The Dirlewanger Division, or the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, was a Nazi division notorious for committing massacres, rape and looting across Europe. Initially made up of ex-convicts, the division eventually opened up to foreign volunteers.
Some of the atrocities commitied by Dirlewanger include:
Some of the atrocities commitied by Dirlewanger include:
- In the early days of the division, members of Dirlewanger injected a group of young Jewish girls with strychnine through hypodermic needles for their own entertainment. Nazi leadership promoted the divison for these efforts.
- Involvement in the Wola Massacre, which claimed the lives of between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish civilians and POWs, the largest single mass killing in Poland during World War II. Nazi troops burned homes, raped civilians and attacked patients in hospitals. The Wola Massacre was part of the Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. In a campaign to crush dissents and intimidate the local population, Dirlewanger soldiers gang raped children and played catch with live babies. The Nazis also hacked off captives' arms, dousing them with gasoline, and set them alight to run armless and flaming through the streets of Warsaw.
- A series of massacres between 1942 and 1944, in which Dirlewanger murdered over 120,000 civilians and raised over 200 villages in Eastern Europe.
Discussion
The story of the SS Dirlewanger Division did not end with the fall of Nazi Germany. Earlier this month, Czech media sources reported that a top military official from the Czech military force in Afghanistan has resigned following a report that two Czech commanders under NATO command wore Nazi symbols on their helmets during their tour
of Afghanistan.
Photo: iddnes.cz
According to the Mlada fronta Dnes daily, commanders Hynek Matonoha and Jan Cermak wore the symbols of the 9th SS panzer Hohenstaufen and the SS Dirlewanger Divison: two vicious Waffen-SS combat units of the Nazi military during WWII. The 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen was an elite Nazi division heavily involved in fighting on the Western front of World War II.
“It was just a joke and I am very sorry about it,” Cermak told the newspaper, adding that he was unaware of the symbol’s history. Matonoha declined to provide a comment on the matter.
It remains unclear if the two soldiers truly understood the history of the two symbols. Michal Mazel, an extremism specialist, rejected the Cermak’s defense telling Russia Today, “He is an elite troop who graduated from university, he is no teenager. The SS symbols on their helmets show a totally perverse view of the world of the NATO military's elite troop."
Given that the Nazi’s recruited foreign soldiers for the two divisions, the use of their emblems by non-German soldiers becomes and even more suspect action.
Whether intentional or not, the two commanders’ rank and unit marked them as examples to soldiers under their command. Seeing their superiors wear such emblems, their soldiers would likely view the symbols not in disgust, but rather in admiration.
