The Nazi Brigade That Disturbed EVEN The SS Dirlewanger

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By spring 1940, Germany was dominant in Europe. With vast areas of Europe under occupation, it needed men to keep order and put down the lingering resistance groups in captured territory. Since the best men were already being sent to the front, the Reich looked elsewhere for men to fill the ranks of the occupation forces.

Hitler had the perfect candidates: poachers. Poachers were criminals who wouldn’t be called up for military service, but they were also fit, healthy, and had some skill with firearms. Hitler and Himmler had a romantic view of poachers as a sort of rugged Aryan warrior, untamed by society, and capable of mastering the wilds.

If the Nazis needed to hunt down rebels and partisans in the forests of occupied Europe, there were no better candidates.

The order went out in March 1940 and by June a selection of 80 convicted poachers were assembled in Oranienburg to begin training for a group that would be nicknamed the Black Hunters. This band of recruits ranged from regular men on the wrong side of the law, to more brutal criminals who just so happened to have been caught hunting on the wrong land.

But the character of the group would be determined by its leader: a singularly repulsive and evil man named Oskar Paul Dirlewanger.

Dirlewanger was a disgusting human even before joining the SS. A drunken sadist with a love of gambling and prostitution, he’d earned combat experience in the First World War but never left the violence behind at the front. After 1918, he joined the far-right Freikorps militia, where he was involved in violent put-downs of worker strikes and targeted harassment of minorities. Despite his propensity for violence, he was not a mindless thug; he held a doctorate in political science and ran a factory for several years. Dirlewanger was an early member of the Nazi Party, joining during its early days in Munich in 1923, and worked his way up the ranks over the next decade.

His career seemed to end in 1934 when he was caught and convicted on charges of pedophilia. His rank and doctorate were stripped, but his connections in the Nazi Party saved him from languishing in jail forever. His friend Gottlob Berger, a senior SS official and associate of Himmler, managed to get his sentence reduced and he was released in 1936.