The Butcher of Warsaw, Oskar Dirlewanger, the worst of the worst

The Butcher of Warsaw, Oskar Dirlewanger, the worst of the worst...

124 years ago today in 1895, one of the most brutally barbaric men of all time, guilty for some of the worst crimes and atrocities of the 20th century, Oskar Dirlewanger, was born in Würzburg, Germany. Nicknamed ‘Gandhi’ for his slender build, such a name could not have been more ill-suited to such a beast of a man as Dirlewanger. Though the Nazi regime had many truly unforgiveable and demonic personalities in its employ, few of them come close to the level of sadistic savagery which Dirlewanger exercised, his evil belonging more to the world of Dante’s Inferno than to the mortal world of the living.

Precious little is known of Dirlewanger’s exact origins or his family background. Born in the 1890s, he belonged to that generation of Germans who were destined from birth to fight in the Great War. In 1913 at the age of eighteen he joined the Prussian Army and served as a machine gunner of the Royal Württemberg Corps. The following year he and all his comrades marched off into the oblivion of the European Armageddon. He served on both the Eastern and Western fronts, was wounded on many occasions and received the Iron Cross for his bravery in the face of the enemy. At the war’s ending he had attained the rank of Lieutenant and was in charge of his own unit in occupied Romania. For all his prowess on the battlefield however, the war in its all-consuming totality had made Dirlewanger, along with so many other European men of his generation, unfit for civilian life. Having born witness to unimaginable horrors and seen the deaths of thousands of men, there was to be no return to normalcy for Dirlewanger. Though this was the case with many veterans of the war, where they “took the war home” with them, Dirlewanger was to take it to the extreme.

Upon his return to a defeated Germany he continued to wear his old uniform and like many other veterans joined the Freikorps militias in their fight against the Communist uprisings that were cropping up everywhere across the fallen Reich. Dirlewanger eagerly assisted in the Freikorps’ brutal suppression of the rebellions and went on to fight in Upper Silesia too against the Polish nationalists there. Rather notably though, Dirlewanger never stayed in a single Freikorps unit for very long, an indication of his ill character. He later went on to establish an armed student formation known as the “Highway Watch” leading them in an attack on the Communist-controlled town of Sangerhausen. Though his assault failed and he was cut off, the Communists ultimately backed off and he was eventually hailed as the town’s ‘liberator’ from the scourge of the ‘Red Terrorists’. In 1923 he joined the Nazi party and became a member first of the SA and later the SS.

Following the German Civil War of the early 1920s, he tried initially to get his life in order and studied political science at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, going so far as to obtain a doctorate in 1922. He worked in various jobs, including a bank and a knit-wear factory. In 1928 he became the director of a textile factory owned by a Jewish family – leading to a temporary renouncement of his service in the SA. His twisted nature however could not keep him out of trouble. He was repeatedly arrested for possession of weapons, for embezzlement and for anti-social behaviour. A police report described him as a “mentally unstable, violent fanatic and alcoholic, who had the habit of erupting into violence under the influence of drugs.” This was to be demonstrated in 1934 when he raped a fourteen-year-old girl from the League of German Girls and crashed a government vehicle under the influence of alcohol. He lost his job, his doctorate, his military honours and was expelled from the Nazi party. Upon his release from prison he was arrested again on similar charges and was sent to a concentration camp as a deviant sexual offender. It can only be surmised that his time in the camps served only to foster greater beastliness within him.

He was eventually released from the camp after an old comrade from the war, Gottlob Berger, spoke on his behalf to Heinrich Himmler who reinstated this perverted criminal into the SS. Dirlewanger thereupon then went to Spain where he fought on behalf of Franco first with the Spanish Foreign Legion and later with the German Condor Legion. For his services in Spain his party membership and doctorate were restored to him. At the beginning of the war, he entered the Waffen-SS and was given his own brigade known as the Dirlewanger Brigade which was composed of a mix of conventional soldiers, convicted criminals, mental asylum patients, interned Gypsies, homosexuals and poachers, the latter of whom were recruited specifically for hunting down partisans. 

Dirlewanger and his unit were assigned to concentration camp in Occupied Poland. Almost immediately he came under scrutiny for wanton acts of murder, corruption and raping those of “inferior” racial status. He would actively pillage the ghettos of Lublin like a barbarian of old. Within the camp he would select young Jewish female prisoners, whip them naked, and then inject them with strychnine so that he and his friends could watch and laugh as they convulsed to death. One Wehrmacht soldier described how he forced mothers to watch as he burned their babies alive. In Warsaw he came upon a school of three to five hundred children, broke in, and beat them all to death. Dirlewanger’s reputation was so terrible that it was from him that the rumour unsurprisingly first emerged of camp prisoners being ground down into human soap. A psychopath true and true, had he lived at any other time under any other government he would have been reprimanded immediately. His patrons however, Berger and Himmler, were of a different mind and had use of his barbarism in their demented cause against “subhumanity” and happily tolerated his sadistic perversions.

In 1942 Dirlewanger and his familiars were let loose on the occupied territories of the USSR to combat partisan activities. Dirlewanger though was more focused on simply having sadistic fun with his victims. He would herd whole villages into barns, set the barns on fire and then mow down anyone who tried to escape in a hail of bullets. Sometimes he would round people up and he would send them as human shields across minefields. As before, he used the opportunity afforded to him to rape and torture countless Jewish and Russian women. The lowest estimate of the amount of people killed during this operation stands at 30,000, most agree though that the true figure is much higher, well over a hundred thousand. For his devilish services, Dirlewanger was awarded the German Cross with Gold. When the Warsaw Uprising happened in 1944, Dirlewanger is believed to have killed over 40,000 civilians in just two days at Wola. He went on to burn three hospitals to the ground with flamethrowers and proceeded to butcher, rape, sing, drink, and torture his way through the city, impaling infants on bayonets and executing prisoners by burning them in gasoline. For this living hell which he unleashed on the people of Warsaw, he received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

He partook in a number of operations on the closing Eastern Front thereafter, including the Slovak National Uprising. At the war’s ending he went into hiding but was eventually arrested by French occupation authorities after being recognised by a former Jewish inmate of the concentration camps. He died two months later, officially of natural causes according to the French authorities. This has been disputed ever since however with many believing that he was bludgeoned to death by Polish prison guards in French service. Many believed that he was not dead and that like some hideous phantom he was still roaming the earth with sightings of this devil in human flesh being made around the world, from Indochina to Egypt. To dispel these fears that this psychopath was still on the loose, German authorities exhumed his body in 1960 to confirm he was dead.