose troops began to flee when faced by Dirlewanger’s units.
After Bagration, The Soviets summarily executed almost everyone from this unit they could find, deserters and Soviet Nationals alike.
I’m not as up on SS as I should be but wasn’t there a Wermacht SS and a civilian based SS as an extension of Himmler’s authority ...Heydrich too till Prague got him..
the SA under the assasinated gay guy lost luster after 1930 something didn’t it?
You mean Ernst Rohm....
He had an incredible war record for bravery under fire....and quite bright.but a real monster...whew...he and Pol Pot woulda made fine pals.
reckon that was him...most amazing thing to me about German military and political ogranization was the detail and the penchant for fancy uniforms....
and they sure kept records didn’t they?
they were hell on wheels for a while withn dive bombers, tanks and troopers with bolt action 8mm and that Hitler zippers machine gun
no wonder folks feared them..
Another interesting side note:
Dirlewanger’s Exec Officer, SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Weisse, became part of the Gehlan Group, and was never prosecuted.
From WIKI:
The Gehlen group was controlled completely by the U.S. Army from 1945 until 1948.
It was then taken over and controlled directly by the Central Intelligence Agency under the command of Colonel James Critchfield until 1955-56, when the group was taken over by the Federal Government of Germany and renamed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) or State Intelligence Service.
Don’t forget the other criminal of the Warsaw Uprising, Joe Stalin who halted the Soviet Army 30 miles from Warsaw and let the Nazis exterminate the Polish Home Army in Warsaw. Stalin also refused to let Allied planes support the Home Army as he refused to let them land in Soviet occupied territory to refuel.
The SS started out as a branch of the paramilitary SA.
By the time in question they were a separate branch of the military. Dictators have a habit of setting up parallel military structures as a check on the “real” army. Saddam had several. The USSR had the KGB, with its military ranks.
But just because they were not part of the main military structure didn’t make the SS civilian.
Can you think of the name of the narrative or where it could be accessed?
It's hard for most people to comprehend or even imagine such sadism and savagery. My wife has difficulty comprehending sadism at all.
Such savagery may be reserved for a fringe element of humanity--the psychotic, sociopathic, etc.--but I doubt it. It is probably a possibility for most humans, under sufficiently conducive circumstances.
Our best hope of avoiding it is to recognize its possibility and resolve never to enable any such thing.
Unfortunately, it is probably fools with good intentions who are most likely to enable such savagery and such horror.
I'm having difficulty putting thoughts concerning such as this into words. Words fail me.
Mother Teresa said that she decided to go to Calcutta when she looked inside herself and saw a Hitler lurking there.
Perhaps this is one of her gifts to all of us.
“He had an incredible war record for bravery under fire....and quite bright.but a real monster..”
After Bagration, entire Soviet battalions would break and run when the RUMOR that they were facing Dirlewanger made the rounds.
The Soviets built monuments at the sites of some of his massacres.
He was a butcher in a business, and at a time, when butchers were prized. He was such a good butcher that the demands of War caused most of his superiors to overlook his other pecadillos. History is rife with such men.
As far as prosecuting these people goes, it’s important to remember that every single member of his unit was a VOLUNTEER.
I believe Hitler had the SA leader Rohm assisinated because he was trying to get away from the early thuggish image of the SA. I think (and I'm no expert either) that the SS was the replacement. There was the waffen SS which was a mechanized force and the regular SS wich ran the camps and pretty much acted as enforcers. I do know that the SS was seperate from the regular German military and there was competition between the two for funding.
I keep meaning to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich but haven't been able to get the time. Now that I'm out of work I should do that. It'll give me insight into the Soetoro administration LOL.
I’m reading it right now...I’m at the part where Hitler is getting ready to invade Poland. Chilling stuff.
Pretty disgusting that is.
It’s even more despicable -— Especially considering the fact that we agreed to bomb the hell out of our allies the Serbians in 1999 while supporting those who willingly and brutally assisted the Nazis in the Balkans - Albanians and Bosnian Muslims.
Things were unbelievably nasty in Germany just after the surrender. A lot of debts got paid off in alleys and back-country ditches and hardly anyone ever even found out about it. Three countries that I know of (we were one of them) and more that were rumored, employed assassins with the tacit or even full knowledge of command. Nuremberg was a tea party by comparison.
I've never read a full treatment of that period in a modern history. I learned about it from my father, who was there, and even then not until I was a veteran myself. He said I wouldn't have understood.
“It’s hard for most people to comprehend or even imagine such sadism and savagery.”
The most savage of all the SS Brigades WAS NOT DIRLEWANGER’s, it was SS Assault Brigade RONA, a Russian volunteer brigade composed of fanatical Anti-Communist peasants, commanded by a Former Soviet Captain, Bronislav Kaminski.
His brutality in suppressing the Soviet Partisans in the Lokot Autonomous District is legendary.
When its Russian commander fell during a skirmish with partisans, Kaminski, a White Russian engineer who had Polish-German blood mixed in his vein, took over and was appointed by Himmler to head the 29. Waffen Grenadierdivision der SS RONA.
This is the unit that found the Warsaw Vodka warehouse, and Kaminski was personally ordered by Himmler to be executed for it.
Kaminski and his entire command staff would be executed by Himmler after the Warsaw uprising.
I have a numbered, first edition of that book sitting above my desk.
While Shirer gets most of the facts right, keep in mind while reading it the he was a committed, pro-Soviet Socialist, and his views reflect that. He omits a lot of facts that would put the Soviets in a bad light, like the atrocities in Eastern Poland and the Baltic States, that he merely glosses over.
btw....modern Afrocentric revisionists hate this book and claim it's all lies...of course..it belies the idyllic noble savage image and how they were plucked by evil white men from Eden essentially..slave trade was truly a multicultural endeavor
hear hear
He further explains what happened after the battle and the virtually unknown fighting which took place between Russians and Poles after the Russian occupation of Poland.
Its an excellent book.
this has piqued my interest...i may read up on this more...got to go make payroll now..thanks
“modern Afrocentric revisionists hate this book and claim it’s all lies..”
Inconvenient facts can be inconvenient truths to people with a political agenda.
Yeah, I kind of noticed that bias. It still paints a vivid picture in the mind of what happened, though.
In 19410, Dirlewanger and his SonderBattallion was attached to SS Police Force-Lublin, and was responsible for the Jewish camp at Dzikow, and area partisan suppression.
Wehrmacht officers in Poland investigated him for his mistreatment of Polish Civilians, and his penchent for raping young Jewish girls before he personally murdered them.
They presented the findings to an SS Court, but it was buried on Himmler’s personal orders.
Like I said, this guy was a real piece of work. Guderian and several Wehrmacht Officers refused to even be in the same building with him.
The guy just looks insane. Sick SOB is reaping his reward.
It is coming close to the time when we see stories like this and movies like that idiotic one reciently “Were in the Nazi Killing Business” as efforts to misdirect the peoples attention from the atrocities and crimminality of those we face in the here and now?
W
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