Oskar Dirlewanger was born on September 26, 1895, in Wörburg, then part of the German Empire. The son of a merchant, he served in the German invasion of Belgium during World War I and later fought in France. He was wounded six times and received the Iron Cross, second and first class, despite being classified as 40 percent disabled.
By the time Germany surrendered in November 1918, Dirlewanger held the rank of lieutenant. The front experiences had a damaging effect on his personality. After the war, he was described as a mentally unstable, violent fanatic and an alcoholic.
In the new Weimar Republic, Dirlewanger joined various far-right paramilitary militias known as Freikorps. These units were ostensibly organized to fight against Communists attempting to overthrow the government. They acted with particular brutality, and many of their units proved rebellious and difficult for the German government and military to control.
In 1921, while serving with a Freikorps unit, Dirlewanger was shot in the head. He continued his studies at university and received a doctorate in political science in 1922. In October of that year, he joined the Nazi Party.
From 1928 to 1931, he served as managing director of a textile company owned by a Jewish family. He was accused of embezzlement and later worked as a self-employed tax consultant until July 1933.
Dirlewanger was not only a thief but also a pedophile and rapist. In 1934, one year after Adolf Hitler came to power, he raped a 13-year-old girl from the League of German Girls, the female section of the Hitler Youth. He was also convicted of driving and damaging a government vehicle under the influence of alcohol.
As a result, he lost his doctorate, was expelled from the Nazi Party and the SA, and was sentenced to two years in prison.
After his release, between 1936 and 1939, he fought in the Condor Legion, the German unit sent to Spain to support General Franco’s nationalist movement during the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded three times. After his return, he was allowed to rejoin the Nazi Party and regained his doctorate.
World War II began on September 1, 1939. In July 1940, Dirlewanger was admitted to the SS. He created and trained a special criminal unit named the Dirlewanger Brigade, which initially consisted mostly of convicted poachers. They were recruited for their tracking and shooting skills to fight partisans. Later, his unit recruited mostly convicted German criminals.
The unit was first sent to Nazi-occupied Poland, where Dirlewanger became commandant of a camp at Sztutowo, set up for Jewish slave labor. Atrocities were committed there and at the Lublin Ghetto. Prisoners were undressed, whipped, and injected with strychnine. The perpetrators laughed as victims convulsed to death.
There were even rumors that they cut up Jewish women and boiled them with horsemeat to make soap. Heinrich Himmler and Dirlewanger’s patron and friend Gottlob Berger knew about these atrocities and tolerated them.
After the war, Berger said of Dirlewanger: “He 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.”
An SS judge accused Dirlewanger of acts of murder and corruption. The dissolution of the unit was considered, and Dirlewanger was supposed to stand before an SS court on charges of race defilement for rapes against Jewish women. None of this came to fruition.
In February 1942, the Dirlewanger Brigade was sent to Belarus. There, they raped and tortured young women and killed at least 30,000 Belarusian civilians. Their specialty was cramming the local population inside a barn and setting it on fire. Those who tried to escape were shot with machine guns.
In some villages, they murdered all inhabitants. Like the Einsatzgruppen, Dirlewanger’s unit made victims kneel naked on the edge of mass graves and shot them in the back of the neck with automatic pistols. Rounded-up civilians were also routinely used as human shields and marched over minefields.
According to reports sent to Berlin, Dirlewanger’s unit claimed to have destroyed 15,000 “bandits” and captured 1,100 rifles, while recording 92 dead in their own ranks.
On August 1, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began. The Polish Home Army, a non-communist underground resistance force, rose against the German occupation authorities in an effort to liberate Warsaw. The impetus for the uprising was the appearance of Soviet forces along the east bank of the Vistula River. The Soviets, however, failed to intervene.
Dirlewanger led his 4,000 men into action against the uprising. His unit quickly committed such unspeakable crimes that both Army and SS commanders demanded its withdrawal.
They took part in the Wola massacre, during which more than 40,000 Poles were murdered in the Wola district of the Polish capital. The massacre was ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, who requested that his forces kill anything that moved in order to stop the uprising.
Dirlewanger’s unit used women and children as living shields when attacking enemy positions. They burned three hospitals with patients inside. Nurses were whipped, gang-raped, and hanged naked together with the doctors.
He showed no mercy even to children. When they found a daycare with 500 children inside, Dirlewanger ordered his men to kill every one of them. To save ammunition, they beat and stabbed the defenseless children to death with rifle butts and bayonets.
Later, they drank, raped, and murdered their way through the Old Town, slaughtering civilians and fighters alike without distinction of age or sex. About 30,000 civilians were killed in the Old Town. Several thousand wounded were killed when field hospitals were overrun, shot, and set on fire with flamethrowers.
The Germans eventually crushed the revolt and razed the center of the city to the ground in October 1944. While captured Home Army combatants were treated as prisoners of war, thousands of captured Polish civilians were sent to concentration camps. In total, 166,000 people lost their lives in the uprising, including perhaps as many as 17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the Home Army or had been discovered in hiding.
For his role in suppressing the uprising, Dirlewanger was promoted to the rank of SS-Brigadeführer, equivalent to a British Army brigadier. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross on October 16, 1944.
Hans Frank, head of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland, hosted a dinner in honor of Dirlewanger at Wawel Castle. Frank expressed gratitude and appreciation for the “exemplary operations” carried out by his group during the fighting in Warsaw.
In October 1944, Dirlewanger and his men also played a crucial role in the brutal suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. On October 30, Jozef Tiso, president of the Slovak State, personally decorated German soldiers in Banská Bystrica. One of those decorated was Oskar Dirlewanger.
He later took part in fighting against the advancing Red Army in Hungary and in Germany. In February 1945, his unit was expanded and redesignated as the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.
That same month, Dirlewanger was shot in the chest while fighting Soviet forces and sent to the rear. It was his 12th and final injury of the war. He had himself cared for and then tried to bring looted goods stored by his parents to safety before the end of the war.
On April 22, 1945, he went into hiding.
After the war ended, Dirlewanger was arrested on June 1, 1945. Although he was wearing civilian clothes and using a false name, he was recognized by a Jewish former concentration camp prisoner and brought to a detention center.
According to the testimony of Lieutenant Anton Fersing, a German prisoner of war who shared his cell, Dirlewanger was pulled out of his cell into the corridor every night and brutally beaten by Polish guards. Fersing later testified: “I have heard blows and terrible screams. In daylight, I would see bleeding open wounds on Dirlewanger’s face, and his entire body was covered with bleeding welts.”
On June 7, 1945, after days of immense torture and suffering, Dirlewanger was savagely beaten to death by Poles in revenge for his brutality and his role in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising. He was 49 years old. Officially, he died of a heart attack.
After the war, rumors spread that Dirlewanger was alive and had served in the Egyptian Army. This led to the exhumation of his remains in November 1960. Examination of the corpse confirmed that the remains belonged to Dirlewanger.
There were no tears shed for Oskar Dirlewanger.