Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

Unlike the affable von dem Bach, Dirlewanger actually looked and acted like the murderer he was. His face resembled that of a vulture, with thin lips and deep circles under his cruel, almost mocking eyes, while his dark hair was cropped close to his bony, angular head. His violent tendencies got him noticed at an early age. After serving in World War I he joined the Freikorps, a volunteer paramilitary organization and temporary home to many future Nazis, where he made a name for himself beating up Communists in the regular street fights of the period. He attended Frankfurt University, earning a PhD in economics, and then joined the Nazi Party, becoming deputy director of the Labour Office in Heilbronn.

      Dirlewanger seemed to enjoy stirring up trouble, and his position was in question almost immediately. The Führer of his SA-Group Southwest reported that for a full five months since joining the Labour Office Dirlewanger had been acting in an ‘undisciplined way’. He had ‘repeatedly had sex in the official car of the Labour Office with girls who were less than fourteen years old’.²⁸ Then on 15 April 1934 he ‘drove the official car of the Labour Office into a ditch while completely drunk; on this occasion, a female passenger was severely hurt and he fled the scene of the accident’.²⁹ Dirlewanger was sentenced by the State Court of Heilbronn on 20 September 1934. At his trial it was noted that he had had sexual relations with ‘several other women among them the twenty-year-old leader of the BDM [League of German Girls] group of Heilbronn’; also, he had ‘used’ the fourteen-year-old Anneliese ‘four or five times in the period of February to mid-July 1934 in order to satisfy his sexual appetite’; during one of these meetings the girl had actually been wearing her BDM uniform.³⁰ Dirlewanger was kicked out of the SA and sentenced to two years in prison. But he had friends in high places.

      Dirlewanger’s old comrade, SS Brigadeführer Gottlob Berger, was outraged. ‘The condemnation was absolutely unjust,’ he said at Nuremberg. ‘I turned to Himmler in a teletype, to the higher SS and Police Leader, and they had enough sense of justice to intervene and fetch him out again the next day. Then I sent him to Spain.’³¹ Berger had salvaged what would turn out to be a most notorious career. Dirlewanger served in the Condor Legion, a unit of German volunteers who fought alongside the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, and in 1938, while he was away, he was investigated by the SD. Its report concluded that ‘Dirlewanger must be called absolutely reliable as far as politics are concerned.’ He returned from Spain in June 1939, and wrote to Himmler asking to join the SS. He was soon to get the promotion that would make his career.

      When Adolf Hitler had lunch with his Minister Dr Hans Lammers in 1942 he introduced an unexpected topic to the conversation. ‘It is ridiculous,’ he said, ‘for a poacher to be sent to prison for three months for killing a hare when there are so many real criminals who serve no time. I myself should have taken the fellow and put him into one of the guerrilla companies of the SS!’³²

      Despite his vegetarianism, Hitler had long had a strange admiration for poachers, and decided that with their particular skills of tracking and killing they might be useful in the fight against the partisans. On 23 March 1940 SS Gruppenführer Karl Wolff had informed Himmler that Hitler had decided to grant an amnesty for convicted poachers, and that they were to be organized into a special sharpshooter company. Eighty poachers were located and transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Someone had to head this unit, and Gottlob Berger thought of his old friend who now needed a job, and wrote to Himmler recommending Dirlewanger. Himmler agreed, and on 1 September 1940 the band of poachers was given the official name ‘Sonderkommando Dr. Dirlewanger’ (SS Special Battalion Dr^fn1 Dirlewanger), and was immediately sent to Poland to work with the SS. Amongst other things they excelled at carrying out the Sonderbehandlung (‘special treatment’) of victims – the Nazi euphemism used to cover crimes including mass murder – in Lublin. On 9 November 1941 Dirlewanger was promoted to SS Sturmbannführer.

      Despite his good fortune, Dirlewanger could not stay out of trouble, and in January 1942 he was again under investigation, this time for corruption, rape and looting. SS Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik criticized Dirlewanger not because he disagreed with what he had done, but rather because he could not control him, and wanted to retain power in the Lublin area for himself. In one incident Globocnik accused Dirlewanger of ‘race defilement’ for taking an attractive young Jewish assistant as his lover; the situation was made ‘worse’ because Dirlewanger repeatedly kept her from being sent away for ‘special treatment’. At the same time, Dirlewanger was under investigation for crimes against Jews. Dr Konrad Morgen, the SS lawyer investigating the case, testified at Nuremberg: ‘Dirlewanger had arrested people illegally and arbitrarily, and as for his female prisoners – young Jewesses – he did the following against them: he called together a small circle of friends consisting of members of a Wehrmacht supply unit. Then he made so-called scientific experiments, which involved stripping the victims of their clothes. Then they were given an injection of strychnine. Dirlewanger looked on, smoked a cigarette, as did his friends, and watched as they died.’³³

      ‘This is a joke,’ Dirlewanger claimed in his defence. ‘It looks as if Brigadeführer Globocnik has made a question out of poisoning Jews in Lublin a subject of investigation. He is besmirching my name. He has tried to do this before. But he is not so lucky this time. It is true that I told a doctor from Lublin to poison these Jews instead of shooting them, but I did it to save the clothes, like coats, for example, which I sent later to Hauptsturmführer Streibel. These were clothes for work. The gold teeth were taken by the Director of the SSPF Infirmary from Lublin so that there would be material for teeth for members of the SS. All of these things were settled with Brigadeführer Globocnik, who then denied all the facts when the SD got involved. It is really a comedy in Lublin. In one trial I am said to have had intercourse with a Jewish woman. In another case I am not showing the correct attitude towards the nation, and I throw out my unbreakable ideology with a Jewess, and when it turns out not to be true I am accused of the complete opposite.’

      Himmler decided that the solution was to quietly send Dirlewanger somewhere else, where his skills could be put to greater use. On 29 January 1942 the Chief of Staff of the headquarters of the Waffen SS placed Sonderkommando Dirlewanger under the direct control of the command staff of the SS Reichsführer himself. The Sonderkommando was refitted and sent to Byelorussia in February 1942. (While Himmler saw great potential in Dirlewanger, and wanted to use him, a problem was that he was being investigated by Dr Konrad Morgen – backed by Globocnik, who wanted to get him out of ‘his’ territory. Himmler spirited Dirlewanger off to Byelorussia as quickly as he could, although Morgen’s dogged investigation into his activities continued throughout the war.)

      The SS Sonderkommando Dirlewanger that arrived in Byelorussia consisted of around ninety former poachers, but it would grow rapidly. Within six months it would receive a few hundred political prisoners, criminals and psychopaths recruited from psychiatric hospitals and concentration camps, and would gain the reputation of ‘exceeding all others’, even amongst the SS, in ‘brutality and depravity’.

      Between February 1942 and June 1944 Sonderkommando Dirlewanger participated in over fifty of von dem Bach’s anti-partisan raids. Some of these were small, with just a few dozen men attacking a single target area. After eighteen German soldiers had been killed in a partisan attack a young soldier, Matthias Jung, witnessed the reprisal: ‘The whole place, everything [was destroyed]. Everything. Totally! The civilians who had done it, all the civilians who were in the place. In each corner stood a machine gun, and then all the houses were set on fire and whoever came out – in my opinion with justice!’³⁴

      The large ‘actions’ were giant sweeps into ‘bandit’ territory involving hundreds of men. There were various approved methods of attacking ‘bandit-infested areas’. The main aim was to encircle an area and to capture or kill anyone within it. Von dem Bach referred to this as ‘extermination by encirclement’.³⁵ The first and preferred form of the extermination of those caught was through combat. This was called ‘Kesseltreiben’, or ‘crushing the encirclement’, and involved units proceeding through the area and slaughtering everyone they could find. The Nazis employed hunting terms to describe various methods of clearing a designated area; human beings were treated like animals.

      This was by no means random