The Dirlewanger Brigade: A Nazi Convict Murder Squad
Among the darkest figures of the Third Reich, Oskar Dirlewanger stands out for a brutality that appalled his own comrades. A convicted criminal turned SS commander, he led a penal unit - later the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division - recruited from poachers, convicts, and the regime’s castoffs to wage “anti-partisan” warfare that devolved into systematic terror against civilians. From scorched villages in Belarus to the Wola massacre during the Warsaw Uprising, the Dirlewanger Brigade left a trail of atrocities that became synonymous with the SS’s worst crimes. This article traces Dirlewanger’s rise, the making of his unit, its most notorious offenses, and the grim fate that followed.
The SS Unit That Horrified Even the Nazis
The Nazi regime has gone down in history as one of the most monstrous regimes in all of history. Six million Jews and five million Roma, Sinti, LGBTQ individuals, disabled people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Polish people were killed by the Nazis during the 1930s and throughout WWII.
Over 44,000 incarceration sites, including detention centers, labor camps, and death camps, were built under the Nazi regime. When discussing the Nazi Party and the Holocaust (Shoa), a few notorious Nazis are known by anyone who has learned about the Holocaust). Men like the “Beast of Belsen” Josef Kramer, Herman Göring, Josef Goebbels, the “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, and Heinrich Himmler will forever be seen as inhuman.
But one Nazi commander, Oskar Dirlewanger, could be said to be by far the worst of the worst. His actions were so brutal and barbaric that other Nazi leaders were disgusted by his deeds and behavior.
He was the commander of a division of the SS that built and ran the death camps like Auschwitz II. But most infamously, Oskar Dirlewanger was the commander of The Dirlewanger Brigade, a group of soulless monsters whose brutality knew no bounds.
