Part Two: Oskar Dirlwanger: The Worst Nazi

Robert is joined again by Matt Lieb to continue to discuss Oskar Dirlwanger. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Oh, Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the drivetime radio podcast
that gets you to your work rocking with are all
our old friends Hitler and Ryan hard Heidrick all the boys.
Hell yeah, Hitler and his friends, Hitler and his friends. Wow.

(00:24):
So everybody, this is Robert Evans with my with my
guests for today this week Matt leeb has Matt has
one of those boxes that radio DJs have that's makes
sounds on demand. And I'm gonna tell you right now,
this is going to be a nightmare for all of you.
I'm very excited. It's the only way you can actually

(00:45):
inject levity into Nazi atrocities is occasional air horn a horn,
you know, and then some cool, funky beats. Yeah yeah,
a couple of a couple of pops. Yeah, Oh my god,
it's a few stings in there. Man. Honest. I've always
said Behind the Bastards needs to be more like a
Morning Zoo Fia exactly. Yeah. We could. We we could

(01:08):
get like a deep fake of l Ron Hubbard to
like come in and be against every now and again
and talk about how to kidnap his baby the best.
Welcome to Boner and the Nord Tell you today we're
talking about Ryan hard Hydra more like ryanrd Hydra. Ye. Sorry,

(01:34):
I'm so sorry. We've really, really all the goodwill that
we've built up for years of carefully doing this podcast
shattered in a second, gone because of my new equipment. Dude,
this this came with it. I don't understand. I don't
need it. It just was like, oh, here's a pad
for sounds. And I was like when you hear about
like people's who being introduced to the global economy having

(01:57):
not ever been brought in before, and suddenly like Coca
Cola comes to them like that at no point of
their ancestors ever processed that amount of sugar. It causes
serious health problems. That's what's happening to me. With access
to this device that you now, I am going to
destroy myself and my show. Um yes, I am someone liberated,

(02:20):
liberated from a work camp who gets a Hershey bar
and exactly it's just too much. Oh boy, So times
we should probably start this episode by talking about what
it means to be a hunter or a poacher right

(02:40):
in Nazi Germany. What Because it's not as simple as
you'd think, right. Poaching is a serious crime, a lot
of the laws that people are getting arrested under date
back to the days when the Kaiser and other nobles
are like the only people who are allowed to hunt,
or at least allowed to hunt in certain areas and right,
because you've got like a king and you've got dukes,
and it's like, well, these are the nice deer and
only they may hunt them. And you know, or in

(03:01):
this woods, all of the game belonged to this noble thing.
It was like I thought it was weird. I was
like poachers. It was it a legal, it's certain game.
It always is, right because you don't want number one,
the Nazis, it must be said, we're kind of ahead
of the curve when it came to like attitudes towards
animal welfs environmental preservation. So there is some some of

(03:24):
this is that like they have laws because it's like, what,
we don't want to do damage to this ecosystem. But
paradoxes of Nazism is like when Hitler is like, I'm
a vegetarian, like I dislike harming of animals. So some
of it does come from just the fact that Hitler
is kind of a guy who likes animals, and some

(03:46):
of it comes from a lot of it. Most of
it comes from just like there have always been these
laws because in all of Europe it's been heavily restricted
who gets to hunt. Why this is a bigger subject.
But hunting is like it's a thing in Europe in
a way it's not in the United States because among
other things, a lot of stuff like who gets to
have weapons is wrapped up and who gets to go hunting,
and like a lot of different kind of game. Number One,

(04:07):
because of how much longer there's been sort of settled
societies in Europe. Uh and they were never because there
is bad at environmental regulation, as white people tend to be,
They wiped out a lot of like the big game species,
so there was kind of a need anyway, there's a
lot of rules here. So Number one, poaching is something
that it is easy to be a poacher, and that

(04:28):
what you can hunt and win is heavily regulated. But
but the other thing that's going on here is that
even though poaching has punished severely and Hitler himself hates
the idea of hunting for meat, hunters have a deep
like almost religious, spiritual sort of place in German folklore. Right,
the concept of a hunter is something that is is venerated.

(04:48):
Think about like at least a couple of times in
those fucking handling Grettelass stories where like the guy who
comes and saves the days, some like hunter who's just
like through the woods, right, Like it's a thing, you know, um,
And it's a thing in part because like Germans have
a lot of German history is like rap and German
like pride is wrapped up and you know they're they're
early history when they were fighting the Romans, and like

(05:09):
they're these kind of woods people who are live in
the dark forest their national folk hero myths, and yeah,
a lot of them are like exactly. So a lot
of Nazi propaganda is focused on people need to return
to nature, need to get back to the woods, they
need to hike into camp, and of course they need
to hunt. Right. That is, as much as Hitler doesn't
like it, a lot of Nazis and a lot of

(05:30):
Nazi propaganda still does venerate hunters. We're not liking it.
And then it's like, don't kill for meat. If you're
gonna kill, kill. This job has been making such moral
compromises unbelievable. Stagg right near where I guess Jews. It
was horrible, can't you believe it? Put his head up

(05:54):
once all. So we we see shades of this in
modern right wing propaganda, right like every if you're gonna
be like a right wing ship head trumpy political candidate,
you're gonna pose with a gun shooting something. Right. Some
of those guys are actual hunters. Neo Nazi. Fucking Paul
Neilon is a hunter and a scary asshole um. But

(06:14):
a lot of them are just like Dr Oz where
it's like, yeah, put me with a shotgun next to
some ducks, like people need to see that I'm a
real man, um. And it's a bit like that with
the Nazis. You definitely have some degree to which this
is like showy. But some of the Nazi high command
are big hunting nerds. I think it's Gearing. Gearing is
huge into hunting, and I believe Himler is as well.
Was either Himler or Gerbel's I actually forgot the double check,

(06:37):
but one of the two of the other big guys
was was also a big hunting nerd, and they have
like very nice hunting lodges. Gearing builds this palace for
himself named after his dead wife, Karen Hall. That's just
for him to go shoot things while the war is
going badly. Um, sell me a dog. There are a
lot of like there. There is Nazis are kind of

(06:58):
as much as Hitler doesn't like attributing some sort of
magical skill to the idea of being a hunter and poachers,
even though it's illegal, poachers are seen as generally the
very best hunters, right because not only are they tracking
and killing animals, but they're doing it while avoiding the law. Right,
So you have to be pretty good at hunting to
be a successful being hunted exactly, so that that there

(07:22):
is like a respect. Even as much as the Nazis
are big law and order guys, there's a respect for
what it means to be a poacher. So it's it's
both this, like, these guys are criminals and thus we
don't want to associate too closely with them, and also
these guys have some sort of primal skill that we've venerate, right. Um,
So when the Nazis decide that they're going to form
a military unit of cotton sentenced poachers, they think they're

(07:45):
making like this is obviously is a is a considered
military decision. It does make sense, right, if you were
planning a counter insurgent campaign, this might be a thing
you would do because it does make sense. But they're
also doing something a little bit more esoteric. The mystical
qualities attributed to hunters by German mythology include an understanding
of the wild as something powerful, spiritual, and valuable, but

(08:09):
by necessity controlled. And there's there's this idea that some
men are wild men, and poachers are among them. Dura
Wanger is a wild man. And you can't let these
people run freely in your society because like they'll suck
it up there too. They bring too much chaos. But
they also they're manly, they're powerful, and they're necessary in

(08:29):
some places. So there's a there's a place for wildness,
there's a place where it's necessary. And as the Nazis
gear up to ethnically cleansed Poland and the East, one
of the things that is like makes immediate sense to
these guys. It's like, well, this is where, this is
a place where wildness is needed, right, this is exactly

(08:50):
we need some fucking lunatics out here. Um, And yeah,
I'm gonna quote again from Christian Ingrau quote the image
of the hunter, like that of his different quarry, corresponds,
according to bertrand Hell, to your European imagination of black blood,
which defines the exact distance from the wild to these societies,
and by a discourse interpreting hunter's behavior, inserts them in

(09:12):
social organization and integrates therein the savagery and violence of
that image. Now black blood meaning like these people have
animal blood in exactly, Yeah, there's something inherently wild about
them that we have to harness. Right, And if you
want to read Christians book, which I do recommend, he
goes into a lot of detail about what this means
kind of the esoteric history. I don't understand all of this.

(09:35):
I'm gonna tell you that right now. I am not
an expert on European folklore, and this is an academic text.
Christian is a little bit wonkier than I entirely get.
But what I do stand understand is that he's saying
the Nazis venerate wildness. Thus, is there a term you
will hear a lot in speeches that, like Hitler and
Himmler and Gering make is hardness. Right, We want to

(09:56):
make young men hard so that they can do the
things that are you need to be done in the East,
and it is it is very funny. We can make
all the dip chokes we want. Um, this is you
can see this as part of the evidence for the
intentionalist sort of thing. Actually, it kind of does fit either,
because what you're seeing here is that when you're when
you're specifically saying we need to make the new generation

(10:18):
of men tough and not care about hurting people and
able to kind of go wild because we're about to
take over a space that we need them to go
wild in in order to detain it. Right, Um, that
is preparation for a genocide. Now not in the sense
that I think is easy to recognize in court papers,
but like that's part of it, right, the the deliberate

(10:40):
inculcation of these virtues of hardness and wildness and young
men and the Reich is part of why the genocide happens.
It's it's it's a it's as necessary as stockpiling the munitions,
right because most people can't just go shoot thirty thod
folks in a day, right, Yeah, like even most assholts
can't do. Take your biggest American dips it and he's

(11:00):
not getting those numbers. No. Um, so the reason darl
Wanger and these poachers are being formed into an anti
partisan unit. In addition to the stuff that just makes
sense militarily, there's an understanding by the Nazi brass that
these guys are going to be good at harnessing the
savagery of the wild to get civilian populations, and that
maybe a little bit of that wildness will rub off

(11:20):
on the other soldiers, and that's kind of what they think,
they know they're going to need. It's so it's the
insane thing about it, too, is that is number one,
they don't have black blood or whatever. The fuck. These
guys are literally just sociopaths. These guys they're finding the
most monstrous fucking like I mean, this would be equivalent

(11:40):
to like guys drinking four local and people going those
guys are wild, man, those guys really animal blood. Yeah,
I mean just yeah, just the biggest assholes in the world.
And they're just attributing some sort of like I don't know,
fucking spiritual animalistic sucking. None of what I'm saying or
what Christian to saying, is that like that this is

(12:01):
a lot a completely logical thing. It's just of course
there's folklore roots because the German the Nazis are big
into that sort of stuff that go deeper than just
like we need some poachers, right, There is a lot
going on here and it is it is meaningful to
understand that. Again, in Grau's book goes into more detail.
I'm not going to claim to entirely understand the arguments
that he's making there beyond what I have related to you,

(12:23):
because it is more complex than that. But you can
read that on your own if you're real into fucking
European folklore and hunting. Um. So this takes us back
to the discourse though that opened the episode about intentionalists
versus functionalists. Durrowanger and his men are about to kill
tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, in
the most brutal way is conceivable. Most of these specific

(12:45):
killings are not ordered by Hitler or by anyone else
in high command directly. Rather, durl Wanger's unit is formed
with the understanding that he and his men will interpret
their job, which is anti partisan activity, to include just
killing everybody in certain areas, right, and not only that,
but that they will develop techniques to do that that
will be replicable by the rest of the German military.

(13:08):
So obviously there are specific direct orders behind a number
of their massacres, but usually said orders are less specific
than you'd imagine. And this is not just a thing
the Germans did when they were committing war crimes. This
is part of their battle theory. There's a thing they
have developed in at the end of World War One
called Alph Truck's tactic, which venerates individual initiative and leaves
solutions to problems open to field commanders. Right, German soldiers

(13:32):
up through World War Two are much less hampered by
like they're much less the command exactly. It's more lest
like no, no, you're in charge of this unit of guys.
We need you here by this stage. However you do,
that's up to you. I'm not going to micro manage you.
And that's part of how like you get stories about
like Rammel being like a hundred miles ahead of the
rest of the army and whatnot, because there this is
like a thing that the German military specifically tries to

(13:54):
inculcate and its soldiers. And so even though there's not
like a direct hitler doesn't send out a memo saying like, hey,
have Oscar Darrow Wanger ethnically cleans large parts of Poland
and Belarus. He is directly orchestrating those massacres by he
and Himler and stuff, by putting this unit together and
putting it in the places that it's being put right

(14:14):
and being like, you know, hey, just if you feel entrepreneurial,
go for it. It's pretty much. It's weird that the
Third Reich was kind of like militarily run like a startup,
which is like, pretty well, yeah, you know, yeah, everybody,
there's a lot of hats. There's a real startup. Yes, well,

(14:36):
there's plenty of snacks and also guns in the kitchen
to kill. We have black massashes at every Thursday, all
the headphones you could ever want. Yeah, it is. It
is a bit like that. So Nazi Germany invades September
nineteen nine Poland. Um, this works pretty well for them. Uh.

(14:59):
They fairly rapidly achieve conquest of Poland alongside the Red Army,
who are on board for the conquest of Poland. At
this everybody wants some Poland right to a few centuries
now where people are just like, hey, let's get Poland.
Every time a war happens. Yeah, I mean outside of
the Nazi stuff. Man, if you come to me and

(15:20):
you're like, hey, Robert, I think we gotta I think
I got an idea we could take some Poland, I'll
be like, I'll hear you out, you know, I'll hear
everyone wants a piece of little bit of Polis. Yeah, exactly.
Not trying to go wild on it. Um. The Nazis
kind of go wild on it a little bit, so
they militarily this goes pretty well for them, but they

(15:42):
start to deal very quickly with the problem that their
forces are conquering more people and coming into possession of
more Jews than they had entirely been ready to handle.
So they've got partisans. There are partisans fighting, although it's
not at its high pitch yet, right because everyone in
Poland is still sort of dealing with the shock of
being invaded. Yeah, very it's it's it's come, it's come

(16:05):
along quickly. So the need to fight partisans at this
period is less important than they need to reduce the
number of human beings living in like the areas the
Germans are trying to take over and turn into Greater Germany.
So Darrel Langer gets sent with his men to Oriannenburg
in May of nineteen forty just a couple of months,
like not more than a couple of months, but not

(16:26):
all of that long after the invasion, and his job
is to train the first few dozen poachers in his
special unit. His men are kept in an isolated barracks,
less their wildness and criminal nature infect the other soldiers.
The specific branch of the German military they were attached
to would later become the Waffen s S, which is
the military arm of Heinrich Hmler's fun club for racists.

(16:47):
And I'm gonna quote now from the s S Darrel
Wanger Brigade by Ingrau quote. The two months of training
they were given must have been limited to the rudiments
of military discipline and a summary physical training, something close
to the Prussian drill, but hardly going for they're considering
how soon they were sent into action. This training was
selective enough that in the end only fifty five of
the eighty poachers were accepted in the commando. The others

(17:08):
were returned progressively to their detention centers without penalty. It
was purely a question of physical inceptibility. The order requesting
their reintegration in prison, specified that no disciplinary measures were involved.
And that's interesting to me that like you get this, like, well,
we don't want them to feel bad, right, we don't like,
we don't like be dicks to them. If they can't look,
you just couldn't cut it, you know, the feeling. Don't
hurt their feelings as they are carrying out one of

(17:31):
the greatest blood bats in history. Well, we wouldn't want
to be like unfair to these guys. Look, they're serving
their time. You know, they volunteered. It's okay, just them
not making the cut into the like varsity killing Jews team.
Hitler sits down next to one of these guys. Look, buddy,
it's nothing against It's all right exactly exactly got cut

(17:51):
from his high school jew killing team too, and Jesus Christ,
oh boy. So in September of nineteen forty, the men
of S. S. Durawanger, which is like what the unit
gets called, right, this is just kind of the naming
scheme at the Germans used are sent to an area
in Poland called Lublin. This town held an important place

(18:13):
in Nazi race theory. One of their propagandists had in
the nineteen thirties described it as quote a bottomless well
from which Jews flow to all corners of the globe,
the source of the rebirth of world jewry. So certain
Nazis are like, this is where the Jews come from. There, Yeah,
this is the well where the Jews are sprouted and

(18:35):
then just get shot into different countries all over the world.
Now look, it's called Lubland, Lublin, Lublin. Now look, I
know everything the Jews mountain, oh man. Given everything that's
going on in Palestine these days, the question of like
what is a Jewish homeland made is a thorny one.

(18:57):
But I think everyone can agree it's not Ublin. It's definitely,
it's definitely not Lublin. Yeah, we don't. We're not always
just like, hey, did you take your your yearly birthright
trips back to Lublin next year in Lublin. So the

(19:19):
surrounding terrain is swampy uh in the area, and so
it was considered to be Lublin's got a large Jewish population,
But it's also considered a great idea. They're going to
take all of the Jewish people from the surrounding area
and they're going to force them into the swamps around Poland,
where they're going to create concentration camps um. And they
think this is a great idea because since it's a swamp,
swamps are bad for you. As a general rule, people

(19:41):
aren't supposed to live in swamps, and the Nazis are
specifically saying that, like, if we make them all live
in this swamp and like shitty camps, it will quote
cause their considerable decimation. This is a free way to
have the environment kill a lot of them, and we
don't know they're trying to biological warfare in a sense. Yeah. Yeah,
So we have very little specific detail on what the

(20:02):
men of the Dura Wanger unit did in these first
eighteen months, but we do know the broad strokes, which
is that they helped to set up and guard the
Belzac and mag the Neck death camps. This was accomplished
in stages, which included destruction of synagogues and Talmudic academies
in Lublin, as the people there were rounded up and
forced behind barbed wire. One German soldier later described, quote,

(20:23):
we threw the huge Talmudic library out of the building
and carried the books to the marketplace, where we set
fire to them. The fire lasted twenty hours. The Lublin
Jews assembled around and wept bitterly, almost silencing us with
their cries. We summon the military band, and with joyful shouts,
the soldiers drowned out the sounds of Jewish cries. Jesus
fucking pretty bad, pretty fucking bad. This is uh sorry,

(20:51):
I just needed something. Yeah, a little bit of airhorn
there to help out airhorns. I mean, I hate to
say it, Matt, but that is kind of what the
Nazi we just read from dead Yeah, yeah, exactly like
I drowned out to cries with my cool horn. This
is bleak, Yes, this is very Why are they crying

(21:11):
so much? Bring out the air horn? Boot? All right? Okay,
they know if they know about speaking of bomba clat.
You know who's fucking just hella into reggae. All of
the sponsors of this podcast, Sylvie and I. Look, when
or or the CIA or whoever comes out and says

(21:33):
they want to do an ad in our show, we
have one question, and it's are you fucking down? Are
you a rude boy? You goddamn right. We're back so
in between helping to carry out actions, like the one

(21:55):
we just read from the Horrible Genocide story and march
intends of thousands of people to the site of their
eventual extermination. The Durrowanger unit got the chance to show
off their special skills encounter sniper missions and in rounding
up escaped Polish officers spotted in the area. After the war.
The s s officer Burger, who's the guy who gets
Durrowinger this job, claimed they spent most of their time

(22:18):
in combat with early stages of the Polish resistance. This
is probably a lie, As with that stuff I said
about counter sniper missions. Ingrou doesn't think they're doing any fighting.
Ingrow thinks they are purely Number one, rounding up Jewish
civilians and like burn burning their ship, beating them with
rifle buds, forcing them into camps, and number two stealing

(22:38):
ship right like, that's actually what they're doing at this stage.
And I'm gonna quote from his book now. Post war
testimony doesn't mention antipartisan activity. Another very credible indicator of
the total absence of danger is the fact that the
units suffered no losses. The men almost never mentioned tracking
partisans in the fullest of the demarcation zone. All, however,
say that the unit spent the majority of its time

(22:59):
on the most ordinary surveillance work. Policing the civilian populations
and fighting the black market seem to have been the
group's main activities. Unit reports speak regularly if the spoils
seized by the men supporting the local police force, money,
consumer goods, valuables, and a lot of this. It's we
don't exactly know, but there's a lot of reports of like, yeah,
we busted this Jewish community center and they had all

(23:20):
of this coffee and meat and stuff, and maybe they
just found where different members of the Jewish community were
like storing their nice stuff, or maybe they were robbing
everyone blind and claiming it was the Jews. They could
take some of that. And this is the thing, by
the way, happens across the s S. Right. There are
actually major discipline problems at the death camps of like
stuff being stolen from Jews by individual members of the

(23:40):
s S. Because that stuff is being stolen for the Reich,
and there's like disciplining over it. People get like transferred
to the East to go die for it. It's like
a whole thing. These guys are like pioneers in the
SS stealing everything that isn't nailed down, right, Um, I
mean the perk of this kind of fucked up job
where you're just like, oh, we get to we get

(24:01):
to go in there first and kill quote partisans, which
are just civilians who have no idea how the hell
you've got in their community center. Yeah, and then fucking
stealing everything inside. Yeah, and we gotta you know, we
give a bunch of it to the government. But like,
some of that's gonna find Some of those cigarettes are
winding up in my pockets, some of that meats winding
up on my table, you know. That's that's what they do. Um.

(24:22):
And obviously everything the Nazis are doing is gangster activity.
What I said earlier in the first episode, these are
webs of different gangsters, right. So like the fact that
these guys are stealing the s S doesn't hate it
because they're stealing it. Hated because no, that's supposed to
go somewhere else, Right, That's that's going up the chain.
You know, I don't consider it stealing from the you know, civilians,

(24:44):
and consider it stealing from them. You know, they're like, hey, hey,
all that stolen ship is ours mother, fucking yeah. Herman
Garring needs that coffee exactly, Martin market meat, Martin Borman
needs to purshuto. You gotta sit now. You don't get

(25:04):
to keep that poachers go hunt something um so the
entire yeah again. The thievery of the darrel Wanger Brigade
eventually grows to be too much for the occupation authorities.
And I'm gonna quote from a right up by Nicola
Bodanovic in War History Online here. Various reports stated that
during this period, rape, murder, extortion, beatings, and other crime

(25:25):
methods were employed by the members of the Special durl
Wanger Unit. The police chief of the Lublin Ghetto, Friedrich
Wilhelm Krueger, was so appalled by the conduct of throat
cutting Madman that he appealed several times for them to
be stopped. Instead, he was transferred to Belarus, So were
the durrell Wangers after their work in Poland was done again,
like the guy the Nazis make head cop in the ghetto,

(25:48):
which is not a good man, right, you don't put
a nice guy in that Job's flatten and say a
cab It's all, but also some are even more kiss
Maybe the yeah the most cab of all of the calves.
And this guy's like, these guys are rapists. These guys

(26:09):
are really bad. I know, I am preparing to exturminate
all of these people, but like, we gotta we gotta
get these these cowboys out of Poland's yeah, these guys
are just kind of going overboard. Yeah. Um. So it
was in Poland that the Darrowenger Brigade first proved itself
in actual anti partisan or sorry, it's in Belarus. Um

(26:32):
so they get they get sent to Belarus, and it's
there that the Darrowanger Brigade UM proves itself and its
first actual anti partisan combat. They do well, they're good
at this, Like it was actually militarily a decent idea
to like throw these guys together. And Oscar is immediately like, well,
this is a small commando unit. You've see what we
can do. Give me another couple of hundred men and
give us some guns and let's get some armored vehicles.

(26:55):
And they get them. And he does this a couple
of times. The Nazis keep reinforcing this unit with more
and more guys. Eventually it hits brigade strength. During this period,
um and which is like eight or nine hundred men
and their first engagements are pretty standard. But then during
one of these actions, a squad of their soldiers is
ambushed by partisans in the road and several are killed.

(27:16):
In reprisal, they burned down a partisan camp in the village,
and it's mostly uninhabited at this point because everybody's running away.
But they burn a village to the ground, and this
is going to be the first of a lot of
villages that they were on the ground. From July to
August of nineteen forty two, they carry out a massive
anti partisan operation and you have to read between the
lines here to find the war crime, but it's pretty

(27:37):
clear when you go through the numbers. By the operations end,
hundred and eighty one partisans had been killed, but only
four hundred and twenty two weapons had been seized, only
twenty seven German soldiers have been killed. One might interpret
from this that they're just rounding up villages and killing everybody.
And yeah, they're doing the thing that the l a

(27:57):
p d does, right, just like keep a gun in
the boot of the car to toss it a guy.
You know. This would prove to be a general trend
for the unit and I'm gonna quote from Ingrou's book again.
During these operations, according to Christian Garlas calculations, six to
ten men were killed for every weapon recovered and confiscated.
He concludes that only fifteen percent of those killed were

(28:17):
real members of armed resistance movements against the Germans. The victims,
thus were primarily peasants and fugitives, notably Jews escaped from
the ghettos. More significant still is the amount of food
among the spoils collected by the anti partisan units. Potatoes, grain,
and cattle appear regularly in the reports of the operations,
transforming them, especially after the winter of nineteen to forty three,

(28:38):
into murderous predatory raids against the local peasantry. The balance
sheet of operations swamp fever, which is what they call this,
sums up the situation perfectly. The Germans, by their own admission,
had killed only four hundred and eighty nine bandits in
over a month of operation. They had, however, eliminated eight thousand,
three hundred and fifty Jews from the Borano Witsitch ghetto,

(28:58):
as well as twelve hundred and seventy four suspects and
evacuated and seventeen other individuals by evacuated, we must understand
deported for labor within the Reich. These were persons fit
for labor found in the villages, while the executed suspects
were either escapees killed in the forest or those unfit
for labor from the same villages, women, children, and the aged.

(29:19):
So they are going through large swaths of territory, they
are rounding everybody up, they're sending the men to Germany
to labor, and they're killing the women, children and old people.
That's the bulk of the anti part as an operation
they're doing here, and they are part of and they're
not the first part of the early stages of the
Final Solution, right, which is camouflaged as anti part As

(29:40):
an activity, the s s tactic here that Durrowinger does
pioneer because they're also dealing with because again the very
like the first stages of what the Einsetz group and
are doing is just massacring communities of people who had
lived in cities. Um. There is an actual partisan movement
here right. There are Red Army partizans and stuff fighting

(30:01):
against the Nazis. And the tactic durrow Wanger develops in
these areas is to create what they call death zones.
These are not just zones that they're emptying of Jews,
but of all of their population. Now SS durrowingger are
not the only union involved in this, not by a
long shot, but they are the guys figuring out how
to depopulate large rural areas for the German military. Right,

(30:22):
that is a question that is a like, how are
we going to do this? What is the best way
to do this that is the most efficient exactly the
less uh least amount of emotional damage to our our people.
And that is a different We're not talking about like
morally different, but that is a different thing tactically from
like we've taken this city and now we're going to
round up the Jews and shoot them and worry or whatever. Right, Like,

(30:45):
it's a different thing. It requires different tactics. UM General
von Gottberg, who's the guy who authors the original death
zone orders and is in direct command of durrow Wanger
and his men, praises Durrowanger for his visionary leadership and
proposes that he be than a medal after his men
kill fifteen thousand people in fifteen months of operations, pausing

(31:06):
only ninety two of their own. Now, the Nazis are
dealing with a serious insurgency in Belarus at this point,
and as you'd expect, Dr Wanger is kind of seen
as their best bet in solving it. One internal report
on his activities read quote traffic with Vilnius itself is
more and more obstructed by acts of terrorism, minds, et cetera.

(31:26):
To this may be added the erroneous psychological treatment of
the population by units on police operations. Here the name
Durrol Wanger plays a particularly significant role for this man
in the war of annihilation. He wages piteously against an
unarmed population, deliberately refuses to consider political necessities. His methods,
worthy of the Thirty Years War, make a lie of
the civil administration's assurances of their wish to work together

(31:48):
with the Belarusian people. When women and children are shot
in mass or burned alive, there is no longer a
semblance of human of humane conduct of war. The number
of villages burned during sweep operations ex needs that of
those burned by the Bolsheviks. God damn, Yeah, that is
that is a Nazi being, Like these guys are out
of control again, this is this is a guy who

(32:11):
is like into this already. He's like no, Like, hey,
I believe in this subjugation of loves this usually, but
some people are doing a little too much. It is
fucking wild. Yeah it is. And again like I'm not
going into too much detailor we will later and some
of these things, but like they're not just massacring people,

(32:34):
Like no, don't just shoot the women who are not
fit for labor, they rape them, right, Like, that's that's
who these guys are. That's what this guy was before
the war start, right, Like, this is not this is
torture as well as execution. They are not doing the
most efficient thing, which generally the EINSTS GROUPA at least
earlier on, are just trying to efficiently massacre people with guns. Right,

(32:57):
there's a there's a degree of creative sadism to the
way that Darrowinger behaves. That is, it's not certainly not unique.
You can find a lot of other Nazi units that
do it, but he is. He is noteworthy for his
dedication to it. I think he's the Steve Jobs. Yeah,
Oscar Darrowinger gets out on the stage. Actually that's that's

(33:21):
literally the parts. So here's Oscar Drwinger in a turtleneck.
Mine Fields a problem since the beginning of modern warfare.
You have a piece of terrain that your enemy doesn't
allow your soldiers to cross because they filled it with
hidden bombs. Here at Nazi Co, we figured out a
solution to mine fields, which is to gather up all

(33:43):
of the women and children in the area and just
walk them through it until there's no mines. And then
and here's here's what's insanely great. Right, here's the thing
that's really cool. We shoot them all the survivors. He's
a visionary. He as as far as I could tell,
like the guy who invents this as a cohesive tactic. Right,

(34:05):
I'm sure there's places where you can find people doing this.
Durrell Wanger is the guy who, like, right, basically rights
up a guide to the German military of like, here's
how you do this. You get all of the you
round these the men up from these nearby villages, and
you make them walk. You keep them shoulder with a
part because that's the right length, and you have them
this is the way in which you use civilians to
clear land mines um and then you shoot them all

(34:25):
to death. And he's squid gaming. He's doing a proto
squid game. Yeah, and it works really well. And in fact,
s S and Wehrmacht units across the Eastern Front are
advised to adopt durroll Wingers tactics when they encounter minefields
because he's like it works pretty well. Um yeah, he's
the Steve Jobs of genocide. So durroll Wanger was also

(34:49):
praised for his ability to save on the expenditure of
munitions during massacres. One way he did this was instead
of look, you've got five people right from these two
or three villages, you could shoot them all and then
you're out five bullets and those aren't or you just
forced them all into barns and you light the barns
on fire. And the exactly he really is like a startup.

(35:14):
Found he really is a start up guys. We're gonna
disrupt ethnic cleansing, exactly exactly. It's just killed different you
know him. The exhumation report of the Soviet Investigating Commission mentions,
besides the number of villages and the number killed in each,
that neither cartridges nor projectiles were found, and it concluded

(35:35):
that the two thousand victims had been burned alive in Barnes,
a witness to the massacres, Alexander Mironov, saw a man
laughing through a fourteen year old child into a bonfire Jesus.
So again, they're not just doing this like coldly because
it's efficient. They're like, they're having fun with this is
their king, this is their thing, that's what they live for.

(35:55):
This is I mean, you know, these fools were in
prison before for being poachers and now they're sing yeah.
And they're also, it has to be said, all on
meth amphetamine, right, Yeah, it's not written about because it's
not generally like discussed all that much, but like this
is the period in which an awful lot of the
German Army is on fucking meth. So they're they're drunk

(36:17):
and on speed and this is like how they're having fun.
So I never with meth, you know, I was like,
I was strictly opiate. So I was like, I don't
want to funk with meth for the same reason I
do not want to drive a VW bug yea Nazi
OPI It's just make you like the least offensive of
the Nazi hike Herman Garring, you know, and look, if

(36:39):
you have to pick one Nazi leader if I had. Yeah.
So by this point, the Dura Wanger Brigade has been
expanded well beyond poachers. Its ranks now included disgraced s
S soldiers on penal release, as well as Russian and
Ukrainian auxiliaries. Right, they don't have that many poachers, you know,
there's not There's only some any. This eventually gets to

(37:00):
be like two thousand people. So like if you're in
the s S and in some cases in the Rmacht
and you get like in trouble because you commit a
series of crimes, they just send you here, right. Um.
They also when they meet fascists who are like Russian
and Ukrainian, they're like, hey, you guys wanna be in
the SS kind of and those guys are like, well,
we really don't have much of a choice. And also

(37:22):
a lot of us are pieces of ships, so yes,
and again it is a mix of people who are
just fascists who live there, and also people who are like,
oh you've got food and I get a gun, well
I'll kill whoever whatever. You don't understand how bleak life
is in Western Russia in nineteen I'll do anything. Yeah,
it sucks. Now, yeah, I will join your stupid club.

(37:45):
Watch the movie Come and See in twenties years under.
By the way, Come and See is literally about this.
It's about it's set in Belarus. It is it is
these Nazis, specifically, it's about Dr Langer, and it's about
from the perspective of the Belarusians, those fucking guys much um.
And it is a harrowing film. Um. The only I

(38:05):
refused to watch Nazi films. The only one I've seen
is um uh, an American tale about the Little Jewish Mouse.
That's the only one I'll watched. Darryl Langer is the cat.
I believe there was a Nazi. Definitely, he's multiple cats. Yeah,
he's he's a couple of them. Um. Now, Come and
See is a movie that was made during the Soviet

(38:27):
Union and is is like probably the most like visually
upsetting film ever made. Um, it's it's it would be
hard to beat. It's the closest you can get to
actually living through like some of these experience. It's it
is fucking gnarly and it's about this. Like if you've
seen Come and See and are still like haunted by

(38:48):
some of those images, it's literally about this period and
these guys is as good as that Georgia Merrow movie
about motorcycles that you keep talking about. Nothing is as
good as Night Writers. Um, if the cast of Night
Writers had been around, they would have put a stop
to this. You think Ed Harris with a sword in
a motorcycle is letting the ship go on the movie.
I mean, in the first scenes of the movie, they

(39:10):
beat up a Nazi like's just shaking her head, like
not again, shaking her head because now two weeks in
a row where he cannot bring it up. This is
the rest of your life. Now, I'm never not talking
about unfortunately, I know, but but that's not true because

(39:30):
you go through phases that would go through phases. I
should talk about that a little bit later. Um, we should.
We should discuss the child hunting island that we shouldn't
be talking about anymore. We'll get to that in a minute.
You know what actually weird about forty minutes, Matt, What
you ever made a joke that went too far? Never? Never? Okay,

(39:51):
that's good. Well, here behind the bastards we have some
running jokes. You know, everybody remembers the Doritos era fondly
ray theon knife missiles, all that good stuff. Lately, I've
really been enjoying a series of running jokes about having
an island where rich people hunt children for sport right
at good time. With those jokes very funny, I assumed
absurd enough that nobody would take them seriously. That's one

(40:14):
of the requirements now incorrect Number one's because we show
the name. And half of why we bleeped the name
was because we didn't want to alienate, you know, someone
who might be a sponsor someday. I think the cats
are that bag, but half of it was also it
just was kind of funny. This led to a lot
of people being like, is Robert serious? Is have a

(40:37):
child hunting island? Is this real? And it was a
constant thing um And normally I thought it was kind
of funny, and generally people would get on the subred
and be like, hey, what's going on, and other people
would correct them, and I was like, Okay, that's fine. Recently,
more than one member of the team have gotten messages
from people who are taking it very seriously, and one
person was distraught and being like, I feel like this

(40:58):
is real and you're not like it's not a joke,
and and you like and the amount of Reddit threads
is deeply and this is the Reddit threads, but those
are funny. There were there were some people I think
who are maybe like having a tough time issue and
took it, took it really serious. And if you are listening,
please I am not joking that that was that was
a gag. That was for yucksing not to have a

(41:24):
child hunting island. Please do not. You are not joking
about the fact that you are joking. I get that.
That's confusing. There is no child hunting island. We will
not be doing that joke anymore. But you know what
we will be doing, Matt what throwing two ads? We're back,

(41:49):
I hope everybody again, very seriously, there's no child hunting island,
um associated with specifically, Oh, Matt, I wanna, I wanna
do a yes and to that, but that's what got
us in this situation, so I have to stop. Um.

(42:09):
So by this point in the war, right and we're
talking like nineteen forty three ish, late nineteen forty three
pretty much, UM, the Dura Winger Brigade has been expanded
to there's these disgrace soldiers, these these auxiliaries, and they're
kind of mostly used as a result, they avoid direct
combat a lot because, among other things, well, there's a
lot of Russians in this unit. We probably shouldn't have

(42:30):
them fighting the Red Army. That might not go great.
We don't know we can trust these guys. Um. Yeah,
and one of these Russians later reported on his time
with the Dura Winger unit. Quote. During these actions, the
peaceful inhabitants of towns, villages, and hamlets were shot, burned, alive,
hanged houses, schools, hospitals, clubs, churches, and other public buildings

(42:51):
were burned. If my memory is correct, more than a
hundred inhabited areas were destroyed together with their inhabitants. Now, Oscar,
it must be noted because they are fighting in actual,
actual insurgence during pieces of this is kind of one
of the reasons that these guys, these criminals and rapists like,
are very loyal to him, weirdly loyal, is that he's

(43:12):
always the first guy into combat. Um, he gets wounded
multiple times during this he I mean, he already has
half an arm. Yeah, he does not give a shit
about right, He trying to hes trying to die like
he's the only thing Oscar Durrell Wanger cares about less
than age of consent laws is getting shot, right, It'll

(43:33):
just make me come harder. Oh boy. This earned him
the adoration of his men um and he also they
appreciated his openness to their suggestions on how to proceed
with the war. The pattern of new tactics of cruelty
originating within the unit and then spreading out to the
German military in the East continued. In addition to barn burning,

(43:54):
which gets adopted on a wider basis by the Germans,
Durrell Winger experimented with letting packs of starving dogs feed
on the corpses of murdered women and children. Like trade
up Ramsey Bolton, He's trying to figure out the most
fucked up ways to like like destroying not just people's lives,
with their minds too. And some of this is like again,

(44:17):
there's a bad and illegal, but like, if you have insurgents,
killing everyone in the area where they are is like
a tactic for fighting them, right because there's no one
to fight you. Um, a lot of this, like the
feasting dogs on corpses, there's no reason for this beyond
he's number one, he wants to like scare people, and

(44:38):
number two he's a monster. Um And for Oscar experimentation,
it's especially in like forty three, it goes beyond stuff
that is helpful to just like stuff a fucked up
dude does because there's no one to stop him. I'm
gonna quote now from a Bond University thesis paper by

(45:00):
Harris Goldworthy. Quote he made so called scientific experiments which
involved stripping the victims of their clothes. Then they the
victims were given an injection of Stryck nine. Darro Wanger
looked on, smoked a cigarette, as did his friends, and
they saw how these girls were dying. Immediately after that,
the corpses were cut into small pieces, mixed with horsemeat

(45:20):
and boiled into soap. Fucking A, there's like no reason
for this. He's just he's just being a piece of ship.
Like he's just he's just trying to it's just a
new It's like you know, I mean, I'm not trying
to minimize it, but it's like, you know, it's like
when you know you need to stop with the porn
hub because you're just like, what's next? Piss porn and

(45:42):
then you're like, am I really going to be a
piss porn guy? And he's the kind of guy who
was like, yes, yeah, he is the kind of guy
who goes straight to piss porn. Yeah, he starts off
because a piss pigo. Okay. The primary causes of death
for Darrel Winger's men during this age of the war
because again most of well they are again, there are

(46:03):
some they are getting into some firefights, some of which
are nearly most of what they're doing is just massacring,
and as a result, the vast majority of men who
die in his units um either get shot by their
own friends because everybody's drunk um, or they die in
like car accidents because again everybody's drong. Everybody's drunk. That
is the primary cause of death is they're wasted in
between massacres and they die somehow. So the larger SS

(46:28):
keeps an eager eye on their progress and on kind
of some of the things they're experimenting with, even though
they they're not. They don't like them, right, because these
guys are gross. Everybody knows it, Like nobody wants to
be these guys other than these guys. But I'm gonna
quote from a write up in Heinrich Himler A Life Here,
Dara Wanger's leadership of the Saunder Commando was characterized by

(46:50):
continued alcohol abuse, looting, sadistic atrocities, rape, and murder, and
his mentor Burger tolerated this behavior, as did Himler, who
so urgently needed men such as the Saunder Come and
Darrow Anger in his fight against sub humanity. It was
important to the Reich's Fearer, however, that the detachments within
the Saunder Commando did not belong to the s S,

(47:10):
but merely served it. It was not until nineteen that
Darrow Anger succeeded in incorporating his unit, which accepted criminals
of every hue and so was growing unstoppably into the
s S as the thirty six Grenadier Division. So that
guy is not with us, Okay, yeah, like he's with us,
but he's not really, he's like a volunteer. Like we

(47:32):
let him wear as a uniform and stuff. But that
all that weird ships, that's not us. That's not some
of that's us. A little bit of it is us,
a tiny, tiny bit, but mostly it's that I don't
know about that these guys are funked up? Should someone
call hr I mean it is one of the one

(47:54):
of the stories that people will tell about Himler. That is,
people take different things out of it. But he is
a period at which he visits one of the death camps.
I think it might have been Auschwitz, and he like
passes out when he's like watching the ship right, And
some people take it as like, oh, he was, like
what a weak man, he couldn't handle it. That's not
how his guys would have interpreted it, because most of

(48:15):
them are not like even mostly people committing the genocide
are not like eager to physically do it. They see
it as like this is a nasty, terrible job and
we're taking this burden upon And that's how they talk
about it to themselves. That's what hardness means. It doesn't
mean like violent sadism. That's not what it's supposed to mean.
It means you're cold enough that like you understand this
has to be done, and like that he would pass out.

(48:37):
That just actually means that he's he's a decent man
who just has to do this terrible task to protect
the right. Good guy. What a good guy like I
hope all of his men cradled the cradled them in
their arms and just like it's okay, please stop crying.
And that's part of why, part of why the s

(49:00):
S and why guys like Himmler, even though they need
the dr Wanger Brigade, find them so off putting and disgusting,
is that like they're taking full ownership of the kind
of things that these guys are making happen, but don't
want to don't want to have as a part of them,
Right Benrick Himler doesn't want to have like rape, burning
a village to death on his soul. He wants it done,

(49:23):
he needs it done, He'll make sure it gets done,
but he doesn't. That's not a part of his conception
of who he is, right, Yeah, and these guys, you know,
I'm more than just death camps. Yea. I am also
a man who likes to dress like a medieval knight.
In my last dress like a night. I like to

(49:43):
you know, go to renfairs. I feel like the problem
with cancel cultures these days is you are reduced to
the worst thing you've ever done. For example, me killing
all of the Jews, Yeah I did that, a big deal, Okay.
I've also read many fine books. Yeah, and so part
of like why there's part of why these guys get

(50:05):
reported so much by the SS is less that the
SS guys who are reporting them are legitimately horrified that
they're committing war crimes and more like it's not you
are you are unabashedly gleeful about doing the thing that
we do, but have to pretend exactly the presense is gone,

(50:25):
and it's like you're you're making us look bad by yeah,
you're making us feel bad because we don't want to
be that guy right when you like and again that
you can make a case that these are less bad
people than, for example, guys like the commandant of Auschwitz,
who was a loving father if I think five kids,
and you can find pictures of him on his vacations

(50:47):
and playing with his children by the pool and being
a wonderful dad while he is running Auschwitz. Rudolf Hess
I believe was his name. Um, and um, I think
it's ho s or whatever, like because there's another guy, yeah,
not that hass, not the other guy. Um. But yeah,
I think you could argue guys like Darrel Winger who

(51:08):
are just like, yeah, man, I fucking love raping and
murdering people. This is awesome, This is who I am.
Baby is a better person than the guy who like
pretends to be the loving father while he gasses a
million people. Right, because they know right from wrong. They
know it's bad, they know they're doing bad. And the
worst part about these people is they've convinced themselves. Their
narrative is that they are the victims. That's why they

(51:30):
have to do this, like how this guy phrases it. Yeah,
and they take the entire narrative and throw it in
the trash when you start gleefully doing it. And then
what does that say about all of your beliefs and
all of your crimes? It says that you are basically
that on the insete. There's no mask with the dar Winger.
Bring this mask off now. As the war turns against Germany,

(51:54):
these guys do find themselves thrown into actual combat more
and more, and the end of ninety three d of
brings an end to the good times because they don't
do great in stand up fights. That's not really not really,
there's not really what they're good at. Um. It also
brings another change in the composition of the unit, as
German manpower struggles become more severe Christian and grow White

(52:14):
writes quote. Starting in July nineteen forty three, the Sounder
and Height received large contentions of delinquents of a different kind.
The idea was not new. In early spring March, Himler
had ordered that Germans of the Reich and all men
of the class of nineteen o one and later living
in an irregular situation within the general government who have
no military training or assignment and who have avoided the

(52:35):
draft for years arrested in a general government sweep must
be gathered and assigned to the penal battalions of the
dure Wanger Unit. Now what that means is he's saying
all of the men of eligible age who have not
been serving in the military because there's some sort of
criminal are going to be sent directly to the dure

(52:56):
Wanger Unit. And these guys are all they're all born
between eighteen nine and eighteen one. Most of them have
been imprisoned as a social individuals or professional criminals. Um,
that's about half of these new guys are just professional criminals,
people who had committed burglary, who had stolen purses, um,
and then often most often for armed robbery, assault, manslaughter,

(53:16):
murder like like mostly bad. About half of these guys
are like violent crime guys, right, But there's also a
bunch of people who get brought into this unit whose
crimes are being a social. Now, this doesn't include petty criminals,
but it also means just like homeless people, right, you're
living on the street, you know you're a social. Unemployed
people who can't get a job, people who are mentally disabled, right,

(53:38):
who have some sort of like mental thing that makes
them unable to like work job, feeble minded right, Um,
there are some people who the Germans considered to be
psychopathic but don't have an extensive criminal record. All these
people get put in there. Now, Beginning in late nineteen
forty four, with shortages even more severe of manpower, Himler,
Gottla Burger, and durl Wanger to side to expand the

(54:01):
number of eligible men for the unit to include not
just those guys we talked about, but also political prisoners
who have been held in Nazi concentration camps. And now
the ranks of this SS units start to swell with
former anti fascists, mostly communists, who had been locked away
who had been in concentration camps for years get put

(54:21):
into the Dura Wanger Unit. Historian Peter Klausch refers to
the unit during this period as consisting of quote, anti
fascists in s S uniform. Yeah, it's this is we
are getting into one of the bleaker parts of the story.
Now Klausch is overstating the matter. But these guys are
never the majority of the unit, right. The majority of
the unit is like violent criminals and stuff um and

(54:44):
members of other military units who had gotten in trouble,
generally for rape or something. But a lot of the
Dura Wanger Unit are like former communists, mens who men
who had fought Nazis in the streets and been arrested
for it. Right, And a lot of these guys take
part in the slaughter of civilians with the Arrowanger Unit.
This is the only and very specific instance in which

(55:04):
the right wingers are like Antifa is the real fascist
is like these this one group of guys. Now, yeah, yeah,
they're the exception that the rule. It is more complicated
than that, because a lot of these guys they're looking
at like, well, we don't know what this unit is doing, right,
Because if you're in a concentrate, you don't know what
they're doing in. You just know, Oh, I can get

(55:25):
out and they're gonna give me a gun. I can
find a way to get away. I can desert and
join the variety. Right, And about a hundred of these
guys do, right. They get over there and as soon
as they can, they desert and they fight for the
Russian army. Right. Um, And like those guys, fine, that's
you do whatever you gotta do to get out of concentration.
I'm not gonna judge you. You You don't know what these
guys are doing. Um, but a significant number of these

(55:46):
dudes don't leave even when like the war turns against
them and they're surrounded and being annihilated. They fight to
death with to the death with their comrades. That's not
an insignificant number of these anti fascists or ori anti fascists.
It's like some Stockholm syndrome ship right there. And this
is all It's hard to say exactly. Some of it's
probably they just you know, these folks have become their comrades.

(56:08):
Some of it maybe they just there wasn't a chance
to get away. It's it's a nasty war, right people.
Show options are limited and we're already in this is
pretty complex moral territory. But it gets gnarlier as you're
surely aware, Matt. Homosexuality is illegal in the Third Reich. However,
many gay men, particularly soldiers, caught engaging in homosexual sex,

(56:28):
aren't sent to concentration camps. Instead, these are some of
the guys who get put in penal battalions. Right, So
a decent number the whole time this brigade is active,
A decent number the guys going in a lot. It's
a mix of like guys who have just committed rape
and guys who are like having homosexual sex and get caught. Now,
Hans Peter Clouch says that the hope here was to

(56:50):
push these men back to the right path via explosion
about you're straighten them out by making them fight with
these these real hard customers. Right. Um, they also didn't
want too They didn't want Germans who were being drafted
to think that if they just like fucked a dude,
they'd get out of military service. Right. That was the
other thing, um, star fucking dudes and it'll just be

(57:13):
a verse. I want to quote next from a Council
of Europe paper titled Queer in Europe. During the Second
World War quote, the Rmacht preferred to retend to retrain
homosexuals rather than exclude them. Franz Siedler adds that even
emasculated men were still fit for military service as long
as they were worthy of serving. It was not desirable

(57:35):
to dispense emasculated men from their military obligations. From nineteen
forty four, when Germany was experiencing huge and growing losses
on the Eastern Front, it was decided to resort to
the forced incorporation of homosexuals interned in concentration camps. As
Schlagdenhaufen describes in his contribution, a number of testimonies show
that this political strategy was seen as a last hope.
The historian Rainier Hoffschlitt has retraced the career of Heinz F,

(58:00):
one of the last homosexuals to have been forced into
the army. On May one, eight days before the capitulation
of Nazi Germany, he joined the Wehrmacht under duress and
a lot again, how you want to morally judge the
men who make the decision to join a unit like
the Darawanger Brigade, or who are made to join it
to avoid life in a camp because like, I don't know,

(58:21):
I'm a podcast host. I'm not gonna parce all this
out for you. But this is a thing that happens, right,
This is part of the history of World War two,
and it's fucking art gnarly. There was a fucking by
the end there it sounds like a rainbow coalition of bastards,
you know. And they were I'm sorry, they were retraining

(58:41):
the gay um soldiers like into straightness or into being
like the strait nous. Right. The idea was that like, well,
you know what is massacre? Yeah, their conversion therapy was like,
go massacre this village with Oscar God, do something straight

(59:02):
like killing innocent people terribly. Yeah, yeah, that's that's basically
what's happening. In total, the Dura Wanger Brigade spent fifty
three months in Belarus, during which we know they killed
at least thirty thousand people, most of whom were women
and children. During this massacre, they'd expanded from a small
commando unit to a regiment of roughly two thousand men.

(59:25):
So that's the death toll so far, right, people, and
this is like, this is this is a death toll
of people. This is like in one specific camp because
like usually here numbers like this, and you started thinking like, oh,
this is we got a death camp going No, this
is this is a roving band of bastards who are

(59:46):
going around doing murder, who have just emptied a big
chunk of the Belarusian countryside, right like, that's what they're doing.
And again it might have been significantly more than thirty thousand.
As the Russian advance began to push the German army westward,
the durl Wanger Brigade was sent back to Poland. When
the Polish underground took control of parts of their former capital,

(01:00:06):
Nazi Germany redeployed badly needed forces to crush the city.
Dr Wanger and his men were front and center. Their
brutality was so intense that it stunned many of the
soldiers they fought alongside. One of these men was an
eighteen year old sapper named Shank, temporarily attached to the
SS for the operation. He later wrote this quote, I

(01:00:28):
would now like to describe the assault on the hospital
as usual. Rushed to the objective grenades, and then after
they exploded, we went in. I was about to fire,
but I heard don't shoot from the inside. What do
I do? I signaled to my comrades twentys away to
cover me. I ordered the Poles to open the door
and come out with their hands up. Inside I heard
snatches of conversation, some in Polish, some in German. The

(01:00:51):
door opened slowly and a Red Cross nurse stuck out
a white flag. My comrades came up and we went
in bayonets fixed a Polish officer, a doctor in fifteen
Polish Red Cross nurses surrendered the hospital. The Germans asked
us not to hurt the Polls. Then the s S arrived.
They immediately executed all the Polish wounded and attacked the nurses,
who were soon stripped and raped. We were pushed out

(01:01:13):
the other door of the hospital. When we could come
back that night, the s S had relieved us, there
was tumult on the execution grounds. Soldiers from all the
units ss Ukrainians were playing flute and singing, and there
I saw something so frightening and horrible I can hardly
describe it. Fifty years later, the s S were pushing
the nurses, naked their hands on their heads to the gallows.

(01:01:33):
They had cut a short tunic for the doctor had
put a rope around his neck and pushed him towards
the gallows, where some ten civilians were already hanging. The
crowd laughed and shouted. Some soldiers were protesting, but they
were drowned out. I saw we could do nothing, so
I kept my remarks for our headquarters. Bro. Pretty bad

(01:01:54):
war crimes, honestly, dude, At this point, I'm starting to
think that Nazis were bad. Yeah, that is the unavoidable
conclusion when you when you try to damn it. Yeah,
pretty bad, pretty bad guys unit. Yeah, those are the
guys raping and murdering nurses. J fuck. Shank makes it

(01:02:16):
clear that whenever the enemy were actual soldiers with actual guns,
the indisciplined, sloppy viciousness of the Dura Wanger of Durrah
Wanger's men was as much a hindrance as a help,
and like real combat. And here's another excerpt from his
recollections quote, Then the reinforcements arrived the s s. It
was the Dura Wanger Penal Battalion. Its soldiers wore no

(01:02:37):
marks of rank, they had drunk a lot and weren't sober.
They immediately attacked the Polish positions. They charged the houses,
yelling Hurrah. Just in front of the houses, they fell
under polish fire. They died by dozens, many were wounded.
They didn't gain a meter of ground. Their leader was frenzied.
We then advanced together with the s S under tank protection,
a few meters in front of the buildings. The tank

(01:02:58):
was hit and exploded. A soldier's helmet flew into the air.
So that's that. Part's funny. That parts that's good. What's
not good is that the polls don't win the wars.
I getta uprising right uh. And the violence that follows
is a slaughter almost unparalleled in the history of armed conflict. Today,

(01:03:19):
it's known as the Wola massacre. Rather than going to
detail about every crime against humanity committed by these men,
I am going to find an accurate summary of their activities.
I found in an article by Peter Preskar quote the
Dura Wanger Brigade reeked a vodka and death. They slaughtered
innocent poles, regardless of age and sex. Dura Wanger, wearing

(01:03:39):
a black coat, walked in the rear, screamed orders and
shot anyone who lagged behind. The Drwinger Brigade and cooperation
with the equally sadistic Kaminsky militia, massacred forty thousand unarmed men,
women and children in the Wola district of Warsaw. They
did all that in less than two weeks. Yeah, drro
Wanger burned multiple hospitals. Patients Inside the hospital, nurses were whipped,

(01:04:03):
gang raped, and hanged naked while popular German music was playing.
At one point, darro Winger ordered his men to execute
five hundred young children. He wanted his troops to save
their bullets, so they did the bulk of their work
with rifle butts and bayonets. On another occasion, one of
dara Winger's men took a pretty young woman. He cut
her blouse open with a bayonet and then raped her. Afterwards,

(01:04:25):
he cut her from belly to neck. So we're gonna
we're gonna leave that be in terms of descriptions of
Nazi war crimes. But like when I say, these guys
are like the worst, not like they're the worst of
Like this is yeah, pretty pretty bad guys. How do

(01:04:46):
you do how long you been doing this podcast? Man?
Like four years? Five ye or something like that? I mean, god,
damn dude, how do you is your How's how's your head?
How's your mental head? You know, it's like you you get,
you get a lot of stories like this you read, honestly,
the ones that are like, I don't know, like, yeah,

(01:05:09):
the thing that I think about when I when I
read stories like this in terms of like visual things
is them Because for the reporting that I did, I
had to watch the christ Church massacre video a number
of times. God, That's the thing that I think about
the most when I think about, like, what kind of
dude does this in in the way in which this

(01:05:30):
kind of like yeah, the very specific sadism, the very specific,
like I mean, just the the evil that veers into
an illness type of like crimes where you're just like,
you know, I don't want to obviously, I'm not trying
to minimize it by saying that this is like, you know,

(01:05:52):
obviously some sort of illness, but it just you can't
you can't otherwise explain this level of sadism. I get
what you have, guys, and we talked about token last
episode a little bit. I get why you get guys
like Tolkien who see pretty terrible things, who view evil
as something supernatural a certain extent, right, because seeing something

(01:06:16):
like this, like it all, there's there's a degree of
to which it like, I don't know there there's there's
something there that it is. It is hard. Maybe we're
programmed to write to write like and maybe it's a
defensive thing. You don't want to believe that it because
it is. I think just people are capable of all
sorts of fucked up shit. Um, but it it does
feel in the same way that like, if you've ever

(01:06:37):
fought a wildfire, it feels like there's some sort of
intelligence to the wildfire. Um. It feels when you when
you like read about cruelty like this, you almost it
is hard not to feel like there's something there, you know,
when you when you look into it that way. I
don't know, not that that means there is anything, but

(01:06:58):
it's hard not to feel that sometimes. Yeah, it's it's
you understand how someone could um look at look at
you know, see these this level of atrocities and it
works with their reality because their reality is based on
kind of this like uh, logical emotionally logical foundation and

(01:07:23):
framework with narratives, with stories, there's the reason in an
action and a reaction and then seeing something this sadistic
and going like this is otherworldly because this doesn't make sense,
it doesn't. This is who it's that hope you You
would hope no one could enjoy something like this, and
you would hope that other people would be like, hey,

(01:07:46):
maybe we shouldn't do this, But to see it in
masses and an up close and personal it's got to be.
I read about orcs and wizards and ship too, dude.
I feel like this is why I talk about the
Sopranos and the Wire because sad it is, it is,
I mean worth noting that, like there are Nazis who

(01:08:06):
try to stop this, like members to give you an
idea of how bad this guy's Members of the s
S during the cleansing of the Warsaw ghetto reprimand this
guy for cruelty that I don't I don't know on
like the bad guy CV, I don't know what else
you could put above that, But like the SS in

(01:08:28):
Warsaw was like Jesus Christ, this guy is unchanged. So
he and his unit are reprimanded and they are removed
to Hungary where they helped to put down the Slovak
national uprising, and they again kill thousands. Terrible bloodshed. I
feel like we have not too. I don't want to
like that, not that that's not also an important story,
but like I feel like I've read enough stories of

(01:08:50):
horrible sure, like you you can, you can get what
they probably did over more atrocities beyond capability to even
a man. Yeah, so you know if that happens. Uh.
And it's here that the story of the Dara Wanger
Brigade starts to come to an end. During an action
against the Red Army, Oscar gets shot through the chest.

(01:09:11):
Now he lives. We're not done yet, of course. Don't worry, though, Matt,
this is actually gonna be fun. You're gonna like this
last part. Yeah. So he gets separated from his unit
because he's hurt pretty bad. Um, And now Oscar is
not a dumb man, and he's pretty obvious at this point,
we're not gonna win this thing, right, We're not. We're
not gonna There's like one battle where like fifteen thousand

(01:09:33):
rockets land on his troops positions. He's like, oh yeah,
we're we're This probably isn't gonna go well for us, boy,
So he he deserts and he goes into hiding near
his own own old hometown. Most of his soldiers die fighting,
some of them get captured, some of them do a
lot you know, do dessert. Um. So there's cases of
like anti fascists who deserted and joined the Red Army

(01:09:54):
and wind up fighting there anyway. Um. And this is
a story that does, thankfully have I'm not gonna call
at a happy ending because this is a nightmare, but
as close to a happy ending as you are going
to get in a story about the s S and genocide.
Because unlike a lot of the guys the Eronsets group
of a lot of the guys who are like architects
of the Holocaust to escape, Oscar does not escape. He

(01:10:16):
gets captured by the French occupation forces at the end
of the war and they put him in a jail.
And I guess who's running that jail. Oh fuck, I
don't know. Former members of the Polish resistance. So guys
who have been fighting his guys in Warsaw exactly. And
those guys are like what we got who? Oh? Yeah,

(01:10:38):
he's not he is not making it to trial, Like, no,
this guy is not seeing the courtroom. We're we're gonna
handle Yeah, We're gonna take care of this. So we
have an account of what happens next from another Nazi,
who's Darrel Wanger's cellmate, right, and here's what he writes.
Quote in front of the cell door, there was French soldier,

(01:11:00):
a garden a red kepi. Never Nevertheless, when I was arrested,
I did not see the frenchman, but rather armed and
uniformed poles. On the next day came a sixteen year
old Jew from Ebber's Bach Solgout County County, where he lived,
and they let him punch us in the face, which
he did under the which he did under the supervision
of the polls until he got tired. Now I'm gonna

(01:11:22):
be like, if we're being totally honest, this is legally
a war crime, I'm also fine with it. I'm completely
fine with it. This is one of them look the
other way. Yeah, let's let's let this boy whose family
was massacred hit these Nazis as much as he fucking wants.
I love it. Punch in the face is just a
great It's a great way to start this. It's just like,

(01:11:44):
all right, first we're gonna have the sixteen year old
punch you in the face. Let him he until he's
all tucker it out. Let him work some stuff out right,
He's got some demon slid him exercise. I'm here quote,
I'm gonna continue now. We returned to the cell with
her face is completely shattered. I myself had been beaten
on the same day by the polls, and only because

(01:12:04):
I forgot refused to shout three times, I am a
German pig. Durrell Wanger and Munch, who's another Nazi, were
pulled out of the cell into the corridor every night
and brutally beaten. I heard blows and terrible screams. In daylight,
I would see bleeding open wounds on the faces of
munctioned Darrell Wanger, and their entire bodies were covered with
bleeding welts. Munchen Darrell Wanger were taken from their cells

(01:12:26):
separately three times on the night of fourth to fifth
June and beaten in the corridor. After they returned to
their cell for the third time, they could no longer
speak or stand. After a short time, the guards came
to the cell again and ordered them to get up
and follow them. Neither Munch nor Durrell Wanger could lift themselves.
Then the guards began to strike them with rifle butts
in their heads so that their heads turned into indiscernible

(01:12:48):
bloody pulp. Then they started kicking them in the stomachs.
After that, the guards left both of them lying in
the cell unconscious. I am surprised that, according to the
registration of death performed by the French commandant, Durro Wanger
had died only on the seventh of June nine. So
you don't get this often with Nazi war criminals. But yeah,

(01:13:09):
that's about the right way for that to end. Oh,
that's wonderful. That is just like the Catharsis, because yes,
you do not get this often. It's always like they
go to fucking you know, they go to Argentina and
hide out and then they gotta be fucking like found
this is they killed themselves like a bunch of bitches.
And you know, we don't get that, like, you know,

(01:13:31):
getting just beat to death. Victims of his crime spend
days beating him to death and miserably in a cell.
It's about I don't know again, not justice, not even legal,
but like what do you want? You know, like what
what what what do you want from these people other
than to do that to him and I love that
they whipped out all the classics. You know, they were

(01:13:52):
just like the sadistic classics, the punching, the kicking, the
pistol whipping. You know, it must have hurt, like double
knowing at like while he's being beaten to death, He's like,
they're not even innovating new ways of doing this. They're
not even building some sort of elaborate Roob Goldberg machine
which kicks me in the nuts till I bleed to death.

(01:14:14):
It's like, no, dude, we're just gonna fucking go. I'm
on you right now. Yeah, we're just gonna yeah, the
old stuff. So the old stuff. That's the story of
Oscar Durrel Wanger. Um, Wow, boy, howdy what a piece

(01:14:34):
of ship. There we go. Yeah. I don't like them.
It is thoroughly nice to like, you know, have one
where they actually you know, beat beat one where they
get there. Yeah, I would say, statistically speaking, a lot
of the times it's and they died at the ripe
old age of way too long. Yea, they died comfortably

(01:14:57):
in their bed. This is and I can imagine a
heart woman is like those Polish guys are like, wait,
that's sucking Oscar Durroll Winger. Yea, you know there's that.
There's that kid came into town the other day. A
whole family got wiped out by Darrell Wingers. Bring him
in here, Yeah yeah, bring him in here. What a
gift we're gonna We're gonna help him move past this.

(01:15:18):
Oh man, I love it. That is like that, that
is what that for that kid must have been. Just
it's like, I mean, I don't but I hope it helped, right, Like, Yeah,
I don't know that that makes it any better, but
I can build a narrative in my head in which
that does feel better for me to hear that, So

(01:15:40):
I would. I certainly don't know if it helped that kid,
but I can't imagine it hurt. No, you're not you.
You are not turned into a worse person because you
punch Oscar Darroll Wanger while he's in prison. I don't
believe that. No, No, that is he's doing God's work right,
He's doing right there for him. Yeah, they got it

(01:16:02):
at the end there, the story really came together. Yeah.
I wish it had started with him being beaten to
death of some but all of these guys, you know,
starting with them being beat to death. You know, it
makes you kind of a little bit go like, no,
the Germans should have kept hitting their children. You know,
it was all that, you know, the progressive lady being like,

(01:16:25):
we shouldn't do that. Well, look where that leaded. Well,
I mean, I will say that the point that that
paper is making that we didn't maybe get new enough
to tail is that like the way in which Dura
Wanger's generation was raised kind of hinged on that when
the not the generation the Nazis raise up that are
like the young soldiers are trained, are like it is

(01:16:45):
about hardness and physical discipline. I don't know that, like
wh who actually knows right that guy Shank who was
eighteen years old is raised under that system and clearly
is like, well this is obviously wrong and evil, and
I am on the wrong side. And I realized that
now as a as a boy um, whereas Darrow Wanger
grows up in a more progressive age and is like
the worst person I magine. So I don't know what

(01:17:07):
to take it about that we don't have the problems,
We don't actually have enough to tail about his childhood
to like make more conclusions about what was going on
and whether they impacted it or if he was just
just an asshole. Yeah, it sounds like an asshole. Um,
sounds like I mean, I'm just gonna be help. Yeah.
That's the thing about World War One. It really it didn't.

(01:17:30):
It didn't make him better. I think we can conclude that.
But to be fair to the rest of the veterans
of World War One, uh, they didn't do the same ship.
Gerald Tolken wrote about Hobbits afterwards. About Hobbits, he was
just like, what if there's these cute little Irish kids
and all they do is, you know, smoke weed and

(01:17:51):
find rings of power? Yeah, same war, same battlefields. One
guy winds up doing the worst things I've ever read about,
And the other guy is like, what if there were
little people who like to eat for breakfast? That seems nice.
I'm gonna write about one fighting a dragon. Yeah. What
if they were elves and they're all hot? Yeah yeah,
like a reason, they're just the hottest people. And there's

(01:18:14):
also the dwarves and they're funny, like yeah, good for
Tolkien man. Yeah yeah, anyway, Really, that's what the that's
the message here is Jero Tolkien was pretty good at
processing trauma. Exactly. He was very good at processing it.
And I think we can all safely say that he
would not give a fuck that Amazon cast Black Elves like,

(01:18:37):
I don't think he would care. He would hate the show,
but not for that reason, right right, right, You would
hate the show for a thousand other reasons, thousand, a
thousand of reasons you would never understand in your entire
ready every one of his books, some of them would
be like, well, what are you going on about? John Um? Anyway,

(01:18:58):
the episodes over, you want to plug your I do
I do. If you've stuck around this long, then you
must be excited for a plug. I do a wonderful
the wire rewatch podcast called pod Yourself The Wire Um.
You should listen to it, and you should give us
five stars in review. I just want that. I just

(01:19:18):
want this one to have all the reviews. I don't
even care that if anyone listens to it. But it's like,
you know, when I go into the Apple podcast store,
I see like people they got like four thousand reviews
and you know five thousand, and I'm like, I want
to be one of those podcasts. So do that for us,
and then also listen to it. Review Bomb and listen

(01:19:40):
to Matt's podcast. You can say anything in the review
as long as it's five stars. You can be like, oh, Matt,
it's a great podcast. Although he keeps talking about feet
feel free mentioned feet, I don't care, just five stars
we love them. Well, you can check that out. You
can read my book After the Revolution. Just type it
in with a k press or just type it into

(01:20:02):
like whatever book buying website you use. You will find
it and can get any book or a physical copy.
And you know, as you go out into the world
after this harrowing week, be the sixteen year old punching
a Nazi in the face that you have them around
the world, right, Hell yeah, dude, fuck yeah. Behind the

(01:20:23):
Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media
dot com, or check us out on the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.