Notorious SS unit 'traced'
Polish authorities claim to have identified three survivors of an infamous SS unit that garnered a reputation for brutality that shocked even German wartime commanders.
By Matthew Day in Warsaw
Last Updated: 7:20PM BST 17 Apr 2009
Prosecutors attached to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the body charged with investigating crimes committed during the war, have announced that they intend to bring the men to justice for their apparent involvement in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising while serving with the SS Dirlewanger Brigade.
The unit, named after its leader Oscar Dirlewanger, comprised of criminals, the criminally insane and volunteers from Nazi-occupied Europe, and developed a reputation for rape, torture and murder, vicious even by the Nazi's bloody standards.
The three, who live in Germany, were found after the Austrian Red Cross gave a Polish museum a card index containing the names and address of those who served in the unit.
Investigators claim to have tracked them down, but the ex-soldiers refused to speak on the phone about the war.
Boguslaw Czerwinski, a prosecutor with the IPN, said that they had now asked for German assistance in bringing the three men to justice and were awaiting a reply.
"It's too early to say where the case will be prosecuted because none of the ex-soldiers questioned by the German authorities have yet to face charges," Mr Czerwinski added.
But Poland would be eager to bring to justice anybody linked to one of the saddest and bloodiest chapters of the nation's history.
At the start of the uprising in August 1944 the Dirlewanger Brigade joined German units engaged in bitter fighting against Polish forces seeking to regain control of their country's capital.
In the first few days the month, and in an effort to break the will of the resistance, it played a key role in the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of Polish civilians. British historian Norman Davies estimates that on just August 5 alone some 35,000 men, women and children were killed in cold blood.
Given a free rein by SS commander-in-chief Heinrich Himmler, Dirlewanger's men also participated in gang rape, torture and the practice of bayoneting babies as a way of striking terror into Poles.
Such was the level of violence that one SS man from another unit described the brigade as "more a group of pigs than soldiers" while General Heinz Guderian wrote in his memoirs that on hearing the "hair-raising news" from Warsaw he asked Hitler to post the Dirlewanger Brigade to the Eastern Front.
Himmler also ordered German police units to stand by in case the brigade, which was at times out of control, turned on regular forces.
Earlier in the war an SS judge and investigator had taken the remarkable step of attempting to prosecute Dirlewanger for war crimes owing to atrocities committed by his brigade while fighting Soviet partisans.
Polish authorities claim to have identified three survivors of an infamous SS unit that garnered a reputation for brutality that shocked even German wartime commanders.
By Matthew Day in Warsaw
Last Updated: 7:20PM BST 17 Apr 2009
Prosecutors attached to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the body charged with investigating crimes committed during the war, have announced that they intend to bring the men to justice for their apparent involvement in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising while serving with the SS Dirlewanger Brigade.
The unit, named after its leader Oscar Dirlewanger, comprised of criminals, the criminally insane and volunteers from Nazi-occupied Europe, and developed a reputation for rape, torture and murder, vicious even by the Nazi's bloody standards.
The three, who live in Germany, were found after the Austrian Red Cross gave a Polish museum a card index containing the names and address of those who served in the unit.
Investigators claim to have tracked them down, but the ex-soldiers refused to speak on the phone about the war.
Boguslaw Czerwinski, a prosecutor with the IPN, said that they had now asked for German assistance in bringing the three men to justice and were awaiting a reply.
"It's too early to say where the case will be prosecuted because none of the ex-soldiers questioned by the German authorities have yet to face charges," Mr Czerwinski added.
But Poland would be eager to bring to justice anybody linked to one of the saddest and bloodiest chapters of the nation's history.
At the start of the uprising in August 1944 the Dirlewanger Brigade joined German units engaged in bitter fighting against Polish forces seeking to regain control of their country's capital.
In the first few days the month, and in an effort to break the will of the resistance, it played a key role in the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of Polish civilians. British historian Norman Davies estimates that on just August 5 alone some 35,000 men, women and children were killed in cold blood.
Given a free rein by SS commander-in-chief Heinrich Himmler, Dirlewanger's men also participated in gang rape, torture and the practice of bayoneting babies as a way of striking terror into Poles.
Such was the level of violence that one SS man from another unit described the brigade as "more a group of pigs than soldiers" while General Heinz Guderian wrote in his memoirs that on hearing the "hair-raising news" from Warsaw he asked Hitler to post the Dirlewanger Brigade to the Eastern Front.
Himmler also ordered German police units to stand by in case the brigade, which was at times out of control, turned on regular forces.
Earlier in the war an SS judge and investigator had taken the remarkable step of attempting to prosecute Dirlewanger for war crimes owing to atrocities committed by his brigade while fighting Soviet partisans.
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