Condemned Men – Meet Hitler’s Penal Battalions

Soldiers of the 36th Waffen SS fought to suppress the Warsaw Uprising. The unit was made up of crooks, thugs and the criminally insane, all hand picked to carry out a terror campaign in Eastern Europe.
Soldiers of the 36th Waffen SS, seen here fighting to suppress the Warsaw Uprising. The unit was made up of crooks, thugs and the criminally insane, all hand picked to carry out a terror campaign in Eastern Europe.

“By 1945, more than 50,000 Wehrmacht troops
had served in punishment regiments.”

CALL THEM THE Fuhrer’s “Dirty Dozens.” The German army’s strafbattalions were infantry units made up largely of convicts, felons, malingerers and thugs.

Inmates in these de facto ‘marching prisons’ could expect only the most hazardous and backbreaking of assignments. When they weren’t being deployed as common labourers, penal units fought as shock troops or were thrown into losing battles to defend hopeless positions. In some cases, whole strafbattalion units would be ordered at gunpoint to march across minefields in order to clear them.

The officers and men of the Nazi prisoner brigades fought without the distinction of rank. Their uniforms bore no unit designation either, save for a telltale red triangle on the sleeve. The battalions were under the direct command of German military police. Discipline was harsh and unrelenting in strafbattalions and soldiers were frequently under-provisioned and poorly equipped. Yet those who refused to perform their duties were liable to be summarily executed. Despite this, assignment to a penal unit wasn’t necessarily a death sentence. The condemned could serve their time and be reinstated to the regular army or in cases of exceptional gallantry under fire have their sentences commuted.

Originally formed in peacetime as simple disciplinary and reeducation units for unruly or disloyal conscripts, by the final two years of the war, the number of strafbattalions expanded to accommodate the growing legions of disaffected and demoralized German soldiers. By 1945, more than 50,000 Wehrmacht troops had served in punishment regiments. Here are some of the units.

Soldiers who fought in punishment units certainly were forced to perform dangerous duty, but the condemned could win their release though acts of heroism. freedom. (Image source: German Federal Archive)

Bewährungsbataillone 500

Soldiers of the 500th Probation Battalion or Bewährungsbataillone 500 were considered small time offenders. In fact, hardened criminals weren’t even allowed into the outfit. Those sentenced to this frontline unit, which was first formed in 1940, would typically serve their sentences and then be returned to their original regiment. Unlike other German penal units, officers and NCOs in good standing commanded the Bewährungsbataillones, not military police guards. Despite this, life in the 500th was intended to be unpleasant. Casualties were high as the unit fought its way across the Eastern Front. Yet soldiers who performed well could expect to have their sentences reduced.

The fighting in North Africa was largely over before the 999th could be committed. (Image source: WikiCommons)

The 999th Light Afrika Division

By 1942, a shortage of fresh troops compelled the Wehrmacht to scour civilian prisons for criminals who were originally thought unsuitable for military service. Convicted felons were granted a clean slate if they volunteered to serve in units like the Bewährungstruppe 999. The 28,000-man division first saw action in the closing days of the North Africa campaign. But since up to a third of its conscripts were political subversives who had little affection for the Nazi regime, many of them were only too happy to turn themselves over to the Allies at the earliest opportunity. The unit would later serve in Greece and then on the Eastern Front.

Recruited from Germany’s prisons, the 36th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS was unleashed on the civilian population of Warsaw during the 1944 uprising there.

Worst of the Worst

Unlike other penal battalions, 36th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS wasn’t established to punish or rehabilitate felons, but rather to ‘weaponize’ Germany’s most dangerous criminals and sociopaths and use them to terrorize civilian populations in the occupied east.

Oskar Dirlewanger was an ardent Nazi and a convicted child molester.
Oskar Dirlewanger was an ardent Nazi and a convicted child molester.

The unit, which was formed in 1940 on orders of Heinrich Himmler, was originally made up of 300 murderers, thieves, rapists and (oddly enough) a number of game poachers as well. Even its commanding officer was a convicted child molester by the name of Oskar Dirlewanger. The 45-year-old die-hard Nazi eventually grew the unit to 4,000 men.

Once outfitted and trained, the Dirlewanger Brigade, as it became known, was turned loose on partisans and civilians in Poland, Belarus and Eastern Europe with horrifying results. Its worst atrocities included mass executions of civilians, torture and rape. It once even set packs of starving dogs upon the helpless residents of a small village. In another well-documented case, members of the 36th amused themselves by deliberately poisoning a group of children with strychnine. In fact, the Dirlewanger Brigade’s depravity was so revolting, even seasoned SS field commanders voiced their displeasure with the group’s methods. However because of Oskar Dirlewanger’s unflagging political loyalty, high-ranking Nazis blocked the mounting pressure to disband the outfit. All told, the 36th reportedly killed as many as 30,000 civilians in its infamous reign of terror, and quite possibly more.

In 1943, the 36th was eventually transferred to the front and sent into action against the Red Army. Although it had spent years preying mostly upon non-combatants, its members had little real combat experience. Not surprisingly, the 36th suffered appalling casualties and was reduced from its peak strength to only a few hundred survivors. But by 1944, a new batch of convicts had been dredged from German prisons and the outfit was reinforced in time to take part in the brutal suppression of uprisings in Warsaw. During the crackdown’s Wola Massacre, soldiers of the 36th reached a new low when they reportedly machine-gunned and bayoneted 500 youngsters.

By 1945, the Dirlewanger Brigade was pulled back to help defend Germany against the final Soviet advance. But as the Red Army poured into the Reich, its soldiers began deserting in droves. What was left of the outfit was utterly destroyed in battle on May 1. Dirlewanger himself was wounded in one of the unit’s final actions. He was captured in civilian clothes by French troops a month after the war ended and was held in a prison at Altshausen, Germany. Although it’s recorded that he died shortly after of complications from his injuries, it’s believed he was actually beaten to death by a group of Polish guards.

17 thoughts on “Condemned Men – Meet Hitler’s Penal Battalions

  1. What a morbid yet incredible report on a buried secret. Indeed, the analogy to the Dirty Dozen is valid albeit a movie. The 36th was real. Horrible and as ghastly as they come. I am elated to know the child molester was killed.

  2. The poachers weren’t in because it was odd. The Dirlewanger Brigade was formed originally from poachers, because these men were excellent marksmen who were otherwise wasting away in prisons when they could be useful on the front lines. As time went on, more and more classes of criminals were added.

  3. The order for the 500 children stems for Dirlewanger’s command to save ammunition. Upon entering a child care facility in Poland, after blowing the door open with explosives, the children raised their small hands into the air. Dirlewanger ordered them killed despite their surrender and obvious lack of threat, Furthermore, to save ammunition, he also ordered that the children be rounded up and brought into the street where they were to be killed by strikes and blows to the head with the butts of the rifles. It was reported by eyewitnesses that the blood and brain matter of the little victims literally ran through the gutters and spilled down into the sewers. Other eyewitness accounts report from a witness testifies to witnessing a solider rape a young girl while yielding a knife and threatening her, and then once ejaculating, cutting her torso open entirely from groin to neck. Dirlewanger was a violent alcoholic who no doubt earned the respect of sociopaths due to the fact that he gave them cart de blanch to engage in all matters of debauchery while he himself participated and led in these acts.

    1. Can I ask where you got this info? A HUGE amount of what people say the D.B did is speculation, as no journalists wanted to travel with them….

        1. That is a non-response. Please comment only if you have knowledge of the subject area. Fiction is not appreciated.

  4. I always knew that the Nazis had penal brigades in their battalions unlike the more published Soviet penal battalions. These terrible atrocities committed by SS Dirlewanger and his minions on innocent men, women and children are appalling by any standards ! The world only knows about Katyn (Poland) but what about the 600 villages in Belarus destroyed, raped, brutalized and whole inhabitants killed by these evil madmen ? What about so many other SS Einsatzgruppen and SS Sonderkommando killing squads doing equally inhuman murders and rapes in Ukraine and Russia ? Can we really fully pin the blame on Russian soldiers as tit-for-tat for the mass rapes of women in Berlin 1945 and condemning German POWs to labor camps in Siberia? Hitler was only a moron and a dirty coward who faked his death, fled to Mar De LaRosa in Argentina and lived a married life until dying in 1965. His brainwashed troops and generals meanwhile sacrificed their lives in a false ideology and died for nothing.

  5. What is your reference for this fictional account? Where is your proof you lying ass faced swine?
    As I observed the lack of quality of the hateful pinheads who commented on this leftist propaganda, the smell of more pervasive commie shit permeated the pages. Any high school red diaper scum of below average intellect is a candidate for recruitment into Antifa and other insane leftwing murder groups that promulgate such ignorant lies
    . Now that the democrats have fixed the latest election the total takeover of our nation by commie, blacks, moslems, illegal immigrant, traitor scum is looming on the horizon. In the meantime the lies of these history-rewriting shit-eaters is increasing.
    Simultaneously thousands of erudite, researched and important history articles refuting shit like this is suppressed by the creeps who control publication in the US.
    O God of hosts help us bring about the Great Civil War that will liberate us finally.

  6. While this article is informative, you left out a huge population also forced into the Strafbattallion 999 – dissidents and other political prisoners. They were not all “thugs, sociopaths, and the worst of the worst.” My grandfather was one of them, and no, he didn’t survive. He also didn’t go to Africa but was part of the poor guys who were sent to Greece, which you didn’t mention in this article, either.My family is very proud of him and the fact that he continued to resist until his dying day.

  7. Regarding the idea that Hitler escaped: The Russians still laugh themselves silly over this fantasy that was hatched in Moscow…

  8. The elements not surrendered in Africa were included with the grenadier regiment 440 and formed into Sturmdivision Rhodos and took part in the fighting on Rhodes in September 1943 against the Italians; British SAS and Greek partisans. The division fought well and defeated the Allies. Once the battle was over Grenadier regiment 440 was sent to the Balkans and Sturmdivision Rhodos renamed Festungs Battalion 999. It finished the war in Rhodes with some of the 999 personnel deserting to the partisans.

  9. I have read elsewhere that DIRLEWANGER was captured by Polish partisans, who not surprisingly gave him a taste of his own medicine. (Suspended over a slow fire etc?) So who do I believe ?

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