Special punitive team SS Dirlewanger. The fate of the punishers from the Dirlewanger team (33 photos)

“Doctor Hertz, the team doctor, was in charge of the gas chamber and, in addition, provided medical assistance to the officers and translators. His duties also included the liquidation of Russian medical institutions and the killing of the patients contained there.
He was perhaps the most educated of all the officers of the team, subscribed books from Germany and received a patent for the invention of a black powder or black liquid, with which he smeared the lips of arrested children. Death occurred instantly in four cases out of ten - the drug required improvement ...

"Gazenvagen".

The Sonderkommando SD 10-a, being created back in Germany, was transferred to the Crimea in 1942, where it took an active part in the fight against the Crimean patriots, carrying out mass executions among the inhabitants of the Crimea.
A few days later, the team moved to Mariupol, then to the territory of the Rostov region, and later to the city of Rostov-on-Don.
Head of the Sonderkommando, Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) SS Christman Kurt, Dr. Personal translator Littikh Sasha.
CHRISTMAN KURT. Doctor. He was born on June 1, 1907 in Munich. Member of the NSDAP since May 1, 1933, party card No. 3203599. Personal No. SS - 103057. Obersturmbannfuehrer.
March 12, 1931 - passed the 1st legal exam.
20.4.1034 - passed the 2nd legal exam with honors.
SERVICE
21.4.1934-14.11.1937 - Main Directorate of Imperial Security. Referent for the press and Marxism.
11/15/1937-6/16/1938 - Main Directorate of Imperial Security. senior referent.
17.6.1938-1.12.1939 - Gestapo in Munich. Investigator.
12/1/1939-1942 - Gestapo of the city of Salzburg. Head of the Gestapo.
1942-1943 - Active army. CHIEF OF SS SONDERKOMANDA 10-A.
1943-1944 - Gestapo of Klafenfurt. Head of the Gestapo.
1944-1945 - Gestapo of Koblenz. Head of the Gestapo.
The USSR was wanted on the list of war criminals as the organizer of mass executions in the cities of Taganrog, Krasnodar, Yeysk, Novorossiysk, Mozyr, and also in connection with the mass extermination of prisoners.

Kurt Christman.

After the end of the war, Christman managed to escape and go to Argentina. In 1956 he returned to West Germany, where he worked as a real estate agent and was engaged in operations with land plots, houses and apartments. His brokerage office was located in a multi-storey building at the address: Munich, Stachus, Stützenstrasse 1.
In 1977, the German authorities began a trial against him, which was suspended due to the defendant's poor health.
On November 13, 1979, he was arrested by the police in Munich on charges of participating in the murder of 105 people in the Krasnodar region in 1942-43.
In 1980, during a trial that took place in Munich, it was proved that Christmann used gas trucks in Krasnodar.
At the trial, materials from another court, which took place 37 years ago in Krasnodar from July 14 to July 17, 1943, were also used as evidence. The case was then considered by the Soviet military tribunal of the North Caucasian Front.
In court, his guilt was proven in the murders in Krasnodar of arrested partisans, their accomplices (including two children), as well as civilians through "gas chambers"; arrest of about 60 partisans, their accomplices and communists in vil. Maryanskaya, and the execution of some of those arrested near the Kuban River. On December 19, 1980, a Munich court found him guilty and sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

Command of the Sonderkommando 10-a in Krasnodar. In the center e- Kurt Christman. 1942

Sonderkommando 10-a returns from a punitive operation. Belarus, Mozyr district. 1943

From the indictment in the case of Skripkin, Eskov, Sukhov and others.

"The Office of the State Security Committee under the Council of Ministers of the USSR for the Krasnodar Territory for active punitive activities and personal participation in the mass destruction of the civilian population arrested the former SS men of the Nazi punitive body" Sonderkommando SS 10-a ":
VEIKH Alois Karlovich, aka Alexander Khristianovich, SKRIPKIN Valentin Mikhailovich, ESKOV Mikhail Trofimovich, SUKHOV Andrei Ustinovich, SURGULADZE Valerian Davydovich, ZHIRUKHIN Nikolay Pavlovich, BUGLAK Emelyan Andreevich, DZAMPAEV Uruzbek Tatarkanovich and PSAREV Nikolai Stepanovich.

Certificate of militiamen attached to the Sonderkommando 10-a.

They told about Skripkin in Taganrog "This is ours, Taganrog". He was well known in the city: a conspicuous figure - lanky, with sharp shoulders, deeply sunken eyes, a hoarse voice. And the surname is sticky, a little funny - Skripkin.
Before the war, he was a football player, he even had his own fans, then they said: "Skripkin - this one will score!", "Gives Skripkin!" And then, already under the Germans, they suddenly saw Skripkin on the street with a policeman's bandage and gasped: that's Skripkin, center forward!
Skripkin: "I arrived in Rostov in July 1942, together with Fedorov - a platoon commander. The first Russian traitor I met in the courtyard of the Sonderkommando was Psareva. Then, during the execution, we stood next to him."
From the Taganrog police, Skripkin ended up in Rostov, in the Sonderkommando. He was tempted to this by a friend - Fedorov, an artist of the cinema "Rot Front", he appointed Skripkin as his assistant (Fedorov was a platoon commander in the Sonderkommando).
With the Germans, with the Gestapo, Skripkin went all the way: he was in Rostov, in Novorossiysk, in Krasnodar, in Nikolaev, in Odessa, then in Romania, in Galati, in Katowice, in Dresden, in Alsace-Lorraine.
He shot, buried, escorted prisoners to Buchenwald, in Nikolaev he served as a guard in the Gestapo prison, and finally, guarded the Hungarians, Poles and Italians near Berlin, in the international penal camp.
For the first time in the "mass execution" Skripkin participated in Rostov - there, on August 10, 1942, the Germans pasted the "Appeal to the Jewish population of the city of Rostov" on the houses.

"Feats" of the Sonderkommando 10 in Moldova.

Fedorov's platoon was ordered to go on an operation. A German officer appeared, explained through an interpreter: to get on the buses. The interpreter was in German uniform, but without shoulder straps, the local German - "Volksdeutsche". The fact that he was a "Deutsche" made him two heads taller than all the rest of the Fedorov platoon, he belonged to the elite.
Skripkin with a rifle climbed into the back; what kind of operation, he did not yet know, he only thought: maybe the prisoners were being taken to escort or to a round-up. We drove through the whole city, to the distant outskirts.
Ten kilometers from Rostov, the cars stopped, and Fedorov commanded: "Get out!" Skripkin got out, looked around - in the distance he could see the railway, station buildings, houses.
Nearby was a deep sand pit. Near this quarry they were placed in a semicircle - the German officer commanded, the translator translated, and Skripkin then guessed what was the matter. Soon, from the direction of Rostov, the first car covered with a tarpaulin appeared. She stopped near the quarry. People with suitcases got out of the car...
In the evening, Fedorov dragged Skripkin to the warehouse, where the belongings of the dead lay. The junk was not god knows what - Skripkin was expecting more - yet they slowly, so that the Germans would not notice, each chose a double-breasted suit for himself, and Skripkin also got children's undershirts.
Arriving at the barracks, they drank - vodka was supposed to be after the "operation" - and Skripkin remembered the house, imagined how delighted his wife would be when she received a package from him, and his heart warmed up.
So murder became his profession. For three years in a row he shot, hung, pushed into gas chambers - a lanky man in leggings and a gray jacket. And since he killed, and since he already had such a service, he wanted it not for "you live great", not for nothing, but to at least make something out of this job.

Emblem of Sonderkommando 10-a, "Ten of Hearts".

The defendants are policemen from Sonderkommando 10-a.

Handwritten testimony of Eskov Mikhail Trofimovich (Excerpts)

“I saw it for the first time so close, so I lost my temper, threw the earth with a shovel, but did not see where it was flying. It seemed to the Germans that we were working slowly, they kept shouting: “Schnel, schnel!”
After the corpses were covered with earth, we sat down to rest, Dr. Hertz joked, laughed (as if it were ordinary earthwork).
As soon as Hans opened the door of the gas chamber, and the translator ordered everyone to undress, we were also given the command to come closer. Two of the pedestrians stood on both sides of the gas chamber, guarding the EXIT to the courtyard, and I and three others began to force the arrested to undress faster.
They have already understood their verdict. Some resisted, they had to be pushed by force, others could not undress - then we tore off their clothes and pushed them into the gas chamber. Many cursed us and spat in our faces. But no one asked for mercy.
Dr. Hertz at that time stood on a dais and, with a satisfied smile, enjoyed the terrible picture of destruction. Sometimes he said something to the interpreter and laughed out loud.

When all the arrested were placed in the gas chamber, Hans slammed the hermetic door, connected the hose to the body and turned on the engine. Dr. Hertz got into the cab. The engine roared, drowning out the barely audible knocks and screams of the dying, and the car drove out of the yard.
We - all six people - got into the second car, which was standing right there. The interpreter got into the cab and went for the gas chamber. The cars drove along the main street, towards the grove, into the vineyards.
Having reached the anti-tank ditch, the driver drove the gas chamber back to the ditch and opened the door. Dr. Hertz was tormented by impatience, he constantly looked into the gas chamber, and - the gas was not yet completely out - he ordered the corpses to be thrown out.
One of ours began to push the corpses to the door, two - by the legs, by the hands, at random - threw the bodies, blue and soiled with feces, into the pit. They fell on top of each other, and when they fell, they made some kind of characteristic, groaning sound, and it seemed that the earth itself groaned, accepting unfortunate victims.
In doing this terrible work, we were in a hurry, urging each other on. Doctor Hertz sometimes held us back. He carefully examined the victims. After that, we washed our hands, got into our car and went on a flight for the second batch ... "

L.V. Ginzburg "Abyss".

BIRKAMP Walter, b. 17. 12. 1901 - in Hamburg. 1942 - Active army, Eastern Front. Head of Einsatzgruppe "D", police and SS general.

BIRKAMP Walter, died in 1945 in Scharbeutz and was buried in Timmerdorferstrandt. The fact of his death is registered in the register of the dead at the Civil Status Office in Gleschendorf.
General Birkamp was in charge of Rostov, and Taganrog, and Yeysk, and Krasnodar. We also found an order that the headquarters of the 11th Army sent to General Birkamp, ​​- a request to end the "mass action" by Christmas, so as not to overshadow the holiday, "to speed up the action, we put gasoline, trucks and human personnel at your disposal."
Birkamp: "As documented, I took over as head of Einsatzgruppe D in June 1942, succeeding General Otto Ohlendorf in this post. Thus, by the time I arrived on the Eastern Front, the main actions in the zone of operations of my group were finished.
I affirm that I knew nothing about such crimes as the murder of the elderly and large families in Taganrog or the destruction of sick children in Yeysk (by the way, please note that in October 1942, when the Yeysk operation was carried out, I was being treated in hospital)".

The execution of some members of the Sonderkommando 10-a in 1943.

Many materials about the history of the Third Reich are still of interest to modern society. Documentary channels show many programs about German warplanes and tanks, about huge battles that took place during the Second World War. Less thoroughly explored is the dark side of the Nazi regime and its war machine - or, to be more honest, the true essence of the war machine that the Nazis led.

Adolf Hitler often tried many unconventional approaches during the war. In March 1940, shortly before the German invasion of France, Hitler decided to form a combat squad of convicted poachers under the command of a tough combat officer. Yes, from poachers - that is, those people who were convicted of illegally hunting animals. Allegedly, Hitler believed that the habit of taking risks would give these men a great advantage in combat. As for their commander, SS leader Heinrich Himmlerum knew only one person capable of up to the task: Oskar Dirlewanger.

Who was Oscar Dirlewanger?

Oskar Dirlewanger served in the German army during World War I. Apparently, he served in good faith: Dirlewanger was twice awarded the Iron Cross and wounded six times. In certain circles, he gained notoriety when, after the surrender of Germany, he managed to withdraw his hard-pressed detachment of 600 people from Romania to Germany. After the war, he joined the Freikorps, an organization of right-wing militants whose detachments existed for some time in post-war Germany. There he made contact with the nascent Nazi Party, but his personal life was in complete disarray. A serious addiction to alcohol often ended in violent acts, as a result of which Dirlewanger had problems with the police. He was several times in concentration camps for his addiction to sex with underage girls (not only persecuted minorities were kept in the camps, but also ordinary criminals). But he managed to earn a justification in the eyes of the Nazis by taking part in the Spanish Civil War (where he was wounded three times), so after the outbreak of World War II, despite his criminal record, he was allowed to join the ranks of the Waffen SS - and just in time to lead a new squad of poachers.

Dirlewanger and his men go to war

During training, the unit was quickly named after its commander: Sonderkommando Dirlewanger. Later, after repeated replenishment, the detachment grew and received the name that still causes disgust in everyone: the Dirlewanger Brigade. This name will forever be associated with massacres, torture, rape, robbery and all the most unimaginable war crimes.

Initially, the Dirlewanger brigade was deployed in occupied Poland in August 1940, when a little less than a year had passed after the occupation of this country. Their task was to put down the petty uprisings that sometimes occurred during the Nazi occupation. However, Dirlewanger and his men used their punitive raids as an opportunity to engage in mass crime. The brigade consisted partly of criminals convicted of extortion, theft and corruption, partly of soldiers who, as a result of "temporary insanity", arbitrarily shot many civilians, and partly of freed psychopaths guilty of sexual crimes, torture and drunken brawls. At night, visitors to the barracks could easily stumble upon mountains of looted property, soldiers drunk on duty, hear the screams of women and children being raped, or prisoners being tortured just for fun.

Many, if not most, of Dirlewanger's men were arrested for their crimes. In the early years of the war, German military lawyers found themselves in a somewhat confusing situation: there were still laws against the killing of civilians, drunkenness in the line of duty, theft of private property, and many other crimes committed by Dirlewanger's people. Dirlewanger himself kept a Jewish woman as a sex slave, while sex between Germans and Jews was forbidden. The behavior of these people disgusted the German authorities - even the local SS and Gestapo were furious. In the end, the commander of the SS troops in the region threatened that if the brigade was not transferred, he would order the troops to cordon off its barracks. And the brigade was sent further east, to Belarus.

Special status of Dirlewanger

Dirlewanger's story was unusual in many ways. First of all, a criminal record should have blocked his path to the ranks of the SS, but this did not happen. In addition, as a commander, he received special permission from Heinrich Himmler to personally punish his people, up to and including execution. This was an unheard of privilege for an officer in the German army; usually the soldier had the right to punish only the court, as in any other army. In the entire multi-million Wehrmacht, only Dirlewanger had such powers, and he disposed of them in his own way: recruits - and these were convicted criminals, and sometimes even political prisoners, but not volunteers - often received severe injuries at the hands of their commander or his entourage. It was in this way that Dirlewanger preferred to show his displeasure.

But, despite his absolute power, Dirlewanger, paradoxically, was very close to his people. He had a habit of using informal language and addressing soldiers by their first names, which was highly unusual for a German officer. He drank with them, raped and killed with them, he acted as if he were one of them. He arranged wrestling matches with them, as he believed that he should be in much better shape than most officers of his rank. His calmness under fire and his almost uncanny closeness to his subordinates caused him to be nicknamed "Gandhi" by the unbelievably ironic nickname among his own men.

Blood and murder

After Poland, the Dirlewanger Brigade was sent to occupied Belarus, where it continued its anti-partisan operations. Such methods of warfare were used as the creation of barriers from women and children who were supposed to walk in front of the advancing soldiers through a minefield. Dirlewanger's soldiers could enter the village, lock all the inhabitants in the barn and set it on fire, and then shoot anyone who tried to escape. And, as always, rapes, murders, robberies and pogroms - all this was in the order of things.

The brigade earned a particularly sad glory during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. With the approach of the Red Army, the Poles decided to take control of the capital, but Hitler ordered the brutal suppression of the uprising. The Dirlewanger brigade was to lead the operation.

The stories about her activities in Warsaw are innumerable. To take just one example, when a German officer was blocked by several Poles in a high-rise building. Later, this officer reported that when the Dirlewanger Brigade arrived, its fighters fearlessly stormed the building. He ended his report by describing how the rebels flew out of the window of the building.

Of course, they wouldn't be the Dirlewanger Brigade if they didn't commit horrific atrocities. Many years later, in the early 1960s, a former member of the gang appeared before the judges. Perhaps he had trouble sleeping. In any case, he described numerous war crimes, including one incident in which a member of the squad, apparently drunk, raped a girl right on the street, and then pulled out his knife and cut her stomach from groin to throat, leaving her to die. In another episode, they took over the kindergarten, small children raised their little hands up to show that they were giving up. Dirlewanger ordered his men to kill them all - but in order to save ammunition, kill the children with bayonets and rifle butts. This nightmare was called the "Volskaya massacre", during which about 500 small children were killed. And this is just one of hundreds, even thousands of stories associated with this detachment.

The Warsaw Uprising was, in fact, the last episode in the life of the brigade. Shortly thereafter, Dirlewanger himself was wounded again - for the twelfth time - and this time the wound was so serious that he could not return to his brigade. By the end of the war, the brigade had grown to the size of a division, with about 7,000 men. But soon, in the spring of 1945, almost all of them were destroyed after being surrounded by Soviet troops during the Battle of the Elbe. Only a few hundred of the brigade survived the war.

As for Dirlewanger himself, he was captured alive by French soldiers. However, he died in custody shortly thereafter. Officially from natural causes, but rumors have long circulated that he was beaten to death by vengeful Polish soldiers.

Thus ended the story of one of the most brutal military formations in world history. How many people did they kill? It's hard to know. Of course, tens of thousands. The so-called "Einsatzgruppen" acted even worse, which, pursuing a policy of genocide, killed more than a million civilians in the occupied territory of the USSR. Incredibly, no member of the Dirlewanger Brigade was ever charged with war crimes, yet their reputation continues to serve as an edifying example of the true nature of the NSDAP and its leader.

The word "Sonderkommando" in pure translation from German means "separate unit", "special unit" - this is its true meaning in the context. Quite the usual army terminology, theoretically existing in the armed forces of all German-speaking states to this day. Basically a harmless wording. But at the mention of this name, somehow by itself, most of us first of all have an association with the dark events of the Second World War. In the German army of that period, a huge number of special forces or groups of the most diverse purposes existed and were formed to carry out various operations, and most of them also bore the name “Sonderkommando”, but nevertheless, under this concept, punitive detachments, which acted with terrifying cruelty, most of all recorded under this concept in history. , as a rule, behind the front line in the occupied territories. The main tasks of such units were counter-guerrilla actions, suppression of the insurgent movement and intimidation of the local population, and the implementation of the then Nazi policy of genocide.

Without a doubt, the most famous and most successful armed formation in this field was the SS Sonderkommando under the command of Oskar Dirlewanger, which over time grew from the size of an army battalion into a regiment, and then into an entire SS division, named after its permanent commander. Wherever the people of Dirlewanger appeared, everywhere they left behind them horror, death and rivers of spilled blood, striking with their cruelty even experienced front-line soldiers with the strongest nerves.

It was on the basis of the actions of such formations that the SS were wholly recognized at the end of the war as a criminal organization, without division into ideological, punitive, police or purely military units.

Who were these people in military uniform and with weapons in their hands, whose deeds even today, more than half a century later, we still talk about with a shudder? What prompted them to do what they did? Were they Nazi fanatics or, conversely, victims of the regime? There is information that punitive detachments were often made up of concentration camp prisoners or captured army deserters, obliged to atone for their own crimes with blood or simply forced to do so, is this true? Is it possible to evaluate the operations they carried out from a purely military-operational point of view? What explained the phenomenal success of this unit in fulfilling its tasks? Is it even possible to consider such a formation as the Sonderkommando Dirlewanger as a military part in the full sense of this definition?

It is not surprising that, in contrast to the huge amount of archival material about the actions of various parts of the Wehrmacht and the SS throughout the Second World War, there are very few documents on the operations of punitive detachments, and almost nothing has been preserved about the Dirlewanger special unit - there was nothing special to be proud of before descendants , and the Nazis tried to destroy everything possible against the backdrop of the end of the regime. Nevertheless, thanks to truly German pedantry and immortal paper bureaucracy, in the depths of the military archives of East and West, one can still find a certain amount of both directly related to the case and indirect documentation, one way or another shedding light on this little-studied topic: reports on some operations , requirements for commissariats, departmental correspondence and documents from other military units that mention the actions of the Sonderkommando, etc. It is on these data, as well as on the very few existing publications, that my attempt to shed some light on this dark and little-known chapter in the history of the Second world war, as well as, to the extent possible, impartially analyze the successes and failures of the combat use of the Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" in the performance of tactical tasks and operations in various zones of military operations behind the front line and at the forefront.

Germany - 1940. Offenders

Probably, you need to start with the fact that from the very beginnings of its existence, the Sonderkommando was already conceived as a penal formation. Now all attempts to guess for what purpose this unit was originally created would be pure speculation, but the fact that penal companies and battalions in all armies of the world and at all times were created to perform the most “dirty work”, and not to participate in parades in front of the lenses of photojournalists and cameramen - this is a naked fact that does not require confirmation. The history of the Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" began in the same way. But the most remarkable is the fact that, unlike the great many military penal units created on the basis of regiments or divisions and, of course, subordinate to them, the decision to create this particular unit arose right at the “very top” of the Third Reich, and all the time of its existence, the Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" was in fact directly subordinate to the central apparatus of the SS, and not to the military command in the field. From this it can already be concluded that the future use of the Sonderkommando had to be very specific.

From the testimony of SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger at the Nuremberg Tribunal:

“... The Dirlewanger brigade arose thanks to the decision of Adolf Hitler, which was made back in 1940 during the Western campaign. Once, Himmler called me to his place and said that Hitler ordered to find and gather all the people who were serving a sentence for poaching with firearms at that moment, and make them into a special military unit ... "

It was rather strange that the vegetarian Hitler, who despised hunting and, in general, what was widely known, did not like the hunters themselves, suddenly became interested in armed poachers, but Berger explains it this way:

“... Shortly before that, he received a letter from a woman whose husband was the so-called “Old Party Comrade”. This man was hunting deer illegally in the National Forests and was caught right at the scene of the crime. At that moment, the man was already in places of detention, and his wife asked the Fuhrer to give him the opportunity to make amends by distinguishing himself at the front ... This was the impetus ... "

SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger

“…according to these orders, I got in touch with the chief of the Imperial Criminal Police Nebe, and we agreed that by the end of the summer all suitable candidates would be selected and sent to the barracks in Oranienburg…”

The first officially recorded mention in the archives of the possibility of creating a new special unit from convicted poachers actually appears even before the start of active hostilities in the West.

On March 23, 1940, the adjutant of Reichsführer SS Himmler, SS Gruppenführer Karl Wolf, telephoned the adviser to the Reich Minister of Justice and informed him that the Fuhrer had decided to grant amnesty to some convicted poachers in order to send them later to atone for their guilt at the front, adding also that the letter, confirming this decision, the Reichsfuehrer will personally sign and send it on the next day. The adviser, one Sommer, made a note of the conversation in his desk journal and passed the information received above, namely to the ministerial secretary, a staunch Nazi, for whom every word of the Fuhrer was law, Dr. Roland Freisler. Freisler set to work so diligently that the search and selection of people convicted of poaching actually began even before the ministry received Himmler's official letter. It came only a week later, on March 30, 1940. In the document, the Reichsfuhrer emphasized Hitler's personal interest in this action, and also clarified some specific details: firstly, only people engaged in poaching with firearms could fall under the amnesty program, and secondly, preference was given to convicts from Austria and Bavaria. A little later, another clarification appeared - only real “professionals” recidivists deserved attention, and not beginners or just people arrested by chance when trying to hunt without permission. According to the first assumptions, it was decided to form a special sniper brigade from the poachers selected in this way. And since the initiative actually came from the apparatus of the Reichsführer, it was quite natural that the formation of a new unit already fell under the auspices of the SS. In this regard, many questions immediately arose: for example, how to include prisoners in the selection program of the SS, proclaimed as the elite of the elite of the nation, or whether to take into account the terms of imprisonment of each specific candidate? other offenses, etc.

What happened to the officers and soldiers from the punitive battalion, then the brigade, and then the SS division Dirlewanger?

Fritz Schmedes and commander of the 72nd SS Regiment Erich Buchmann survived the war and later lived in West Germany. Another regiment commander, Ewald Ehlers, did not live to see the end of the war. According to Karl Gerber, Ehlers, who was distinguished by incredible cruelty, was hanged by his own subordinates on May 25, 1945, when his group was in the Halb cauldron.
Gerber heard the story of the execution of Ehlers while walking under escort with other SS men to the Soviet prisoner of war camp in Sagan.
It is not known how the head of the operations department, Kurt Weisse, ended his life. Shortly before the end of the war, he changed into the uniform of a corporal of the Wehrmacht and mingled with the soldiers. As a result, he ended up in British captivity, from where he made a successful escape on March 5, 1946. After that, traces of Weisse are lost, his whereabouts have never been established.

To this day, there is an opinion that a significant part of the 36th SS division was, in the words of the French researcher J. Bernage, "brutally destroyed by Soviet troops." Of course, there were facts of the execution of SS men by Soviet soldiers, but not all of them were executed.
According to the French specialist K. Ingrao, 634 people who previously served with Dirlewanger managed to survive the Soviet prisoner of war camps and return to their homeland at different times.
However, speaking of Dirlewanger's subordinates who were in Soviet captivity, one should not forget that more than half of those 634 people who managed to return home were members of the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, who fell into the SS assault brigade in November 1944 G.

Fritz Schmedes.

Their fate was hard. 480 people who defected to the side of the Red Army were never released. They were placed in prisoner camp No. 176 in Focsani (Romania).
Then they were sent to the territory of the Soviet Union - to camps No. 280/2, No. 280/3, No. 280/7, No. 280/18 near Stalino (today Donetsk), where they, divided into groups, were engaged in coal mining in Makeevka , Gorlovka, Kramatorsk, Voroshilovsk, Sverdlovsk and Kadievka.
Of course, some of them died from various diseases. The process of returning home began only in 1946 and continued until the mid-1950s.

A certain part of the penalty box (groups of 10-20 people) ended up in the camps of Molotov (Perm), Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg), Ryazan, Tula and Krasnogorsk.
Another 125 people, mostly communists, worked in the Boksitogorsk camp near Tikhvin (200 km east of Leningrad). The bodies of the MTB checked every communist, someone was released earlier, someone later.
About 20 former members of the Dirlewanger formation subsequently participated in the creation of the Ministry of State Security of the GDR ("Stasi").
And some, like Alfred Neumann, a former convict of the Dublovic SS penal camp, managed to make a political career. He was a member of the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, headed the Ministry of Logistics for several years, and was also Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers.
Subsequently, Neumann said that the communist penitentiaries were under special supervision, they did not have the status of prisoners of war until a certain point, since for some time they were considered persons involved in punitive actions.

The fate of convicted members of the SS, the Wehrmacht, criminals and homosexuals who were captured by the Red Army was in many ways similar to the fate of the communist penitentiaries, but before they could be perceived as prisoners of war, the competent authorities worked with them, seeking to find war criminals among them.
Some of those who were lucky enough to survive, after returning to West Germany, were again taken into custody, including 11 criminals who did not serve their sentences to the end.

As for the traitors from the USSR who served in a special SS battalion, an investigation group was created in 1947 to search for them, headed by the MTB investigator for especially important cases, Major Sergei Panin.
The investigation team worked for 14 years. The result of her work was 72 volumes of the criminal case. On December 13, 1960, the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the Byelorussian SSR initiated a criminal case on the facts of atrocities committed by punishers of a special SS battalion under the command of Dirlewanger in the temporarily occupied territory of Belarus.
In this case, in December 1960 - May 1961, KGB officers arrested and prosecuted former SS men A.S. Stopchenko, I.S. Pugachev, V.A. Yalynsky, F.F. Grabarovsky, I. E. Tupigu, G. A. Kirienko, V. R. Zaivy, A. E. Radkovsky, M. V. Maidanov, L. A. Sakhno, P. A. Umanets, M. A. Mironenkov and S. A. Shinkevich.
On October 13, 1961, the trial of collaborators began in Minsk. All of them were sentenced to death.

Of course, these were far from all the collaborators who served with Dirlewanger in 1942-1943. But the lives of some ended even before the mentioned process took place in Minsk.
For example, I. D. Melnichenko, who commanded the unit, after he fought in the partisan brigade named after. Chkalov, deserted at the end of the summer of 1944.
Until February 1945, Melnichenko hid in the Murmansk region, and then returned to Ukraine, where he traded in theft. From his hand, the representative of the Rokitnyansky RO NKVD Ronzhin died.
On July 11, 1945, Melnichenko confessed to the head of the Uzinsky RO NKVD. In August 1945 he was sent to the Chernihiv region, to the places where he had committed crimes.
During transportation by rail, Melnichenko escaped. On February 26, 1946, he was blocked by officers of the operational group of the Nosovsky District Department of the NKVD and shot dead during the arrest.

In 1960, the KGB summoned Pyotr Gavrilenko for interrogation as a witness. The state security officers did not yet know that he was the commander of the machine-gun squad that carried out the execution of the population in the village of Lesiny in May 1943.
Gavrilenko committed suicide - he jumped out of the window of the third floor of a hotel in Minsk, as a result of a deep emotional shock that occurred after he, together with the Chekists, visited the site of the former village.

The search for former subordinates of Dirlewanger continued further. Soviet justice also wanted to see the German penalty box in the dock.
Back in 1946, the head of the Belarusian delegation at the 1st session of the UN General Assembly handed over a list of 1200 criminals and their accomplices, including members of the special SS battalion, and demanded their extradition for punishment in accordance with Soviet laws.
But the Western powers did not extradite anyone. Subsequently, the Soviet state security agencies established that Heinrich Faiertag, Barchke, Toll, Kurt Weisse, Johann Zimmermann, Jakob Tad, Otto Laudbach, Willy Zinkad, Rene Ferderer, Alfred Zingebel, Herbert Dietz, Zemke and Weinhoefer.
The listed persons, according to Soviet documents, went to the West and were not punished.

In Germany, several trials took place, in which the crimes of the Dirlewanger battalion were considered. One of the first such trials, organized by the Central Office of Justice of the city of Ludwigsburg and the Hannover Prosecutor's Office, took place in 1960, and, among other things, it clarified the role of fines in the burning of the Belarusian village of Khatyn.
Insufficient documentary base did not allow bringing the perpetrators to justice. However, even later, in the 1970s, the judiciary made little progress in establishing the truth.
The Hanover prosecutor's office, which dealt with the Khatyn issue, even doubted whether it could be about the murder of the population. In September 1975, the case was transferred to the prosecutor's office of the city of Itzehoe (Schleswig-Holstein). But the search for the perpetrators of the tragedy turned out to be of little success. The testimony of Soviet witnesses did not help either. As a result, at the end of 1975, the case was closed.

Five trials against Heinz Reinefarth, commander of the SS task force and police in the Polish capital, also ended in vain.
The prosecutor's office of Flensburg tried to find out the details of the executions of civilians during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in August - September 1944.
Reinefart, who by that time had become a member of the Landtag of Schleswig-Holstein from the United Party of Germany, denied the participation of the SS in the crimes.
His words are known, spoken before the prosecutor, when the question touched on the activities of the Dirlewanger regiment on Volskaya Street:
"The one who on the morning of August 5, 1944 set out with 356 soldiers, by the evening of August 7, 1944, had about 40 people who fought for their lives.
The Steingauer battle group, which existed until August 7, 1944, could hardly carry out such executions. The fighting she fought in the streets was fierce and resulted in heavy casualties.
The same goes for the Mayer battle group. This group was also constrained by hostilities, so it is difficult to imagine that it was engaged in executions contrary to international law."

In view of the fact that new materials were discovered, published in the monograph of the historian from Lüneburg, Dr. Hans von Krannhals, the Flensburg prosecutor's office stopped the investigation.
Nevertheless, despite the new documents and the efforts of the prosecutor Birman, who resumed the investigation in this case, Reinefart was never brought to justice.
The former commander of the task force died quietly at his home in Westland on May 7, 1979. Almost 30 years later, in 2008, journalists from Spiegel, who prepared an article about the crimes of the special SS regiment in Warsaw, were forced to state the fact: "In Germany Until now, none of the commanders of this unit has paid for their crimes - neither officers, nor soldiers, nor those who were at one with them.

In 2008, journalists also learned that the collected materials on the formation of Dirlewanger, as prosecutor Joachim Riedl, deputy head of the Ludwigsburg Center for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, said in an interview, were either never transferred to the prosecutor's office or were not studied, although since 1988, when a new list of people put on the international wanted list was submitted to the UN, a lot of information accumulated in the Center.
As is now known, the administration of Ludwigsburg handed over the materials to the court of Baden-Württemberg, where an investigation team was formed.
As a result of the work, it was possible to find three people who served in the regiment during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. On April 17, 2009, GRK prosecutor Boguslav Chervinsky said that the Polish side requested assistance from the German colleagues in bringing these three individuals to justice, since there is no statute of limitations for crimes committed in Poland. But the German judiciary did not bring any charges against any of the three former penalty boxers.

The real participants in the crimes remain at large and quietly live out their lives. This, in particular, applies to an anonymous SS veteran interviewed by the historian Rolf Michaelis.
After spending no more than two years in the Nuremberg-Langwasser POW camp, the anonymous man was released and found a job in Regensburg.
In 1952 he became a school bus driver and later a tour bus driver and traveled regularly to Austria, Italy and Switzerland. Anonymous retired in 1985. The former poacher died in 2007.
For 60 post-war years, he was not brought to justice even once, although from his memoirs it follows that he took part in many punitive actions on the territory of Poland and Belarus and killed many people.

Over the years of its existence, the SS penalty box, according to the authors' calculations, killed about 60 thousand people. This figure, we emphasize, cannot be considered final, since not all documents on this issue have been studied yet.
The history of the formation of Dirlewanger, as in a mirror, reflected the most unattractive and monstrous pictures of the Second World War. This is an example of what people who are overcome by hatred and embark on the path of total cruelty can become, people who have lost their conscience, who do not want to think and bear any responsibility.

More about the band. Punishers and perverts. 1942 - 1985: http://oper-1974.livejournal.com/255035.html

Kalistros Thielecke (matricide), he killed his mother with 17 stab wounds and ended up in prison and then in the SS Sonderkommando Dirlewanger.

Karl Johheim, a member of the Black Front organization, was arrested in the early 30s and spent 11 years in prisons and concentration camps in Germany. He was amnestied in the fall of 1944 and, among the amnestied political prisoners, was sent to the brigade located at that time in Slovakia Dirlewanger. Survived the war.

Documents of 2 Ukrainians from Poltava Pyotr Lavrik and Kharkiv resident Nikolai Novosiletsky, who served with Dirlewanger.

Diary of Ivan Melnichenko, deputy commander of the Ukrainian company Dirlewanger. On this page of the diary we are talking about the anti-partisan operation "Franz", in which Melnichenko commanded a company.

"December 25.42, I left Mogilev, to Berezino metro station. I met the New Year well, I drank. After the New Year, there was a battle near the village of Terebolye, from my company, which commanded, Shvets was killed and Ratkovsky was wounded.
It was the most difficult battle, 20 people were wounded from the battalion. We retreated. After 3 days, Berezino station went to Chervensky district, cleared the forests to Osipovichi, the whole team plunged into Osipovichi and left ....."

Rostislav Muravyov, served as a Sturmführer in a Ukrainian company. He survived the war, lived in Kyiv and worked as a teacher at a construction college. Arrested and sentenced to CMN in 1970.

Dear German,

I just got back from surgery and found your letter dated November 16th. Yes, we must all suffer in this war; My deepest condolences to you on the death of your wife. We just have to keep living until better times.
News from Bamberg is always welcome. We have the latest news: our Dirlewanger was awarded the Knight's Cross in October there were no celebrations, the operations are too difficult, and there is no time for this.
The Slovaks are now openly allied with the Russians, and in every muddy village there is a nest of partisans. The forests and mountains in the Tatras have made the partisans a deadly danger to us.
We work with every newly arrived prisoner. Now I am in a village near Ipoliság. The Russians are very close. The reinforcements we have received are no good, and it would be better if they remained in the concentration camps.
Yesterday twelve of them went over to the Russian side, they were all old communists, it would be better if they were all hanged on the gallows. But there are still real heroes here.
Well, the enemy artillery opens fire again, and I must return. Warm regards from your brother-in-law.
Franz.

Fourth chapter

Russians in the special SS team "Dirlewanger"

Another formation of the SS, where Russian (and with them Belarusian and Ukrainian) collaborators served, was a special unit of the SS Troops of Oscar Dirlewanger. We must immediately make a reservation that we decided to place the story about this formation in the section relating to the SS troops, since the orders carried out by Dirlewanger's people did not always have a punitive value, but were also associated with combat missions, which later became their main activity . In addition, at the end of the war, the Dirlewanger connection became a full-fledged grenadier division of the SS Troops (36. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS).

At the same time, in order not to seem biased, we note that the personnel of this unit took part in the destruction of the civilian population and the burning of settlements and earned the worst reputation. Not least, this was due to the fact that many servicemen from this unit, created on the basis of the 5th regiment of SS units "Dead Head" in Oranienburg (Sachsenhausen concentration camp), had a criminal past (some were serving sentences for poaching), and officers the composition was recruited from those who were forbidden by the court of honor for various misconduct and disciplinary offenses to wear insignia until the end of their service.

To match his subordinate was Dirlewanger himself (born in 1895), who had a very turbulent past behind him. Veteran of World War I (reserve lieutenant), commandant of an armored train of a volunteer corps from Württemberg, doctor of economic sciences, but with all this, an anti-Semite, seen in sexual relations with underage girls (on September 22, 1934, he was expelled from the ranks of the Nazi Party Assault Squads and served two years in prison). If it were not for the intercession of his fellow soldier Gottlob Berger, who held the high post of head of the SS Main Directorate, Dirlewanger would most likely have ended his life in a concentration camp.

However, the criminal with a doctoral degree was lucky, and, having “redeemed himself” before the nation by participating in the Spanish Civil War (from September 1936 to the summer of 1939, Dirlewanger fought as part of the Condor Legion), he was rehabilitated to a certain extent, until he again fell into "history". Already the commander of a special SS team that arrived on September 1, 1940 under the command of the Fuhrer of the SS and the police of the Lublin district, SS Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, Dirlewanger was accused of corruption, extortion of money and sexual relations with a 17-year-old Jewish woman. The SS court in Krakow began to conduct an inquiry against him, but thanks to Berger, who intervened in the process, the case was pending at the SS Headquarters, where, by order of Himmler, it was postponed until better times. Dirlewanger himself, who had sat in the rear, was decided to be sent out of harm's way to the Eastern Front, and on January 22, 1942, having received an order, he left with a team for the occupied territory of Belarus.

The Dirlewanger unit (then still a special SS command - SS-Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger") arrived in Mogilev in early February 1942. Immediately the question arose to whom the unit would directly report. The Dirlewanger team was intended to be closed to the command headquarters of the Reichsfuhrer SS (Kommandostab Reichsfuhrer-SS), which was subordinate to three brigades of the SS troops (two motorized and one cavalry). But after a meeting with Himmler (February 27, 1942), Berger ensured that Dirlewanger's people obeyed mainly the High Fuhrer of the SS and Police of Central Russia, Erich von dem Bach-Zelevsky.

The unit began to carry out measures to combat partisans in March 1942. It is difficult to say for sure when volunteers appeared on the team. The Dirlewanger team, which had spent the entire spring in combat operations and suffered certain losses, needed replenishment. In part, this was already discussed in the April report of the colonel of the security police von Braunschweig addressed to the Reichsfuehrer SS. Von Braunschweig was very pleased with how the "poachers" acted, and asked the SS high command to increase the team's personnel to 250 people. Nevertheless, in Berlin they were in no hurry to draw conclusions, but continued to look closely at how Dirlewanger was fighting in Belarus.

Convinced that the special unit was effectively fighting the partisans, Himmler personally signed an order to send "poachers", "suitable" prisoners from concentration camps to the ranks. However, their arrival was delayed, because they had to undergo special training, and there was no time, as the Soviet partisan movement was gaining strength. Then Dirlewanger, having agreed with the leadership of the SS and the police of the general district "Belarus", decided to replenish the team with foreign volunteers. On May 28, 1942, an order was issued to transfer to his disposal personnel from one auxiliary police battalion - 49 privates and 11 non-commissioned officers. According to the documents, these people passed as Ukrainians, but it is known that many Russians served in the units and units of the auxiliary police, intended to perform security and anti-partisan functions.

According to some researchers, the “baptism of fire” of collaborators (their names are preserved: I.E. Tupiga, Mironenko, V.R. Zayviy, A.E. Radkovsky, L.A. Sakhno, Yalynsky) occurred on June 16, 1942, when the village of Borki was burned to the ground, where, according to Dirlewanger's report, the bandits who staged the attacks near the highway Mogilev - Bobruisk were sheltered. Then Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian assistants participated in the destruction of the villages of Kobylyanka, Khonovo, Nemki and 16 other settlements.

By the autumn of 1942, the Dirlewanger unit had grown to a battalion, although formally it remained a special SS command. The team included:

German company (150 people);

German motorcycle platoon (40 people);

3 Russian companies (450 people; one of the companies served mainly Ukrainians, and Ivan Melnichenko commanded them; another company, where Russians and Belarusians served, was commanded by Volksdeutsche August Barchke);

Artillery battery (40 people: half Germans, half Russians).

The age of German soldiers reached 40 years, Russian - up to 25.

It should be added that already in the second half of 1942, the Dirlewanger Sonderkommando was a special part of the SS of a mixed German-Russian composition, which was well known in Berlin. Moreover, the documents allow us to judge so much that the Russian volunteers were in many respects on an equal footing with the German criminals. Dirlewanger did not make exceptions for anyone, as the commander quite rightly believing that it was precisely such an order that he had established in the team that would make the personnel more monolithic, and his wards would act more smoothly during hostilities.

In mid-autumn 1942, the battalion was involved in anti-partisan operations. By order of the Command Headquarters of the Reichsführer SS, the unit was temporarily transferred to the 1st SS Motorized Brigade (1. SS-Infanterie-Brigade), with which it participated in the Karlsbad operation, which was held from October 10 to 23 in Kruglyansky , Tolochinsky, Orsha and Shklovsky districts of the Mogilev region. The team operated in conjunction with the 14th SS Police Regiment, the 255th Latvian Security Battalion, the 638th French Infantry Regiment, the High Führer SS Special Command and Police von dem Bach.

The purpose of the operation was to defeat the people's avengers (8th, 24th, 28th, 30th separate detachments) under the command of S.G. Zhunin (8th Kruglyanskaya brigade) and partisan unit "Chekist" (1st, 5th, 10th and 20th separate detachments). During the operation, the partisans suffered significant losses. Participants in those events after the war recalled that the detachments of the Chekist brigade “suffered serious losses. The commanders I.N. Suvorov and B.N. Kolyushnikov, commissar of the 20th detachment N.I. Massyurov, D.I. Radiance, secretary of the party organization of the detachment L.F. Nosovich, A.D. Voronkov ... This was noticeably reflected in the mood of the partisans ... "The picture was darkened by the fact that the SS men" burned the villages of Berezka, Goenka, Zaozerye, Kleva ... Soon the partisans learned another sad news - the commander of the detachment A.S. was killed. Denisov, who, with a group of partisans, was outside the blockade. His group stopped in the Ratsevo forest, not far from the village of Orekhovka. Punishers attacked her trail and surrounded the dugout at night. A fight broke out. The partisans died, including the commander ...

... The blockade of the Ratsevsky, and then the Krupsky forests, seriously affected the combat capability of the brigade ["Chekist". - Note. ed.]. Her losses were significant.

From November 4 to November 10, 1942, the Dirlewanger battalion participated in Operation Frida. Civilians were again destroyed, in addition, the SS killed over 130 "people's avengers". On November 11, the unit was withdrawn from the subordination of the 1st SS motorized brigade, after which it returned to Mogilev, simultaneously clearing several villages and villages in the Cherven region from the "bandits".

At the end of December, Dirlewanger, according to some historians, received leave for success in the fight against the "bandits" (from December 28, 1942 to February 20, 1943). The duties of the battalion commander began to be performed by SS Sturmbannführer Franz Maggil, an employee from the command headquarters of the Reichsführer SS. Maggil was an experienced officer, capable of performing tasks of a very different nature, both combat and punitive. Before he was assigned to the Reichsführer-SS Command Staff, he commanded the 2nd Cavalry Regiment of the 1st SS Cavalry Brigade. His regiment "became famous" for ruthlessly killing civilians (mostly Jews) during a punitive operation in the Pripyat marshes (late July - early September 1941). According to the most underestimated data, the Maggil regiment executed 6526 Jews. And now in his submission was one of the most brutal parts of the SS.

What was Maggil's attitude towards the collaborators is not known, but it is clear that he did not distinguish between foreign assistants and the German staff. The whole unit was involved in a series of special operations - "Franz" ("Franz"), "Harvest Festival" ("Erntefest"), "February" ("Hornung") - in early 1943. Maggil set a specific task for each unit, which was to turn their combat area into a no man's land: "All local residents are shot without exception." During the three operations, 18,975 civilians were killed, including 3,300 Jews. About 2,400 people were evacuated from the war zone and sent to forced labor.

The actions of the special SS team caused a mixed reaction from the High Fuhrer of the SS and the police von dem Bach. The representative of the Reichsfuehrer SS for the fight against banditry expressed the opinion that the elimination of partisans is not at all a reason to kill civilians. It's time, said von dem Bach, to "get down to business" - collecting agricultural products, recruiting teams from local residents to be sent to work in Germany. Dirlewanger, who returned to the unit at the end of February 1943, did not react to these words in any way. He still believed that the fight against the partisans not only involves the neutralization of the civilian population, but also is its basis, since the partisans receive help from the villages. Later, in July 1943, Dirlewanger had a conflict with SS Gruppenführer and Police Lieutenant General Gerret Korsemann (Von dem Bach's deputy; from April 24 to July 5, 1943, he acted as High Fuhrer of the SS and Police of Central Russia), who forbade the destruction of civilians residents.

Although Dirlewanger did not change his principles, his people had to deal with economic issues. As the researcher A. Bochkarev notes, the SS team not only collected agricultural products, but also controlled how the peasants restored agriculture. It even got to the point that the personnel of the team distributed agricultural machinery between the villages and gave out seeds for sowing campaigns.

On March 22, 1943, Dirlewanger's soldiers took part in the burning of Khatyn, and at first they did not play a leading role in this action. Events unfolded like this.

Early in the morning, the 118th police battalion received a message that the telephone connection had been damaged in the section between Pleschenitsy and Logoysk. A construction unit from Pleshchenitsy was sent to restore communications, as well as two platoons of the 1st company of the 118th battalion, led by the captain of the security police Wellke. At that moment, when restoration work was going on, suddenly, from a distance of 30 meters, fire was opened on the policemen. Captain Wellke and three Ukrainian policemen were immediately killed, two Schutzmanns were injured. Platoon commander Vasily Meleshko took charge of the battle. As a result of the skirmish, the partisans began to retreat eastward to Khatyn. The police tried to pursue them, but there were no forces to eliminate the "bandits". Meleshko, who was slightly injured, immediately sent an alarm message asking for help. While the police were waiting for support, they managed to detain a work team (about 40–50 people) from the Kozyri settlement. The team was chopping wood and clearing roadsides near the Pleschenitsy-Logoysk road. Suspecting the workers of links with the partisans, the police arrested the entire team, and 15 law enforcement officers took them to Pleschenitsy. On the way to Pleschenitsy, an incident occurred: the workers, thinking that they were being taken to be shot, panicked and rushed to run - this happened at the edge of the forest, outside the village of Guba. The police opened fire to kill, from 20 to 25 people were killed, the rest of the fugitives were captured by the field gendarmerie from Pleschenitsy and interrogated.

In the meantime, the alarm signal reached the location of the Dirlewanger battalion. Motorized SS companies were sent to help the police. Arriving at the place, the SS men, together with law enforcement officers, launched an offensive against the partisans who took up defense in Khatyn itself and on its outskirts. Having blockaded the village, the punishers began to "cleanse", pulling up heavy mortars and anti-tank guns for this purpose. The partisans put up fierce resistance, for an hour they fired back from the village houses, turned into firing points. The SS had no choice but to suppress the enemy with mortar and anti-tank fire. By 4:30 p.m., when the partisan resistance was broken and the punishers entered the village, Khatyn had already been turned into ruins, and therefore there was practically nothing to burn there. During the battle, 34 "bandits" were killed, including one Jewish woman. Since the villagers sheltered the partisans, allowed them to turn their houses into firing points, it was decided to burn the entire population.

The initiators of the burning were Ukrainian police officers from the 118th battalion, who considered that the locals were fanatical supporters of the Soviet regime and despised the Christian faith (one of the policemen, driving people into the barn, said: “You trampled on the icons and burn, now we will burn you”) and comprehensively help the partisans. As a result, in a barn 6 by 12 meters, the punishers burned about 152 people, among whom were children, women and the elderly, only four managed to survive.

In April 1943, on the eve of the visit to Minsk of the Commissioner General for the use of labor Friedrich Sauckel, the head of the SS and police of Belarus, Kurt von Gottberg, ordered a total check in the city, clearing it of partisans, underground fighters and other "bandit elements". To this end, from April 17 to April 22, an operation was carried out in Minsk under the code name “Magic Flute” (“Zauberflote”). To carry it out, parts of the police and the SS, including part of Dirlewanger, were pulled into the city. The task of the team was to guard the Minsk ghetto. Nevertheless, according to some reports, the battalion units participated in round-ups, searches and mass arrests of the urban population, in which they were actively assisted by Lithuanian police officers from the 12th “noise” battalion. During the operation, 76,000 people were checked (130,000 lived in Minsk at that time). Dozens of people were hanged for "illegal" actions and association with "bandits" (this was primarily done by the Lithuanian police under the command of Antanas Impulevicius). On April 23, after the end of the operation, a parade of its participants took place in Minsk (at 11 o'clock), which was received by the Higher Fuhrer of the SS and Police of Central Russia Bach-Zelevsky.

In early May, the SS battalion was engaged in clearing the Manila and Rudny forests from partisans, then - from May 20 to June 21, 1943 - a unit was involved in the large-scale Kottbus action. The police and SS authorities of the General Commissariat "Belarus" have been preparing this operation for a long time. It was preceded by the collection of intelligence information. According to the data of the SD and the Gestapo, in the region of Khrost - Pleschenitsy - Dokshitsy - Lepel, the presence of large "gangs" with well-equipped fortifications was noted. In addition, SS intelligence found that the area was heavily mined. The main goal of the operation was to regain control over the Minsk-Vitebsk road and clear the area in the Pleschenitsa-Dokshitsy-Lepel triangle from partisans.

In addition to the Dirlewanger battalion, the 2nd SS police regiment, the 15th, 102nd, 118th and 237th auxiliary police battalions, the 600th Cossack battalion, the 633rd "eastern" battalion, 1st and 12th police tank companies, one battalion of the 331st grenadier regiment, four companies of the 392nd main military commandant's office with a battery, a platoon of anti-tank weapons and a platoon of heavy mortars, a reinforced company of the 286th security division, 2nd division 213 1st artillery regiment, three motorized field gendarmerie platoons, special SD teams, aircraft of the 4th group of the bomber squadron and the 7th special purpose squadron. The operation was led by a headquarters headed by SS Gruppenführer and Police Lieutenant General von Gottberg.

Domestic and Western historians have different opinions about how the Cottbus operation was conducted and how it ended. It is believed that the partisans inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, did not allow themselves to be destroyed and, thus, thwarted the plans of the Germans. So, the "people's avengers" allegedly managed to defeat the 600th Cossack battalion, and also almost completely exterminate about two battalions of the 2nd SS police regiment. At the same time, given the numerical superiority of the enemy, the partisans had to leave their bases, break out of the encirclement and evade pursuit. This is how the picture looks in partisan documents, where, on top of everything else, there are underestimated data on losses (no more than 500 fighters).

In German documents, on the contrary, everything looks different. The report (dated July 28, 1943) on the results of Operation Cottbus, drawn up by Gottberg, states the following:

“Enemy losses: 6087 people were killed in battles, 3709 were shot, 599 were captured. Manpower was captured - 4997 people, women - 1056. Own losses: Germans - 5 officers were killed, including the battalion commander, 83 non-commissioned officers and privates. 11 officers were wounded, including two regiment commanders, 374 non-commissioned officers and privates, three were missing. Trophies: 20 guns of caliber 7.62, 9 anti-tank guns, 1 anti-aircraft gun, 18 mortars, 30 heavy machine guns, 31 light machine guns. One aircraft (destroyed), 50 gliders (destroyed), 16 anti-tank rifles, 903 rifles…”

A number of scholars dispute these figures, arguing that the Germans could not have killed so many partisans. Basically, according to these historians, we are talking about civilians who were brutally killed and tortured by punishers, in particular the people of Dirlewanger. However, despite the facts of brutal massacres that took place during the operation "Cottbus", in general there is no reason to doubt the report of von Gottberg. Moreover, the victims of this operation among the civilian population are placed in a separate column. Given the German pedantry in compiling documents of this kind, it is unlikely that von Gottberg wanted to deliberately mislead the top leadership of the SS.

Following Operation Cottbus, part of Dirlewanger (which by that time had already officially become known as the special SS battalion - SS-Sonderbataillon "Dirlewanger") participated in the "German" action - from July 3 to August 30, 1943. The operation was carried out against partisans operating in the Baranovichi district, in the area of ​​Nalibokskaya Pushcha, along the Volozhin-Stolbtsy line. The forces of the 1st SS motorized brigade, the 2nd SS police regiment, the 30th police battalion, three separate SS battalions (Kerner group), the 15th, 115th, 57th and 118th auxiliary police battalions, the gendarmerie group of Kraikombom consisting of three teams. The total number of punitive units - according to the estimates of the partisans - reached 52 thousand people.

From the first days of the operation, a special SS battalion got bogged down in battles with partisans, but several of its units were engaged in the destruction of the civilian population. Having suffered minor losses, the unit withdrew from the fighting and was sent for reorganization. The fact is that by the end of the summer of 1943, over a thousand soldiers and officers were subordinate to Dirlewanger, so in September 1943 the battalion was deployed into a regiment - SS-Regiment "Dirlewanger".

It should be emphasized that, having withstood the blows of the Germans during Operation German, the leadership of the partisan brigades sent a message to the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement (TSSHPD) about the fight between the partisans and the punitive expedition. The secretary of the Baranovichi Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Chernyshev, who took upon himself the coordination of the actions of the "people's avengers", noted in a message that "in the first days of the fighting ... the partisans killed the executioner known to the population of Belarus from the beginning of the war, lieutenant colonel of the SS troops Dirlewanger and captured the entire plan of the operation » . Chernyshev also stated that the partisans killed and wounded over 3 thousand Germans, destroyed a lot of enemy equipment and captured a lot of trophies. However, German documents, more reliable in this case, refute Chernyshev's victorious reports. Firstly, the total losses of the Germans and their allies were 205 killed, wounded and missing, and secondly, Dirlewanger, unfortunately, was not killed by the partisans, since in September he became the commander of an SS regiment.

According to documents, from March 1942 to August 1943, Dirlewanger's soldiers liquidated 15,000 "bandits" (civilians and partisans), the unit's own losses amounted to 92 people killed, 218 wounded and 8 missing. Soviet researchers claimed that in the two years of their activity, the SS men under the command of Dirlewanger destroyed more than 100 settlements in the territory of Minsk, Mogilev, Vitebsk regions, and also shot and burned alive about 20 thousand people.

In the future, the Dirlewanger regiment was also involved in punitive operations, the most recent of which was the "Spring Holiday" ("Fruhlingsfest") action. Then the regiment was withdrawn to the General Government, where in August 1944 the unit was engaged in suppressing the uprising in Warsaw, for which Dirlewanger was awarded the Knight's Cross.

As a result of the disbandment of the 29th SS Grenadier Division (No. 1st Russian), in October 1944, the 72nd and 73rd SS Grenadier Regiments were transferred to Dirlewanger, where mostly Russian and Belarusian volunteers served. On December 19, 1944, the Dirlewanger regiment was deployed to the SS assault brigade (personnel were recruited from Reich concentration camps, for example from Buchenwald), and in February 1945, to the division that received No. 36 in the register of the SS Main Directorate (36. Waffen-Grenadier- Division der SS).

According to one version, in April 1945, the formation fought on the Soviet-German front as part of the 4th Panzer Army, in the Lausitz area. The division fought defensive battles on the Oder and was surrounded southeast of Berlin. On April 29, 1945, the soldiers and officers of the formation laid down their arms in front of the Soviet troops. According to a number of researchers, 4 thousand soldiers of the division, who were captured by the Red Army, were immediately shot.

According to another version, in the spring of 1945, the 36th SS division fought on the western front, in the Althausen-Württemberg region, where it surrendered to the French. The personnel of the unit was distributed among the POW camps. Oskar Dirlewanger, who was taken prisoner along with his people, was also in the camp. On July 8, 1945, he died under very dark circumstances. Some historians believe that he died as a result of mistreatment by French guards.

After the war, former collaborators who served with Dirlewanger became the object of hunting by the USSR state security agencies. Most of them were eventually identified, put on trial and executed. Severe punishment for many was imposed on the basis of the facts of the participation of Russian collaborators in numerous cartel operations and “cleansing operations”, and not in the hostilities in which they also showed themselves.