Some of Dirlewanger's crimes cw: war crimes, chemical torture, r*pe etc
Oskar Dirlewanger was born on September 26, 1895, in Würzburg, Germany. He was a machine gunner with the Prussian Army in WWI in the 123rd Grenadier Regiment. He saw action in Belgium and France.
Unable to adapt to peace, Dirlewanger joined the Freikorps paramilitary militia – perhaps as an outlet for his post-traumatic stress. He fought in the German Revolution of 1918-1919; and also against German communists, Polish nationalists, and a German uprising.
In 1934, he raped a 14-year-old girl who was a member of the League of German Girls; a Nazi youth group. He then got drunk, stole a government car, and crashed it.
The Nazi party expelled him, revoked his doctorate title and military medals and sent him to prison for two years. Shortly after his release he repeated the same offenses and was sent to a concentration camp for sexual offenders. Fortunately for him, he had friends in high places.
One of those friends was Gottlob Berger, a Nazi official who was best buddies with Heinrich Himmler – head of the Gestapo (Secret State Police) and mastermind of the death camps.
Worse than his treatment of his men was his treatment of the people in the camps and ghettos. Dirlewanger would repeatedly pillage them, kidnapping children, and demanding ransoms.
To entertain his soldiers, Dirlewanger would torture prisoners at the concentration camps, injecting young women with strychnine, a neurotoxin that causes a violent, painful death. He would order hundreds of children to be slaughtered at once, but in the interest of saving bullets would order the executions done by bayonet and rifle butts.
During the unit’s time in Russia, Dirlewanger would burn women and children alive, and then let packs of starving dogs feed on them. A horrific rumor surfaced that he was cutting up Jewish women and boiling them with horse meat to make soap, though no SS officers ever confirmed.
Word of Dirlewanger’s atrocities quickly made their way back to the Allied forces, and soon after being commended by his superiors, Oskar Dirlewanger went into hiding. He was arrested on June 1, 1945, just one month after Hitler’s suicide and the German surrender.
Dirlewanger was placed in a prison camp within the French borders and was pronounced dead five days later from natural causes. However, as death had come so quickly to a seemingly healthy man, it was widely disputed by German officials, who claimed he had been beaten to death by the French prison guards.
