Oskar Dirlewanger the sadistic beast that the Nazis themselves feared!
When you say „Nazi“, what’s the first thing you think of? A lot of people think of cruelty, inhumanity and sadism. The Nazis tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in cold blood in the name of Hitler and his race.
But there were Nazis who stood out among the other Nazis, in a way, for their love of sadism, and we certainly don’t need to introduce names like Josef Mengele, Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. With their sadism and their inhumanity they have gone down in history as the greatest and most heinous mass murderers. There is one Nazi, however, who is not so much talked about, but whose sadism surpassed them all. His name was Oskar Dirlewanger.When he was still young, he joined the Prussian army and subsequently rose as high as he could on the imaginary ladder of rank. He subsequently became a lieutenant and took part in the invasion of Belgian territory alongside the German army. When Germany surrendered, he was captured by the Romanian government. However, he resisted imprisonment along with 600 other prisoners and so escaped back to Germany.
He was accused of raping a 14-year-old girl. He was stripped of his doctorate, sent to trial and sentenced to two years in prison. But that didn’t stop him. When he was released from prison, he maintained his innocence. Thanks to a friend from the First World War, he joined the Waffen-SS as an officer. Oskar’s unit was based in Poland as part of the civil defence outside the concentration camps and consisted of soldiers, but also civilians who had criminal records or were known for their aggression and cruelty.Dirlewanger was a recruiter who made sure to bring as many people as possible into his party. So he began to use threats or even violence to force all sorts of people to join his unit. Worse, he treated people in camps and ghettos. He repeatedly abused them, kidnapped their children and demanded ransom. To amuse his soldiers, he tortured prisoners in concentration camps and injected women with strychnine, a neurotoxin that causes violent and painful death. He also entertained himself by killing hundreds of children at a time, but in order to save bullets he ordered soldiers to pierce children with bayonet rifles.
While his unit was in Russia, he burned women and children alive. Their remains were then thrown to starving dogs. It has also been reported that he dismembered Jewish women and then boiled their organs with horse meat to make soap. However, this has never been confirmed. But the height of his rampage came during the Warsaw Uprising. He and his troops tortured people and raped women. He killed more than 40,000 people during his rampage. He forced the members of his unit to remain silent.
Despite all the evil that Dirlewanger did, he was eventually rewarded for his service. Soon, however, rumours of his inhumanity began to circulate and Dirlewanger had to go into hiding. He was arrested on June 1, 1945. He was transported to a prison camp in France, where he died a few days later, allegedly of natural causes. However, few people believe this, and since everyone would have wished him a painful and long death, it is very likely that the French soldiers beat him to death as much as they could, or so the story goes. But there have also been theories that Dirlewanger is still alive. In 1960, however, the government ordered an exhumation to prove that this beast in human skin was indeed dead.
