Customer Reviews

The Cruel Hunters: SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger Hitler's Most Notorious Anti-Partisan Unit (Schiffer Military History)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

MacLean has attempted a history of Dirlewanger's notorious SS unit . This is an ambitious project if only because former unit members are understandably reluctant to come forward with their story . Perhaps for that reason most of the book is taken up with a rather dry litany of combat strengths , casualty reports , SS member records etc . The author hints at 'incidents' but does not speculate further leaving the reader somewhat frustrated . There is little examination of the anti-partisan tactics used by Dirlewanger and surprisingly little attempt is made to analyse the man beyond the broadest generalisations . Whilst it is laudable to stick strictly to the facts the book could have benefitted from a more detailed account of the excesses during Warsaw Rising and some forensic analysis of Dirlewanger himself .There are many eye witness accounts of the unit's activities yet few were included in the book . Whilst I personally enjoyed the book the lay reader will find it a little too dry and will get the impression of microfiched archives transferred to paper with too little of the author's own comment .

In a word...disappointing. MacLean manages to confuse reams of irrelevant information regarding promotions and personal information of anonymous SS men as salient to the story. The translations from German to English are poorly done (they read in many cases as literal translations) and the few worthy anecdotes that a reader truly interested in Oskar Dirlewanger and his role in history will find could easily have been condensed into thirty pages. Pictures are somewhat interesting but nothing unique. Listings of SS personnel having served with Dirlewanger is of some value. Printed in China and looks it. At the price, I'd recommend that you take a pass.

What happens when you organize criminal riff-raff into a military formation, then give them carte blanche to act as they please? The answer is in the book, and it's not pretty. SS Sonderkommando Dirlewanger was originally formed from convicted poachers, but eventually grew to include many who were convicted of various crimes or had fallen from grace. However, some men who were not criminals were also assigned to this unit.

"This Waffen-SS formation consisted not only of common criminals, but also disgraced army and SS officers, reduced in rank and now serving as privates. However, not all officers and non-commissioned officers were sent to the unit as punishment. Many had been previously assigned to the SS main headquarters and were transferred to the Sonderkommando to gain front-line combat experience and perhaps an award or two before returning to Berlin." The commander, Oskar Dirlewanger, was himself a sexual deviant, having had several episodes involving girls under 14 years of age. He was also monstrously cruel, and though designated as an anti-partisan unit, they spent a great deal of their time hunting (and killing) Jews.

The book is written in a severely factual style, rather dry actually, but is still very interesting nonetheless because of its subject matter. I found especially interesting the chapter on the Warsaw uprising and the Sonderkommano's role in crushing the Polish Home Army, as there does not seem to be much literature on that elsewhere.

Chapters are as follows: 1. A Monster is Born (Dirlewanger's early years, in and out of the SS, and his run-ins with authorities). 2. The Anti-Partisan Years, 1942. 3. The Anti-Partisan Years, 1943. 4. Farewell to Russia, 1944. 5. Warsaw. 6. The Monster Dies (Dirlewanger's summary execution). 7. Judgement at Nuremburg.

I was very excited when i got this book and couldn't wait to read it. Well as i started to get deeper into the book I just couldn't believe I was reading about a great subject written so poorly. I have read 100's of WW2 books and i have to say this was by far the worst. All the author talked about was so and so got promoted or recieved the iron cross first class. Stuff the nobody really cares about. And when someone does get promoted you have to read the entire recomondation. Its truly a brutal piece of work. Basically he skims over the fights that the Cruel hunters were in and just had stats on how many people were killed or shipped back to the Reich. I have to say if you really want to read this book E mail me and you can have mine!

This was a huge disappointment for me. Like many I'd waited for this to be published and then found that all I had was the footnotes and end-notes for a book that's yet to be written.

There was so much to be tackled - Dirlewanger's life, his unit's formation, his friends in high SS-places, his own 'sex-crimes', the numerous witnesses on German, Polish, Russian, Partisan sides, the excesses, the 'fight-or-die' fanatical courage of his gang under fire, the brutality and debauchery, the 'recruitment' of all sorts including concentration camp prisoners.

There is so much to work with but I guess we'll have to wait for someone else to track down the witnesses, interview the veterans, translate the archives... etc, etc.

MacLean's book on Dirlewanger has some serious weaknesses, but it is for the moment the most complete account we have of Sonderkommando Dirlewanger. For reasons that become increasingly obvious as one reads the book, few good records were kept, this organization was mentioned only very rarely in military dispatches and was never covered in contemporary newspaper or magazine accounts, and of course at the very end whatever documentary evidence might have existed was lost or destroyed. What is left has to be pieced together from general Wehrmacht and SS records.

MacLean goes through what records there are and does more editing than writing. Every character is defined by his Party and SS number, decorations, etc, presumably just pulled directly from archive records. Every letter he could find touching on every promotion or comment regarding Dirlewanger's legal situation is quoted or reproduced in full; in some cases this becomes quite repetitious. It is obvious that there is just not enough available at this time to fill out a full sized book, and the author seems to be struggling to fill up space. There are a couple of maps which must be regarded as completely useless; the photos are a bit better.

On the other hand, one does learn something of the nature of the partisan fight in Russia over the years. The unit was moved around within a relatively small area fighting Russian partisan bands, occasionally taking time out to find Jews to murder, until they found that the front had come to them; it turned out that fighting the very heavily armed Russian army was a little different from hunting down lightly armed peasants. Dirlewanger's story in Warsaw is better known, and the chapter on his murder by French soldiers just after the end of the war is informative.

The very spotty nature of the records and MacLean's writing style detract from the book, but the information that is there is worth having, and is largely unavailable elsewhere.

This book had great promise, but ended up being a packaging of a bunch of German records from the National Archives. In addition to being poorly edited, it is written in a very dry manner - for example, whenever anyone is mentioned throughout the book, there is a standard list of things that is covered for each person, such as the date of birth, their Nazi Party number, their SS number, etc. The maps included are very rudimentary and do not show any unit movements - looking things up on Mapquest would provide the reader with better geographic fidelity. Not recommended.

This book consistes essentially of the presentation of numerous translated archived documents thrown to the reader without interconnecting the facts. It is unclear what the author exactly intends with this book at all. Should it be a historic review on the topic or does he only want to use to massage this sad matter into a Hollywood type epic or story? Maybe because so far it has received little attention and this could be a market nitch for revenue? Either way, he failed bitterly.
If intended as historian, the book is rather an embarrasment because of its total lack of objectivity. Entiteling chapters such as "a monster is born" lacks historic professionalism. Other than rambling raving using emotional verbage, the author fails to make his case. He also fails to draw correct conclusions on the facts he provides. E.g. he labels D. as a criminal sex offender and alcoholic. D. was convicted and sent to a concentration camp exactly during the Roehm uprise. The author should know that exactly then alleged sex offenses were used to kill hundreds of people or send them to camps. This may have been the case here, nobody knows. But it needs to be stated and further discussed. In this context, the author fully legitimises the concentration camp punishment for D. Well, knowing that innocent were sent there, should we conclude that camps were actually a good thing? A professional historian would have approached this much more cautiously, especially since D. was later on exonerated and fully rehabilitated by the German justice system. Thus, according to these facts, D. officially had no prior record, employing simple basic legal standards. This should at least be ackknowledged. Alcohol related unspecified misbehavious of D.?! Not a problem to remain or become president of US and commander in Chief here. Unfortunately, the book is very opinionated, however, a trained and professional historian should retain objectivity even with the worst offenders. The author finally wants to make a case by quoting anonymous German sources ("highly decorated officers he personally knows and befriended"). Sorry, first, why should these talk to someone who's goal is to discredit their former forces? As a member of the armed forces, the author should employ some basic logic. Unless, he approached these men and was dishonest about his intentions, who knows. Nevertheless, if the source of information cannot be provided, it should not be used. In summary, this book should be marketed as "copies of archives" the author's amateur editions are not only distracting and disturbing, they are inaccurate as he fails to draw correct conclusions based on the facts provided.

"Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men. . ." Macbeth, Act III, Scene 1

The Cruel Hunters is a detailed and thoroughly documented account of the activities and personnel of one of the most ghastly and criminal units in the Second World War. The author, French Maclean, is a military historian and a soldier himself who stumbled on the operational records of the Dirlewanger unit in the U.S. National Archives while working on another project. The heart of the book is a chronological narrative of the unit's activities. Mr. Maclean, however, has added important dimensions to this narrative. He describes and documents authoritatively the much-disputed relationship of this unit to the SS, the German Army, and top Nazi leadership. He provides extensive information on many of the individuals who made up the unit from personnel records, detailing both pre-war and wartime activities. He provides what amounts to a biography of Dirlewanger himself. This book reveals the strange mixture of savagery, bureaucracy, and perversion at the worst levels of the Nazi organization. Eight appendices and a list of sources offer tabulated data and ample material for further research. A collection of photographs, few more horrible than the two portraits of Dirlewanger himself, adds impact.

I overlook any stylistic deficiencies of this work and focus on its historical content. The book begins with Dirlewanger's early life, service in WWI, etc. The account of his mid-1930's crime of statutory rape (pp. 28-29, 48-49) makes it unclear if the age of consent in Nazi Germany had been only 14.

MacLean refutes those who say that Dirlewanger's unit had not been part of the Waffen SS, an organization condemned as criminal at the Nuremberg trials. (p. 13). Dirlewanger's unit included some non-Germans, such as Ukrainians. (p. 74, 76). It has therefore been argued that Dirlewanger's unit was a "second class" one. To the contrary, quite a few non-German-including (or entirely non-German) SS units, such as the Scandinavian-rich "Wiking", the Latvian-rich 19th SS Grenadier, and the Dutch "Nederland", had many recipients of the Knight's Cross, Germany's highest honor for bravery and military achievement. (p. 262). By no stretch of the imagination were these second-class units!

Among Germans at least, admission into the SS was forbidden to anyone who had any trace of Jewish ancestry more recent than 1750. Interestingly, and in spite of this requirement, SS officer and executor of the Final Solution, Otto Bradfisch, had been a Mischlinge. (pp. 88-89).

During 1942 and 1943, Dirlewanger's unit was responsible for massive collective reprisals against Byelorussian civilians for guerrilla warfare. These mass murders, and those of Poles later, went far beyond any semblance of military necessity, and clearly partook of genocide. In fact, MacLean quotes General Adolf Heusinger, OKH, who said: "The treatment of the civilian population and the methods of anti-partisan warfare in operational areas presented the highest political and military leaders with a welcome opportunity of carrying out their plans, namely the systematic extermination of Slavism and Jewry." (p. 69).

MacLean includes a fine chapter on the Warsaw Uprising. In early August 1944, Dirlewanger's units burned several Polish hospitals with wounded soldiers in them. (p. 182). There were numerous cold-blooded massacres of unarmed Polish civilians. In addition, Polish civilians were forced to serve as shields around German tanks. The Polish insurgents (AK, or A. K.) fired at them anyway. In the first week of the Uprising alone, 40,000--50,000 Poles had been killed in combat or murdered (mostly the latter), primarily in Ochota and Wola, where Dirlewanger's Sonderkommando operated. (p. 187). Another unit--the Kaminsky Brigade--killed thousands of Poles, but much less than the Sonderkommando.

MacLean cites von dem Bach Zelewski's estimate that 10,000 German combatants perished during the Warsaw Uprising and 7,000 were missing. (p. 196). Some have interpreted the latter as a German reluctance to admit the full scale of German losses against the Poles. MacLean, on the other hand, suggests that the 7,000 missing were largely those Germans (especially the S.S.) who fell into Polish hands and were killed in reprisal for the earlier mass murders of Polish civilians.

Imprisoned by the French, mass-murderer Dirlewanger finally met his fate in early June 1945: "The French probably did murder him and have successfully covered up the facts of the incident; it could have been an interrogation that went too far or possibly Polish nationals, working for the French, could have spotted their old nemesis and meted our justice." (p. 259). There had been rumors that Dirlewanger had survived the war and was hiding in Egypt. To debunk this, MacLean discusses an investigatory exhumation that proved that the remains in his reputed grave are indeed those of Oskar Dirlewanger. (p. 254).