Oskar Dirlewanger

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Oskar Dirlewanger, here SS-Oberführer (1944)

Oskar Paul Dirlewanger (born September 26, 1895 in Würzburg , † June 7, 1945 in Altshausen ) was a German officer in the Waffen SS and war criminal . He was the commander of a special unit of the Waffen-SS named after him , which was involved in crimes against humanity on a large scale . From August 12, 1944, he had the rank of Oberführer of the Waffen SS Reserve.

Life

First World War

Dirlewanger was the son of a businessman who settled in Esslingen am Neckar with his family in 1906 . After attending grammar school in Esslingen and the Schelztor secondary school, he passed his Abitur in 1913 . He stepped on 1 October 1913 as one-year volunteer in the machine gun - Company of the Grenadier Regiment "King Karl" (5 Württembergisches) # 123. The Württemberg army and took to this unit in 1914 at the invasion of Belgium and France in part. After several wounds, he was classified as 40 percent war-damaged. Despite his handicap, he reported back to the front as a lieutenant and took over an assault and machine-gun company. As a young officer, Dirlewanger received both classes of the Iron Cross and the Golden Military Merit Medal . Last used as first lieutenant in the reserve on the Eastern Front, the 2nd MG Company of the Infantry Regiment "Alt-Württemberg" (3rd Württembergisches) No. 121 withdrew at the end of the war under Dirlewanger's leadership via Romania to Germany.

Weimar Republic

Education and employment

After the end of the First World War Dirlewanger joined various nationalist free corps and in 1920 fought as commander of an armored train in Württemberg, in the Ruhr area , in Saxony and Thuringia and in the spring of 1921 in Upper Silesia . During a mission with the Freikorps Holz , he was wounded in the head in 1921. He was a member of paramilitary groups for at least three years . In the meantime, he studied at the School of Economics in Mannheim Economics . Because of anti - Semitic agitation he was de -registered in 1921 and continued his studies in Frankfurt am Main , where he received his doctorate in political science in 1922 . In his doctoral thesis he dealt with questions of a national planned economy in a future case of war, so that the supply crises that occurred during World War I would be avoided. From 1928 to 1931 he was the managing director of an Erfurt textile company that belonged to a Jewish family. There he was guilty of embezzlement with which he supported the SA . Until July 1933 he worked as an independent tax advisor .

Entry into NSDAP and SA

Since 1919 Dirlewanger was a member of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund . On October 1, 1922, Dirlewanger joined the NSDAP , was temporarily excluded and accepted again years later ( membership number 1.098.716). In addition, Dirlewanger was an SA man in the 1. Sturmbann of the 122nd SA standard. After the Sturmbann attacked the trade union building in Esslingen, he was on trial for breach of the peace in December 1932 . In 1932 he got a job as a full-time SA leader in Esslingen am Neckar.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the takeover of the Nazi party, he was the " old fighter " a job at the Heilbronner labor office , where he was first head of department and later deputy director.

Statements by Dirlewanger about other "old fighters", whom he accused of lacking qualifications and corruptibility, led to disciplinary proceedings within the SA. As a result of the proceedings, several criminal charges against Dirlewanger that had previously been suppressed were investigated. In 1934 he was sentenced to two years in prison for raping a thirteen-year-old girl and for harassing other underage girls (judgment of the Heilbronn Regional Court of September 21, 1934). As a result, he lost his position, his doctorate and all military awards. After his release from two years in prison in Ludwigsburg, he was tried again in 1936 because of the money embezzled in the Erfurt textile factory, convicted on October 12 in Heilbronn and taken to the Welzheim protective custody camp , which he did after the intervention of his friend, the later one SS-Obergruppenführer and chief of the SS-Hauptamt , Gottlob Berger , was soon able to leave. Berger and Dirlewanger were in the same regiment during the First World War, they had operated the NSDAP's covert armament in the southwest, and they were also hostile to the Württemberg Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr .

Legion Condor

From 1936 Dirlewanger took part in the Spanish Civil War for three years, first as a Spanish Foreign Legionnaire and then as a member of the Condor Legion . Awarded the Spanish Cross and through his contacts with the Nazi power apparatus, he succeeded in getting his case to be resumed before the Stuttgart Regional Court . In the course of the renegotiation he was acquitted on April 30, 1940, despite "still not inconsiderable grounds for suspicion" for lack of evidence. The original judgment has been overturned. At the instigation of the Ministry of Education , Dirlewanger also got his doctorate back.

Second World War

Dirlewanger as head of an SS special unit

After his return in April 1940, Dirlewanger was found to be “ worthy of military service ” in May and, at Berger's suggestion, was accepted into the Waffen SS (SS no. 357.267). He received the rank of Obersturmführer .

Dirlewanger became notorious as the commander of various Waffen SS units that bore his name, but especially as the commander of the "SS Special Unit Dirlewanger". These units were considered to be the “special hobbyhorse” of the head of the SS main office, Gottlob Berger . Like Heinrich Himmler , Berger was an admirer of King Heinrich I (see Heinrich's program ), whose model served him for training purposes in the SS main office training office. So this king exempted robbers and thieves from their punishment if they placed themselves in his service and henceforth attacked his Slavic enemies. At the suggestion of Gottlob Berger, Himmler turned this model into the idea of ​​transferring criminal poachers into the SS. Favored by the fact that the Reichsführer SS Himmler also held the office of chief of the police, he came to an agreement with the Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring , persons suspected of poaching on the basis of the Emergency Service Ordinance of October 15, 1938 ( RGBl. I p. 1441) To use military service.

Operations of the Sonderkommando

In May 1940 Dirlewanger was commissioned to form the Oranienburg poachers' command with 80 previous convicts who were concentrated in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and received two months of training. Gottlob Berger selected around 60 prisoners , most of whom had not only been convicted of poaching but also of other offenses. On September 1, 1940, the “Dirlewanger Sonderkommando” was relocated to the Lublin area, where it was used to monitor Jewish labor camps, as it did later in Lemberg . In January 1942, Berger had the unit relocated to Belarus . On January 29, 1942, Dirlewanger's unit was placed directly under the command staff of Reichsführer SS . By February 10, 1942, after the equipment and training had been completed, it was to be sent to the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia Center Curt von Gottberg . On December 5, 1943, Dirlewanger was awarded the German Cross in Gold for his "merits in partisan combat " . According to the award application, Dirlewanger's unit had "destroyed" 15,000 bandits, captured 1,100 rifles and recorded 92 deaths in their own ranks. The ratio of the numbers documents that during the operations of the Dirlewanger unit, mostly unarmed civilians were systematically murdered. In the “ Lokot Self-Governing District ” the command continued to fight partisans together with the Kaminski Brigade .

In the fighting during the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, Dirlewanger and his unit again showed their cruelty and brutality, which was extraordinary even for SS units (compare the Wola massacre ).

Polish civilians murdered by the "Sonderkommando Dirlewanger" in Warsaw (1944)

Mass shootings, torture of prisoners, looting, rape, crimes against children and excessive alcohol, also with the participation of Dirlewanger himself, are evidenced by eyewitness reports from members of the Wehrmacht . Dirlewanger's unit - deployed in the working-class district of Wola - used women and children for the first time as “living shields” when attacking enemy positions. Dirlewanger and the SS generals Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and Heinz Reinefarth received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on September 30, 1944 for the suppression of the uprising with over 170,000 civilian victims .

At the end of January 1945, the troops reached the Oder front in the area around Guben , where heavy fighting with Soviet troops broke out. On February 19, 1945, Himmler ordered the brigade , now led by SS Standartenführer Fritz Schmedes , to be increased to the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS . It no longer bore the name Dirlewangers for further identification. Dirlewanger had already been replaced as commander in mid-February 1945 because he suffered from the consequences of a shot in the chest. He took care of himself in Württemberg and tried to get the booty stored with his parents to safety before the end of the war.

death

Dirlewanger tried to go into hiding on April 22, 1945 when he exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes in an Allgäu hunting lodge by Gottlob Bergers. Based on a photograph, it is assumed that Dirlewanger was taken prisoner by the French on May 7, 1945. German prisoners got to know him and the SS man Minch as fellow prisoners at the beginning of June. According to the testimony of a fellow inmate in Altshausen in Upper Swabia , then Saulgau district in Württemberg ( French occupation zone ), Dirlewanger stated that he was recognized by a former Jewish concentration camp inmate. Like Minch, he was then so ill-treated in French custody by armed Poles, presumably former forced laborers , that he died on June 7, 1945. The death register of the Altshausen community names June 19, 1945 as the date of Dirlewanger's quick and informal burial.

Until the 1960s, rumors circulated that Oskar Dirlewanger survived the war. In 1960 the Ravensburg public prosecutor's office ordered the body to be exhumed. The forensic examination clearly showed that the person buried was Dirlewanger.

Of 35 criminal cases initiated by the judiciary in the 1960s, only one led to indictment and conviction, namely of four former special forces officers for involvement in crimes against Jewish labor camp inmates.

Personality and troop leadership

personality

Wolfgang Benz characterizes Dirlewanger as a type of Landsknecht who "morally unstable and obsessed with power (...), driven by cruelty and arbitrariness, makes crime the principle of struggle". Christian Ingrao states that Dirlewanger's lifetime consisted of 17 years of war - that is a third of his life. The circumstances of his end, which had not been known to the public for a long time, and the imprecise date of death would have contributed significantly to the formation of the legend and, as late as 1962, after Dirlewanger's autopsy in 1960, led Gottlob Berger to suspect the historian Helmut Heiber that his friend was the secret advisor to the mighty in Syria or Egypt live on.

In a biographical sketch in 2004 Knut Stang saw four factors as determining for Dirlewanger's career: “He had an amoral personality, additionally shattered by alcoholism and a sadistic sexual predisposition, the experience of the First World War, intoxicating violence and barbarism that were personally unsuccessful and frustrating years of peace and a political leadership that not only tolerated unscrupulous terror warfare, but turned it into a method. ”According to Stang, it was remarkable that“ Dirlewanger was first recognized and exploited by Berger, despite previous convictions and other abnormalities. [...] Hitler and Himmler saw - rightly - in Dirlewanger the most radical representative of what distinguished Nazi warfare compared to the not exactly philanthropic warfare of the German military tradition. "

Ingrao evaluated interviews from the summer of 1942 and witness statements from the post-war period and investigated the contradicting information about Dirlewanger. According to this, it is not enough to characterize Dirlewanger as an “omnipotent and feared boss”, but also to take into account the impressions of subordinates who portrayed him as a charismatic and respected superior.

Dirlewanger as a troop leader

An explanation for the role Dirlewanger is seen in his military career. Even during the First World War, despite severe wounds, he did not refrain from further action. After a cut in his left arm in hand-to-hand combat in September 1915, which made it immobile, he continued his military service in 1916 after recovering. In 1917 he volunteered again for the front. He was promoted to lieutenant and used as a company commander of a machine gun unit in southern Russia, which was occupied by German troops after the Peace of Brest. In November 1918 he managed to return directly to Germany with 600 soldiers bypassing internment , which in 1932 earned him an honor from old comrades in the press.

As numerous soldiers' letters show, the experiences in Russia were formative in that, unlike in the West, they led many soldiers to a racist perception of the enemy and the local populations, which led to a strengthening of a social Darwinist feeling of superiority. This image of the East, prepared and shaped by the culture carrier theory , was transferred during the Weimar Republic by reactionary forces to the target groups of the volunteer corps, then short-circuited with the term “ subhuman ”, which is usually referred to as Slavs, and to that of National Socialist propaganda The fear of “Jewish Bolshevism” was shared and spread.

When Dirlewanger, after his civil war experience in Spain in 1940, was declared worthy of defense again, took over command of the military training of poachers who had been released for this purpose, their future use to "fight gangs" in the east was already certain. The unit was tasked with searching for the partisans , which Curt von Gottberg had declared “ fair game ”, as well as all Jews, and usually murdering them, and thereby realizing what Himmler had announced as the goal of the Russian campaign in 1941, namely “the decimation of the Slavs Population by thirty million ”. At the same time, Himmler was aware of what that meant: "In this confrontation with Asia we have to get used to the fact that the rules of the game, the customs of past European wars that have become dear to us and are much closer to us, are condemned to oblivion."

During their first deployment in the Generalgouvernement until January 1942, the troops, including Dirlewangers, were considered neglected even by higher-level agencies and persons of the National Socialist regime. The behavior of the unit and the atrocities it committed were not accepted even there at that time and led to Odilo Globocnik and Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger wanting to see them removed and the SS to review the dissolution of the unit. However, Himmler, Berger and Viktor Brack held on to Dirlewanger and in 1942 relocated the unit to Belarus for murder and combat operations. From the military documents it emerges for Ingrao that the unit was unanimously recognized because of its "efficiency" in the forests of Belarus and in the Pripyat swamps and was preferred by the commander for Central Russia to the more strictly hierarchical and thus more immobile units.
After serving in the Warsaw Uprising and the murder of a total of 20,000 to 50,000 civilians, the unit was considerably enlarged and supplemented by additional branches of service. Dirlewanger seemed no longer suitable for leading a division and was seen as overwhelmed. In February 1945 he was replaced.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Seniority list of the Waffen-SS (status: July 1, 1944) Edited by Brün Meyer, Biblio, Osnabrück 1987.
  2. ↑ Rolf Laschet: Oskar Dirlewanger as Esslingen's symbolic figure in the destruction of basic union and human values , 2014
  3. ^ Rolf Michaelis : The SS storm brigade "Dirlewanger". From the Warsaw Uprising to the Halbe Cauldron. Dörfler-Verlag [Nebel] 2011, ISBN 978-3-89555-706-4 (= reprint from 2006), p. 51
  4. ↑ Article of the taz
  5. ^ Christian Ingrao, Les chasseurs noirs. La brigade Dirlewanger , Paris (Perrin) 2006, pp. 65, 71.
  6. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 78 f.
  7. ↑ Stang, Dirlewanger , pp. 68f.
  8. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 86.
  9. ↑ Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich . Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 93.
  10. ↑ Stang, Dirlewanger , p. 69.
  11. ^ White, Lexicon , p. 93.
  12. ↑ Weiß, Lexikon , p. 38.
  13. ^ Richard Breitman: Heinrich Himmler. The architect of the "final solution" . Zurich 2000, p. 64.
  14. ^ Widukind von Corvey : Res gestae Saxonicae. The history of Saxony . Latin / German, ed. v. Ekkehart Rotter et al. Bernd Schneidmüller, Stuttgart (Reclam UB No. 7699) 1997, p. 111.
  15. ↑ See Weiß, Lexikon , p. 37 f.
  16. ↑ Stang, Dirlewanger, p. 69.
  17. ↑ Weiß, Lexikon, p. 93. Ingrao, 2006, p. 21.
  18. ↑ According to the application for the award, see Michaelis, Sonderkommando, p. 25. The own losses mainly affected the Ukrainian and Russian auxiliary troops, by the end of 1943 the actual commando had recorded 19 deaths. For this: Stang, Dirlewanger, p. 71.
  19. ^ Michaelis, Sonderkommando, p. 25.
  20. ↑ Eyewitness report - see also Ingrao, 2006, pp. 134, 158, 181 f.
  21. ↑ Stang, Dirlewanger, p. 71. Mentioned there: Participation in “extensive massacres, looting and rapes”.
  22. ↑ Auerbach, 1962, p. 260. Ingrao, 2006, p. 60.
  23. ↑ Stang, Dirlewanger, p. 72
  24. ^ French military photo from May 7, 1945 ( Memento of the original from September 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.histoquiz-contemporain.com
  25. ↑ Stang in Württembergische Biographien , Vol. 2, Stuttgart 2011, p. 42.
  26. ↑ Weiß, Lexikon , p. 94; Auerbach, VfZ, 1962, Hf. 3, p. 252. - Cf. also Ingrao, 2006, p. 206 f.
  27. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, pp. 217-219.
  28. ↑ Benz in: Weiß, Lexikon , p. 94. - The description of Dirlewanger as a Landsknecht figure from the Thirty Years' War already belongs to a report from 1943 (cf. Ingrao, p. 129.)
  29. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, pp. 65, 92.
  30. ↑ a b Stang, Dirlewanger , p. 73
  31. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 90.
  32. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, pp. 93-108. - On p. 103 Ingrao mentions twice the “domination charismatique” (= charismatic rule) exercised by D. towards his subordinates.
  33. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, pp. 66-68.
  34. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 69.
  35. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 69. On this in detail Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius : Kriegsland im Osten. Conquest, colonization and military rule in the First World War , Hamburger Edition: Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-930908-81-6 , pp. 189–216.
  36. ↑ See on this Hans-Erich Volkmann (Ed.), The image of Russia in the Third Reich , Böhlau: Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-412-15793-7 .
  37. ↑ See chap. 5 at Ingrao: "Une guerre cynégétique?"
  38. ^ Joe Heydecker / Johannes Leeb: The Nuremberg Trial. With a foreword by Eugen Kogon and Robert MW Kempner , Kiepenheuer & Witsch: Köln 1995, ISBN 3-462-02466-3 , p. 377.
  39. ↑ Speech on May 5, 1944 before generals in Sonthofen: Bradley Smith / Agnes Peterson (eds.): Heinrich Himmler. Secret speeches from 1933 to 1945 and other speeches. With an introduction by Joachim C. Fest , Berlin 1974, p. 202.
  40. ↑ Ingrao (2006), pp. 125-127.
  41. ↑ Bernd Böll: Chatyn . In: Gerd R. Ueberschär : Places of horror. Crimes in World War II . Darmstadt 2003, pp. 19–29, here p. 21.
  42. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, pp. 130-132.
  43. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 200.
personal data
SURNAME Dirlewanger, Oskar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dirlewanger, Oskar Paul (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer of the Waffen SS and war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Wurzburg
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1945
Place of death Altshausen