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| A lunatic Chaplin imitator and his greatest fans Nazism |
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| First as tragedy |
| Then as farce |
“”In all the theaters of the Second World War, few could compete in cruelty with Dirlewanger
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| —Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin |
Oskar Paul Dirlewanger (26 September 1895–c. 7 June 1945) was an SS commander, a convict of multiple crimes, a sadistic war criminal, a leader of one of the most savage groups deployed by the Third Reich, and man who committed such heinous crimes that the SS themselves were mortified at the reports, was probably one of the sickest men to ever grace God's green Earth. He and his men, the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger or "Dirlewanger Brigade", committed some of the worst atrocities seen by mankind during World War II. As the leader of a band of convicted murderers and rapists, Oskar and his soldiers would pillage, rape, loot, murder, and burn across Poland and modern-day Belarus for years.
It is hard to over-state how evil Oskar and his men were during the war. Think of the worst thing the Nazis could have done to the people of the lands they occupied. There is a good chance the Dirlewanger Brigade committed those acts, and then some. In a nation that made genocide its national policy, Oskar stands out as being uniquely cruel and sick in his actions. Yet, it is still important to remember that the Holocaust was not just the fault of the highest echelons of the Nazi party, that men of all stripes came together to murder Jewish people and invade countless nations willingly and with great enthusiasm. Oskar Dirlewanger's story though exemplifies just how far those type of men were willing to go to enable the twisted ideology of the Third Reich.
Before World War II[edit]
“”[...]his amoral personality, with his alcoholism and his sadistic sexual orientation, was additionally shattered by the front experiences of the First World War and its frenzied violence and barbarism.
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| —Knut Stang |
Oskar lived his entire life as two things; a soldier and a felon. In 1913, he enlisted with the German Imperial military as a machine-gunner, and would be deployed with his unit to march into Belgium and France once World War I broke out. He served on the Western Front, where he would receive two Iron Crosses and be wounded SIX times (this is going to be a common frustrating trend, for Oskar will get wounded a lot in his life and yet, to the regret of humanity, the fucker would not die). Eventually, Oskar would be promoted to Lieutenant, and be stationed in Romania, which is where he was when the war ended. Disobeying orders, Oskar marched his troops out of Romanian internment back to Germany.
After the war, Oskar was, as one police report noted, "a mentally unstable, violent fanatic and alcoholic, who had the habit of erupting into violence under the influence of drugs". Perhaps his psychotic nature is why he joined various Freikorps, right-wing paramilitaries that formed to murder leftists in the early days of the Weimar Republic. One of his most notable actions as a member of the Freikorp was leading a band of para-militarists to Sangerhausen, where a group of German Communists had raided and occupied hopping to inspire a worker's uprising. Though the Commies held against Dirlewanger and his forces, reinforcements led to the Freikorps storming the city and probably butchering every communist they could find. The communists also apparently sucked at aiming for Oskar was grazed in the head by a bullet during all this.
After this stunt and between serving jail time for embezzlement and illegal fire-arm possession, Oskar got a doctorate in political science and took command of a textile mill (which he 100% embezzled from). In 1923, he joined the SA and eventually the SS. He did leave the SA though, a few years before Hitler had them all executed. When the Nazis did take power, Oskar was rewarded with some local business leadership positions and enjoyed a relatively stable (although full of occasional prison stints) life...
...that he flushed down the toilet by raping a 14 year old girl... yea...
Oskar was thrown in prison for two years for rape, drunk driving, and crashing the car he was driving drunk cause it was a government car. He lost his job, his position, his doctorate, his Iron Crosses, and was thrown out of the Nazi party. Yet, when he was released, he immediately went and raped another girl, and got thrown into a concentration camp (remember, sex deviants like mass-rapists and pedophiles were considered criminals worthy of being sent to the camps under the Third Reich. Homosexuals were also considered sexual deviants too, and often were the first victims of the Holocaust alongside socialists). He was paroled though, for you see, one of his closest companions in the Nazi Party was one Gottlob Berger
, a prominent member of the SS and one of Heinrich Himmler's closest advisors. Berger intervened and had Oskar released from the camp, and had him sign up for the Condor Legion, a group of German soldiers who would be sent to fight for Fascist Spain in the Spanish Civil War. He would serve in Spain for three years, and get shot three more times (seriously, that's 9 people who could have made humanity a little better off!!!). Berger also had Oskar's doctorate and party status restored as well. It pays to have friends in high places!
The Dirlewanger Brigade[edit]
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“”[Dirlewanger's leadership] was characterized by continued alcohol abuse, looting, sadistic atrocities, rape, and murder—and his mentor Berger tolerated this behavior, as did Himmler, who so urgently needed men such as the Sonderkommando Dirlewanger in his fight against 'subhumanity'
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| —Peter Longreich |
“”Now Dr. Dirlewanger was hardly a good boy. You can't say that. But he was a good soldier, and he had one big mistake that he didn't know when to stop drinking
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| —Gottlob Berger at Nuremberg |
When World War II broke out, Oskar enlisted with the Waffen-SS, the militarist branch of the SS. He was given his own battalion to command, a group of poachers hand-picked by Oskar to leader anti-partisan activities in Poland. You see, in 1940, the Nazis decided to offer convicted criminals a choice; they could die serving Germany, or die at the end of a firing squad. The battalions formed from these convicts would make up numerous penal battalions across Germany, and these men were tasked with some of the most suicidal missions the Nazis could throw at them. Many of these men were criminals of the worst degree, and some were even clinically insane. Dirlewanger's force was like this, yet it had the exception of being an SS brigade, which pissed them off cause now they were using people they wanted to exterminate to fight their wars. By the end of the war, Dirlewanger was commanding German convicted criminals (civilian and military), concentration camp inmates, mental asylum patients, homosexuals, interned Romani people, and (at the end of the war) even political prisoners sentenced for their anti-Nazi beliefs and activities.
The atrocities began with the brigade's first assignment to oversee a concentration camp in occupied Poland. An SS Judge, Georg Konrad Morgen, would report that Dirlewanger's men were engaging in acts of pillaging the nearby ghetto, "wanton acts of murder", corruption, and Rassenschande (the Nazi term for race-defilement, which leads one to assume that a lot of Jewish people got raped...). Of course, Morgen would be demoted and sent to fight in Russia for reporting this. Dirlewanger and his men were accused of injecting strychnine into young Jewish female prisoners, previously undressed and whipped, to watch them convulse to death in front of them for entertainment. They also were accused of cutting up Jewish women, boiling them with horse meat, and making soap out of their remains.
Eventually the Dirlewanger's Brigade ended up in Belarus, where they were tasked with anti-partisan activities, which to them translated as "kill anyone you even have the slightest thought of being a partisan and every Jew you find". Oskar's favorite method of "anti-partisan" activity was rounding up a village, crowding them into a church, lighting it on fire with them inside, and shooting anyone who managed to get out. They also shot, raped, and tortured Jewish people to such a degree that the local SS death squads were appalled. 30,000 Belorussians are estimated to have been brutally murdered by the Dirlewanger brigade. He also managed to kill 14,000 "partisans", for which Oskar was rewarded the German Cross by Himmler himself, even though Himmler knew of all the awful shit Oskar and his men were doing.
Eventually, the Red Army turned the tide and began pushing back. Oskar's brigade suffered brutal losses at the hands of the Red Army with extreme prejudice (turns out they only were good at shooting people who didn't shoot back). Oskar and his men were sent back to Poland. It was in Poland that they committed their greatest atrocity, the Wola Massacre. Following their assistance in brutally putting down the Warsaw uprising, Oskar, his men, and local police rounded up and shot 40,000 civilians in the town of Wola Poland. He followed this up by burning three hospitals with patients still inside, whipped, raped, and hung the nurses, got drunk and raped and murdered through the rest of the town. 30,000 additional civilians would die in this festival of debauchery, 7,000 the brigade lit on fire with flamethrowers. The SS soon started describing Oskar and his band as nothing more than mercenaries. Oskar would be awarded for his by his superior officer in Warsaw.
Oskar and the Dirlewanger Brigade would end up also putting down a Slovak uprising before finally being sent up against the Red Army and getting curb-stomped once again. Only 700 of the Brigade managed to survive until their surrender at the end of the war. Oskar himself would be wounded again by getting shot in the chest, marking this the 12th and final time Oskar would be wounded in his life. He just would not fucking die!!!!
Death[edit]
Dirlewanger would go into hiding on April 22nd before the end of the war. Having looted, raped, and murdered across Eastern Europe, Dirlewanger would get civilian clothes and try to sneak out of Europe. He almost got away, until a concentration camp inmate recognized him and the French detained him on June 1, 1945. Dirlewanger would eventually die in custody sometime between June 5th and June 7th.
Now, Dirlewanger's death is a bit dicey since we have no idea what actually happened to him. French and Polish forces were guarding him, and their accounts vary. The French claim he died of a heart attack. The Polish claimed he died of mistreatment. Other inmates and guards claimed he got out, and some even say he got recruited to join the French Foreign Legion. Yet, the most likely situation as to what happened is that the Poles, remembering what Dirlewanger did in Wola, took him out back and bashed his skull in before throwing him in a ditch, which is fucking metal. Rot in hell you psychotic asshole!
The Allies may not have gotten the rabid dog, but they did get the man who let him off the leash for a bit. Oskar's mentor and protector, Gottlob Berger, would stand trial at Nuremburg. He was found guilty of his fifth charge, "War crimes and crimes against humanity, atrocities and offences committed against civilian populations", with his involvement with the Dirlewanger Brigade being one of the chief pieces of evidence regarding it. He would be sentenced to 25 years, of which he only served six.
Legacy (Because God hates us)[edit]
Wolfsbrigade 44, a German Neo-Nazi group formed in 2016, identifies with Dirlewanger's band of murder-hobos. In fact, the 44 stands for "DD", which stands for "Division Dirlewanger". The German government had the group banned in 2020, along with a few members getting arrested.
Come and See[edit]
"Come and See", one of possibly the greatest movies ever made, takes inspiration from accounts of the atrocities of the Dirlewanger Brigade in Belarus during the War. It's screenplay was written by a former Belarusian partisan, and details the events of a Belarusian resistance fighter as he comes to grips with the horrors unleashed by the Third Reich on his people. It is a terrifying movie, for the acts that the Germans commit in the movie are things they actually did to Belarusian people during the war. They even have a scene where they burn a church with people inside it, similar to how the Dirlewanger Brigade executed large groups of citizens.