Oskar Dirlewanger commanded the Dirlewanger Brigade, the SS unit recruited principally from convicted criminals and used by the regime for the most brutal anti-partisan and anti-civilian operations on the eastern front and in occupied Poland. The brigade killed an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 civilians during the war, including around 35,000 to 40,000 in Warsaw alone during the suppression of the Polish Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. Dirlewanger died on 5 June 1945 in French custody at Altshausen in southern Germany, beaten to death by Polish guards from a French Foreign Legion unit who had recognised him.
The brigade
The Dirlewanger Brigade was originally formed in 1940 as the Sonderkommando Dr Dirlewanger, an SS unit recruited from German prisoners convicted of poaching offences who had volunteered for combat service in exchange for sentence remission. The unit was Himmler’s personal experiment in using convicted criminals for special operations. By 1942 it had been expanded to a regiment, drawing recruits from the wider German prison population including violent criminals and the asocial categories the regime had imprisoned in concentration camps. By 1944 it was a brigade of around 4,000 men. The recruits were given short military training, deployed as an SS combat unit, and used for operations the regular Waffen-SS would not undertake.
Dirlewanger himself was a personally violent commander, an alcoholic, a Spanish Civil War veteran, and a previously convicted child sex offender (a 1934 conviction in Germany for the rape of a fourteen-year-old). His professional unsuitability for any normal military command was the reason Himmler considered him an excellent fit for the brigade.
The Belarusian operations
From 1942 the Dirlewanger Brigade was deployed in occupied Belarus and the surrounding eastern territories on anti-partisan operations. The operations had a particular character: the unit would identify a village suspected of supporting partisans, surround it, kill the inhabitants, burn the buildings. The Khatyn massacre of 22 March 1943, in which around 150 Belarusian villagers were burned alive in a barn, was conducted by an Ukrainian auxiliary battalion under Dirlewanger Brigade command. Several hundred similar operations took place across Belarus during 1942 and 1943. The total Belarusian civilian death toll attributable to Dirlewanger Brigade operations is estimated at around 30,000 to 40,000 people, though the figures are uncertain because the operations were often unrecorded.
Warsaw, August 1944
The Dirlewanger Brigade was the principal SS unit used in the suppression of the Polish Warsaw Uprising of August to October 1944. The brigade entered Warsaw on 5 August 1944 and over the following two weeks conducted the killings in the Wola and Ochota districts of the city. Around 40,000 to 50,000 Polish civilians were murdered during the Wola massacre alone. The killings were carried out openly: civilians of all ages, including hospital patients, nuns, children, were assembled in courtyards and streets and shot. Dirlewanger himself was personally present during many of the killings.
The Wola massacre is one of the largest single-week civilian killings in the European theatre of the Second World War. It was the work of around 4,000 Dirlewanger Brigade men under his command. The German army officer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the senior SS commander in Warsaw, intervened personally to redirect the brigade away from civilian killings and toward actual combat operations against the Polish Home Army, after concluding that the killings were undermining the German military objective. Dirlewanger was decorated by Hitler in late August 1944 for the Warsaw operations.
The death
Dirlewanger was captured by French forces on 1 June 1945 in Altshausen in southern Germany. He was held in a French Foreign Legion detention facility manned partly by Polish guards. The guards recognised him within days. On 5 June 1945, four days after his capture, he was beaten to death in his cell. The official cause of death was recorded as natural causes. The actual cause was reported by witnesses present at the facility, including French officers, who confirmed that Polish guards had killed him in revenge for what he had done in Warsaw. He was 50.
The Dirlewanger Brigade itself disbanded at the end of the war. Several of his subordinate officers were tried by Polish, Soviet and Yugoslav courts in the late 1940s and executed. The brigade is one of the most extreme cases of an SS unit operating outside any meaningful chain of command supervision, and its operations are studied as a particular case in the historical literature on the perpetrator violence of the Holocaust era.
What he was
Dirlewanger is the case of the SS field commander as a personally violent criminal given a unit of personally violent criminals and turned loose on the civilian populations of occupied Eastern Europe. Himmler authorised the formation of the brigade. Hitler decorated Dirlewanger personally. The senior SS leadership treated the brigade’s pattern of mass civilian killing as an asset rather than an embarrassment. He is one of the cases in the perpetrator literature most useful for refuting the line that the SS was a disciplined organisation and that excesses were the work of unauthorised subordinates. Dirlewanger’s excesses were the operational role he had been given.
See also
Sources
- Christian Ingrao, The SS Dirlewanger Brigade, Skyhorse, 2011
- Hans-Peter Klausch, Antifaschisten in SS-Uniform, Bremen, 1993
- Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw, Macmillan, 2003
- Polish Institute of National Remembrance investigations into the Wola Massacre
- USHMM: The Dirlewanger Brigade