The Third Reich created opportunities for men whose records would have barred them from any respectable career in ordinary times. One such man was Oskar Paul Dirlewanger, born into a wealthy Swabian family. Those who knew him as a child described him as quiet, peaceful, and devout, a boy who obediently attended Sunday church services with his parents. No one who met him then could have foreseen the path he would take.
His early life seemed to follow a conventional course. After receiving his diploma, Dirlewanger volunteered for the army of Kaiser Wilhelm II as the First World War began. His regiment was transferred to Lorraine, where the young soldier proved genuinely brave. By the second year of the war, he had been promoted to lieutenant, and his exploits earned him the Iron Cross twice.
But even then, his darker tendencies were emerging. He discovered that robbing civilians during wartime was common and went unpunished, and he resolved to take full advantage of the opportunity. When the war ended, Dirlewanger’s military career went into abeyance, and he drifted through a series of civilian professions. Between roughly 1918 and 1933, he worked as a tax advisor, a factory manager, and a bank clerk, but he was repeatedly entangled in scandals involving bribery and theft.
Despite his record, he avoided prison, getting away with nothing worse than dismissals. During these years, he also joined the Freikorps, participating in street clashes against pro-communist groups, and his political views hardened into an extreme nationalist ideology. He despised all peoples except Germans, and his hatred of Jews was especially virulent. Sensing that a period of great change was approaching, Dirlewanger understood he needed credentials to advance.
He had been expelled from a commercial school after two years for antisemitism, but he managed to graduate from the University of Frankfurt and earn a doctorate. Around the same time, he attempted to join the Nazi Party, though his first attempts were unsuccessful. Dirlewanger knew how to wait, and in 1933, when the party officially came to power, he secured a position as head of a department. It was a small post, but it was power nonetheless, and it began to reveal his true character.
As was his habit, Dirlewanger soon became embroiled in scandals involving bribery, theft, and abuse of his official position. But a new and graver offense emerged. He developed a taste for sexual relations with minors and made a habit of entertaining himself with thirteen-year-old girls. This time, he was caught red-handed.
The party expelled him, stripped him of all his ranks and awards, and he was sent to prison. It was a heavy blow. After his release, Dirlewanger went to Spain and enlisted in General Franco’s volunteer army. Once again, he proved to be an excellent soldier and was awarded the Spanish Cross.
But Spain was not his goal. He wanted to return to Germany and recover everything he had lost through his own folly. With the help of his friend Gottlob Berger, who held a high position in the SS leadership, Dirlewanger managed to obtain an acquittal in the rape case. The court was clearly subjected to pressure, but the outcome was what mattered.
He was restored to his ranks and readmitted to the Nazi Party. The higher ranks of the Third Reich knew perfectly well what kind of man Dirlewanger was. His moral wretchedness was no secret. But they operated on the principle that personnel decide everything, and they kept him close, convinced he could be useful.
The opportunity soon came. As preparations for war demanded the mobilization of enormous numbers of men, the Nazi command decided to create several punishment battalions formed from convicts. Such units required a suitable commander, and Heinrich Himmler remembered Dirlewanger. Oscar took command with great zeal.
Among the criminals selected for these units, he felt like a fish in water. He created one of the most ruthless and intimidating formations of the war, a division that would leave a devastating mark wherever it operated. Dirlewanger was alien to human feeling. Years of his own criminality had turned him into a genuine beast.
He took real pleasure in torturing children and women in his presence, and he watched with open joy as townships burned along with their inhabitants. The scoundrels who served under him adored him because he imposed no moral principles on them, giving them free rein for all manner of atrocities. His units distinguished themselves particularly in operations in Belarus, Warsaw, and Slovakia. What the Nazis did there is almost impossible to convey.
Villages were burned to the ground, people were exterminated, and women and girls were raped. Yet these crimes were counted as victories for the Third Reich, and in 1942 Dirlewanger was promoted to the rank of Oberführer. He showed no pity toward his own soldiers either. Knowing the squads would be constantly replenished, since there was no shortage of prisoners in Germany, he threw his men into machine-gun fire without hesitation, even when any conceivable victory was not worth their losses.
For the marginal men under his command, who lived one day at a time, this was not seen as a crime against them. The main thing was that they were allowed to kill and rob. In February 1945, Dirlewanger’s divisions were relocated to Brandenburg. During the fighting, he was badly wounded and sent to Baden-Württemberg for treatment.
By coincidence, in April, Soviet troops together with French legionnaires took the city and discovered Dirlewanger recovering in a local clinic. The general of marauders was immediately captured and taken to the local prison. What he found there horrified him. The prison staff consisted almost entirely of Polish soldiers who remembered his atrocities in Warsaw.
The Poles, seeing who had been delivered into their hands, began to beat him severely, several times each day. Dirlewanger’s weakened health could not withstand the abuse, and he died of the beatings a month after being placed in the detention center. He was buried on the prison grounds. Almost immediately, a theory emerged that Dirlewanger had escaped, and there were those who claimed to have encountered him personally.
But the exhumation of his remains in 1960, followed by forensic examination, showed conclusively that the buried corpse really was Dirlewanger. The executioner had met his end.