March 1940, Nazi Germany.
After consulting with the Reich’s SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler approves the creation of a special combat unit composed exclusively of people serving a prison sentence for poaching and related crimes.
This combat unit is recruited to fight partisans in mountainous areas.
Soon, murderers, psychopaths, sexual deviants, and rapists of the worst degree will become members of this unit which will terrorize the civilians and commit unspeakable atrocities mostly in Poland and Belarus.
Its commander becomes Oskar Dirlewanger, one of the most sadistic Nazi criminals.
Oskar Dirlewanger was born on the 26th of September 1895 and his father was a merchant.
After the outbreak of WW1, Dirlewanger took part in the German invasion of Belgium and later fought in France.
He was wounded 6 times, received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and 1st Class and in November 1918, at the time of Germany’s surrender, he held a rank of lieutenant.
The front experiences had a damaging effect on Dirlewanger’s personality.
When WW1 ended, Oskar Dirlewanger was described as a mentally unstable, violent fanatic and alcoholic.
People with such personality traits were top candidates for the Nazi party and SA which Oskar Dirlewanger joined in 1923.
One year earlier in 1922, he had completed his studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and received his doctorate in political science.
Oskar Dirlewanger was also a pedophile and rapist.
In 1934 he raped a 13-year-old girl from the League of German Girls which was the female section of Hitler Youth.
He was also convicted of driving and damaging a government vehicle under the influence of alcohol.
As a result, he lost his doctorate, was expelled from the Nazi party and SA, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.
After his release, between 1936 and 1939 he fought in the Condor Legion which was a German military unit sent to Spain to support General Franco’s Nationalist movement during the Spanish Civil War.
It was a great opportunity for Nazi Germany to test and develop methods of strategic bombing which were soon after used during the Second World War.
Dirlewanger was wounded 3 times and after his return, he was again allowed to join the Nazi Party and regained his doctorate which he had lost for having raped a 13-year-old girl.
WW2 started on the 1st September 1939 and in July 1940 Dirlewanger was admitted to the SS.
He created and trained a special criminal unit named the Dirlewanger Brigade which at the beginning consisted mostly of convicted poachers.
They were recruited thanks to their tracking and shooting skills to fight partisans.
Later, his unit recruited mostly convicted German criminals.
At first, his unit was sent to Nazi-occupied Poland where Dirlewanger became a commandant of a camp at Stary Dzików which was set up for the Jewish slave labor.
They committed atrocities here as well as in ghetto in Lublin.
They used to undress the young Jewish female prisoners, then they whipped them and injected them with strychnine.
They were laughing as the poor victims were convulsing to death in front of them.
There were even rumors that they used to cut up Jewish women and boiled them with horse meat to make soap of them.
Heinrich Himler as well as Dirlewanger’ s patron and friend Gottlob Berger knew about these atrocities and tolerated them.
They needed men like Dirlewanger in their fight against the so called “ non-aryan subhumans”.
In February 1942 the Dirlewanger Brigade was sent to Belorus where they not only raped and tortured young women, but also killed at least 30,000 Belarusian civilians.
Their specialty was to cram the local population inside a barn and then set it on fire.
Whoever tried to escape from the burning barn, was shoot with a machine gun.
As with the Einsatzgruppen which were Nazi death squads operating behind the front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, Dirlewanger unit made their victims, often naked, kneel down on the edge of a mass grave as Dirlewanger’s kommando shot them in the back of the neck with an automatic pistol and then the bodies dropped straightly into the pit.
On 1 August 1944 the Warsaw Uprising began and Dirlewanger and his men participated in its suppression while committing unspeakable crimes.
During the uprising, they also took part in the Wola massacre during which more than 40,000 Poles were murdered in the Wola neighborhood of the Polish capital.
This massacre was ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, who requested to kill “anything that moves” in order to stop the Warsaw Uprising.
The Dirlewanger Brigade burned 3 hospitals with patients inside.
The nurses were whipped, gang-raped and hanged naked together with doctors.
He did not have any mercy even with children.
When they found a daycare with 500 children inside, Dirlewanger ordered his man to kill of them.
Because he wanted his men to save their bullets, they killed the poor children with rifle butts and bayonets.
In the Old Town of Warsaw, thousands of civilians, and prisoners of war, regardless of gender and age, were raped and murdered.
Many of them were shot or set on fire with flamethrowers.
The Warsaw uprising lasted 63 days ending on the 2nd of October 1944.
Even though the Red Army was in the suburbs of Warsaw, it did not help the Poles.
It is believed that a major reason why Stalin decided not to support the uprising was because he wanted to establish a pro-Soviet communist regime in Poland and a successful uprising of the rebels, who supported the democratic Polish government-in-exile in London, could threaten his plans.
It is estimated that more than 150,000 civilians died in the Warsaw Uprising.
For his merits in the suppression of the uprising, Oskar Dirlewanger was promoted and awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross In October 1944, Dirlewanger and his men played a crucial role in a brutal suppression of the Slovak National Uprising which lasted from the 29th of August to the 28th October 1944.
Later they took part in fights against the advancing Red Army in Hungary and Germany.
After the end of the war, Oskar Dirlewanger was arrested on the 1st of June, 1945.
Although he was wearing civilian clothes and using a false name, he was recognized by a Jewish former concentration camp prisoner and brought to a detention center.
Dirlewanger died on the 7th of June, 1945.
Officially, he died of a heart attack.
However, the truth is that after he had been recognized by former Polish prisoners, they beat him to death in revenge for his brutality in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising.
There were no tears shed for Oskar Dirlewanger.
