SS special unit Dirlewanger

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Oskar Dirlewanger, here SS-Oberführer (1944)

The SS special unit Dirlewanger , which committed war crimes on a large scale , was set up by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler from May 1940 at the instigation of Gottlob Berger, initially from legally convicted poachers as the " poaching commando Oranienburg", then changed its status from September 1940 onwards Special command over battalions - and nominal regimental strength for the brigade , until it was transferred to the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS in February 1945 . From the start, this unit was headed by Oskar Dirlewanger, who had several criminal records . From November 1943 to January 1944 Erwin Walser temporarily led the unit.

The number of poachers in the task force

From March 1940, Himmler set up a sniper unit, for which legally convicted poachers from all over the Reich were to be brought together in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . To this end, Himmler wrote to the Reich Minister of Justice on March 29, 1940 :

"The Führer decrees that all game shooters, especially those of Bavarian and Eastern Marks origin, who have broken the law not by snares but by hunting, by serving in the SS- affiliated special sniper companies exempt from serving their sentence for the duration of the war and with good leadership can be amnestied. "

On May 14th, Himmler was able to select the first 48 registered people. From the end of May 1940 they were trained by SS-Obersturmführer Oskar Dirlewanger as "poachers' command Oranienburg". As a friend of Dirlewanger, who was twice convicted, Gottlob Berger had previously recommended the establishment of the unit to Himmler and had Dirlewanger declared "worthy of military service" again before he was accepted into the Waffen SS in May . From the unit, which had grown to 80 people, 55 soldiers remained for the "SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger" at the end of the training. They were the beginning of September 1940 using the General Government to Lublin in the area of the local SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik seconded where they were grown to nearly 100 members to February 1,942th In September 1942, 115 more poachers were added to the unit. For March 1943, around 250 poachers can be assumed to be the core of the formation.

On August 3, 1944, Himmler declared to the Gauleiter in Posen :

“I had the Fuehrer give me permission to pull out all poachers who are rifle hunters, i.e. bullet poachers, not snare hunters, from the prisons in Germany. That was about 2000. Of these decent and good men unfortunately only 400 live. "

These 2,000 poachers have verifiably never been in the special unit. For March 1944, for example, the following approximate number can be assumed in Belarus: In addition to the 250 poachers, there were 1,200 ordinary criminals and so-called anti - socials selected from the concentration camps , 200 SS soldiers prosecuted for disciplinary offenses, and almost 500 Russian auxiliaries. Of this total strength of about 2150 members, 881 were deployable for the fight after the Russian auxiliaries were left behind when they withdrew from Belarus in June 1944.

Force changes and crimes

During the first deployment in the General Government from September 1940 to January 1942, partisans were not to be expected there. The command monitored the labor deployment of Jews who were housed in camps. Dirlewanger and his men, however, behaved in such a way that the judiciary of the SS wanted to initiate proceedings against the unit itself and even the dissolution of the commando should have been considered. In 11 counts, around 30 offenses - poisoning of Jews, theft, robbery, black market trafficking, corruption , mistreatment, rape - were listed of which Dirlewanger and the unit are said to have been guilty. In addition, Dirlewanger is said to have entered into a so-called racially abusive relationship with the interpreter Sarah Bergmann, who was also his housekeeper but was arrested for theft . The proceedings initiated by Globocnik and Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger were thwarted, and at the instigation of Gottlob Berger, the now almost 100 men of the unit were transferred to Belarus to fight partisans from February 1942 according to their destiny . From November 11, 1942, after being increased, it was named "SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger", at the end of 1943 and from March 19, 1944 it became the "SS-Sonderregiment Dirlewanger". In July 1944, the regiment became the "SS Storm Brigade Dirlewanger". Curt von Gottberg , in whose area of ​​command in Belarus Dirlewanger's unit was integrated, had ordered in an order of August 1, 1943 that the entire population was to be removed from the combat areas so that they would become "dead zones". The special unit not only fought against partisans, but also killed around 30,000 Russian farmers and Jews. A large number of villages were burned down. The villagers were usually shot or burned with their houses, later often recruited as forced laborers in Germany or locally because of the labor shortage , which particularly affected women. A letter from Dirlewanger to the adjutant Gottlob Bergers from March 1944 documents a payment of two bottles of schnapps per woman for a total of ten female forced laborers, which Dirlewanger “procured” for the SS main office . According to Curt von Gottberg's final report on “Aktion Cottbus” of June 28, 1943, Dirlewanger's “demining apparatus” had proven itself completely: Locals were driven over streets suspected of being mined in order to render minefields harmless for the advancement of their own people. The "fight against gangs" was accompanied by mass rape and other excesses, the victims were often underage women and children, for example in Chatyn on March 22, 1943. What happened there became the basis for the 1985 anti-war film Come and See . Gottlob Berger, who traveled from Berlin especially, was also involved in part. It was also he who continued to protect Dirlewanger from criticism. When Oskar Dirlewanger was to be awarded a medal in December 1943, Dirlewanger's unit had, according to the information in the award application, 15,000 "bandits destroyed", 1,100 rifles captured and 92 dead 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 1943 there was the following structure:

  • Headquarters company with motorcycle rifle platoon
  • 1st (German) company
  • 2. (Recruit) Company (concentration camp prisoners)
  • 3rd (Recruit) Company (concentration camp prisoners)
  • 4th (Russian) company
  • 5th (Russian) company

During the mission to suppress the Warsaw Uprising on August 4, 1944, a large contingent of inmates from the SS penal institution in Danzig-Matzkau was deployed .

Members of the Waffen SS, including soldiers from the Dirlewanger special unit, in Warsaw. Admission of an SS war correspondent (August 1944)

The deployment of the special unit, which had become a "storm brigade", in the suppression of the Warsaw uprising cost another 30,000 partisans, men, women and children their lives between August 4 and mid-October 1944. In Warsaw, in the context of the Wola massacre , the unit again showed its cruelty and brutality, which was extraordinary even for SS units. Mass shootings, torture of prisoners , looting, rape, crimes against children and excessive alcohol are documented 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. The goal of destroying every trace of a memory of Polish identity has made Warsaw "one of the largest ossuary of the Second World War ".

Two months later, the Dirlewanger SS Special Regiment was deployed to combat the Slovak National Uprising , and in December it fought against the advancing Red Army in the vicinity of Budapest . In view of the impending defeat and the high losses, Dirlewanger had also resorted to political prisoners from concentration camps when recruiting. In October 1944, with Himmler's approval, he began to recruit Reich German prisoners in the concentration camps who “changed inwardly” and who wished to join the Wehrmacht and fight for the Greater German Reich . Other such recruits took place in March and April 1945. The attempt failed, however, because the majority of the prisoners recruited in this way tried to join the Red Army on their first deployment to the front . From December 12 to 14, 1944, almost the entire 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment changed fronts in Hungary . Among them were political prisoners recruited from the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps . Of the 770 political prisoners, around 500 succeeded in converting and around 200 were executed. Another collective change of front took place in February 1945 - one of the defectors was the later SED political office member Alfred Neumann .

The importance of poachers in combat

The quoted by Himmler, but never reached the number of 2,000 poachers and the description of the soldiers as "decent and brave men" shows the appreciation of hunting with rifle poachers in the folk tradition has a long tradition. At the same time, Himmler reproduces something in which he did not want to be inferior to his model Heinrich I. Its chronicler reports:

“King Heinrich was indeed very strict towards strangers, but in all cases mild towards his countrymen; Whenever he saw that a thief or robber was a brave man and fit for war, he exempted him from the appropriate punishment, transferred him to the suburbs of Merseburg, gave him fields and weapons, ordered him to spare the citizens against them Barbarians (= Slavs ), however, as much as they dared to undertake raids. The crowd gathered in this way formed a complete army for the campaign. "

At a group leader conference from June 11 to June 15, 1941, a few days before the start of the attack on the Soviet Union , Himmler had stated its purpose: "The decimation of the Slavic population by thirty million". According to Erich von dem Bach's testimony , the Dirlewanger special unit mentioned at the Wewelsburg “really had to be active in this sense”. The unit "officially consisted of so-called poachers", but "for the most part from convicted criminals".

The history of the unit, of which files of 634 survivors were created at the Red Cross tracing service , has not been processed legally, in contrast to the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD , which carried out similar tasks. The number of victims is given as 60,000 deaths in Eastern Europe, mostly civilians. In 2006, Christian Ingrao examined above all the poaching character of the unit and found that this corresponded to what Ministerialrat Günther Joel recorded from a conversation with Hermann Göring on September 24, 1942. In the east, gangs of “passionate” smugglers are to be deployed who can “kill, pillage, rape, and desecrate” there, provided that they are immediately placed under strict surveillance on their return. Curt von Gottberg called in his order of August 1, 1943, with which the combat areas were to be transformed into “dead zones”, people still encountered there “ fair game ”, which had to be hunted and destroyed accordingly. Himmler declared in a speech on May 5, 1944 to generals in Sonthofen :

“The Jewish question has been resolved in Germany and in general in the countries occupied by Germany. [...] In this confrontation with Asia we have to get used to the fact that we condemn the rules of the game that have become dear to us and that are much closer to us from past European wars. We are m. E. Even as Germans, with all the emotions coming so deeply from our hearts, not entitled to let the hate-filled avengers grow up so that our children and grandchildren then have to deal with them because we, the fathers or grandfathers, are too weak and too were cowards and left it to them. "

The Dirlewanger special unit acted beyond all "rules of the game" and did not consist exclusively of poachers, as the actual composition of the unit shows. The majority of all German units fighting against "Asia" in the " total war " in the East adhered to the behavior originally only allowed to poachers beyond the edge of civilization, by destroying everything that moved. Because for Himmler and a large part of the generals of the Wehrmacht, "Asia" already meant " Untermenschentum " and "Niederrassen" in 1941 . This also applies to Himmler's speech on September 21, 1944 on the Warsaw Uprising :

“When I heard the news of the uprising in Warsaw, I went straight to the Führer. Let me give you this as an example of how one should take such a message calmly. I said: 'My Führer, the timing is unsympathetic. Historically, it's a blessing that the Poles are doing this. We'll be out of here for five or six weeks. But then Warsaw, the capital, the head, the intelligence of this former 16 or 17 million people will be wiped out, this people who have blocked the east for us for 700 years and have been in our way since the first battle near Tannenberg . Then the Polish problem for our children and for everyone who comes after us will no longer be a big problem for us. ' In addition, at the same time I gave the order that Warsaw be completely destroyed. Gentlemen! You can now think that I am a terrible barbarian. If you will: yes, I am if I have to. The order was: every block of houses is to be burned down and blown up so that no more stages can get stuck in Warsaw. "

When the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS was set up in February 1945, the name Dirlewangers disappeared, even if it remained unofficially associated with the division. In no other combat unit was the name of the troop leader so closely fused with that of his unit. He owed his special role to his friendship with Gottlob Berger, which went back to the First World War and through whom he was connected to the SS leadership.

Processing after 1945

Of 35 law enforcement files filed with the judiciary in the 1960s, only one led to charges and convictions, namely of four former members of the special forces unit, for involvement in crimes against Jewish labor camp inmates.

In 2008, the Austrian Red Cross gave the Warsaw Uprising Museum previously unknown data on the SS unit. The names of soldiers and their addresses are recorded on around 100 index cards. The employees of the memorial found that some of them can still be reached today at old addresses. The Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff , head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center , pleaded for criminal prosecution and processing of the fight against the insurgents in Warsaw and the massacre of the civilian population in the Wola district. According to a report in the “ Frankfurter Rundschau ” on June 5, 2008, the reappraisal in Poland was so long in coming because the uprising of the Polish Home Army (AK) was a taboo subject for the communist regime . The Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) is striving to investigate the ten or so survivors of the "storm brigade".

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Printed in Erich Hobusch, 2004, p. 5.
  2. ↑ Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich . Frankfurt am Main 2002, pp. 38, 92.
  3. ↑ Berger's letter to Himmler of October 3, 1942, cf. Ingrao, 2006, p. 246, note 38. For the number of 250 poachers cf. Christian Ingrao , 2006, p. 49.
  4. ↑ Heinrich Himmler's speech to the Gauleiter on August 3, 1944 . In: Hans Rothfels, Theodor Eschenburg (Hrsg.): Quarterly books for contemporary history . No. 4 , 1953, pp. 357-394 ( PDF; 5.5 MB ).
  5. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 49.
  6. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 26 and P. 243 f. (Note)
  7. ↑ Bernd Boll : Chatyn. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär : Places of horror. Crimes in World War II . Darmstadt 2003, pp. 19–29, here p. 21.
  8. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, pp. 108, 125-127.
  9. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, pp. 46, 49.
  10. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 35 f.
  11. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 50. Ingrao assumes around 100 villages burned down: p. 250, note 95.
  12. ↑ Dirlewanger's letter to Berger's adjutant Blessau dated March 11, 1944, see Stang, “Dirlewanger”, p. 71. The letter and Blessau's answer printed by Rolf Michaelis : “ Das SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger. The use in Belarus 1941–1944 . ”2nd, revised edition, Michaelis, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-930849-38-3 , p. 111. Cf. also Ingrao, 2006, p. 164.
  13. ^ Interrogation from 1948, see Stang, "Dirlewanger", p. 71. Cf. also Ingrao, 2006, p. 131 f., 233.
  14. ↑ Referring to post-war statements (including Nuremberg Document NO-867): Stang, “Dirlewanger”, p. 71.
  15. ↑ 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.
  16. ^ Michaelis, Sonderkommando, p. 25.
  17. ↑ Michaelis, “Sonderkommando”, p. 11.
  18. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 53.
  19. ↑ Eyewitness report - see also Ingrao, 2006, pp. 134, 158, 181 f.
  20. ↑ Stang: Dirlewanger. P. 71. Ibid. Mentioned: Participation in “extensive massacres, looting and rape”.
  21. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 184.
  22. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 58 f.
  23. ↑ Karin Orth : Was there a warehouse company? “Criminals” and political prisoners in the concentration camp. In: Norbert Frei : Exploitation, Destruction, Public. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-598-24033-3 , p. 127
  24. ↑ Horst-Pierre Bothien (Ed.): Nikolaus Wasser . Bonn communist and resistance fighter. Memories (1906–1945). Stadtmuseum Bonn , Bonn 1999, page 102.
  25. ^ Widukind von Corvey : Res gestae saxonicae. The history of Saxony. Stuttgart 1997, p. 110f.
  26. ^ Karl Hüser : Wewelsburg 1933 to 1945. Cult and terror site of the SS. Paderborn 1987, p. 7.
  27. ↑ Joe Heydecker , Johannes Leeb: The Nuremberg Trial. Cologne 1995, p. 377.
  28. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 63.
  29. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 123. - This does not address anything particularly peculiar to National Socialism, as Widukind von Corvey already shows. Irène Némirovsky gives a similar thought in her novel "L'affaire Courilof" from 1933 (Eng. " Der Fall Kurilow ", Frankfurt a. M. 1995) when she lets a doctor in the company of a Tsarist minister say the following in 1903: “ One would have to create a secret society whose job it would be to exterminate these damned socialists, revolutionaries, communists, free thinkers and all Jews, of course ... One could employ former bandits, criminals under common law, and promise them reprieve. These people, this revolutionary rascal, deserve no more pity than mad dogs ... ”(Némirovsky, 1995, p. 102 f.)
  30. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, p. 36.
  31. ^ 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.
  32. ↑ George H. Stein: History of the Waffen SS. Hitler's elite troops in the war 1939–1945. Düsseldorf 1967, p. 114.
  33. ↑ Jürgen Förster : On the military's image of Russia 1941–1945. in: H.-E. Volkmann (ed.): The image of Russia in the Third Reich. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 1994, pp. 141-164.
  34. ^ Włodzimierz Borodziej : The Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 121.
  35. ↑ Ingrao, 2006, pp. 217-219.
  36. ^ Zuroff is hunting SS Nazis in Poland May 20, 2008.