Brutal Death of Oskar Dirlewanger
- Bestial Nazi SS Officer - Dirlewanger Brigade - Warsaw Uprising

22 May 2022

Category: High Ranking Nazi Representatives

Oskar Dirlewanger was born on the 26th of September 1895 and between 1936 and 1939 he fought in the Condor Legion which was a German military unit sent to Spain to support General Franco's Nationalist movement during the Spanish Civil War. It was a great opportunity for Nazi Germany to test and develop methods of strategic bombing which were soon after used during the Second World War.

WW2 started on the 1st September 1939 and in July 1940 Dirlewanger was admitted to the SS. He created and trained a special criminal unit named the Dirlewanger Brigade which at the beginning consisted mostly of convicted poachers. They were recruited thanks to their tracking and shooting skills to fight partisans. Later, his unit recruited mostly convicted German criminals.

Massacres of civilians

At first, his unit was sent to Nazi-occupied Poland where Dirlewanger became a commandant of a camp at Stary Dzików which was set up for the Jewish slave labor. They committed atrocities here as well as in ghetto in Lublin. In February 1942 Dirlewanger Brigade was sent to Belorus where they not only raped and tortured young women, but also killed at least 30,000 Belarusian civilians.

As with the Einsatzgruppen which were Nazi death squads operating behind the front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, Dirlewanger unit made their victims, often naked, kneel down on the edge of a mass grave as Dirlewanger’s kommando shot them in the back of the neck with an automatic pistol and then the bodies dropped straightly into the pit. On 1 August 1944 the Warsaw Uprising began and Dirlewanger and his men participated in its suppression while committing unspeakable crimes.

The Warsaw uprising took 63 days until 2 October 1944. It is estimated that more than 150,000 civilians died in the Warsaw Uprising. In October 1944, Dirlewanger and his men played a crucial role in brutal suppression of the Slovak National Uprising which lasted from the 29th of August to the 28th October 1944. Later they took part in fights against the advancing Red Army in Hungary and Germany.

Recognized by a prisoner

After the end of the war, Oskar Dirlewanger was arrested on the 1st of June, 1945. Although he was wearing civilian clothes and using a false name, he was recognized by a Jewish former concentration camp prisoner and brought to a detention center. Dirlewanger died on the 7th of June, 1945. Officially, he died of a heart attack. However, the truth is that after he had been recognized by former Polish prisoners, they beat him to death in revenge for his brutality in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising.

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