Hardly anyone would think Oskar Dirlewanger a Feldherr, a great military commander. He was more brave than capable; his eleven wounds, Iron Crosses (from both wars), and Knight’s Cross bore testimony to the former. As for the latter, many superiors, including the Army Group commander who had escaped capture by the skin of his teeth when visiting a position he had ordered the Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger to hold, could say otherwise.
Unfortunately for the general military efficiency of the desperate German Army, holding to its last positions on the Oder against the Bolshevik horde, one of those who believed was his superior officer, the commander of the Heeresgruppe Weichsel, no less than the Reichsführer-SS himself, Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler commanded at considerable remove, having betaken himself to a sanitarium for his health. When the actual commander, the chief of staff, gave orders, things went not too badly.
However, when Dirlewanger came to personally express his gratitude for his new expanded responsibility, something clicked in the torturous mind of the Reichsführer. And so, two days after the new division commander left, he received orders giving him a new assignment. Perhaps it had to do with the abrupt change-over of chiefs of staff, when General Wenck was injured in an automobile accident.
“The vanquisher of Bolshevik pretentions in Warsaw will deliver the final blow to Bolshevik pretentions in Berlin itself!”
Whoever wrote those melodramatic words — perhaps one of the bizarre and nigh-deranged associates of the Ahnenerbe — wasn’t much in touch with reality. What they meant, though, was dire.
Dirlewanger had been promoted and named commander of the V SS-Jägerkorps. Not that it had anything to do with mountains or much to do with the SS. At first. (As the Nazi domain shrank, the grandiosity of its formations swelled in equal and opposite proportion.)
The Army commander, General Busse, did not seem to care. He was glad to be out of Courland. So, to add to his rag-tag collection of rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists, Dirlewanger got two other divisions of whatever SS types Himmler could scrape up. Somehow having a unit styled “SS und Polizei Panzergrenadierdivision” under his command didn’t seem to fit Dirlewanger’s . . . er . . . style. That and the division of officer cadets.
But it looked very impressive when written down:
V SS Jägerkorps
SS-Gruppenführer und Generallieutenant der Waffen SS Oskar Dirlewanger
32. SS Freiwillingengrenadierdivision ‘30. Januar’
35. SS und Polizei Panzergrenadierdivision
36. Waffengrenadierdivision der SS ‘Dirlewanger’
Calling any of these division was something of a joke, of course, but in Berlin the Führer was pleased.
Shortly thereafter, Himmler had to lay down some of his burden, and a real army commander, Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, took over. He did not care to have contact with Dirlewanger, whose corps was in any case in a quiet sector. So he did not know of the secret order Himmler had given his Treue Oskar.
On April 19, for some unaccountable reason Dirlewanger decided that the special orders would come into effect. The SS units, heretofore thinking they could make a run for it, were told to make a run for it.
Some, anyhow, knew that the jig was up. As the Dirlewanger “Division” headed west and then north, there were a number of desertions. Then, they stopped abruptly.
Along the way, another formation joined in. The Dutch SS had provided a division, or at least the recruits for one, to fuel the Aryan fantasies of the SS high command. Now, a regiment of this had somehow run across this command. Safety in numbers.
So it was with great glee that the Führer was informed that the defenders of Fortress Berlin had been augmented by three and a half divisions of SS. Loyal ones, not like those shirkers who had failed in Vienna.
By then, as everyone else knew, the designation of a unit as a division was sufficient in Hitler’s mind to make that a full-strength unit, with the ranks and the fighting strength of a unit from before the war.
There were other considerations. Meddling again, Hitler went on to assign the other SS unit already there to Dirlewanger (“A True Aryan, a German Hero!” he said); the “Nordland” Division, which was built around Norwegians and Danes, and had attatched to it the remnant of the “Charlemagne” Division of Frenchmen.
Yes. Berlin would be defended by those who had nothing left to lose; renegades and criminals. Even Oskar Dirlewanger, a man with no illusions as to his own fate in a defeated Germany, could fight well when he was a cornered rat. His men had learned city warfare in a hard school, and could have no illusions as to their fate.