Army of Evil: A History of the SS (41 page)

Dirlewanger rejoined the NSDAP yet again in March 1932, and later that year he signed up with his local SA unit, where he was appointed a platoon commander. The following year, he secured a job as deputy director of the Employment Office in Heilbronn.
²⁹
At this point, Dirlewanger should have been well set on the path to success: he enjoyed prestige as a distinguished “old fighter” and war hero, and he was in tune with the opinions of the new regime. However, he was soon branded a disruptive influence by the SA, his local NSDAP and the Employment Office. The root cause of this was his alcoholism, a condition that he never managed to overcome. In July 1934, in the wake of the Night of the Long Knives, he went for a drunken drive around Heilbronn in his official car. He caused two road accidents and left the scene of both. Even more disturbingly, during the course of this binge, he had sex with a thirteen-year-old member of the
Jungmädel
(Young Maidens),
*
and it was later alleged that he sexually abused girls from this organisation on a routine basis.

Dirlewanger lost his job, was expelled from the party and the SA, and received a two-year prison sentence. He admitted that he “did wrong,”
³⁰
but vehemently denied that he was a serial child abuser, claiming that he thought the girl in question was sixteen. A subsequent investigation by the SD suggested that the local NSDAP leadership might have put pressure on the court to find him guilty. Furthermore, when Dirlewanger tried to have his case reopened after his release from prison in 1936, the local party leaders almost immediately placed him in “protective custody” in a local concentration camp, presumably to shut him up.

Dirlewanger’s rehabilitation began in April 1937, when Gottlob Berger, who seems to have been a friend, helped to find him a post as a company commander in the Condor Legion—the quasi-official German military presence in Spain during the civil war. At one point he was summoned back to Germany to be investigated for “political unreliability,” but Viktor Brack of the Führer Chancellery intervened to ensure Dirlewanger’s release and return to the fighting. The next time he returned to Germany, in May 1939, he was awarded the Spanish Cross in Silver by the OKW (to go with two Spanish Nationalist decorations).

With a much larger war now in the offing, Dirlewanger wrote to Himmler in July 1939 to apply for one of the SS military units. However, he was initially turned down, pending the outcome of a fresh appeal he had made against his conviction five years earlier. Finally, in May 1940, following the presentation of a new testimony, Dirlewanger’s conviction on the underage sex charge was overturned and he was exonerated of guilt. Ultimately, he was also allowed back into the NSDAP.

It is impossible to know whether Dirlewanger’s friends in high places pulled some strings on his behalf, just as it is impossible to know whether his original conviction was secured by political enemies. Whatever the truth, Berger now felt free to champion Dirlewanger. He reminded Himmler of this potentially promising commander, and suggested that he should be placed in charge of training the new poachers’ unit. Himmler agreed, and on 17 June 1940 orders were issued to transfer Dirlewanger from the army reserve into the Waffen-SS with the rank of SS-reserve lieutenant.

However, just as Dirlewanger arrived at Oranienburg to take up his new post, the whole project hit a snag. One of the poachers wrote a letter home, and this found its way into the hands of an NSDAP leader in Hettstedt. The party man subsequently complained that there was “general indignation, both in party circles and in the SS,”
³¹
at the very idea of convicted poachers serving in Himmler’s supposedly elite service. As convicts, these men were deemed to be
Wehrunwürdig
—unworthy
to carry arms in the service of the state—and thus could not be drafted by the
Wehrmacht
, and yet here was the SS seeking to recruit them. A cunning way was found to dampen this criticism: it was decided that the unit would not be
part of
the Waffen-SS but a special formation
under the control of
the SS. Likewise, while the unit’s commanders were to be drawn from the Waffen-SS, the poachers, in effect, were to be employed by the SS but could not be members of it until they had redeemed themselves in combat.

With this established, Dirlewanger supervised the basic training of the eighty
³²
poachers at Oranienburg. Then, in the autumn of 1940, he was ordered to take the unit to Poland. Although it had been renamed
SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger
(SS-Special Battalion Dirlewanger), it was organised at this stage as an infantry company. In Poland, its members undertook a variety of tasks: for instance, they were involved, probably as slave-labour guards, in the digging of anti-tank ditches on the defensive “Otto Line” that was prepared against possible Soviet attack; they supervised Jewish slave labourers from a concentration camp at Dszikow; and they swept up remnants of the Polish Army hiding in the forests near the demarcation line between the German and Soviet zones.
³³
There is no concrete evidence for how they behaved at this time; however, given their conduct later in the war, it is safe to assume that they were casually brutal towards both their enemies and their prisoners.

More is known about what life was like for the poachers themselves at this time. One of the original members of the unit recalled: “We learned from the beginning that Dirlewanger was ‘Lord of Life and Death’; he treated us as he wanted. He could pronounce sentence of death and carry it out. He didn’t need to carry out a trial. These powers were given to him by the National Leader of the SS.”
³⁴
This was certainly true, but it appears that Dirlewanger also had a certain degree of affection for his men, and he could treat them decently, provided that they observed absolute obedience to him and maintained an iron discipline.

•    •     •

A
S WE HAVE
seen, the Waffen-SS was hardly deluged with volunteers when it tried to recruit ethnic Germans and the “Nordic” races from occupied Europe. However, that recruitment campaign was a roaring success in comparison with its various attempts to persuade significant numbers of Allied nationals to join its ranks.

A British volunteer unit fighting in the Third Reich’s “crusade against Bolshevism” was first seriously mooted in the winter of 1942. Its proponent was John Amery, the elder son of a member of Churchill’s government, who had thrown in his lot with the Third Reich and moved to Berlin several months earlier. Eventually, despite considerable effort over the next two years, this would turn out to be the smallest independent foreign volunteer unit of the Waffen-SS.

Amery’s father, Leo, a contemporary of Churchill at Harrow, was elected to Parliament in 1911 and was soon being touted as a rising star of the political right. Over the next thirty years, he established a reputation as “One of the best informed and most intellectually sophisticated men in British public life.”
³⁵
Indeed, his speech to the House of Commons on 7 May 1940 helped precipitate the fall of Chamberlain’s government and Churchill’s assumption of power.

John Amery, who was born the same year his father entered Parliament, was an entirely different character. A strange and difficult boy from a very early age, he suffered from a personality disorder that seems to have left him more or less indifferent to the consequences of his actions. He ran away from school on several occasions, drank heavily, contracted syphilis at the age of fourteen, stole, lied, ran up huge debts, wrecked cars and married bigamously on two occasions (his three “wives” were all prostitutes). He was living in southern France in the spring of 1940—supported by an allowance from his family—and spurned a number of opportunities to return to Britain. By then, he had a fairly unique political philosophy, combining his father’s British Conservative imperialism with French-tinted fascism and virulent
anti-Semitism—which was particularly peculiar, as his grandmother had been a Hungarian-Jewish refugee. These political views—and his connection to Churchill’s government—earned him considerable suspicion from the Vichy government, and he was incarcerated in a concentration camp at Vals les Bains in November 1941.

Released after a few weeks, Amery began to look for ways to improve his situation. Enthused by the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he approached the Finnish and Italian governments and asked to join their forces, but then he was contacted by the German Foreign Ministry in August 1942 and invited to visit Berlin under safe conduct. Fired up with vanity and self-importance, he accepted. The Germans, of course, merely wanted to see if this anti-Semitic fascist sympathiser with a direct link to the British establishment might be of use to them. Amery met with Dr. Fritz Hesse, chairman of the German inter-departmental “England Committee,” around Christmas 1942. Hitler was kept informed of these meetings and seemed to think that Amery might provide Germany with a major propaganda coup. It was agreed that Amery should make a series of “pro-peace” (anti-British) broadcasts on German radio, but Hitler was also interested in the Englishman’s suggestion that he should recruit sympathetic British prisoners of war to fight for the German cause on the Eastern Front. On 28 December, Ambassador Walter Hewel, the Foreign Ministry’s representative at Hitler’s headquarters, telegrammed Hesse: “The Führer is in agreement with the establishment of an English Legion…[recruited from] former members of the English Fascist Party or those with similar ideology—thus quality not quantity.” Immediately, the England Committee decided to exclude Amery entirely from the recruitment process.

The SS did not become formally involved in the formation of the “English Legion” until September 1943. By then, an effort had been made to identify fascists among the sixty thousand or so British POWs being held by the Germans, and to concentrate them at two special camps in the suburbs of Berlin: Zehlendorf for officers, and Genshagen
for other ranks. A rumour was started that these two camps were “holiday centres” for long-term prisoners, where they would have access to better food, sports facilities, entertainment and even sight-seeing trips around Berlin. In reality, they were run by a member of the England Committee, Arnold Hillen-Ziegfeld. Under his direction, supposed British fascist sympathisers were installed as the permanent trusties of the camp and ordered to identify and recruit other potential volunteers.

It seems that the Zehlendorf camp was a complete failure, but the same cannot be said of the Genshagen camp. Among the “German” staff there were Oskar Lange, an army NCO who had lived in New York for many years, and Thomas Cooper, who was now an SS-corporal. Cooper had spent most of 1941 and 1942 officially as a member of the guard unit at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but actually detached to the Heidelager training area at Debica, where he had supervised slave labourers working on construction projects. At the beginning of 1943 he and other NCOs from his unit had been drafted into the Waffen-SS Police Division and sent to the Eastern Front. Cooper received severe leg wounds during the fighting around Leningrad and was seconded to Genshagen to recuperate.

The British “camp leader” was Battery Quartermaster Sergeant J. H. O. Brown, a pre-war member of the BUF and a notorious figure among British POWs because of his black-marketeering and collaboration. However, Brown was playing a double game. He had been a genuine fascist before the war, but his loyalty to his country far outweighed any political allegiance. By late 1942, he was sending coded intelligence back to Britain via the POW mail system. His permanent staff at Genshagen included: Francis MacLardy, a sergeant pharmacist from the Royal Army Medical Corps who had been a district secretary of the BUF; two former commandos and ex-BUF members—Corporal Paul Maton and Lance Corporal William Charles Britten; Frederick Lewis, a merchant seaman and also an ex-BUF member; and Roy Courlander, a British-born New Zealander with no
previous history of fascist sympathies. Brown did not realise that MacLardy, Maton and Courlander had already individually volunteered to serve in the Waffen-SS, and the other fascist sympathisers in the camp had agreed to recruit others. Consequently, while Lange, Cooper and the other fascists busily canvassed the “holidaying” POWs, Brown and several confidants in the camp did all they could to undermine the project.

In August 1943, the senior British POW in Germany, Major General Victor Fortune, sent Brigadier Leonard Parrington to inspect Genshagen. Parrington took the camp at face value and gave permission for the prisoners to participate in recreational activities under parole.
*
This was misinterpreted by the fascists within the camp, who assumed that Parrington was endorsing their recruitment campaign.
†
Not long after, they left Genshagen to form the nucleus of the new unit.

In September 1943, Hesse wrote to Gottlob Berger to suggest that the SS-Main Office should assume control of the administration of the British unit. Berger was unconvinced, but as the British were regarded as “Germanic,” it made sense for the new formation to come under the auspices of the SS. Berger grudgingly appointed a young, English-speaking artillery officer, SS-Captain Hans Werner Roepke, to act as “liaison officer” and acting commander until a suitable British officer could be found to lead the unit. Roepke then convened several meetings with the volunteers (there were only six of them) to thrash out some administrative details. It was decided that the unit would be called the British Free Corps; that it would be active only on the Eastern Front against the Soviets; that its members would wear German uniforms with distinctive insignia; that it would be led by British officers, if any could be recruited; that members would not be subject
to the full range of German military law;
*
and that they would receive normal German military rates of pay. Roepke also explained that the unit would have to be fully trained and number at least thirty personnel before it could be committed to the front.