Warsaw Uprising

Bronislaw Kaminski

Waffen-Brigadeführer Bronislaw Vladislavovich Kaminski (in Russian: Бронисла́в Владисла́вович Ками́нский) was one of the most enigmatic figures in World War II.  He was born to a Polish landowner father and a Volks-German mother on June 16, 1899 in Vitebsk, then in the Russian Empire.  His later moved to Saint Petersburg, where he began his studies in chemical engineering at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University.  His studies were interrupted during the Russian Civil War, when Kaminski served in the “Red Army.”  After he was demobilized, Kaminski returned to the Polytechnical Institute., and after graduation worked at a paint factory as a chemical engineer.  During the Great Purge in the 1930s, Kaminski was accused of “belonging to a counter-revolutionary group,” arrested and imprisoned in 1937.  One source states that he also was accused of being a western spy and of belonging to the “Bucharin Group,” while another source indicates that his only “crime” was to cricize collectivization.  Kaminski began serving his ten-year sentence, first at a gulag near Chelyabinsk and later at a Sharashka-network distillery in the Bryansk region of Russia.  He was released from prison in 1941 and sent to the Lokot area, southeast of Bryansk, an area designated for persons after incarceration with no right to return to their previous places of living.
Bronislav Kaminski

Reputed photo of Kaminski in his youth

The German military advance into Russia, termed Operation Barbarossa, reached the area of Lokot and Bryansk, on October 6, 1941.  The following month, a local technical schoolteacher Konstantin Voskoboinik, and Kaminski, then working as an engineer at a local alcohol plant, approached the German military administration with a proposal to assist the Germans in establishing a civil administration and local police of the area.  The Germans designated Voskoboinik as the Starosta of the “Lokot volost” and the head of the German-controlled local militia; they named Kaminski as his assistant.  Voskoboinik immediately founded the National Socialist Russian Workers’ Party.  That month the militia numbered no more than 200 men, with a mission of simply assisting the Germans in conducting their different activities, including numerous murders of the civil population, loyal or accused of loyalty to the Soviet authorities or to Soviet partisans.  The militia grew rapidly and by January 1942, it numbered 500 men.  Soviet partisan Alexander Saburov led a targeted attack on January 8, 1942, which killed Voskoboinik.  One source states that Kaminski had a hand in the assassination of his superior.  Kaminski then took over command of the expanding militia; local German personnel were delighted in the increase to 1,400 personnel, as the number of Soviet partisans in this area had been estimated as high as 20,000 that had effective control over almost the entire rear area of Army Group Center.

The commander of the German Second Army, Generaloberst Rudolf Schmidt, appointed Kaminski mayor of the Army Rear Area 532, centered on the town of Lokot.  Three months later, Kaminski received a degree of autonomy and nominal self-governing authority, under the supervision of Major von Veltheim and Colonel Karl Rübsam of the German Army.

Bronislaw Kaminski

Bronislaw Kaminski in 1944

Kaminski was made the chief major of the Autonomous Administration of Lokot and the brigade commander of the local militia.  In this capacity, he administered the local government and established his own courts, jails and newspaper, encouraging private enterprise and abolishing collective farming.  From June 1942, Kaminski’s militia took part in the major action codenamed Operation Vogelsang.  In the autumn of 1942, Kaminski ordered a compulsory draft into the militia of able-bodied men in the area; he also boosted strength through Soviet prisoners of war from nearby Nazi POW camps.  By late 1942, the militia of the Lokot Autonomy had expanded to the size of a brigade (14 battalions), with 8,000 men under arms.  In the spring of 1943, Kaminski reorganized the brigade’s structure, which now consisted of five regiments with three battalions each, an anti-aircraft battalion and an armored unit.  He also created a separate guard battalion, increasing the brigade’s strength to an estimated 12,000 men.

In May and June 1943, the brigade took part, with other German security units, in Operation Zigeunerbaron.  It followed this by participating in Operation Freischütz, Operation Tannhaüser and Operation Seydlitz, all of which involved action against partisans, but also reprisal operations against the civilian population that harbored them.  However, the brigade began to suffer major desertions and partisans conducted several attempts on Kaminski’s life.  He narrowly avoided death each time, and executed all captured conspirators.  The failure of the German Operation Citadel forced the brigade, along with their families, to flee to the Lepel area of Vitebsk by the end of August 1943; the evacuation involved up to 30,000 people.  According to post-war Soviet estimates, up to 10,000 civilians were killed in the area in which Kaminski operated.  The Lepel area was overrun by partisans; Kaminski’s brigade was involved in heavy combat in this area for the rest of 1943.  During the retreat west, desertions from the brigade increased significantly to the point where the entire formation seemed close to disintegration.  When the commander of the Second Regiment, Major Tarasov, decided to join the partisans with his entire regiment, Kaminski flew to his headquarters and strangled Tarasov and eight other officers in front of the men, but 200 men in the regiment still deserted within the following two days.  By the beginning of October 1943, the brigade had lost two thirds of its personnel.

Kaminski RONA Patch

On January 27, 1944, Kaminski received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Iron Cross 1st  Class.  He also received the Bravery Medal for Eastern Peoples 1st Class in Silver with Swords.  Three weeks later, Kaminski issued an order to relocate the brigade and Lokot administration further west to the Dzyatlava area.  At this point, the brigade’s ranks were augmented with police forces from White Russia.  On March 1, 1944, the brigade was renamed Volksheer-Brigade Kaminski. It was subsequently attached to SS-Kampfgruppe von Gottberg and fought in anti-partisan Operation Regenschauer, Operation Frühlingsfest and Operation Kormoran.  During these operations, thousands of local civilians were shot as “suspected partisans” or deported as slave laborers.  Several thousand actual partisans were also killed.

In June 1944, the brigade was absorbed as a part of the Waffen-SS and renamed Waffen-Sturm-Brigade RONA (Russian National Liberation Army – Russkaya Osvoboditelnaya Narodnaya Armiya,) with Kaminski receiving the grade of Waffen-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der SS, the only man with such rank.  As the result of Operation Bagration, the Soviet summer offensive, the anti-partisan activities of the brigade ceased and its personnel were assembled at the SS training camp at Neuhammer.  On July 31, 1944, Kaminski and his chief of staff reported to Rastenburg and met with Heinrich Himmler and Chief of Anti-Partisan Operations, SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach.  The SS Main Headquarters in Berlin made plans to create a non-German SS Division, the 29. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (russische Nr. 1), issuing the order on August 1, 1944.

However, the Warsaw Uprising started the same day.  To fight the massive uprising, Heinrich Himmler placed SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth in charge of Kampfgruppe Reinefarth, a “pacification unit,” which consisted of the Kaminski unit along with the Dirlewanger Regiment and several other Ordnungspolizei and SS rear area units.  On August 4, 1944, one of Kaminski’s regiments was ready to deploy to the Polish capital, after Himmler personally requested Kaminski’s assistance.  The regiment formed a task force of 1,700 unmarried men, with four T-34 tanks, one SU-76 self-propelled assault gun and a few towed-artillery pieces) to Warsaw as a mixed regiment under command of Kaminski’s brigade chief-of-staff, SS-Sturmbannführer Yuri Frolov (Frolov later stated that the regiment had up to 1600 men, seven artillery pieces and four mortars.)

Kaminski gave his men permission to loot during the operation, and he personally did as well, collecting valuables stolen from civilian homes.  Kaminski’s unit lost all combat value.  Some 10,000 residents of the Ochota district of Warsaw were killed in several massacres, many murdered by Kaminski’s men, although Dirlewanger’s unit was no paragon of virtue in the same actions.  However, Kaminski’s four-day mass rape and murder at the Marie Skłodowska Curie Radium Institute, a cancer treatment facility, was one of the worst scenes of evil in the entire war.  German commanders decided that the brigade was too undisciplined and unreliable; in addition, some 500 men had been killed or wounded.  SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach ordered Kaminski to depart Warsaw and report to Łódź to attend a conference; Kaminski apparently departed on August 26, 1944.

What happened next has never been fully resolved, although five explanations remain in various sources.  One historian posits that as soon as he arrived at Łódź (in German: Litzmannstadt), local Gestapo authorities (on orders from higher authority) arrested Bronislaw Kaminski and the same day executed Kaminski, his driver, chief of staff and the brigade surgeon with shots to the back of the neck by a Walther pistol.  A second author has written that the Łódź Gestapo arrested Kaminski and several staff members when they arrived in the city (again, on orders from higher authority); a military tribunal later tried and convicted Kaminski of stealing from the Reich (under the pretext that looted property belonged to the government, not the individual,) after which he was executed by a firing squad on October 4, 1944.  A third historical opinion, and the official German version concerning Kaminski’s death, is that Polish partisans ambushed and killed Kaminski and his chief of staff, Waffen-Obersturmbannführer Ilya Shavykin, twenty miles south of Warsaw, as he was enroute to the meeting at Łódź.  Kaminski’s men later demanded to see the ambush site.  After initially declining the request, German authorities made Kaminski’s staff car – replete with bullet holes and bloodstains – although authorities stated that the bodies were never found.  The fourth possibility that has been proposed is that after receiving the order to depart Warsaw, Kaminski realized its lethal nature and ordered his driver to head toward Tarnów, in southeastern Poland – not Łódź.  South of Tarnów, in the Carpathian Mountains, the Security Police (Sicherheitsdienst) apprehended Kaminski and killed him, making it appear that local partisans had dispatched the renegade leader.  The final account seems the most plausible.  It states that SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach notified SS authorities in Łódź, soon after Kaminski’s departure on August 26, to arrest Kaminski and his traveling companions as soon as they arrived later that day.  He instructed that the SS commander there convene a court-martial and try Kaminski for the crimes listed above.  The court-martial did just that and after finding Kaminski and his associates guilty and sentencing them to death, turned them over to the Gestapo.  Two days later, on August 28, 1944, Gestapo officers went to the detention cells holding the condemned men and executed them.

According to this most-likely scenario, Gestapo authorities buried the four bodies on the grounds of the Gestapo Headquarters at 1 Limanowskiego Street on August 28, 1944.  Fearing discovery of the remains, the Gestapo exhumed the bodies in the following day or two, took the four corpses to a nearby woods and burned them.  If this scenario is correct, it is very likely that the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst in Łódź, SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. Otto Bradfisch had a direct role in the execution of Bronislaw Kaminski and the subsequent destruction of his remains.

Bronislaw Kaminski2015-09-11T19:10:02-05:00

Oskar Dirlewanger

Oskar Dirlewanger

Oskar Dirlewanger

Oskar Paul Dirlewanger, SS-Oberführer (SS Senior Colonel), was born on September 26, 1895 in Würzburg.  The son of a lawyer, he attended grade school and high school, before passing the Abitur, a test that allowed him to enroll in college.  Dirlewanger was never married; he stood six feet tall.  He was wounded in combat during in World War I and won the Wound Badge in Black, the Iron Cross Second Class and Iron Cross First Class, as well as the Württemberg Golden Medal for Bravery.  In the chaos of post-war Germany, Dirlewanger served on an armored train in a Freikorps (Free Corps) para-military volunteer unit that fought Communist insurgents.  He originally joined the Nazi Party in 1922 , with party number 12,517, but he was later expelled from that organization.  Dirlewanger then attended the University of Frankfurt, where he obtained a Ph.D.  He later re-joined the Nazi Party (party number 1,098,716,) but ran afoul of some local party leaders; the Gauleiter of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Wilhelm Murr, even attempted to put him in a concentration camp.  During the early 1930s, Dirlewanger was a member of SA Brigade 155, but quickly was charged with insubordination and disrespect.  A serial sex-offender, Oskar Dirlewanger was convicted of morals’ charges and sentenced to several years in prison (the girl was under 14 while Dirlewanger was 39.)

After his release from prison, Dirlewanger — on the recommendation of his World War I comrade, now SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger (head of the SS Main Leadership Office) — volunteered to serve with a German military expeditionary force in Spain, known as the Condor Legion; here he helped train Spanish crews in tank warfare, after arriving in Spain in April 1937.  His commander, Oberst Ritter von Thoma, of the German Army, rated his performance in Spain as outstanding.  For his superior service there, Dirlewanger received the Spanish Campaign Medal, the Spanish Military Service Cross and the Spanish Cross in Silver.  Oskar Dirlewanger returned to Germany from Spain in May 1939.  In commenting on his past, Dirlewanger said at this point, “Even though I did wrong, I never committed a crime.”  After the outbreak of World War II, Dirlewanger wrote to a senior SS officer and volunteered for service as an SS officer, suggesting that a special unit be formed of hunter poachers, with Dirlewanger in command.  His rationale was that if men could successfully track and find animals in the forests, those same men could successfully hunt and kill men in those same areas of rough terrain.  Promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer, he was named to command the Special Command Dirlewanger (Sonderkommando Dirlewanger), a Waffen-SS unit (composed of these former prisoners) formed to hunt partisans.

Oskar Dirlewanger and his unit, initially battalion-size, fought partisans in Poland in 1942, guarded Jews in forced labor camps (and the Lublin Jewish Ghetto) and in general made life miserable for Poles in Lublin and Kraków.  According to British historian Michael Tregenza, Oskar Dirlewanger and SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik took part in numerous drunken outings, when Sonderkommando Dirlewanger was assigned to Lublin in 1941 and 1942.  The unit transferred to White Russia in 1943, after the SS chief in Poland, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, said that the unit was too brutal and corrupt to remain in the General Government.  Dirlewanger fought against Soviet partisans through the summer of 1944 in Russia and White Russia, killing thousands of armed – and unarmed – inhabitants in the region.  Dirlewanger and his unit took part in the following anti-partisan operations: Operation Adler, Operation Greif, Operation Nordsee, Operation Regatta, Operation Karlsbad, Operation Frieda, Operation Franz, Operation Erntefest I and II, Operation Hornung, Operation Lenz Süd, Operation Lenz Nord, Operation Zauberflöte, Operation Draufgänger I and II, Operation Günther, Operation Kottbus, Operation Frühlingsfest and Operation Hermann.

Heinrich Himmler discussed the unit with his senior SS leaders about this time in the war, and said, “In 1941 I organized a ‘poacher’s regiment’ under Dirlewanger…a good Swabian fellow, wounded ten times, a real character – bit of an oddity, I suppose.  I obtained permission from the Führer to collect from every prison in Germany all the poachers who had used firearms and not, of course, traps, in their poaching days — about 2,000 in all.  Alas, only 400 of these ‘upstanding and worthy characters’ remain today.  I have kept replenishing this regiment with people on SS probation, for in the SS we really have far too strict a system of justice…When these did not suffice, I said to Dirlewanger…’Now, why not look for suitable candidates among the villains, the real criminals, in the concentration camps?’…The atmosphere in the regiment is often somewhat medieval in the use of corporal punishment and so on…if someone pulls a face when asked whether we will win the war or not he will slump down from the table…dead, because the others will have shot him out of hand.”

In August 1944, the Dirlewanger Regiment moved to the Warsaw Uprising (August-September 1944) and the Slovakian Uprising in October-November 1944.  During the Warsaw Uprising in Poland, Dirlewanger killed thousands of civilians and his men behaved in such a despicable manner that SS generals at Warsaw begged for the unit to be sent somewhere else.  Moving to Slovakia, Dirlewanger and his men ravaged that countryside as well, as they attempted to suppress that uprising.  The Dirlewanger Regiment then moved to the Eastern Front in late 1944, first to Hungary; by this time, the unit was receiving drafts of unwilling troopers scoured from the concentration camps.

Sonderkommando Dirlewanger expanded throughout the war and finished as the 36th Waffen-SS Division in Germany, fighting near Halbe as part of the German Ninth Army.  German propaganda correspondents and wartime photographers did not follow them in action.  This was for good reason, as wherever the Dirlewanger unit operated, corruption and rape formed an every-day part of life and indiscriminate slaughter, beatings and looting were rife.  On August 15, 1943, SS-Gruppenführer Curt von Gottberg and SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach recommended Dirlewanger for the German Cross in Gold for his achievements against Soviet partisans; he later received the award.  He received the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross for his accomplishments in Russia in 1944 and for his role in crushing the Warsaw Uprising.  In fighting in both world wars, Dirlewanger was wounded in action at least twelve times.  He received the Wound Badge in Black, the Close Combat Bar and the Anti-Partisan Badge.

Dirlewanger avoided death on the Eastern Front, after he was wounded in February 1945, when he turned the division over to Fritz Schmedes.  One source says that he came back to command the unit and served with them until about April 12, 1945, when he was wounded once again.  Subsequently, Dirlewanger attempted to hide in Upper Swabia at the end of the war.  Free French authorities arrested Dirlewanger at the end of May or beginning of June, probably in the Allgäu Alps in southern Germany.  Polish laborers, under the employment of the French, identified Oskar Dirlewanger and beat him to death on June 7, 1945 at Altshausen/Upper Swabia, while he was in French captivity, although rumors persisted that Dirlewanger had survived the immediate post-war period and fled to Egypt or Syria in late 1945 to avoid prosecution.  French authorities later exhumed the remains of Oskar Dirlewanger from the Altshausen Friedhof on the northwest side of town and confirmed that it was indeed him, although the French file on Oskar Dirlewanger remains locked and inaccessible.  After the war, in perhaps the most-classic understatement of the war, Gottlob Berger said this of Oskar Dirlewanger, “Now Dr. Dirlewanger was hardly a good boy.  You can’t say that.  But he was a good soldier, and he had one big mistake that he didn’t know when to stop drinking.”

Capture of Oskar Dirlewanger

Reputed photo of Oskar Dirlewanger after arrest

Oskar Dirlewanger was undoubtedly a serial sex offender and pathological killer.  British historian Michael Tregenza has documented Dirlewanger in Lublin, Poland and presents strong evidence that Dirlewanger murdered Polish women there, to include killing some by Strychnine injections.  Had Oskar Dirlewanger survived the aftermath of the war, and been apprehended, the only question would have been which nation would have tried and executed him.

For many years after the war, the operations of Dirlewanger and his unit remained shrouded in mystery.  This ended in 1988, when the author found several thousand pages of reports of Sonderkommando Dirlewanger in the U.S. National Archives, later using them to write The Cruel Hunters: SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, Hitler’s Most Notorious Anti-Partisan Unit.

During the war, Dirlewanger’s unit had the following designations:

Wilddiebkommando Oranienburg (June 1940 to July 1940)
Sonderkommando Dr. Dirlewnager (July 1940 to September 1940)
SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger (September 1940 to September 1943)
Einsatz-Bataillon Dirlewanger (numberous occasions in 1943 and 1944)
SS-Regiment Dirlewanger (September 1943 to December 1944)
SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger (December 1944 to February 1945)
36. Waffen-Grenadier Division der SS (February 1945 to May 1945)

 

Oskar Dirlewanger2016-03-28T19:45:49-05:00
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