Too Brutal for the SS: The Extraordinary Crimes of Oskar Dirlewanger

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” - Primo Levi

There were many violent men in Nazi Germany. There were murderers, sadists, fanatics and career criminals who found themselves operating within a regime where cruelty was not only tolerated but frequently rewarded. Even among this collection of people, however, Oskar Dirlewanger managed to develop a reputation that set him apart. He was a convicted criminal, an alcoholic, a Nazi, a decorated soldier and eventually the commander of perhaps the most notorious penal unit of the Second World War. His men were drawn from prisons, penal institutions and eventually concentration camps. What began as a small collection of convicted poachers developed into an armed gang associated with some of the worst atrocities committed in occupied Europe. They became known simply by the name of the man who commanded them: the Dirlewanger Brigade.

Oskar Paul Dirlewanger was born in Würzburg, Germany, on 26 September 1895. He fought during the First World War, eventually becoming an officer and receiving decorations for bravery. He was wounded several times but repeatedly returned to combat. War, it seems, suited Dirlewanger considerably better than peace. When Germany was defeated in 1918, he did not simply return home and settle into an ordinary civilian existence. Instead, he became involved with the Freikorps, right-wing paramilitary organisations largely composed of former soldiers who fought communists and other political opponents during the violent years that followed the collapse of Imperial Germany.

Remarkably, Dirlewanger was also highly educated. He studied economics and political science in Mannheim and Frankfurt and was awarded a doctorate in political science in 1922. The image of Dirlewanger as nothing more than an unintelligent thug therefore does not really work. He was an educated man who had experienced university, military command and political organisation. He joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and became involved in the political violence that characterised Germany during the interwar period.

In 1934, Dirlewanger received a criminal conviction that resulted in imprisonment and the loss of much of the status he had accumulated. His doctorate and military standing were taken from him and his career appeared to have collapsed. For a time, even the Nazi system seemed to have decided that Oskar Dirlewanger was unsuitable for respectable employment. Yet he possessed something extremely useful in Nazi Germany: powerful friends.

One of them was Gottlob Berger, who later became one of the most influential figures within the SS recruitment apparatus. Berger had known Dirlewanger for years and helped him rebuild his career. Dirlewanger travelled to Spain and fought on the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War, serving with German forces associated with the Condor Legion. Military service once again offered him a route back into favour. After returning to Germany, he fought successfully to have much of his former status restored and was accepted into the SS in May 1940.

That same month, Heinrich Himmler authorised an unusual military experiment. A special unit was to be created from convicted poachers. The idea sounds strange, but there was a certain logic behind it. Poachers already knew how to shoot, track animals, move quietly through forests and survive for extended periods away from towns and roads. These were precisely the skills the SS believed could be useful when hunting resistance fighters hiding in the huge forests of occupied Eastern Europe. Dirlewanger was placed in command of what became known as the Poaching Squad Oranienburg.

It did not remain a collection of poachers for long.

As the war progressed and Germany required more manpower, the unit expanded dramatically. Convicted criminals and other prisoners were added to its ranks. In the final months of the war, even prisoners who had themselves been persecuted by the Nazi regime were forced into the formation. The result was one of the strangest military organisations of the Second World War: a unit created by a dictatorship from men whom that same dictatorship had imprisoned, and then armed and sent into occupied territory.

Essentially, the Nazis had taken people they considered unsuitable to walk freely around German society and given them rifles.

Dirlewanger proved to be an appropriate commander for such an organisation. His unit was deployed in Poland and Belarus from 1940 and became heavily involved in what the Germans described as anti-partisan warfare. On paper, these operations were intended to destroy armed resistance movements operating behind German lines. In practice, the distinction between fighting partisans and murdering civilians frequently disappeared. Villages suspected of helping resistance fighters were surrounded and destroyed. Civilians were executed, buildings were burned and populations were forcibly removed. The Dirlewanger formation became notorious for its behaviour during these operations.

Eventually, its conduct attracted attention from within the SS itself. An investigation into Dirlewanger’s activities was launched in 1942 and findings were submitted to an SS court. Archival records held by the German Federal Archives confirm that SS and police judicial investigations concerning Dirlewanger existed. Yet intervention from above repeatedly protected him and his unit remained operational.

There is something almost impossible to comprehend about this.

The SS was an organisation centrally involved in genocide, mass execution, concentration camps and racial extermination. Yet elements within that same organisation were investigating Oskar Dirlewanger and the behaviour of his men.

And still he survived professionally.

Far from being removed permanently, Dirlewanger continued to receive promotions and decorations. His men were useful precisely because they were willing to carry out operations in which conventional military restraint had largely disappeared. As Germany’s position in the war deteriorated, units willing to fight brutally and absorb enormous casualties became increasingly valuable. Then came Warsaw.

On 1 August 1944, the Polish Home Army launched the Warsaw Uprising. Its goal was to liberate the Polish capital from German occupation as Soviet forces approached from the east. Hitler and Himmler reacted furiously and reinforcements were rushed to Warsaw to destroy the uprising. Among them was Dirlewanger’s formation.

The brigade arrived in the Wola district as German forces began one of the most horrific massacres of civilians during the war. From 5 August, civilians were driven from houses, basements and apartment blocks and killed in enormous numbers. Buildings were set on fire and people attempting to escape were shot. Polish historical authorities estimate that between 40,000 and 60,000 people were murdered during the Wola Massacre. Dirlewanger’s unit was one of the formations specifically identified for its extreme brutality during the operation.

Hospitals offered little protection. The elderly, children, medical workers and ordinary civilians were caught in the killing. Dirlewanger’s men fought their way through Warsaw while simultaneously suffering enormous casualties themselves. This was not a sophisticated elite military formation. It was a penal unit thrown into ferocious urban combat and used with little concern for either the civilians in its path or its own survival.

Perhaps most extraordinary is what happened to Dirlewanger afterwards. He was promoted.

During 1944 Dirlewanger rose to the rank of SS-Oberführer and continued to be rewarded despite the reputation he and his unit had developed. By this stage of his career he was already a highly decorated soldier. During the First World War he had received both classes of the Iron Cross and the Württemberg Gold Medal for Bravery, while his involvement in post-war fighting earned him the Upper Silesian Eagle.

His decorations continued during the Second World War. He received clasps to his earlier Iron Crosses, the German Cross in Gold, the Gold Wound Badge and awards for service on the Eastern Front. His most prestigious decoration came in 1944 when he received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. By the end of the war, Dirlewanger had accumulated an extraordinary collection of military honours. The medals on his uniform presented the image of a decorated German war hero. The reality of the man wearing them was considerably different.

After Warsaw, the unit was sent to help suppress the Slovak National Uprising. It later fought near Budapest as the Red Army advanced across Eastern Europe. By February 1945, the formation had expanded sufficiently to be renamed the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. Calling it a conventional military division, however, probably gives it considerably more professionalism than it deserved. It remained a strange mixture of penal recruits, forced recruits and surviving members of Dirlewanger’s original formation.

Dirlewanger did not remain with it until the end. In February 1945 he was seriously wounded in combat and relinquished command. Germany was now collapsing. The Red Army was advancing from the east, the Western Allies were moving through Germany from the opposite direction and the Nazi regime that had protected Dirlewanger for years was disappearing around him. Dirlewanger attempted to disappear.

He changed into civilian clothing and tried to hide in southern Germany, but French occupation forces captured him. He was imprisoned at Altshausen in what is now Baden-Württemberg. The man who had spent much of his adult life surviving wars, political violence and repeated battlefield injuries had finally run out of places to go.

He would not survive captivity for long.

Dirlewanger died on 7 June 1945. Modern historical research records that he was severely beaten while in detention and died from the injuries, although accounts differ regarding exactly who was responsible. He was buried in Altshausen. His death did not immediately end the story because rumours circulated for years that he had somehow survived and escaped. German authorities eventually had his grave opened and his remains examined, putting the escape stories to rest.

There was therefore no spectacular trial for Oskar Dirlewanger. He never sat in the dock at Nuremberg. There was no lengthy interrogation about the forests of Belarus or the streets of Warsaw, and there was no final public judgement against him. He survived the First World War, the political battles of post-war Germany, the Spanish Civil War and almost the entirety of the Second World War, only to die in a detention cell less than a month after Nazi Germany surrendered.

There is a temptation when looking at someone like Dirlewanger to explain him away as a monster who somehow slipped into the Nazi system unnoticed. That explanation is comforting because it separates the individual from the state around him. Dirlewanger becomes an aberration rather than part of the wider story. The reality is more uncomfortable.

The Nazi regime knew who Oskar Dirlewanger was. It knew he had been convicted and imprisoned. It knew the reputation his unit had developed in occupied Europe. Elements within the SS investigated him. Yet he repeatedly returned to service, accumulated rank and was entrusted with more men. Dirlewanger did not simply slip through the cracks of Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany repeatedly opened the door and let him back in.