The Nazi Murder Machine: 13 Portraits in Evil (2 page)

Brandt, Rudolf

Rudolf Brandt, who had what might be termed an important ‘clerical role’ in the Nazi’s so-called ‘Final Solution’ – the proposed, total extermination of the Jewry.

At the start of 1932, the twenty-two-year-old Rudolf Brandt became the 1,331,536
th
member of the Nazi Party. In October the following year, he joined the SS, ultimately rising to the rank of
Standartenfuhrer
(Colonel).

Brandt’s exceptional ability at shorthand and transcribing (he averaged around 360 syllables a minute) soon attracted the attention of
Reichsfuhrer
Heinrich Himmler
, who had the tirelessly efficient young man transferred to his staff. Soon, Brant was handling almost all of Himmler’s total correspondence, which led to him having to produce anything up to eighty letters per week.

At the end of the war, one associate of Brandt’s described him thus –

Brandt would begin work at seven in the morning, regardless of whatever time he had gone to bed the previous evening. He only ever needed a maximum of four hours sleep.

Barely had Himmler risen in the morning and washed, when Brandt would go to him carrying a multitude of letters, papers and files. Even while Himmler shaved, Brandt would read him the most important items in that morning’s mail. He always prefaced the telling of bad news by saying, ‘Pardon, Herr
Reichsführer
’. At this, Himmler would temporarily cease shaving, in case this bad news upset his hand and so caused him to cut himself.

Alternately complaining about being overworked, and then almost bragging about the seniority of his position within Himmler’s personal staff, Brandt was an extremely important individual. It is no exaggeration to say that he served almost as Himmler’s ears and eyes, and it was in the very manner in which he presented news to Himmler that often determined the way Himmler would react to it…

From March through to May of 1941, Brandt saw military action, fighting in Greece as a soldier of the Artillery Regiment of the 1
st
SS Panzer Division.

But he was soon back at his beloved Himmler’s side, again producing the copious letters which his master dictated – a number of which requested that precisely 87 Jews imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp be used for the proposed ‘Jewish Skeleton Collection’. This would preserve the remains of a group of Jewish
Untermensch
(‘sub-humans’), after that race had been entirely eradicated, in accordance with the plan known as the ‘Final Solution’.

(
Untermensch
was a term not just used for the Jews. The Nazis also used it to describe Poles, Slavs, blacks and others whom they considered to be ‘beneath’ them. Following Germany’s military victory, it was proposed that these
Untermensch
would be used as slave labor for the German Empire, the Third Reich, and would ultimately be worked and starved to death. The Jews, however, were to be exterminated as quickly as possible.)

The cadaver of Berlin dairy merchant Menachem Taffel. He was transported to Auschwitz in March 1943, together with his wife and child who were gassed upon their arrival. Selected as one of the 87 ‘anatomical specimens’ for the proposed ‘Jewish Skeleton Collection’, Taffel was murdered, by gassing, in August 1943. (All but one of the ‘specimens’ were gassed, as it was deemed essential that the body, and especially the head, should not be ‘damaged’ in anyway – for example, by other methods of execution. Only one man was shot, as he began to struggle upon realizing that he was about to be put in a gas chamber.) Note the concentration camp ‘inmate number’, tattooed upon Menachem Taffel’s left forearm.

With his customary, brisk efficiency, Brandt dealt with the correspondence concerning the ‘Jewish Skeleton Collection’ whilst simultaneously attending to the other, more mundane matters which were part-and-parcel of working for
Reichsfuhrer
Himmler. These might include anything from selecting suitable brides for SS men, to querying an unusually high utilities bill received by his department.

As Germany’s defeat became certain, Brandt went into hiding with Himmler, but ultimately surrendered to a group of British soldiers.

Brandt pictured during the Nuremberg Trials. He remained completely defiant and unrepentant to the end – and a hangman’s noose. His master, Heinrich Himmler, had already committed suicide by biting down on the cyanide capsule a British doctor had been about to discover concealed on his person.

Brandt was tried at Nuremberg. Convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership of a criminal organization (the SS), the physically-slight, bespectacled Brandt, the son of an impoverished railway worker, was hanged on June 2, 1948 – his thirty-ninth birthday.

Dirlewanger, Oskar (the ‘most evil man in the SS’)

Oscar Dirlewanger was born September 1895, and served with such bravery during the First World War, as part of the infantry on the Western Front, that he was awarded the Iron Cross. Soon after the end of the First World War, he assisted with the German Revolution of 1918 – 1919.

In 1922, he obtained a degree in political science at Goethe University, Frankfurt. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1923, and while working at a bank became a violent alcoholic, ultimately imprisoned for raping a fourteen-year-old girl. (Dirlewanger had a predilection for young girls.)

Stated one police report concerning him –

…
(He is) violently unpredictable, frequently disposed to erupt into fearsome rages at the slightest provocation… Such rages are exacerbated by his heavy use of alcohol, and other drugs…

Along with the conviction for child molestation (his victim was coincidentally a member of the
Bund Deutscher Madel
, or the ‘League of German Girls’), he was also found guilty of damaging a military vehicle while under the influence of drugs, and of multiple counts of keeping illegal firearms.

He served two years imprisonment, and upon his release was almost immediately rearrested on similar charges, this time being sent to a concentration camp named Welzheim. This was standard practice at the time for men convicted of sexual offences against children/minors, and Dirlewanger was fortunate to escape being chemically castrated – a ‘treatment’ for pedophiles that was becoming increasingly popular within the Nazi Party.

The pennant of the ‘League of German Girls’. Dirlewanger was arrested for the sexual molestation of one of its members.

Dirlewanger obtained his release by stating that he wished to go and fight in the Spanish Civil War. In this he was wounded three times, and upon his return to Germany successfully campaigned not only to rejoin the Nazi Party, but also to have his doctorate from Goethe University returned. (Both his membership of the Nazi Party, and this doctorate, had been stripped from him when he’d been imprisoned.)

So it was that Dirlewanger was given the membership number 1,098,716, shortly before the Second World War broke out. The experienced soldier applied to join the Waffen SS, was accepted and given the rank of
Obersturmfuhrer
.

He soon set about forming his own SS battalion (which would ultimately become a division), formerly entitled the ‘36
th
Waffen Grenadier Division’, but more commonly known simply as ‘SS Penal Unit Dirlewanger’.

As the name suggests, this unit was comprised of men who had criminal records. At first, this was merely for such crimes as poaching (Dirlewanger believed that their skills at such things as tracking and shooting would be invaluable against enemy forces), but would later include mental asylum patients, as well as men convicted of such crimes as rape and murder.

‘SS Penal Unit Dirlewanger’ quickly became one of the most feared and hated of all German military units. Initially, they were assigned to keep watch over a forced-labor camp in German-occupied Poland. Here, Dirlewanger kept him and his men amused through such activities as stripping and horsewhipping Jewish women, before injecting them with strychnine and laughing at their agonizing death convulsions.

Dirlewanger is also reputed to have pioneered the use of human corpses to make soap, cutting up Jewish women and boiling them with horsemeat in order to make this product.

There were other German officers who protested against the cruelty of Dirlewanger and his men, but – as an excellent and experienced soldier – he had the support of
Heinrich Himmler
as well as other, high-ranking Nazis, who decided simply to turn a blind-eye to the varied, and frequent, alcohol-induced atrocities.

In any case, Dirlewanger was hardly the only one indulging in such revolting acts of sadistic cruelty and murder, even if those other officers who were disgusted by the activities of ‘SS Penal Unit Dirlewanger’ were by now quietly referring to him as being ‘the most evil man in the SS’.

Said Gottlob Christian Berger, a high-ranking Nazi official and one of Dirlewanger ‘protectors’ –

‘Dirlewanger was certainly not what you would have called a ‘good man’… Of course, you cannot say that… He was, however, a truly excellent soldier, albeit with one major flaw in this side of his character – once he started drinking, he was wholly unable to stop…’

At the start of 1942, Dirlewanger and his ever-growing group of men found themselves being reassigned – to conduct ‘anti-partisan’ duties in German-occupied Belarus.

This basically gave SS Penal Unit Dirlewanger
carte-blanche
to conduct wholesale rape, mutilation and murder. Whole villages were herded inside barns which were then set on fire. Anyone trying to escape was machine-gunned down. Dirlewanger realized that his unit could cross minefields simply by using captured ‘villagers’ as ‘human shields’, forced to walk in front of him and his men.

Members of the infamous SS Penal Unit Dirlewanger

By the end of 1943, with SS Penal Unit Dirlewanger responsible for over 100,000 deaths of innocent men, women and children, together with the destruction of some 200 villages, Himmler decided that there was ample reason to award the unit’s proud leader with the German Cross.

During the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, when members of the Polish Resistance fought a brave but ultimately futile battle against the German army, SS Penal Unit Dirlewanger continued with their assorted crimes against humanity.

Members of this unit laughed as they impaled babies upon their bayonets, with the mothers then being raped and thrown from windows. A hospital was broken into, the patients set on fire and burnt alive, and the nurses gang-raped before being strung-up, naked, together with the doctors. This was all done to the accompaniment of music, Dirlewanger and his men drinking heavily all the while.

Women and children murdered by SS Penal Unit Dirlewanger

In October 1944, Dirlewanger received another medal – the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross – and his final promotion, to the rank of
SS-Oberfuhrer
.

In February of 1945, with Germany fast losing the war, he was shot in the chest while fighting against the invading Soviet forces in Brandenburg. He recovered to then go into hiding, but was arrested on June 1, having reportedly been recognized by a former Jewish concentration camp inmate.

Dirlewanger was taken to a prison camp in Altshausen in southern Germany, where he was suddenly pronounced dead of ‘natural causes’ just a few days later. It is strongly suspected that he was in fact beaten to death by Polish guards, who were fully aware of all his crimes and, furthermore, were most desirous that he should fully atone for them at their hands.

Rumors persisted that he’d actually somehow escaped this prison camp and was still alive – with one such rumor stating that he’d joined the French Foreign legion – but in 1960 his grave was opened, and his remains examined to officially confirm his identity.