The fate of the punishers from the Dirlewanger team (33 photos). Russians in the special SS team "Dirlewanger

What happened to the officers and soldiers from the punitive battalion, then the brigade, and then the SS division Dirlewanger?

Fritz Schmedes and commander of the 72nd SS Regiment Erich Buchmann survived the war and later lived in West Germany. Another regiment commander, Ewald Ehlers, did not live to see the end of the war. According to Karl Gerber, Ehlers, who was distinguished by incredible cruelty, was hanged by his own subordinates on May 25, 1945, when his group was in the Halb cauldron.
Gerber heard the story of the execution of Ehlers while walking under escort with other SS men to the Soviet prisoner of war camp in Sagan.
It is not known how the head of the operations department, Kurt Weisse, ended his life. Shortly before the end of the war, he changed into the uniform of a corporal of the Wehrmacht and mixed with the soldiers. As a result, he ended up in British captivity, from where he made a successful escape on March 5, 1946. After that, traces of Weisse are lost, his whereabouts have never been established.

To this day, there is an opinion that a significant part of the 36th SS division was, in the words of the French researcher J. Bernage, "brutally destroyed by Soviet troops." Of course, there were facts of the execution of SS men by Soviet soldiers, but not all of them were executed.
According to the French specialist K. Ingrao, 634 people who previously served with Dirlewanger managed to survive the Soviet prisoner of war camps and return to their homeland at different times.
However, when talking about Dirlewanger's subordinates who were in Soviet captivity, one should not forget that more than half of those 634 people who managed to return home were members of the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, who fell into the SS assault brigade in November 1944 G.

Fritz Schmedes.

Their fate was hard. 480 people who defected to the side of the Red Army were never released. They were placed in prisoner camp No. 176 in Focsani (Romania).
Then they were sent to the territory of the Soviet Union - to camps No. 280/2, No. 280/3, No. 280/7, No. 280/18 near Stalino (today Donetsk), where they, divided into groups, were engaged in coal mining in Makeevka , Gorlovka, Kramatorsk, Voroshilovsk, Sverdlovsk and Kadievka.
Of course, some of them died from various diseases. The process of returning home began only in 1946 and continued until the mid-1950s.

A certain part of the penalty box (groups of 10-20 people) ended up in the camps of Molotov (Perm), Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg), Ryazan, Tula and Krasnogorsk.
Another 125 people, mostly communists, worked in the Boksitogorsk camp near Tikhvin (200 km east of Leningrad). The MTB authorities checked every communist, someone was released earlier, someone later.
About 20 former members of the Dirlewanger formation subsequently participated in the creation of the Ministry of State Security of the GDR ("Stasi").
And some, like Alfred Neumann, a former convict of the Dublovic SS penal camp, managed to make a political career. He was a member of the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, headed the Ministry of Logistics for several years, and was also Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers.
Subsequently, Neumann said that the communist penalists were under special supervision, until a certain point they did not have the status of prisoners of war, since for some time they were considered persons involved in punitive actions.

The fate of convicted members of the SS, the Wehrmacht, criminals and homosexuals who were captured by the Red Army was in many ways similar to the fate of the communist penitentiaries, but before they could be perceived as prisoners of war, the competent authorities worked with them, seeking to find war criminals among them.
Some of those who were lucky enough to survive, after returning to West Germany, were again taken into custody, including 11 criminals who did not serve their sentences to the end.

As for the traitors from the USSR who served in a special SS battalion, an investigation group was created in 1947 to search for them, headed by the MTB investigator for especially important cases, Major Sergei Panin.
The investigation team worked for 14 years. The result of her work was 72 volumes of the criminal case. On December 13, 1960, the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the Byelorussian SSR opened a criminal case on the facts of atrocities committed by punishers of a special SS battalion under the command of Dirlewanger in the temporarily occupied territory of Belarus.
In this case, in December 1960 - May 1961, KGB officers arrested and prosecuted former SS men A.S. Stopchenko, I.S. Pugachev, V.A. Yalynsky, F.F. Grabarovsky, I. E. Tupigu, G. A. Kirienko, V. R. Zaivy, A. E. Radkovsky, M. V. Maidanov, L. A. Sakhno, P. A. Umanets, M. A. Mironenkov and S. A. Shinkevich.
On October 13, 1961, the trial of collaborators began in Minsk. All of them were sentenced to death.

Of course, these were far from all the collaborators who served with Dirlewanger in 1942-1943. But the lives of some ended even before the mentioned process took place in Minsk.
For example, I. D. Melnichenko, who commanded the unit, after he fought in the partisan brigade named after. Chkalov, deserted at the end of the summer of 1944.
Until February 1945, Melnichenko hid in the Murmansk region, and then returned to Ukraine, where he traded in theft. From his hand, the representative of the Rokitnyansky RO NKVD Ronzhin died.
On July 11, 1945, Melnichenko confessed to the head of the Uzinsky RO NKVD. In August 1945 he was sent to the Chernihiv region, to the places where he had committed crimes.
During transportation by rail, Melnichenko escaped. On February 26, 1946, he was blocked by officers of the operational group of the Nosovsky District Department of the NKVD and shot dead during the arrest.

In 1960, the KGB summoned Pyotr Gavrilenko for interrogation as a witness. The state security officers did not yet know that he was the commander of the machine-gun squad that carried out the execution of the population in the village of Lesiny in May 1943.
Gavrilenko committed suicide - he jumped out of the window of the third floor of a hotel in Minsk, as a result of a deep emotional shock that occurred after he, together with the Chekists, visited the site of the former village.

The search for former subordinates of Dirlewanger continued further. Soviet justice also wanted to see the German penalty box in the dock.
Back in 1946, the head of the Belarusian delegation at the 1st session of the UN General Assembly handed over a list of 1200 criminals and their accomplices, including members of the special SS battalion, and demanded their extradition for punishment in accordance with Soviet laws.
But the Western powers did not extradite anyone. Subsequently, the Soviet state security agencies established that Heinrich Faiertag, Barchke, Tol, Kurt Weisse, Johann Zimmermann, Jakob Tad, Otto Laudbach, Willy Zinkad, Rene Ferderer, Alfred Zingebel, Herbert Dietz, Zemke and Weinhoefer.
The listed persons, according to Soviet documents, went to the West and were not punished.

In Germany, several trials took place, in which the crimes of the Dirlewanger battalion were considered. One of the first such trials, organized by the Central Office of Justice of the city of Ludwigsburg and the Hannover Prosecutor's Office, took place in 1960, and, among other things, it clarified the role of fines in the burning of the Belarusian village of Khatyn.
Insufficient documentary base did not allow bringing the perpetrators to justice. However, even later, in the 1970s, the judiciary made little progress in establishing the truth.
The Hanover prosecutor's office, which dealt with the Khatyn issue, even doubted whether it could be about the murder of the population. In September 1975, the case was transferred to the prosecutor's office of the city of Itzehoe (Schleswig-Holstein). But the search for the perpetrators of the tragedy turned out to be of little success. The testimony of Soviet witnesses did not help either. As a result, at the end of 1975, the case was closed.

Five trials against Heinz Reinefarth, commander of the SS task force and police in the Polish capital, also ended in vain.
The prosecutor's office of Flensburg tried to find out the details of the executions of civilians during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in August - September 1944.
Reinefart, who by that time had become a member of the Landtag of Schleswig-Holstein from the United Party of Germany, denied the participation of the SS in the crimes.
His words are known, spoken before the prosecutor, when the question touched on the activities of the Dirlewanger regiment on Volskaya Street:
"The one who on the morning of August 5, 1944 set out with 356 soldiers, by the evening of August 7, 1944, had about 40 people who fought for their lives.
The Steingauer battle group, which existed until August 7, 1944, could hardly carry out such executions. The fighting she fought in the streets was fierce and resulted in heavy casualties.
The same goes for the Mayer battle group. This group was also constrained by hostilities, so it is difficult to imagine that it was engaged in executions contrary to international law."

In view of the fact that new materials were discovered, published in the monograph of the historian from Lüneburg, Dr. Hans von Krannhals, the Flensburg prosecutor's office stopped the investigation.
Nevertheless, despite the new documents and the efforts of prosecutor Birman, who resumed the inquiry into this case, Reinefart was never brought to justice.
The former commander of the task force died quietly at his home in Westland on May 7, 1979. Almost 30 years later, in 2008, journalists from Spiegel, who prepared an article about the crimes of the special SS regiment in Warsaw, were forced to state the fact: "In Germany Until now, none of the commanders of this unit has paid for their crimes - neither officers, nor soldiers, nor those who were at one with them.

In 2008, journalists also learned that the collected materials on the formation of Dirlewanger, as prosecutor Joachim Riedl, deputy head of the Ludwigsburg Center for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, said in an interview, were either never transferred to the prosecutor's office or were not studied, although since 1988, when a new list of people put on the international wanted list was submitted to the UN, a lot of information accumulated in the Center.
As is now known, the administration of Ludwigsburg handed over the materials to the court of Baden-Württemberg, where an investigation team was formed.
As a result of the work, it was possible to find three people who served in the regiment during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. On April 17, 2009, GRK prosecutor Boguslav Chervinsky said that the Polish side requested assistance from German colleagues in bringing these three individuals to justice, since there is no statute of limitations for crimes committed in Poland. But the German judiciary did not bring any charges against any of the three former penalty boxers.

The real participants in the crimes remain at large and quietly live out their lives. This, in particular, applies to an anonymous SS veteran interviewed by the historian Rolf Michaelis.
After spending no more than two years in the Nuremberg-Langwasser POW camp, the anonymous man was released and found a job in Regensburg.
In 1952 he became a school bus driver and later a tour bus driver and traveled regularly to Austria, Italy and Switzerland. Anonymous retired in 1985. The former poacher died in 2007.
For 60 post-war years, he was not brought to justice even once, although it follows from his memoirs that he took part in many punitive actions on the territory of Poland and Belarus and killed many people.

Over the years of its existence, the SS penalty box, according to the authors' calculations, killed about 60 thousand people. This figure, we emphasize, cannot be considered final, since not all documents on this issue have been studied yet.
The history of the formation of Dirlewanger, as in a mirror, reflected the most unattractive and monstrous pictures of the Second World War. This is an example of what people who are overcome by hatred and embark on the path of total cruelty can become, people who have lost their conscience, who do not want to think and bear any responsibility.

More about the band. Punishers and perverts. 1942 - 1985: http://oper-1974.livejournal.com/255035.html

Kalistros Thielecke (matricide), he killed his mother with 17 stab wounds and ended up in prison and then in the SS Sonderkommando Dirlewanger.

Karl Iochheim, a member of the Black Front organization, was arrested in the early 30s and spent 11 years in prisons and concentration camps in Germany. Dirlewanger. Survived the war.

Documents of 2 Ukrainians from Poltava Pyotr Lavrik and Kharkiv resident Nikolai Novosiletsky, who served with Dirlewanger.

Diary of Ivan Melnichenko, deputy commander of the Ukrainian company Dirlewanger. On this page of the diary we are talking about the anti-partisan operation "Franz", in which Melnichenko commanded a company.

"December 25.42 I left Mogilev, to metro Berezino. I met the New Year well, I drank. After the New Year, there was a battle near the village of Terebolye, from my company, which commanded, Shvets was killed and Ratkovsky was wounded.
It was the most difficult battle, 20 people were wounded from the battalion. We retreated. After 3 days, Berezino station went to Chervensky district, cleared the forests to Osipovichi, the whole team plunged into Osipovichi and left ....."

Rostislav Muravyov, served as a Sturmführer in a Ukrainian company. He survived the war, lived in Kyiv and worked as a teacher at a construction college. Arrested and sentenced to CMN in 1970.

Dear German,

I just got back from surgery and found your letter dated November 16th. Yes, we must all suffer in this war; My deepest condolences to you on the death of your wife. We just have to keep living until better times.
News from Bamberg is always welcome. We have the latest news: our Dirlewanger was awarded the Knight's Cross in October there were no celebrations, the operations are too difficult, and there is no time for this.
The Slovaks are now openly allied with the Russians, and in every muddy village there is a nest of partisans. The forests and mountains in the Tatras have made the partisans a deadly danger to us.
We work with every newly arrived prisoner. Now I am in a village near Ipoliság. The Russians are very close. The reinforcements we have received are no good, and it would be better if they remained in the concentration camps.
Yesterday twelve of them went over to the Russian side, they were all old communists, it would be better if they were all hanged on the gallows. But there are still real heroes here.
Well, the enemy artillery opens fire again, and I must return. Warm regards from your brother-in-law.
Franz.

The word "Sonderkommando" in pure translation from German means "separate unit", "special unit" - this is its true meaning in the context. Quite the usual army terminology, theoretically existing in the armed forces of all German-speaking states to this day. Basically a harmless wording. But at the mention of this name, somehow by itself, most of us first of all have an association with the dark events of the Second World War. In the German army of that period, a huge number of special forces or groups of various purposes existed and were formed for various operations, and most of them also bore the name "Sonderkommando", but nevertheless, under this concept, punitive detachments, which acted with terrifying cruelty, were most strongly recorded in history. , as a rule, behind the front line in the occupied territories. The main tasks of such units were counter-guerrilla actions, suppression of the insurgent movement and intimidation of the local population, and the implementation of the then Nazi policy of genocide.

Without a doubt, the most famous and most successful armed formation in this field was the SS Sonderkommando under the command of Oskar Dirlewanger, which over time grew from the size of an army battalion into a regiment, and then into an entire SS division, named after its permanent commander. Wherever the people of Dirlewanger appeared, everywhere they left behind them horror, death and rivers of spilled blood, striking with their cruelty even experienced front-line soldiers with the strongest nerves.

It was on the basis of the actions of such formations that the SS were wholly recognized at the end of the war as a criminal organization, without division into ideological, punitive, police or purely military units.

Who were these people in military uniform and with weapons in their hands, whose deeds even today, more than half a century later, we still talk about with a shudder? What prompted them to do what they did? Were they Nazi fanatics or, conversely, victims of the regime? There is information that punitive detachments were often made up of concentration camp prisoners or captured army deserters, obliged to atone for their own crimes with blood or simply forced to do so, is this true? Is it possible to evaluate the operations they carried out from a purely military-operational point of view? What explained the phenomenal success of this unit in fulfilling its tasks? Is it even possible to consider such a formation as the Sonderkommando Dirlewanger as a military part in the full sense of this definition?

It is not surprising that, in contrast to the huge amount of archival material about the actions of various parts of the Wehrmacht and the SS throughout the Second World War, there are very few documents on the operations of punitive detachments, and almost nothing has been preserved about the Dirlewanger special unit - there was nothing special to be proud of before descendants , and the Nazis tried to destroy everything possible against the backdrop of the end of the regime. Nevertheless, thanks to truly German pedantry and immortal paper bureaucracy, in the depths of the military archives of East and West, one can still find a certain amount of both directly related to the case and indirect documentation, one way or another shedding light on this little-studied topic: reports on some operations , requirements for commissariats, departmental correspondence and documents of other military units that mention the actions of the Sonderkommando, etc. It is on these data, as well as on the extremely few existing publications, that my attempt to shed some light on this dark and little-known chapter in the history of the Second world war, as well as, to the extent possible, impartially analyze the successes and failures of the combat use of the Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" in the performance of tactical tasks and operations in various war zones behind the front line and on the front line.

Probably, you need to start with the fact that from the very beginnings of its existence, the Sonderkommando was already conceived as a penal formation. Now all attempts to guess for what purpose this unit was originally created would be pure speculation, but the fact that penal companies and battalions in all armies of the world and at all times were created to perform the most “dirty work”, and not to participate in parades in front of the lenses of photojournalists and cameramen - this is a naked fact that does not require confirmation. The history of the Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" began in the same way. But the most remarkable is the fact that, unlike the great many military penal units created on the basis of regiments or divisions and, of course, subordinate to them, the decision to create this particular unit arose right at the “very top” of the Third Reich, and all the time of its existence, the Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" was in fact directly subordinate to the central apparatus of the SS, and not to the military command in the field. From this it can already be concluded that the future use of the Sonderkommando had to be very specific.

From the testimony of SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger at the Nuremberg Tribunal:

“... The Dirlewanger brigade arose thanks to the decision of Adolf Hitler, which was made back in 1940 during the Western campaign. Once, Himmler called me to his place and said that Hitler ordered to find and gather all the people who were serving a sentence for poaching with firearms at that moment, and make them into a special military unit ... "

It was rather strange that the vegetarian Hitler, who despised hunting and, in general, what was widely known, did not like the hunters themselves, suddenly became interested in armed poachers, but Berger explains it this way:

“... Shortly before that, he received a letter from a woman whose husband was the so-called “Old Party Comrade”. This man was hunting deer illegally in the National Forests and was caught right at the scene of the crime. At that moment, the man was already in places of detention, and his wife asked the Fuhrer to give him the opportunity to make amends by distinguishing himself at the front ... This was the impetus ... "

SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger

“…according to these orders, I got in touch with the chief of the Imperial Criminal Police Nebe, and we agreed that by the end of the summer all suitable candidates would be selected and sent to the barracks in Oranienburg…”

The first officially recorded mention in the archives of the possibility of creating a new special unit from convicted poachers actually appears even before the start of active hostilities in the West.

On March 23, 1940, the adjutant of Reichsführer SS Himmler, SS Gruppenführer Karl Wolf, telephoned the adviser to the Reich Minister of Justice and informed him that the Fuhrer had decided to grant amnesty to some convicted poachers in order to send them later to atone for their guilt at the front, adding also that the letter, confirming this decision, the Reichsfuehrer will personally sign and send it on the next day. The adviser, one Sommer, made a note of the conversation in his desk journal and passed the information received above, namely, to the ministerial secretary, a staunch Nazi, for whom every word of the Fuhrer was law, Dr. Roland Freisler. Freisler set to work so diligently that the search and selection of people convicted of poaching actually began even before the ministry received Himmler's official letter. It came only a week later, on March 30, 1940. In the document, the Reichsfuehrer emphasized Hitler's personal interest in this action, and also clarified some specific details: firstly, only people engaged in poaching with firearms could fall under the amnesty program, and secondly, preference was given to convicts from Austria and Bavaria. A little later, another clarification appeared - only real “professionals” recidivists deserved attention, and not beginners or just people arrested by chance when trying to hunt without permission. According to the first assumptions, it was decided to form a special sniper brigade from the poachers selected in this way. And since the initiative actually came from the apparatus of the Reichsfuehrer, it was quite natural that the formation of a new unit already fell under the auspices of the SS. In this regard, many questions immediately arose: for example, how to include prisoners in the selection program of the SS, proclaimed as the elite of the elite of the nation, or whether to take into account the terms of imprisonment of each specific candidate? other offenses, etc.

The SS brigade under the command of Oskar Dirlewanger became one of the most brutal units of the Second World War and, perhaps, the craziest military formation in world history. Although as such it generally remains on the periphery of public attention in Russia, indirectly it is familiar to literally anyone in our country. The Dirlewangers participated in the most brutal actions to suppress the partisan movement in Belarus, including (albeit on the sidelines) the massacre in Khatyn. The genocide in this republic was carried out by relatively small forces, and the "penal brigade" was very actively involved in counter-guerrilla (in fact, aimed at exterminating the population) activities. Even as part of the Wehrmacht and the SS troops, the soldiers of this unit managed to earn a reputation as dangerous lunatics.

Bright youth of a maniac

Often, when analyzing the biographies of pathological characters, the origins of their psychoses are sought in deep childhood. In our case, however, nothing at first foreshadowed any horrors. The future executioner was born into a fairly prosperous family. Late 19th century, Swabia, burghers' paradise. Oscar was the fourth child of a successful sales agent.

After graduating from school, he planned to enter the university, but before that - to serve in the army as volunteers. The machine-gun company he entered was part of an old regiment with glorious traditions. A great place to spend time usefully and return to your desk as a student. Outside stood the golden noon of mankind. It was 1913.

The cozy world of bourgeois progress collapsed overnight with the outbreak of the First World War. In August 1914, Oskar Dirlewanger was already going to war as a non-commissioned officer.

The Dirlewanger regiment from the very beginning was involved in fierce battles, first in Belgium, then in France. Dirlewanger himself fought bravely and always tried to act on the edge of the blow. Already in the First World War, his phenomenal survivability manifested itself: bullets, fragments, shrapnel fell into him, he was stabbed with a bayonet, almost hacked to death with a saber.

Then he first came to Russia: in 1918, near Taganrog, he was wounded by the Reds as an interventionist. One of these wounds permanently crippled Dirlewanger's leg. However, he survived and received an officer's rank. With such an impressive set of wounds, he could have sat out in a rear position.

Dirlewanger was placed in command of machine-gun courses, but he did not want to cool off far from the front line and achieved a return to the front as a pulrota commander. With the collapse of the German army in 1918, Dirlewanger led the march of a large German detachment home, maintaining discipline. In 1918, an exemplary front-line hero returned to Germany.

Germany was in a fever. In the struggle between the communists, the government of the Weimar Republic and the Nazis, thousands of people died. Dirlewanger participated in these events as a fighter of freikorps - volunteer formations that fought against radical leftist rebel groups, and he held an unusual position there - the commander of an armored train. Then he gets another wound - in the head - and for the first time faces the law: he gets arrested (albeit not for long) for illegal possession of weapons. During the civil unrest in Germany, he finally and irrevocably came to radical ideas. In the 1920s, he joined Hitler's nascent party, the NSDAP.

After the Nazis came to power, he goes to a purely peaceful job - an official of the labor exchange. However, in his new position, he managed to quickly derail his entire former life. Dirlewanger in the 20s managed to become addicted to the bottle, and then completely got into a vile story: he received two years in prison for pedophilia.

The fall of Dirlewanger seems to be amazing. Meanwhile, many years of participation in the war does not improve anyone's mental health. In addition, in the 30s he found himself in an environment where violence was considered the norm.

Prison has completed the faceting of personality. The hero, a role model, an excellent soldier of the world war, imperceptibly managed to turn into a criminal, and then into a real devil, and in the 30s the story of a completely different person began - a monster that became a black legend of a new world war.

regrown fangs

In 1937, having left the camp, Dirlewanger went to the Spanish Civil War. And upon his return, already in 1940, he gets into the SS and receives the task of forming a special unit from convicted poachers. The new formation was supposed to be used to fight the partisans. Poland was already under Nazi control, where guerrilla warfare was unfolding, and it was expected that many new territories would soon be conquered, which the Nazis had to bring into obedience.

The place of formation of the new part is already characteristic: the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Even then, the curious position of the penal unit within the SS troops became clear: the Dirlewanger detachment was not part of the "security detachments", but was only under their control. Soon the detachment was turned into a battalion, and in the fall of 1940, the unit, named after the commander "Dirlewanger", went to Poland.

The first actions looked quite simple: the Dirlewangers were on duty in the cordon, guarding the Jewish concentration camp. However, they were quickly used for their intended purpose. A number of partisan organizations operated in Poland, the most powerful of which was the Home Army, which had not yet acquired this name.

For poachers accustomed to the forest, hunting bipedal prey was an easy task. In addition, Dirlewanger himself enjoyed unquestioned authority. To his own subordinates, he was merciless if they violated his orders. Penalty boxers were beaten with sticks and locked in a wooden box for several days.

Already at this stage, a characteristic feature of the Dirlewangerites appeared - brutal cruelty. Almost no prisoners were taken, they dealt not only with the rebels, but also with those who attracted the slightest suspicion. There is nothing to say about the attitude towards the Jews: they were not considered people. In the autumn of 1941, the brigade took part in the deportation of Poles from Lublin. At the same time, the punishers mercilessly robbed the population and later sold the loot on the black market.

Impunity provoked more and more swine behavior, and sexual pathologies progressed in Dirlewanger itself: there were defenseless Polish and Jewish girls around, whose fate no one would ask. The maniac even came under an internal investigation - of course, not for sadistic orgies as such, but for association with "racially inferior women." If Dirlewanger got away from the accusations of robberies, and the murders were considered as an everyday matter, but "desecration of the race" is another matter. In January 1942, the Dirlewanger detachment was sent away from sin to Belarus. And that's where they really kicked off.

Ordinary fascism

The guerrilla warfare in the Soviet Union took on a stunning scale. In terms of organization, outside support, and combat capabilities, the Soviet partisans surpassed, perhaps, any similar movement in world history. The mainland continuously supplied the forest fighters with weapons, food and specialists, and the cruelty of the occupation regime led to the fact that more and more people went to the forests.

By the end of 1941, the Germans had already realized that the situation was getting out of control. In Belarus, the nature of the terrain turned out to be the most useful for a broad guerrilla war (forests and swamps), and the occupation regime was the most brutal. In addition, after the death in the cauldron of the Western Front in the summer of 1941, many soldiers and officers of the Red Army remained in these places.

These people were not going to lay down their arms and continued the fight in a new capacity, and even generals came across among the commanders of partisan detachments. For a long time it was easy to find weapons in the forests, then it was possible to establish contact with the mainland. It was Belarus that became the scene of the most desperate guerrilla war. Both the most heroic and the most nightmarish of its pages were written here.

Dirlewanger's Nazi penalty boxes were located in Mogilev and quickly turned out to be one of the most valuable acquisitions of the occupation administration. The poachers first went to operations on sledges, then began to operate on foot. The first area where the Dirlewangers fought against the Soviet partisans was Klichevsky. Here the partisans managed to achieve impressive success: they not only occupied the villages, but in the end managed to kill the garrison of the regional center, the burgomaster was hanged, the police chief died in battle.

However, the successes of the partisans attracted undue attention to them. The partisan region became a thorn in the side of the local German authorities. Among others, a detachment of Dirlewanger was involved in the defeat of the partisans.

The partisan zone proved to be a tough nut to crack, however. The green fortress on the banks of the Olsa River desperately fought back. For attacks on partisans, the Germans even had to use aviation. Nevertheless, the successes of the punishers turned out to be rather modest: after burning several villages to the ground, they only succeeded in capturing a few barrels of weapons. The bulk of the partisans disappeared into the forests. But the Dirlewangers paid off for modest successes with the population: in the village of Susha, they executed more than 30 people and completely burned the village itself.

At this stage, the composition of the Dirlewanger detachment became more colorful. It began to enroll not only poachers, but also ordinary criminals and collaborators. If poachers still had value as specialists in forest warfare, then newcomers were treated like meat. On the other hand, the punishers received a huge amount of alcohol, and the behavior was limited only by the need to strictly follow orders. Therefore, there was no end to those who wanted a sort of "self-realization". In total, from 150 to 800 penalized soldiers served at the same time: the losses were high, because the number of punishers changed often and dramatically.

Soon the villages began to burn one after another. The Germans had too few people to tightly control the entire territory of Belarus, and they tried to compensate for the lack of personnel with cruelty. Hoping to cut the ground from under the feet of the partisans, they destroyed their main source of life - the population.

In the summer of 1942, the Dirlewangers carried out a series of insanely cruel actions. Khatyn is only the most widely known of the destroyed villages in the occupied territory. However, alas, she was not the first either in terms of the mass number of victims, or, so to speak, in terms of the completeness of the cleansing. There are still living people in Khatyn. In many other places not a single person survived.

What does this massacre have to do with the actual struggle against the partisans can be judged from one case: in the village of Borki in the summer of 1942, according to German reports, 2027 people were exterminated. At the same time, 7 machine guns and 2 pistols were found in the village and its environs. According to Dirlewanger himself, there were almost no men in the village. There were too many inhabitants, so it was not possible to kill them all at once. The population was locked up in five barns. Then they began to indiscriminately shoot inside from machine guns through the doorways. When the exits were clogged with dead bodies, the barns were locked and set on fire. Someone managed to get out, but punishers with carbines were already waiting there. Dirlewanger personally participated in the execution of people escaping from the fire.

The Sonderkommando swept through eastern Belarus, betraying everything to fire and sword. The actual result of the actions of the punishers was strictly the opposite of what was intended. Whole villages went to the partisans, without waiting for the killers to come. Villages were abandoned or turned into redoubts with the help of more experienced partisans, resisting reprisals. Even regardless of personal courage and convictions, a bullet on the run is a much better fate than death in a burning barn, and PPSh in the hands became the only defense.

The secret of the emergence of huge partisan territories lies not only in the patriotism of people and not only in active assistance with weapons from the mainland, but also in reprisals against the population. Even in the Nazi administration of Belarus, the question arose: is it really necessary to put out the fire of a partisan war in precisely these ways? However, in the leadership of the occupied territories, they finally ceased to be restrained.

It cannot be said that the Dirlewanger detachment did not fight at all, but only killed defenseless people. However, the fact is striking: the detachment's claims regarding the killed "bandits" never corresponded to the captured trophies. Where hundreds, even thousands of partisans were "killed" in the reports, there were usually several times, or even orders of magnitude, fewer gun barrels.

However, sometimes the penalists did manage to inflict heavy losses on the people's avengers. So, in the middle of the summer of 1942, near Mogilev, again in the Klichev district, a grandiose counter-partisan action was carried out. The position of the partisans was complicated by the fact that for 4 thousand fighters in the ranks they had 25 thousand civilians who inhabited the partisan region. The Nazis assembled a grouping of strength into a full-blooded division with artillery, tanks, engineering units and aircraft. As a result, they managed, by cordoning off the forests, to kill large forces of partisans, despite desperate resistance - the forest army even had two dozen guns. 1800 partisans died.

The Dirlewanger detachment itself suffered losses all the time. During the spring of 1942, the punishers lost 2/3 of the composition. So the involvement of bandits, as well as collaborators from among Russians, Ukrainians and even Belarusians was inevitable. Moreover, a detachment of gypsies was somehow included in the unit, although usually representatives of this people were simply exterminated. In general, people who ended up in camps for a variety of reasons were recorded as punishers, for example, at some point a group of people who had previously been sent to concentration camps for homosexuality were included in the punitive battalion.

There was even a case of recording a group of German communists in the detachment. It was assumed that they would not run away, since the partisans would certainly shoot them as SS men. The experiment ended in failure: four SS communists actually fled, but the partisans willingly included them in their detachment. Another time, an attempt to include several Balts in the battalion turned into a complete fiasco: they could not find a common language with the Slavic part of the punitive detachment, and they were simply shot by "comrades in arms", waiting for the officers to turn away.

All this affected the fighting qualities of the detachment. Only one company of poachers remained, and the rest were by no means always fit to put them into battle.

If the punisher fell into the hands of the partisans, he did not have to hope for indulgence, and vice versa. Residents were not only killed, they also tried to let them go ahead of the SS detachment in case of mining. Often people were driven at once in large crowds through those places where one could expect mines.

In March 1943, the Dirlewanger detachment took part in the defeat of the village of Khatyn. The 118th police battalion directly burned the village, the Dirlewanger battalion only provided support. The murder in Khatyn developed according to the same scenario as many others. A successful ambush of partisans (police captain Velke, the champion of the 1936 Olympics, and three Ukrainian policemen with him was killed), then the departure of the punitive team, a short battle with the partisans (their losses were insignificant that day), and then - the extermination of the population of the nearest village in revenge .

Khatyn entered Soviet history not as the largest, but as a typical such episode. For the Nazis, this action was completely routine, they simply did not pay attention to it, especially since they burned the next two villages the very next day. During major operations, several settlements were destroyed daily, which was Khatyn. Only during the operation "Cottbus" between Minsk and Vitebsk in the summer of 1943, in 31 days, the battalion burned 39 villages.

From Belarus to Warsaw

In 1944, the holiday of death, arranged by the punishers in Belarus, was cut off in the most cruel way. The Red Army launched one of the largest offensives in world military history.

The operation "Bagration", during which Belarus was completely liberated, is only slightly less famous than the battles of Stalingrad or Kursk, and in the West one of the books about it is modestly called: "Hitler's Biggest Defeat."

In the twenties of June, the front of Army Group Center completely collapsed under a series of blows from Vitebsk to Bobruisk. Positions defended by the Germans for many months were captured in a few hours. Entire corps immediately burst out of the formation of the "Center" group. The complete defeat of the front-line units led to the fact that reserves were thrown to plug the breakthroughs from wherever they could be found.

Among others, Dirlewanger's punishers were driven to the front line. The police and punitive units were assembled into a single battle group von Gottberg. This loose mixture was supposed to support the counterattack of a tank division and a battalion of heavy tanks that arrived from another sector of the front.

At the front, the punishers showed themselves not as brightly as in the extermination of the population. The Gottberg group turned out to be a weak link, and through its positions, units of the Red Army began to make their way to the rear of the German improvised redoubt near Borisov. Then von Gottberg declared that the salvation of his people was more important than the retreat of the tankers, and for many hours delayed the withdrawal of the Tigers battalion through the Berezina.

In general, he was right in his own way: in the event of the captivity of the tankers, only a few years of various kinds of work in places of military glory awaited, while the punishers did not expect anything but a noose. Subsequently, the Dirlewanger detachment (by that time deployed into a regiment) conducted containment operations near Grodno.

On August 1, 1944, an uprising broke out in Warsaw against the Nazi occupation. The Red Army was already on its way, so the command of the Home Army - the Polish partisan army - considered that help would come soon. However, just a few hours before the uprising, units of the Red Army on the eastern bank of the Vistula ran into a powerful counterattack, and the question of helping the Polish capital was not on the agenda for the coming weeks.

In the German leadership at that time there was a debate about what forces to suppress the uprising. The decisive role in these disputes was played by SS Gruppenführer von dem Bach, who oversaw anti-partisan operations in Eastern Europe. He convinced the leaders of the Third Reich that it was the SS that should deal with the defeat of the rebels.

Dirlewanger was to play one of the first violins in this process. The punitive detachment was by that time deployed into a regiment, but consisted of only 881 people, that is, it was still a reinforced battalion. The punishers had to act, sparing neither themselves nor the Poles. The instruction did not allow discrepancies:

"The captured militants should be killed, regardless of whether they fought according to the rules of the Hague Convention or not ... The part of the population that does not take part in the hostilities, women and children, should also be destroyed ... The entire city should be razed to the ground."

The Dirlewangers entered the battle on August 5, entering Warsaw from the west. The first target of their attacks was the sleeping suburb of Wola. Although the Poles lacked weapons, they resisted fiercely. This crazy battle was described by one of the Wehrmacht fighters, who reinforced the Dirlewanger group:

"We entered Warsaw, marching on the paving stones. The Poles fired at us, but we did not see them. We stormed house after house, and everywhere we found the corpses of civilians with holes in their foreheads ... The next day we received an order to saddle the road and began to get to it through some gardens - our lieutenant drove us forward. Then we came under heavy fire from some building - we blew up the doors with grenades and burst in. The Poles piled on us, followed by a short knife fight, and we retreated - disappeared in the bushes. Four of those with whom I once rode in the same railway car were killed. We were under fire all the time. Then the SS arrived. They looked somehow strange - there were no insignia on their uniforms, and all without exception were pumped up with vodka.

They immediately rushed to the attack, yelling "Hurrah" - dozens of them were mowed down by enemy fire. Then a tank came along. We moved forward, followed by the SS. A few meters from the building, the tank was hit. Then it exploded, and a soldier's cap flew into the air ... The second tank was in no hurry to join the battle. So, we were in the front line, while the SS drove the civilians out of their houses, pushed them closer to the tank and forced them to sit on the armor. I saw this for the first time in my life ... They drove a polka woman in a long coat to the tank - she had a little girl in her arms. The people who had already climbed onto the tank helped her climb onto the armor. Someone took the girl in his arms, and at that moment the tank moved forward. The girl fell under the caterpillars - she was crushed. The woman screamed in horror, and then one of the SS men shot her in the head ... The tank continued to move forward. Someone tried to escape, and the SS killed these people"

The Dirlewangers drove the Poles out of Wola, but what happened next turned out to be something outstanding even by the standards of the Second World War. Dirlewanger massacred the captured hospitals, raped the nurses and, like the patients, killed them.

Then the soldiers began herding the inhabitants into the yard of a nearby factory, who were shot in droves. Wola is a densely populated area, so there was someone to kill. After the cleansing, the houses were burned with flamethrowers, along with everyone who could not hide. Not only Dirlewanger's squad was involved in the bacchanalia, but it was his group that was responsible for almost half of the murders. In total, up to forty thousand people died in Wola.

Even the German military was stupefied by what they saw. In the hospital, German wounded were found who were taken prisoner in the first days of the uprising. Now they - not boys themselves, who had seen and committed many atrocities - screamed in horror, seeing the massacre of the Polish wounded and medical staff.

Dirlewanger personally hanged some of the nurses. Leaving Wola in smoking ruins, the punishers moved east. Their task was to clear the Old City and cut through the corridor to the surrounded German units. The penalty box was reinforced with flamethrowers, armored vehicles and artillery, however, the fighting was desperate and a breakthrough did not work for a long time.

At the same time, women and children caught in the neighborhoods around were used as human shields. Dirlewanger himself was at the forefront and personally drove his men into the attack. It was the Dirlewangers who became the enemy of the Polish army units that crossed the Vistula in September. Contrary to the thesis that the Red Army did not provide assistance to the uprising, the landing on the western bank of the Vistula was landed, but the use of inexperienced Polish units for this was a mistake. After fierce fighting, the landing had to be evacuated.

The struggle against the Warsaw Uprising is considered a kind of finest hour of Dirlewanger, if such a turn is appropriate here. However, it is characteristic that the SS as a whole did not show any amazing fighting qualities, only amazing cruelty.

The battles against the Poles dragged on for two months, despite the fact that the fire superiority of the Nazis was absolute: they could use aircraft and artillery of all calibers. It is characteristic that at the end of September, when ordinary front-line units entered Warsaw, the enclaves of the rebels began to collapse one after another, so the Wehrmacht battalions cleared the Mokotow area that had resisted the SS for 8 weeks in 4 days.

However, in August and September, it was the punishers, including the Dirlewanger detachment, who ensured pressure on the Poles and a gradual reduction in the territory occupied by the rebels.

During the Warsaw Uprising, the Dirlewanger regiment was given a real bloodletting. Within two months, its composition was completely updated three times. Starting with 881 soldiers and receiving 2,500 reinforcements, she had only 600 fighters by the end of the battle for the city. On the one hand, this is an indicator of exclusively - for wear and tear - active participation in battles. On the other hand, this level of losses demonstrates the extremely low quality of tactical training. At the beginning of the uprising, the Poles had a meager amount of weapons and ammunition, and if the punitive regiment suffered such damage, it only means that the Varsovians filled it up with meat.

Mad Dog

Warsaw became the apogee of the activities of Dirlewanger and his team. The regiment was deployed into a brigade, then into a division, but the death knell had already sounded - and not for the squad of punishers, but throughout the Reich. Nevertheless, the turning point on the fronts of the world war did not yet promise an easy death of the Nazi state.

On August 28, when battles were in full swing in Warsaw, an uprising began in Slovakia. This event is much less known than the insurgent action in Warsaw, and meanwhile, the Slovaks acted much more effectively than their Polish comrades in the fight against the Nazis. The partisans captured several cities, including the rather large Banska Bystrica, airfields, and weapons. The airfields made it possible to establish an air bridge with the Red Army, to take out the wounded, to deliver weapons to the rebel area, and even to transfer a fighter aviation regiment with Czechoslovak pilots to the rebels. A scattering of army and SS units, including the Dirlewanger brigade, went to Slovakia.

The fight against the Slovaks did not cover the punishers with glory. Dirlewanger understood perfectly well what was going on at the fronts. His alcoholism worsened, the SS commander drank all night long. The SS advanced slowly and with heavy losses.

Ultimately, the resistance of the rebels was broken, but numerous detachments of partisans and many civilians eventually managed to reach the positions of the Russians. The penalty brigade behaved as usual, and in the end, a semblance of order was restored only after a personal dragging from Himmler.

Through massacre and executions, Dirlewanger brought order to the detachment, and soon the brigade was deployed to the 36th SS division. To do this, the penalty box was diluted with army units, and the old companies and battalions were replenished with punished Wehrmacht soldiers and prisoners of concentration camps, including political ones. About a hundred graduates of cadet schools were sent by this rabble to restore at least some kind of controllability.

In this form, the punishers were driven to the front, where they were to take the last battles. There are too few soldiers left in the Reich to allow anyone to sit in the rear. However, if the Dirlewangers were still somehow suitable for the fight against poorly armed rebels, then the superbly armed units of the Red Army, hardened in battles, simply ran over them.

In December 1944, the Dirlewangers were thrown into Hungary, where the Red Army was advancing - the Budapest operation. The very first clash with the Red Army ended in mass desertion - almost 500 people fled, and the communists, who had fallen into the division shortly before from the camps, generally provoked a mass exodus of recruits into captivity.

In March 1945, the effects of an old wound worsened at Dirlewanger. His division was defending south of Berlin against Marshal Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front. It was the troops of Ivan Stepanovich who had to put an end to the history of the punitive detachment.

On April 16, the attack on Berlin began. The defense of the German 9th Army was quickly broken, and the tanks rushed to Berlin from the south through the blazing forests. Konev cut down the main forces of the 9th Army with a "sickle" of two tank armies. Soon the 9th Army, along with the 36th SS Division, was surrounded south of the German capital.

About 150 thousand soldiers and officers, including the punitive division, got into the boiler. Soon the surrender of individual groups of SS men began. However, too much has already happened so that the owners of double zig in their buttonholes who go out with raised hands can count on mercy. Surrendering SS men were most often simply taken to the nearest funnel. On April 25, when the remnants of the encirclement made the last attempt to break through to the west, only a few hundred people remained of it.

The cauldron, the battle in which received in Western historiography the gloomy name of the "massacre at Halbe", lived only a few days. The mixed crowds of soldiers, among which were the last punishers of Dirlewanger, tried to break through at the small station of Halbe.

There they were met by ambushes and artillery fire at point-blank range. Batteries hit with shrapnel from zero range. The surviving tanks went straight through the piles of the dead and more wounded. Some batteries of Russians shot all the ammunition, and the gunners mowed down the human waves coming at them with bursts of captured machine guns and fire from faustpatrons, also beaten off from the previous wave of encirclement.

In the end, hardly 1/5 of the encircled forces managed to break through, the rest died or were captured. The arrows of the 1st Ukrainian Front cleared the forests, capturing or destroying everyone who continued to resist. Only a few punishers managed to escape from the encirclement alive. The 36th SS division ceased to exist.

Dirlewanger himself did not see all this. In April, when the remnants of the punishers were dying near Halbe, he took refuge in Swabia, dressed in civilian clothes. Dirlewanger was under 50, but the hectic life prematurely aged him. Looking even slightly comical old man, it would seem, could not be seen. However, Dirlewanger had a too conspicuous face. Already in May, he was accidentally identified by a former prisoner of the concentration camp.

The punisher was arrested and put in the Altshausen prison. What is especially sad for Dirlewanger, the guards consisted of Poles. For the next few days, the SS man was artlessly beaten. According to one of the German officers sitting next door, he constantly heard the sounds of blows and heart-rending screams from the corridor. The beatings continued until 5 June.

At night, Dirlewanger was ordered to leave the cell, but he was no longer able to get up, and then the Poles beat him with rifle butts and boots. The death certificate was marked "natural causes".

Subsequently, there were rumors that Dirlewanger was seen somewhere in Egypt, Indochina, South America, but this is nothing more than idle speculation.

The trials of those involved in the activities of the Dirlewanger detachment went on for a long time. In the dock were soldiers who left the Dirlewanger detachment for some reason, or who managed to get out from under Halbe, or those who gave orders to the punishers.

Von dem Bach became one of the key figures at the Nuremberg Trials, testified willingly and bought his own life, but was subsequently tried several times and eventually died in prison. Since the bulk of the surviving Dirlewangerites were captured by the Red Army, the criminal prosecution of the punishers was carried out carefully. The investigative group of state security agencies to search for identified criminals has been working for a decade and a half. The last identified Dirlewanger collaborators were executed in Minsk already in the 60s. Several people died or committed suicide during their arrest.

The database of the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus contains a mention of 9085 villages destroyed during the occupation. Of these, part of Dirlewanger destroyed at least 179 settlements. The victims of this punitive part were, according to various sources, from 30 to 120 thousand civilians. About 200 thousand people died in Warsaw, and up to 15 thousand people were killed by the Dirlewangers only in Wola.

UNKNOWN PAGES OF THE BLOODY ROAD OF THE SS MEMBERS OF OSCAR DIRLEVANGER

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the German invaders. Unfortunately, today few people clearly imagine what Soviet citizens had to go through, forced to exist for three years under the conditions of the Nazi “new order”. The lives of tens of thousands of civilians, including very old people, women and helpless children, were ruined during the so-called anti-partisan operations. It was on the territory of Belarus that punitive operations were carried out with special, unprecedented cruelty. Of course, in order to carry out their plans to conquer "living space in the East", the Nazis needed not ordinary performers, but ruthless killers, fanatics, or completely unprincipled individuals completely devoid of moral guidance and conscience. Perhaps the most notorious “fame” was won by the SS penal formation under the command of Oscar Paul Dirlewanger.

From the first months of its existence, the Sonderkommando Dirlewanger specialized in fighting partisans and carrying out actions against the civilian population. Suppressing resistance in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, Poland and Slovakia and committing monstrous crimes at the same time, Dirlewanger's subordinates earned themselves the worst reputation even among the SS troops!

The permanent commander of the formation, Oskar Dirlewanger - in the past a Kaiser officer and a criminal - instilled in his soldiers the most inhuman principles of warfare. Under his leadership were criminals, SS and Wehrmacht servicemen who had been at fault, European and Soviet collaborator traitors, and at the end of the war even political prisoners, including communists, social democrats and priests. The command was successively deployed into a battalion, regiment, brigade and division. This unprecedented experiment can no doubt be called a mockery of all the traditions of military service.

The idea to put criminals under arms was born in the highest echelons of the Third Reich in the early 1940s. Adolf Hitler received a letter from the wife of a Nazi Party official sent to prison for illegal hunting. The wife of the arrested Nazi asked the Fuhrer to sort it out and release her husband, especially, as the woman claimed, her faithful shot from a rifle and could be useful at the front. Hitler, being a vegetarian, was disgusted with hunting, but this letter intrigued him. In one of the conversations with the leadership of the SS in Berchtesgaden, he mentioned this case and made a proposal to use poachers in hostilities.

The SS troops took the words of the dictator seriously. Moreover, with the outbreak of World War II, the SS, unlike the Wehrmacht, had problems with the recruitment of personnel. It was decided to form an experimental unit staffed by convicted poachers. On March 29, 1940, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler sent a letter to the Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner, in which, in particular, he emphasized: “The Führer ordered that all poachers ... who hunted not with snares, but with guns and violated the law, were amnestied for passage during the war, serving in a special SS sniper company, for the purpose of correction, and could be pardoned for good behavior.

The base of the 5th regiment of the SS units "Dead Head" was determined as the gathering place - in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Oranienburg. In June 1940, 80 people were brought to the concentration camp. All of them have been carefully selected and inspected. According to the results of a medical examination, SS doctors recognized 55 people fit. The stringent requirements that existed at first, subsequently decreased, since the problem with staffing did not disappear anywhere. The situation was quickly corrected: already in August 1940, about 90 criminals served in the penal company.

The special unit was named the Oranienburg poacher team. Convicts from the southern lands of the Reich, Ostmark (Austria), the Sudetenland and East Prussia were gathered in its ranks. Soon the unit's commander, Dirlewanger, also arrived.

OSCAR WAS DAMAGED IN THE FIRST WORLD

Oscar Paul Dirlewanger, who belonged to the Swabian nationality of the German nation, was born on September 26, 1895 in Würzburg, into a respectable bourgeois family of a wealthy sales agent August Dirlewanger and his wife Paulina (nee Herrlinger). In 1900, the family moved to the capital of the Württemberg kingdom, Stuttgart, and five years later, to the metropolitan suburb, Esslingen. Oscar graduated from elementary and high school and passed the Abitur exam. Planning to enter a higher educational institution in the future, young Dirlewanger took advantage of his right, instead of a two-year military service as a private, to serve one year as a volunteer. In 1913, he was enlisted in the machine-gun company of the 123rd Grenadier Regiment and quite successfully joined the military team, quickly mastering the drill and tactical standards prescribed by the charters and instructions. He met the First World War already as a non-commissioned officer.

The 123rd regiment took part in the triumphant Ardennes operation for the Germans, fought in Lorraine, then in Luxembourg, and participated in the fighting on the Meuse. As follows from the characteristics of Dirlewanger, he fought desperately and was always at the forefront. Not surprisingly, on April 14, 1915, he was awarded the rank of lieutenant. Of course, Dirlewanger was not spared by numerous injuries and concussions. In the battle of Longwy on August 22, 1914, he was wounded twice, receiving a bullet in the leg and a saber blow in the head. The next day he was shell-shocked by shrapnel in one of the oncoming battles. During the defensive battles in Champagne on September 7, 1915, Dirlewanger was wounded in the arm and a bayonet strike in the right thigh. Finally, on April 30, 1918, he was wounded in the left shoulder during the battle for the village of Pokrovskoye near Taganrog.

As a result of all these injuries, Dirlewanger actually became an invalid and, most likely, was somewhat damaged in his mind. He was one of the very few World War I soldiers who managed to survive such wounds.

Returning to Esslingen, Dirlewanger saw a completely different Germany for which he shed blood. The monarchy has fallen. The country was engulfed in revolutionary riots initiated by leftist-minded circles oriented towards the "world revolution". Dirlewanger had no sympathy for the left. He joined the counter-revolutionary movement and fought as part of the volunteer corps of Epp, Haas, Sprosser and Holtz, who took part in the suppression of communist uprisings in Backnang, Kornwestheim, Esslingen, Untertürkheim, Ahlen, Schorndorf and Heidenheim. After the formation of the Reichswehr, he was entrusted with the command of an armored train.

Dirlewanger's real "finest hour" was the participation of his armored train in the spring of 1921 in the liberation of the Saxon city of Sangerhausen from the gang of anarcho-communist adventurer Max Goelz, who intended to rob and burn the village. The city was cleared of radical elements. As a token of gratitude, in 1934 the future war criminal was awarded the title of honorary citizen of Sangerhausen.

Dirlewanger tried to combine the fight against the Reds with higher education. Back in 1919, he entered the Higher Technical School in Mannheim, from where he was expelled for anti-Semitic agitation. I had to transfer to another educational institution - to the University of Frankfurt am Main, where a Swabian capable of science studied economics and law for six semesters. In 1922, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic: "Toward a Criticism of the Idea of ​​Planned Management of the Economy." In the same year he joined the Nazi Party. Dirlewanger's party career can hardly be called successful. In addition, it was interrupted several times. Nevertheless, in the party, the crippled veteran acquired those connections that subsequently rescued him more than once from hopeless situations. In Stuttgart, where Dirlewanger moved after receiving his doctorate, he became friends with a man who played a key role in his life.

This man was Gottlob Christian Berger, who later became Obergruppenführer and head of the SS Main Office. He was not just a countryman and the same age as Dirlewanger. Both of them volunteered for the war, both fought in the Württemberg units of the German army, both were awarded for military distinctions. Like Dirlewanger, Berger fought against the communists. Having joined the NSDAP, Berger made a dizzying career.

PEDOPHILI DOCTOR AND HIS TEAM

Having a higher education, Dirlewanger easily got a job at the Stuttgart company Troyhand, and then became the executive director of the Korniker company in Erfurt. He was in charge of the financial affairs of the firm. An interesting circumstance is that the owners of Korniker were Jews. Apparently, this freed Dirlewanger's hands: he, without a twinge of conscience, pulled off a series of frauds that allowed him to steal several thousand marks. Part of these funds was directed to support the Erfurt assault detachments.

After the Nazis came to power (January 30, 1933), Dirlewanger, as an "old fighter", received a highly paid position at the labor exchange in Heilbronn. It would seem that life turned to face him. However, accusations from the assault squads and the local party leadership soon began to pour into his address. The newly minted bureaucrat was accused of a complete lack of discipline, called a "troublemaker and talker", "the evil spirit of Heilbronn." Probably one of the reasons for all his misadventures was alcoholism.

On the occasion of Dirlewanger being awarded the title of honorary citizen of Sangerhausen, he arranged a buffet for his employees, after which, drunk, he began to drive around Heilbronn in an official car. Having made two accidents, he tried to escape. Even more serious questions were raised by the fact that he had a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl who was a member of the Union of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM). His detractors from the local assault squads even began to claim that he regularly sexually abused the girls from this organization.

As a result, Dirlewanger lost his job, was expelled from the party, stripped of his honorary citizen and doctorate, and received two years in prison. He confessed to his crime, but categorically denied that he was a serial maniac: he allegedly believed that the girl had reached the age of sixteen. In the prison of Ludwigsburg, where he was serving time, fellow inmates gave him the nickname Stallion-BDM.

Having been released in 1937, Dirlewanger tried to initiate a review of the case. But local party leaders sent him to the Welzheim concentration camp, from where Berger rescued him. The old friend managed to convince Himmler of the possibility of "correcting" Dirlewanger. And yesterday's "convict", in order to atone for his sins, went to serve in the ground units of the Condor Legion, which took part in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the troops of General Franco.

Returning to his homeland in 1939, Dirlewanger achieved the resumption of the process in his old case. This time, luck smiled at him. On April 30, 1940, the charges of molesting minors were dropped from him, and the sentence was canceled with the wording: "for lack of corpus delicti." After that, he got his degree back, resumed membership in the Nazi Party, joined the SS and was appointed commander of a team of poachers.

To his subordinates, Dirlewanger was a "demigod". As one of the former employees of the punitive battalion noted, he was “the master of life and death, he treated us as he wanted. He could pass a death sentence and immediately carry it out. He didn't have to go to trial."

Dirlewanger was a champion of iron discipline and absolute obedience to his will. He treated with dignity only those convicts who unquestioningly carried out his orders. The fate of those who did not want to obey was sad. Dirlewanger developed his own "disciplinary charter". The punishments were the same as in the concentration camps. For an ordinary misconduct, a soldier received 25 blows with a stick, for a similar violation - 50. For a gross misconduct, 75 blows were supposed, and if it was repeated again - 100. After the fiftieth blow, the offender, as a rule, was taken to a military hospital. It was considered a gross offense to protest. Open disobedience was punishable by death on the spot. In addition, the unit commander came up with a special punishment. It was called "Dirlewanger's box" or "Dirlewanger's coffin". Its essence was that the violator of discipline was forced to stand at attention in a narrow box for two weeks! The box was checked on the third or fourth day. When it was unlocked, the penalty box was always unconscious.

In part, fist law also dominated. They were severely beaten for cowardice. Convicts who saved in battle or were seen in something similar were immediately sentenced to death. In a word, brute physical force as an educational means was constantly used in the Sonderkommando.

At the same time, the cane discipline introduced in the formation often did not prevent the penalty box from engaging in robberies and murders. Dirlewanger did not differ in constancy. One day he could look at the robberies through his fingers, and on the next he could disable the extortionists known to him and shoot him with his own hands. Knowing perfectly the psychology of his subordinates, he knew how to lead them and, depending on the situation, could condone them to commit crimes, even provoke them to do so, and then “tighten the screws” again, turning the gurgling criminal swamp into a military team capable of performing combat missions. . He regulated the life of the unit according to his own understanding and his own standards, finding a place for everything - both for drill and for sharing alcoholic beverages with soldiers. But the main thing was only one principle - blind obedience to the will of the commander. Once Dirlewanger was a criminal, but once he was also an officer. These two aspects of his personality turned out to be inseparable unity and led to the fact that a criminal and a serviceman coexisted in him.

SUMMARY OF THE COMBAT ACTIONS IN KHATYN

LUBLIN ORGIES

In Dirlewanger's formation, human life was worthless. It was not considered shameful for the unit commander to beat the women he was brought for sexual orgies, or to sell them for a few bottles of moonshine. A particularly revealing case occurred in occupied Poland, called the "governor general" by the Nazis, where the SS penal battalion was transferred in 1940. Fighting the Polish rebels, the criminals were simultaneously engaged in robberies and murders of the Jewish population of Lublin. They robbed the local ghetto, they arrested Jews, accusing them of ritual murders, they blackmailed and extorted large sums of money from them, threatening to shoot them.

All these outrages led to the fact that an SS investigator, Untersturmführer Konrad Morgen, was sent to Lublin, who managed to collect a lot of compromising materials on Dirlewanger. 10 criminal cases were opened against Dirlewanger. On top of that, the commander of the penalty box once again confirmed his title of "master of sexual and pathological sophistication." According to eyewitness accounts and reports from members of the Lublin criminal police, Dirlewanger, without having the authority to do so, somehow arrested a dozen Jewish girls aged 13 to 18 who worked with one of the Wehrmacht supply units. He invited Jewish women to his apartment, forced them to strip naked, turned on music on the radio and ordered them to dance. During the dances, he, together with several officers of his unit and in the presence of SD representatives invited to the party, beat the girls with leather whips.

By the end of the orgy, Dirlewanger arranged what he called "scientific experiments". He gave each girl an injection of strychnine, and then, standing in a circle of drinking companions and smoking a cigarette, he watched the death agony of the poisoned victims.

Morgen also established that Dirlewanger had a Jewish translator, Sarah Bergmann, and the doctor liked to hang out with her alone. Of course, during the investigation, the commander of the criminals completely denied intimate ties with representatives of the "lower race", but to one degree or another admitted (of course, not before the SS judicial authorities) ties with Jews in general. In a letter to his friend, an employee of the SS Main Office, Dr. Friedrich, Dirlewanger wrote: “The whole Lublin story is simply comical; according to one version, I had a relationship with a Jew, I drank schnapps with the Jews, and after that I became heartless again and poisoned these people. In one case, I am accused of mistreating them and betraying my ideological beliefs because of a Jewess, and when this turns out not to be true, I am accused of completely the opposite - of poisoning the Jews.

Dirlewanger wanted to be put behind bars. But here, as usual, Berger came to his aid. Only his petition saved the mad doctor from inevitable punishment.

After the noisy scandal in Lublin, which reached the Reichsfuehrer SS himself, there could be no question of the special command of the SS continuing to remain in the Polish General Government. There was a war. The German armed forces faced a serious enemy in the east. It was also restless in the rear of the German army. The danger of the partisan threat was growing day by day, giving the Wehrmacht, its rear services and communications a lot of trouble. Therefore, Berger sent the Dirlewanger battalion to the occupied territory of the Soviet Union.

REPORT ON BURNED BELARUSIAN VILLAGES

MANHUNTERS

In January 1942, criminals appeared in occupied Belarus and immediately began to commit monstrous crimes. At first, the penitentiaries shot Jews in the Mogilev ghetto, then they were switched to fighting partisans. In a few months, the poachers earned the respect of the higher SS command, and Dirlewanger himself was presented for an award.

The team constantly practiced burning settlements, thus trying to reduce partisan activity. Sometimes, one shot fired from the forest was enough to decide on the destruction of a village, and punishers arrived in a suspicious village. In the memoirs of one SS veteran who served with Dirlewanger, there is a story about how the team members acted in the summer of 1942: “A cordon was set up around the village to prevent the escape of local residents, all houses and dugouts were inspected. It happened like this. We went into the house and shouted: “Come on, come on, come out!”

After that, the house was looked around, and something suspicious was looked for in it - a weapon, elements of a military uniform or a piece of a leaflet ... Local residents who found themselves in houses and objected to the search - no matter with words or hand gestures - were shot on the spot. In such cases, no one was interested in their explanations. Others were usually arrested and either machine-gunned or herded into some structure (often a former church) and set on fire. We threw a few hand grenades, and then waited for the flames to flare up inside. For us at that time, the most important thing was to secure the deep rear of the army ... Such orders were given to us. Of course, this explanation can hardly serve as an excuse, but we were brought up in the Third Reich, where the slogan was often heard: "Obedience to death."

It was according to this scheme that on June 15, 1942, the village of Borki and the surrounding villages were burned. Dirlewanger's subordinates, with the support of the SD team and security police units, killed 2027 women, the elderly and children here. Only 12 people escaped from the village. The same sad fate befell many other villages - for example, Pirunovo, Vilenka, Zabudnyansky Khutor and Nemki. In the village of Zbyszyn, 1,076 people were burned and shot. In November 1942, when the punishers (as part of Operation Frida) hunted the Minsk partisans, they burned the villages of Dubovruche and Borovino. So, in Borovino about 300 people were tortured. Surrounding the village, the SS killed everyone who caught their eye. Some of the inhabitants were thrown into wells and burning houses.

Of course, one of the most famous actions in which a special SS battalion took part was the destruction of the village of Khatyn on March 22, 1943. It must be said that the Sonderkommando played a rather secondary role here. The personnel of the 118th security police battalion, staffed by Ukrainian collaborators, committed the most atrocities. The SS men of Dirlewanger arrived at the place of operation when they were urgently asked to do so by the command of the Ukrainian battalion. In a daily report dated March 23, 1943, sent to the name of the “chief of the anti-gang formations,” SS General Erich von dem Bach, the events in Khatyn are presented as follows: “The 118th battalion urgently requested support near the village of Guba. The German motorized company, together with the 118th battalion, pursued the bandits who retreated to Khatyn. After a firefight, the settlement was taken and destroyed. 30 armed bandits (in full gear, including 1 partisan) were killed. Captured property and weapons were left to the 118th battalion.

In Khatyn, 149 people were shot and burned, including 76 infants and young children. By the cruelty with which the Ukrainian policemen dealt with the population, we can say that they were not much inferior to the German criminals and even, perhaps, surpassed them. For the Dirlewanger battalion, this was an ordinary action, as poachers wiped out even larger villages.

For two and a half years, while Dirlewanger's punishers were in occupied Belarus, they burned more than 180 settlements and killed more than 30 thousand people. The personnel of the special SS battalion took part in almost all major operations against the partisans, planned by the security forces of the Wehrmacht and the SS command. Among them - "Maybeetle", "Eagle", "Carlsbad", "Franz", "Harvest Festival", "February", "Magic Flute", "Daredevil", "Cottbus", "Hermann", "Spring Holiday" and "Baklan".

So, during the operation "Cottbus" the battalion of criminals met stubborn resistance from the partisan brigades of the Borisov-Begoml zone. The people's avengers skillfully mined the approaches to their defensive positions, and because of this, the punishers suffered heavy losses. Dirlewanger sent captured local residents ahead of the SS chains, who were literally torn to pieces. Those who were wounded and still alive were finished off with a shot in the back of the head. In the report of SS General von dem Bach on the results of Operation Cottbus dated June 23, 1943, it was reported that 2-3 thousand people were captured, who "cleared minefields and took off into the air."

As part of the German operation, all punitive "records" were broken - SS and police units destroyed more than 150 settlements in five districts of the Baranovichi region! According to the report of the Dirlewanger battalion dated August 7, 1943, in one day the SS burned the villages of Adamki, Ugli, Serkuli, Skiporovtsy, Rudnya, Sivica, Good Sivica, Dubki, Sidivichi, Daynova and Pogorelka.

Constantly participating in anti-partisan operations, the Dirlewanger formation suffered losses. Since it was not always possible to quickly prepare the required number of poachers, the commander of the penalists was forced to include Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian traitors, selected from among the captured Red Army soldiers, in his unit. At one time, the battalion included several Russian units in the state that performed punitive functions.

Subsequently, when a special SS battalion was deployed into a regiment (and then into a brigade), not only collaborators served with Dirlewanger. Volunteers from Western countries, recidivist criminals from concentration camps, all kinds of asocial elements, including ... homosexuals, underwent “rehabilitation” here. And at the end of the war, political prisoners appeared in the penal formation - communists, social democrats and priests!

Documents show that in November 1944 alone, 188 communist political prisoners were sent to the Dirlewanger compound. The reasons that pushed the German left to join the ranks of the punishers could be different. Someone probably wanted to go over to the Soviet side at the first opportunity. Some, having spent 10-12 years in concentration camps, simply dreamed of leaving the barracks. For example, the communist Paul Lau, a prisoner of Sachsenhausen, wrote a letter to his sister in Hamburg, where there were these words: “You will probably be surprised to learn that I am no longer a concentration camp prisoner, but an SS private. Yes, times are changing, and we must change with the times too.”

For Dirlewanger, it didn't really matter how many people died during the fighting. The main thing for him was to complete the assigned combat mission. This approach manifested itself most clearly during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in August-October 1944. In two months of fierce fighting, the personnel of the special SS regiment changed at least three times! This became possible due to the fact that the formation was replenished by convicted Wehrmacht soldiers and SS troops arriving from the prisons of Glatz, Torgau, Anklam and Bruchsal. In total, the regiment of punishers lost, according to various estimates, from 2,500 to 2,700 military personnel.

Dirlewanger's subordinates committed terrible crimes in Warsaw, which are included in modern historical literature under the name of the Wolski massacre. The bloody bacchanalia lasted two days - from August 5 to August 7, 1944. Moving towards the city center along Volskaya Street, SS penal combat groups killed everyone they came across. Only on the territory of the Ursus factory, from 5 to 6 thousand people were shot. Numerous murders were accompanied by wild robberies, violence against children and women. So, one SS Hauptsturmführer from the Dirlewanger regiment, as one SS man later recalled, combined rape with cruel perversions: he placed hand grants in the genitals of captured girls, after which he undermined them. The fingers of the victims were cut off if they could not remove the golden rings from them ...

SS OBERFUHRER OSCAR DIRLEWANGER. WARSAW, 1944

DEATH IN A FRENCH PRISON

For his active participation in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, Dirlewanger was awarded the highest award of the Reich - the Knight's Cross and received the rank of general of the SS troops. At the end of the war, the 36th SS Waffen Grenadier Division was formed from his subordinates - convicted military personnel, criminals and political prisoners. She was defeated in the Halb cauldron, during the battle for Berlin. Dirlewanger, who received another wound, was sent to the rear and never returned to the front. After the end of the war, he hid for several weeks in Upper Swabia until, in May 1945, soldiers of the French army arrested him. The commander of the punishers ended his journey in the prison of the city of Altshausen. On the night of June 4-5, 1945, he was beaten to death in his cell by Polish guards, in revenge for the atrocities committed in Warsaw.

Unlike Dirlewanger, his old friend Gottlob Berger died of his own death. On April 11, 1949, the military tribunal No. 4 in Nuremberg sentenced the former head of the SS Main Office to 25 years in prison. But Berger did not stay behind bars for long. His acquaintances from the Bosch company filed documents in the name of the High Commissioner of the US Zone in Germany, John McCloy, on Berger's humane treatment of prisoners of war, due to which his prison sentence was reduced to 10 years. And on December 15, 1951, the former SS Obergruppenführer was released for good behavior. Representatives of the Bosch company helped Berger successfully go through the process of denazification, they found a job for him in one of the Stuttgart newspapers. True, Berger was soon fired from there because of his collaboration with the neo-Nazi magazine Nation Europe. For some time he lived in the small town of Böblingen, and at the end of his life he moved to his native village of Gerstetten, where he died on January 5, 1975.

In the post-war years, several trials were held in different countries over the SS fined. Some former soldiers of the Sonderkommando - those who did not fall into the formation of their own free will and, being anti-fascists, remained true to their convictions - were able to avoid any retribution for the fact of serving in the SS, and some of them even managed to reach a high position ( for example, Alfred Neumann, who headed the Ministry of Logistics in the GDR!). In the USSR, almost all punishers found in the course of operational-search activities were executed after trials or received long terms of imprisonment.

The history of the formation of Dirlewanger, as in a mirror, reflected the most unattractive and monstrous pictures of the Second World War and showed what deeds a group of people can do, which is beyond the usual ideas of good and evil. This bunch of criminals left behind deep bloody wounds on the body of Central and Eastern Europe, which are still making themselves felt.

Many materials about the history of the Third Reich are still of interest to modern society. Documentary channels show many programs about German warplanes and tanks, about huge battles that took place during the Second World War. Less thoroughly explored is the dark side of the Nazi regime and its war machine - or, to be more honest, the true essence of the war machine that the Nazis led.

Adolf Hitler often tried many unconventional approaches during the war. In March 1940, shortly before the German invasion of France, Hitler decided to form a combat squad of convicted poachers under the command of a tough combat officer. Yes, from poachers - that is, those people who were convicted of illegally hunting animals. Allegedly, Hitler believed that the habit of taking risks would give these men a great advantage in combat. As for their commander, SS leader Heinrich Himmlerum knew only one person capable of up to the task: Oskar Dirlewanger.

Who was Oscar Dirlewanger?

Oskar Dirlewanger served in the German army during World War I. Apparently, he served in good faith: Dirlewanger was twice awarded the Iron Cross and wounded six times. In certain circles, he gained notoriety when, after the surrender of Germany, he managed to withdraw his hard-pressed detachment of 600 people from Romania to Germany. After the war, he joined the Freikorps, an organization of right-wing militants whose detachments existed for some time in post-war Germany. There he made contact with the nascent Nazi Party, but his personal life was in complete disarray. A serious addiction to alcohol often ended in violent acts, as a result of which Dirlewanger had problems with the police. He was several times in concentration camps for his addiction to sex with underage girls (not only persecuted minorities were kept in the camps, but also ordinary criminals). But he managed to earn a justification in the eyes of the Nazis by taking part in the Spanish Civil War (where he was wounded three times), so after the outbreak of World War II, despite his criminal record, he was allowed to join the ranks of the Waffen SS - and just in time to lead a new squad of poachers.

Dirlewanger and his men go to war

During training, the unit was quickly named after its commander: Sonderkommando Dirlewanger. Later, after repeated replenishment, the detachment grew and received the name that still causes disgust in everyone: the Dirlewanger Brigade. This name will forever be associated with massacres, torture, rape, robbery and all the most unimaginable war crimes.

Initially, the Dirlewanger brigade was deployed in occupied Poland in August 1940, when a little less than a year had passed after the occupation of this country. Their task was to put down the petty uprisings that sometimes occurred during the Nazi occupation. However, Dirlewanger and his men used their punitive raids as an opportunity to engage in mass crime. The brigade consisted partly of criminals convicted of extortion, theft and corruption, partly of soldiers who, as a result of "temporary insanity", arbitrarily shot many civilians, and partly of freed psychopaths guilty of sexual crimes, torture and drunken brawls. At night, visitors to the barracks could easily stumble upon mountains of looted property, soldiers drunk on duty, hear the screams of women and children being raped, or prisoners being tortured just for fun.

Many, if not most, of Dirlewanger's men were arrested for their crimes. In the early years of the war, German military lawyers found themselves in a somewhat confusing situation: there were still laws against the killing of civilians, drunkenness in the line of duty, theft of private property, and many other crimes committed by Dirlewanger's people. Dirlewanger himself kept a Jewish woman as a sex slave, while sex between Germans and Jews was forbidden. The behavior of these people disgusted the German authorities - even the local SS and Gestapo were furious. In the end, the commander of the SS troops in the region threatened that if the brigade was not transferred, he would order the troops to cordon off its barracks. And the brigade was sent further east, to Belarus.

Special status of Dirlewanger

Dirlewanger's story was unusual in many ways. First of all, a criminal record should have blocked his path to the ranks of the SS, but this did not happen. In addition, as a commander, he received special permission from Heinrich Himmler to personally punish his people, up to and including execution. This was an unheard of privilege for an officer in the German army; usually the soldier had the right to punish only the court, as in any other army. In the entire multi-million Wehrmacht, only Dirlewanger had such powers, and he disposed of them in his own way: recruits - and these were convicted criminals, and sometimes even political prisoners, but not volunteers - often received severe injuries at the hands of their commander or his entourage. It was in this way that Dirlewanger preferred to show his displeasure.

But, despite his absolute power, Dirlewanger, paradoxically, was very close to his people. He had a habit of using informal language and addressing soldiers by name, which was highly unusual for a German officer. He drank with them, raped and killed with them, he acted as if he were one of them. He arranged wrestling matches with them, as he believed that he should be in much better shape than most officers of his rank. His calmness under fire and his almost uncanny closeness to his subordinates caused him to be nicknamed "Gandhi" by the unbelievably ironic name among his own people.

Blood and murder

After Poland, the Dirlewanger Brigade was sent to occupied Belarus, where it continued its anti-partisan operations. Such methods of warfare were used as the creation of barriers from women and children who were supposed to walk in front of the advancing soldiers through a minefield. Dirlewanger's soldiers could enter the village, lock all the inhabitants in the barn and set it on fire, and then shoot anyone who tried to escape. And, as always, rapes, murders, robberies and pogroms - all this was in the order of things.

The brigade earned a particularly sad glory during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. With the approach of the Red Army, the Poles decided to take control of the capital, but Hitler ordered the uprising to be brutally crushed. The Dirlewanger brigade was to lead the operation.

The stories about her activities in Warsaw are innumerable. To take just one example, when a German officer was blocked by several Poles in a high-rise building. Later, this officer reported that when the Dirlewanger Brigade arrived, its fighters fearlessly stormed the building. He ended his report by describing how the rebels flew out of the window of the building.

Of course, they wouldn't be the Dirlewanger Brigade if they didn't commit horrific atrocities. Many years later, in the early 1960s, a former member of the gang appeared before the judges. Perhaps he had trouble sleeping. In any case, he described numerous war crimes, including one incident in which a member of the detachment, apparently drunk, raped a girl right on the street, and then pulled out his knife and cut her stomach from groin to throat, leaving her to die. In another episode, they took over the kindergarten, small children raised their little hands up to show that they were giving up. Dirlewanger ordered his men to kill them all - but in order to save ammunition, kill the children with bayonets and rifle butts. This nightmare was called the "Volskaya massacre", during which about 500 small children were killed. And this is just one of hundreds, even thousands of stories associated with this detachment.

The Warsaw Uprising was, in fact, the last episode in the life of the brigade. Shortly thereafter, Dirlewanger himself was wounded again - for the twelfth time - and this time the wound was so serious that he could not return to his brigade. By the end of the war, the brigade had grown to the size of a division, with about 7,000 men. But soon, in the spring of 1945, almost all of them were destroyed after being surrounded by Soviet troops during the Battle of the Elbe. Only a few hundred of the brigade survived the war.

As for Dirlewanger himself, he was captured alive by French soldiers. However, he died in custody shortly thereafter. Officially from natural causes, but rumors have long circulated that he was beaten to death by vengeful Polish soldiers.

Thus ended the story of one of the most brutal military formations in world history. How many people did they kill? It's hard to know. Of course, tens of thousands. The so-called "Einsatzgruppen" acted even worse, which, pursuing a policy of genocide, killed more than a million civilians in the occupied territory of the USSR. Incredibly, no member of the Dirlewanger Brigade was ever charged with war crimes, yet their reputation continues to serve as an edifying example of the true nature of the NSDAP and its leader.