Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 15

Like that of Erich von dem Bach, Oskar Dirlewanger’s name will always be linked first and foremost with the Warsaw Uprising. He too did the majority of his ‘practical training’ in Byelorussia. Unlike the affable von dem Bach, Dirlewanger actually looked and acted like the murderer he was. His face resembled that of a vulture, with thin lips and deep circles under his cruel, almost mocking eyes, while his dark hair was cropped close to his bony, angular head. His violent tendencies got him noticed at an early age. After serving in World War I he joined the Freikorps, a volunteer paramilitary organization and temporary home to many future Nazis, where he made a name for himself beating up Communists in the regular street fights of the period. He attended Frankfurt University, earning a PhD in economics, and then joined the Nazi Party, becoming deputy director of the Labour Office in Heilbronn.

Dirlewanger seemed to enjoy stirring up trouble, and his position was in question almost immediately. The Führer of his SA-Group Southwest reported that for a full five months since joining the Labour Office Dirlewanger had been acting in an ‘undisciplined way’. He had ‘repeatedly had sex in the official car of the Labour Office with girls who were less than fourteen years old’.²⁸ Then on 15 April 1934 he ‘drove the official car of the Labour Office into a ditch while completely drunk; on this occasion, a female passenger was severely hurt and he fled the scene of the accident’.²⁹ Dirlewanger was sentenced by the State Court of Heilbronn on 20 September 1934. At his trial it was noted that he had had sexual relations with ‘several other women among them the twenty-year-old leader of the BDM [League of German Girls] group of Heilbronn’; also, he had ‘used’ the fourteen-year-old Anneliese ‘four or five times in the period of February to mid-July 1934 in order to satisfy his sexual appetite’; during one of these meetings the girl had actually been wearing her BDM uniform.³⁰ Dirlewanger was kicked out of the SA and sentenced to two years in prison. But he had friends in high places.

Dirlewanger’s old comrade, SS Brigadeführer Gottlob Berger, was outraged. ‘The condemnation was absolutely unjust,’ he said at Nuremberg. ‘I turned to Himmler in a teletype, to the higher SS and Police Leader, and they had enough sense of justice to intervene and fetch him out again the next day. Then I sent him to Spain.’³¹ Berger had salvaged what would turn out to be a most notorious career. Dirlewanger served in the Condor Legion, a unit of German volunteers who fought alongside the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, and in 1938, while he was away, he was investigated by the SD. Its report concluded that ‘Dirlewanger must be called absolutely reliable as far as politics are concerned.’ He returned from Spain in June 1939, and wrote to Himmler asking to join the SS. He was soon to get the promotion that would make his career.

When Adolf Hitler had lunch with his Minister Dr Hans Lammers in 1942 he introduced an unexpected topic to the conversation. ‘It is ridiculous,’ he said, ‘for a poacher to be sent to prison for three months for killing a hare when there are so many real criminals who serve no time. I myself should have taken the fellow and put him into one of the guerrilla companies of the SS!’³²

Despite his vegetarianism, Hitler had long had a strange admiration for poachers, and decided that with their particular skills of tracking and killing they might be useful in the fight against the partisans. On 23 March 1940 SS Gruppenführer Karl Wolff had informed Himmler that Hitler had decided to grant an amnesty for convicted poachers, and that they were to be organized into a special sharpshooter company. Eighty poachers were located and transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Someone had to head this unit, and Gottlob Berger thought of his old friend who now needed a job, and wrote to Himmler recommending Dirlewanger. Himmler agreed, and on 1 September 1940 the band of poachers was given the official name ‘Sonderkommando Dr. Dirlewanger’ (SS Special Battalion Dr^fn1 Dirlewanger), and was immediately sent to Poland to work with the SS. Amongst other things they excelled at carrying out the Sonderbehandlung (‘special treatment’) of victims – the Nazi euphemism used to cover crimes including mass murder – in Lublin. On 9 November 1941 Dirlewanger was promoted to SS Sturmbannführer.

Despite his good fortune, Dirlewanger could not stay out of trouble, and in January 1942 he was again under investigation, this time for corruption, rape and looting. SS Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik criticized Dirlewanger not because he disagreed with what he had done, but rather because he could not control him, and wanted to retain power in the Lublin area for himself. In one incident Globocnik accused Dirlewanger of ‘race defilement’ for taking an attractive young Jewish assistant as his lover; the situation was made ‘worse’ because Dirlewanger repeatedly kept her from being sent away for ‘special treatment’. At the same time, Dirlewanger was under investigation for crimes against Jews. Dr Konrad Morgen, the SS lawyer investigating the case, testified at Nuremberg: ‘Dirlewanger had arrested people illegally and arbitrarily, and as for his female prisoners – young Jewesses – he did the following against them: he called together a small circle of friends consisting of members of a Wehrmacht supply unit. Then he made so-called scientific experiments, which involved stripping the victims of their clothes. Then they were given an injection of strychnine. Dirlewanger looked on, smoked a cigarette, as did his friends, and watched as they died.’³³

‘This is a joke,’ Dirlewanger claimed in his defence. ‘It looks as if Brigadeführer Globocnik has made a question out of poisoning Jews in Lublin a subject of investigation. He is besmirching my name. He has tried to do this before. But he is not so lucky this time. It is true that I told a doctor from Lublin to poison these Jews instead of shooting them, but I did it to save the clothes, like coats, for example, which I sent later to Hauptsturmführer Streibel. These were clothes for work. The gold teeth were taken by the Director of the SSPF Infirmary from Lublin so that there would be material for teeth for members of the SS. All of these things were settled with Brigadeführer Globocnik, who then denied all the facts when the SD got involved. It is really a comedy in Lublin. In one trial I am said to have had intercourse with a Jewish woman. In another case I am not showing the correct attitude towards the nation, and I throw out my unbreakable ideology with a Jewess, and when it turns out not to be true I am accused of the complete opposite.’

Himmler decided that the solution was to quietly send Dirlewanger somewhere else, where his skills could be put to greater use. On 29 January 1942 the Chief of Staff of the headquarters of the Waffen SS placed Sonderkommando Dirlewanger under the direct control of the command staff of the SS Reichsführer himself. The Sonderkommando was refitted and sent to Byelorussia in February 1942. (While Himmler saw great potential in Dirlewanger, and wanted to use him, a problem was that he was being investigated by Dr Konrad Morgen – backed by Globocnik, who wanted to get him out of ‘his’ territory. Himmler spirited Dirlewanger off to Byelorussia as quickly as he could, although Morgen’s dogged investigation into his activities continued throughout the war.)

The SS Sonderkommando Dirlewanger that arrived in Byelorussia consisted of around ninety former poachers, but it would grow rapidly. Within six months it would receive a few hundred political prisoners, criminals and psychopaths recruited from psychiatric hospitals and concentration camps, and would gain the reputation of ‘exceeding all others’, even amongst the SS, in ‘brutality and depravity’.

Between February 1942 and June 1944 Sonderkommando Dirlewanger participated in over fifty of von dem Bach’s anti-partisan raids. Some of these were small, with just a few dozen men attacking a single target area. After eighteen German soldiers had been killed in a partisan attack a young soldier, Matthias Jung, witnessed the reprisal: ‘The whole place, everything [was destroyed]. Everything. Totally! The civilians who had done it, all the civilians who were in the place. In each corner stood a machine gun, and then all the houses were set on fire and whoever came out – in my opinion with justice!’³⁴

The large ‘actions’ were giant sweeps into ‘bandit’ territory involving hundreds of men. There were various approved methods of attacking ‘bandit-infested areas’. The main aim was to encircle an area and to capture or kill anyone within it. Von dem Bach referred to this as ‘extermination by encirclement’.³⁵ The first and preferred form of the extermination of those caught was through combat. This was called ‘Kesseltreiben’, or ‘crushing the encirclement’, and involved units proceeding through the area and slaughtering everyone they could find. The Nazis employed hunting terms to describe various methods of clearing a designated area; human beings were treated like animals.

This was by no means random or hurried killing. Areas with ‘proven’ bandit connections were targeted for destruction weeks, or even months, in advance. Agents were placed in villages and towns, with collaborators, Hilfswillige and others recruited as spies. Signs of suspicious activity – the delivery of too much food, or strange movements at night – were noted. Before the Aktion began, the SS or police would arrive and check papers. Houses and barns were meticulously searched. A hidden weapon meant certain death; if there was an extra coat in the kitchen or too much food on the table the householders were shot.

On the fateful day the SS and police would surround the area and herd the inhabitants into the largest building in town – usually a church or hall. When everyone was inside it would be set on fire; anyone who tried to escape was shot. At Nuremberg, von dem Bach described the standard procedure: ‘The village was suddenly surrounded and without warning the police gathered the inhabitants into the village square. In front of the mayor, people not essential to the local farms and industry were immediately taken off to collection points for transfer to Germany.’³⁶ Von dem Bach was careful not to mention that those who were not designated as useful slave labour were burned alive or shot.

The partisans, if indeed there were any in the area, often escaped to the woods in advance, leaving only innocent civilians behind. They were killed anyway, the logic being that if you couldn’t kill the actual partisans, you could at least destroy the people who might be aiding them. From six to ten people were killed for each weapon that was found. It became mass murder on a grand scale: it is estimated that 345,000 civilians, many of them Jews, and only 15 per cent of them actual partisans, were killed in these operations, but there were probably many more who died without a trace. The reports speak for themselves. Von dem Bach’s deputy von Gottberg wrote to Berlin after the relatively small Operation ‘Nürnberg’ on 5 December 1942, boasting that 799 bandits, over three hundred suspected gangsters and over 1,800 Jews had been killed. In all this only two German soldiers had been killed and ten wounded. ‘One must have luck,’ he quipped. One had only to recall Himmler’s words of July 1942: ‘All women and girls have the potential to be bandits and assassins.’

Dirlewanger’s first large-sweep operation was Operation ‘Bamberg’, near Bobruisk, in March–April 1942. It was reported that he had proved himself with ‘flying colours’. He met von dem Bach on 17 June, and was praised again for his work. Soon the brigade was involved in some of the biggest ‘anti-bandit’ operations in Byelorussia, which were given romantic-sounding code-names like ‘Adler’, ‘Erntefest’, ‘Zauberflöte’ and ‘Cottbus’. Most lasted three to four weeks, and involved attacks against not only the Byelorussian peasant communities, but also the remaining ghettos – ‘Hornung’ ended with the liquidation of the Slutsk ghetto, and ‘Swamp Fever’ with that of the Baranovitsche ghetto.³⁷ The commander of the 286th Protective Division of the Wehrmacht, General-Leutnant Johann Georg Richert, congratulated Dirlewanger in front of von dem Bach after Operation ‘Adler’. The enemy had ‘tried to escape capture by going up to their necks in the bog or by climbing thin branches of trees and viciously tried to break through. In many cases officers and commissars committed suicide to avoid capture.’ Dirlewanger had ruthlessly hunted them down.

Operation ‘Hornung’, in February 1943, was staged ostensibly to prevent the spread of ‘bandits’ in the Slutsk region. After careful reconnaissance, von dem Bach arrived at Combat Group Staff von Gottberg on 15 February to give the order to begin. Dirlewanger had just been put at von Gottberg’s disposal – other units taking part were Einsatzgruppe B and the Rodianov Battalion, which came from the rear area of Army Group Centre and was also known for its ruthlessness. Five combat groups including the Dirlewanger Brigade were sent into the area with orders to kill everyone they could find, and to take all useful property. Dirlewanger primed his men not to shirk from killing civilians, who, he said, were guilty by association: ‘Given the current weather it must be expected that in all villages of the mentioned area the bandits have found shelter.’ All the houses in Dirlewanger’s area were burned down, and cattle and food taken. Villages were utterly destroyed, along with their inhabitants – the official lists included dozens of place names, all carefully tallied up: ‘Lenin 1,046 people, Adamovo 787, in Pusiczi 780 …’ and so it went on. In all 12,718 people were reported killed, including 3,300 Jews murdered in the Słuck ghetto. Only sixty-five prisoners were taken in the entire operation. Later, when the Soviets exhumed the bodies they found no bullets or spent cartridges lying around. The victims had been burned alive in the barns.

In this terrible phase of the ‘Bandit War’ few prisoners were taken; indeed, only 3,589 people were taken for slave labour by the Sauckel Commission (in charge of processing forced and slave labourers) in the course of eleven major operations, in which at least 33,378 people were murdered.³⁸ It was straightforward slaughter. Gana Michalowna Gricewicz, who survived the destruction of her village, remembered feeling as if ‘there was no one left in the world, that all had been killed’. The country around Slutsk was turned into a ‘dead zone’: all the people, animals and supplies were removed, and the area torched. Any person found there was to be treated like ‘game’, and shot on sight.

One of the most deadly ‘actions’ in which Dirlewanger participated was Operation ‘Cottbus’, which started on the morning of 30 May 1943. The attack at Lake Palik saw 16,662 soldiers sent in to push a terrified civilian population in front of them, forcing them to fight with their backs to the water; the death toll was at least 15,000 people.³⁹ Bach’s deputy von Gottberg praised Dirlewanger’s innovation of forcing civilians to walk over minefields: ‘The mine detector developed by the Dirlewanger Battalion has successfully passed the test,’ he crowed.⁴⁰ Von dem Bach was delighted by this new technique, which had ‘sent two to three thousand villagers flying’, he said.⁴¹ It soon became standard practice. Dirlewanger also continued in his sexual abuse of, and by now profitable trade in, women, noting that one group had ‘enjoyed’ catching many girls who had been trapped on the edge of Lake Palik. The victims were gang raped, and then sold to Dirlewanger’s friends. Some were kept in makeshift prisons, to be abused later.⁴²

Despite his successes in Byelorussia, Dirlewanger’s brutality brought him negative attention once again. Wilhelm Kube reported a massacre in the village of Vitonitsch, complaining that bullet-wounded escapees were climbing out of their pits and seeking help in hospitals and clinics. Kube wrote in a report to Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for Occupied Territories, that in terms of turning the local population against the Germans, ‘the name Dirlewanger plays a particularly significant role, for this man, in the war of annihilation he wages pitilessly against an unarmed population, deliberately refuses to consider political necessities. His methods, worthy of the Thirty Years War, make a lie of the civil administration’s assurances of their wish to work together with the Byelorussian people. When women and children are shot en masse or burned alive, there is no longer a semblance of humane conduct of war. The number of villages burned during sweep operations exceeds that of those burned by the Bolsheviks.’⁴³ Kube’s report was ignored. Dirlewanger was given even more men, this time hardened criminals from Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. In order to impose discipline he had three of them shot in the back of the head in front of their new comrades upon their arrival. All the men knew that they would quickly share the same fate if they did not fall into line; at best they could expect to be sent back to the camps at the first sign of weakness.

Far from attempting to rein him in, von dem Bach and Himmler rewarded Dirlewanger. His grand residence in the ancient town of Lagoisk was perfect for entertaining. Unlike von dem Bach he was not one for ballet or theatre, preferring a ‘Kameradenschaftliche Abend’ (comradeship evening), for which colleagues would be invited from the area, or flown in on his own Fieseler Storch aircraft. After drinks, the guests would be seated at the large table, the lights glinting off stolen glass and silver. The best pieces were sent to his storage facility near his home at Esslingen, in Württemberg, but there was enough left over to make life at headquarters bearable. To the sound of a gramophone playing songs like Dirlewanger’s favourite ‘Alle Tage ist kein Sonntag’, particularly pretty young women prisoners, specially chosen during round-ups, would be forced to serve the food and wine, and to endure the lurid attentions of the host and his guests. Dirlewanger would invariably get very drunk, and invite his guests to join in the rape, and often the murder, of these women. His officers were permitted to capture women during the partisan sweeps: a unit veteran, Waldemar B, certified that in one case ‘the officers shut up eight women, confiscated their clothing, and in the evening took them to the castle, where they whipped them’.⁴⁴ A company of policemen operating with the unit was in the habit of taking women prisoners and selling them. A radio message sent by Dirlewanger on 11 March 1944 confirmed this trade: ‘The Russian [women] requested by Stubaf. Otto will be captured on Monday and delivered with the next men to go on leave. The price is the same as that fixed by Ostuf. Ingruber in the Lake Palik woods. Price per Russian woman: two bottles of schnaps.’⁴⁵

Dirlewanger’s last ‘sweep’ in Byelorussia, Operation ‘Kormoran’, took place in May and June 1944. It was never completed. On the night of 19 June the partisans who for so long had been hunted by the Germans set off a massive series of bombs and explosions, which heralded the beginning of the great Soviet summer offensive into Byelorussia. Hundreds of thousands of Germans, Dirlewanger included, would soon be scrambling to get out as fast as they could, as the house of cards collapsed around them. Dirlewanger had spent twenty-eight months in Byelorussia. His next stop was to be Warsaw.