The Cruel Hunters

The Cruel Hunters PDF Author: French L. MacLean
Publisher: Schiffer Military History
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This is a brutal story - but, from the safety of fifty years distance in time - it is an extremely compelling one. It is also an enduring lesson that a military unit, formed under an evil ideology, led by a social outcast and composed of vicious criminals, will sink to its lowest common denominator - hate. The Dirlewanger Battalion, also known as "Sonderkommando (special commando) Dirlewanger" was perhaps the least understood, but at the same time the most notorious German SS anti-partisan unit in World War II. German propaganda correspondents and wartime photographers did not follow them in action. And for good reason. Wherever the Dirlewanger unit - named for and led by Oskar Dirlewanger - operated, corruption and rape formed an every-day part of life and indiscriminate slaughter, beatings and looting were rife. Formed as a battalion of convicted poachers in 1940, the unit operated in Poland until 1942, guarding Jews in forced labor camps and making life miserable for Poles in Lublin and Cracow. From there Dirlewanger spent two years combating partisans in central Russia, giving no quarter and expecting none in return, during vicious fighting against an elusive foe in the midst of inhospitable swamps and dismal forests. In 1944 Dirlewanger savaged Warsaw during the Polish Uprising, before moving to Slovakia to crush another rebellion there. The end of the war saw the unit, which was now a division in size, fighting for its life south of Berlin against the Soviet Army. Medieval in their outlook on war and certainly not indicative of many German military formations, this unit none-the-less remains a reflection of a segment of mankind gone mad in the inferno of World War II on the eastern front. Size: 6" x 9" over 50 b/w photographs, maps, fully annotated

The Cruel Hunters

The Cruel Hunters PDF Author: French L. MacLean
Publisher: Schiffer Military History
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book

Book Description
This is a brutal story - but, from the safety of fifty years distance in time - it is an extremely compelling one. It is also an enduring lesson that a military unit, formed under an evil ideology, led by a social outcast and composed of vicious criminals, will sink to its lowest common denominator - hate. The Dirlewanger Battalion, also known as "Sonderkommando (special commando) Dirlewanger" was perhaps the least understood, but at the same time the most notorious German SS anti-partisan unit in World War II. German propaganda correspondents and wartime photographers did not follow them in action. And for good reason. Wherever the Dirlewanger unit - named for and led by Oskar Dirlewanger - operated, corruption and rape formed an every-day part of life and indiscriminate slaughter, beatings and looting were rife. Formed as a battalion of convicted poachers in 1940, the unit operated in Poland until 1942, guarding Jews in forced labor camps and making life miserable for Poles in Lublin and Cracow. From there Dirlewanger spent two years combating partisans in central Russia, giving no quarter and expecting none in return, during vicious fighting against an elusive foe in the midst of inhospitable swamps and dismal forests. In 1944 Dirlewanger savaged Warsaw during the Polish Uprising, before moving to Slovakia to crush another rebellion there. The end of the war saw the unit, which was now a division in size, fighting for its life south of Berlin against the Soviet Army. Medieval in their outlook on war and certainly not indicative of many German military formations, this unit none-the-less remains a reflection of a segment of mankind gone mad in the inferno of World War II on the eastern front. Size: 6" x 9" over 50 b/w photographs, maps, fully annotated

The SS-Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger"

The SS-Sonderkommando Author: Rolf Michaelis
Publisher: Schiffer Military History
ISBN: 9780764344794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A rare look inside the Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger," the SS anti-partisan unit notorious for atrocities in Poland and Russia during World War II. These memoirs were written by a former member of the unit from its formation in 1940 to the end of the war and took part in nearly all its operations. A first hand account of the brutal and barbaric methods used by Dirlewanger against partisans - methods that appalled even some SS commanders - are revealed here in this memoir. SS-Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" was originally manned by convicted poachers, however as the war progressed replacements were found by emptying prisons and filling the ranks with more hardened criminals. Here are the chilling recollections of a soldier in the SS-Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" during the Polish and Russian campaigns, the 1944 Warsaw uprising and the final battles near Berlin.

The SS Dirlewanger Brigade

The SS Dirlewanger Brigade PDF Author: Christian Ingrao
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1626364877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The Dirlewanger Brigade was an anti-partisan unit of the Nazi army, reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler. The first members of the brigade were mostly poachers who were released from prisons and concentration camps and who were believed to have the skills necessary for hunting down and capturing partisan fighters in their camps in the forests of the Eastern Front. Their numbers were soon increased by others who were eager for a way out of imprisonment—including men who had been convicted of burglary, assault, murder, and rape. Under the leadership of Oskar Dirlewanger, a convicted rapist and alcoholic, they could do as they pleased: there were no repercussions for even their worst behavior. This was the group used for its special “talents” to help put down the Jewish uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, killing an estimated 35,000 men, women, and children in a single day. Even by Nazi standards, the brigade was considered unduly violent and an investigation of its activities was opened. The Nazi hierarchy was eager to distance itself from the behavior of the brigade and eventually exiled many of the members to Belarus. Based on the archives from Germany, Poland, and Russia, The SS Dirlewanger Brigade offers an unprecedented look at one of the darkest chapters of World War II.

Warsaw 1944

Warsaw 1944 PDF Author: Alexandra Richie
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374286558
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
History.

Believe and Destroy

Believe and Destroy PDF Author: Christian Ingrao
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745670040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated; they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power. Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party’s elite protection unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of twenty million individuals of allegedly ‘inferior’ races. Most of them became members of the paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a million people. Based on extensive archival research, Christian Ingrao tells the gripping story of these children of the Great War, focusing on the networks of fellow activists, academics and friends in which they moved, studying the way in which they envisaged war and the ‘world of enemies’ which, in their view, threatened them. The mechanisms of their political commitment are revealed, and their roles in Nazism and mass murder. Thanks to this pioneering study, we can now understand how these men came to believe what they did, and how these beliefs became so destructive. The history of Nazism, shows Ingrao, is also a history of beliefs in which a powerful military machine was interwoven with personal experiences, fervour, anguish, utopia and cruelty.

The SS Dirlewanger Brigade

The SS Dirlewanger Brigade PDF Author: Christian Ingrao
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
ISBN: 1620876310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Describes the dark history of an exceedingly violent group in the Nazi army, made up of robbers, murderers, rapists and other convicts and who were believed to have been responsible for killing 35,000 people in the Warsaw Ghetto in a single day. Original.

The Waffen-SS

The Waffen-SS PDF Author: Jochen Böhler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198790554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
From 1941, faced with a shortage of men, the Waffen-SS admitted or recruited by force hundreds of thousands of non-Germans to their ranks. This volume, from a team of international contributors, shows who these foreign recruits were, where they came from, what their wartime experiences were, and what happened to them after 1945.

The Fifth Field

The Fifth Field PDF Author: French L. MacLean
Publisher: Schiffer Military History
ISBN: 9780764345777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The Fifth Field reveals one of the final secrets of the war: how 96 American soldiers in Europe and North Africa were tried by American General Courts-Martial, convicted by military juries, sentenced to death, executed and buried in an obscure, secret plot at an American military cemetery in France"--Author's website.

The Kaminski Brigade

The Kaminski Brigade PDF Author: Rolf Michaelis
Publisher: Schiffer Military History
ISBN: 9780764337659
Category : Generals
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The political and military movement of Bronislav Kaminski in Russia 1941-1944 was a single case in the German occupation politic. Because of his constituted NationalSocialist Russian Labour Party he became for some time an ally to Hitler. His Peoples Selfdefend Army reached 10,000 men and fought for at least two years with great success against the communistic partisans in his combat area on the Russian front.

The Unknown Eastern Front

The Unknown Eastern Front PDF Author: Rolf-Dieter Müller
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
ISBN: 9781780768908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa with his attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Wehrmacht deployed 600,000 troops to the Eastern Front. Their numbers were later swelled by a range of foreign volunteers so that, at the height of World War II, astonishingly one in three men fighting for the Germans in the East was not a native German. Hitler's declaration of the 'struggle against Bolshevism' reverberated throughout all of Europe - among convinced fascists as well as among non-Russian eastern Europeans seeking to regain their independence from the USSR. Many of these volunteers subsequently became involved in the atrocities of the Wehrmacht and the SS. Vilified by Hitler for their supposed failures, condemned and forgotten by their homelands for treason and collaboration, their involvement in the war has been largely ignored or swept aside by historians. Rolf-Dieter Müller here offers a fascinating new perspective on a little-known aspect of World War II.