Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ Bandit War, with the approval of the OKW, the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces; on 21 June 1943 he was promoted to Chief of the Bandit War (Chef der Bandenkampfverbände).²² His deputy was to be the drunkard Curt von Gottberg.

      Von dem Bach’s star was rising, and it was clear to all in the inner circle that Himmler was grooming him for high office. He was given all the perks of enormous power – meetings with high officials on visits to Berlin, palatial headquarters in Mogilev and a palace in Minsk, chauffeur-driven limousines and even a Junkers 52 passenger transport plane directly from Göring – a huge status symbol in Nazi Germany, which implied that he had reached the realm of strategic command.²³ He was even given a new, grand-sounding code-name – ‘Arminus’. ‘I was very well known, respected, and beloved,’ he said at Nuremberg, and his diary records a social life befitting his new status. As the brutal war raged around him he described evenings of cocktail parties and cultural events. He arranged for the latest films to be screened for his secretaries, and when after heavy fighting officers of the 14th Police Regiment needed a rest he gave them a free night at the Minsk theatre, with the whole building set aside for their use. Ballet, chamber music, opera and cabaret all played a part in his life, with many local artists given rations to keep them alive. He and Artur Nebe conducted ‘actual exercises’: the first was a search-and-destroy operation in a village near Mogilev; the second took place in a forest where they ‘dug out’ partisans who were later shot.

      Von dem Bach was now in charge of a large organization dedicated to the fight against the ‘bandits’. After the war he claimed that at its height his gleaming offices received 15,000 pieces of information every day, much of it intelligence from local villages and towns, on suspicious characters and possible collaborators. This information allowed the Germans to create enormous ‘bandit maps’ of ‘infested areas’. When an area seemed beyond control and resources allowed, it would be subject to an ‘Aktion’, in effect a killing spree. Von dem Bach could draw upon army personnel – security divisions, units composed of indigenous collaborators, SS units, police regiments and Einsatzgruppen for as long as he needed them for any particular operation. In the military areas the same responsibility was exercised by the chief of the army’s General Staff; in practice the two often overlapped.²⁴

      Killing so-called partisans became a part of everyday life: ‘A partisan group blew up our vehicles,’ wrote Private H.M., a member of an intelligence unit. ‘Early yesterday morning forty men were shot on the edge of the city … Naturally there were a number of innocent people who had to give up their lives … One didn’t waste a lot of time on this and just shot the ones who happened to be around.’²⁵ The Wehrmacht, too, participated in these killings. Wehrmacht soldier Claus Hansmann recalled an execution of partisans in Kharkov: ‘The first human package, tied up, is carried outside … The hemp neckband is placed around his neck, hands are tied tight, he is put on the balustrade and the blindfold is removed from his eyes. For an instant you see glaring eyeballs, like those of an escaped horse, then wearily he closes his eyelids … one after the other is brought out, put on the railing … Each one bears a placard on his chest proclaiming his crime … Partisans and just punishment.’²⁶ Field Marshal Walter Model, soon to become the head of Army Group Centre, requested that partisans be executed out of sight of his office, as the sight of men hanging nearby was so unpleasant.²⁷ Murder of partisans and civilians was carried out on a grand scale in Byelorussia, to be sure, but one person who stood out even in that terrible time was Oskar Dirlewanger.

       The Very Face of Evil

      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’ СКАЧАТЬ