Wagner Group, Waffen SS | Wagner is Putin’s Waffen-SS
The comment expresses the writer’s opinions.
With the Wagner group, Putin has acquired his own Waffen-SS.
Today’s assassins, rapists and torturers could have been sourced directly from Oskar Dirlewanger cruel «SS-Sondereinheit».
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Poachers
The idea for a special unit staffed with criminals came one evening in March 1940 while Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler sat and talked about the future. Hitler is said to have suggested that Himmler gather together the core of convicted poachers in prisons and concentration camps.
After a short time, the SS chief had to face the fact that among this staff he could only collect a few hundred. So the rest had to be recruited from among convicted murderers, rapists and child abusers.
The department was headed by Oskar Dirlewanger, who himself had a long prison sentence, including serving a sentence by a judge for embezzlement and the rape of a 13-year-old girl.
The obviously sadistic alcoholic Dirlewanger was given free rein to use violence against his own soldiers.
Sadist
First they were put in Poland, where thousands of civilians – including women and children – were subjected to terrible massacres.
Torture and rape were commonplace. Later during the war, they were moved to Belarus, where the department was expanded with three companies of volunteer Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians.
The concentration camps
From 1943, Dirlewanger could regularly recruit criminal prisoners from the concentration camps.
During the Polish uprising in Warsaw in the autumn of 1944, when the population attacked the German forces in the city – while Stalin’s Red Army stood on the other side of the river and pretended not to assist the Polish resistance movement – there were reports of hair-raising excesses from Dirlewanger’s people, which is held responsible for at least 50,000 victims.
Asbjørn Svarstad
Asbjørn Svarstad started writing in the local newspaper Dagningen, for some years was linked to VG. From 1987 Dagbladet’s stringer in Copenhagen. Since 1996 lived permanently in Berlin where he has worked for various Scandinavian media. Works mostly with historical feature articles, political commentary and is an authorized guide in Sachsenhausen.
Afterwards, it was told about bloody scenes in which Oskar Dirlewanger personally participated in grotesque rapes and murders.
The man barely managed to hide his personal pleasure.
Executed
Some of Dirlewanger’s worst criminals were arrested in Warsaw by people from the Wehrmacht, convicted by a court of premeditated murder of German citizens – and executed on the spot.
In the late autumn of 1944, Dirlewanger was in action during the Germans’ ruthless crushing of an attempted uprising in Slovakia – which also cost tens of thousands of lives.
Many from the interior in mid-January, when Dirlewanger was located on the river Oder east of Berlin and was exposed to fierce attacks from the Soviet side.
News studio: The war in Ukraine
Norwegians
In the autumn of 1944, there were probably four Norwegians in Dirlewanger.
One was Ørnulf Erichsen from Bergen, who was an SS volunteer with a conviction for theft – which had to be served in a penal battalion.
Erichsen was wounded during fierce battles around Budapest, and was in the hospital when the Americans moved in.
When he was set free in 1946, the Bergen went into British service and was sent as a military spy to a small town outside Berlin.
He was quickly discovered and received a sentence of ten years’ penal servitude.
Erichsen died in Waldheim prison in Saxony in 1949, without the family in Norway ever being informed of his fate.
Here you can read more comments by Asbjørn Svarstad
Communists
At this time, there must have been 800 “political prisoners” from Sachsenhausen in the penal department.
These German communists used the first opportunity to desert – and to run over to the Soviet side. As many as 200 were executed on suspicion of having planned to escape, while only 100 men survived.
Oskar Dirlewanger was wounded on this occasion – something that gave him the opportunity to run away to the west.
In May 1945, he was recognized in a prison camp by Polish soldiers who simply beat men to death.
Fifteen years after the end of the war, there were persistent rumors that Oskar Dirlewanger had in fact survived the war and that he was living well with a false identity in Germany.
The authorities made sure to dig his diaper open, so that it could be established without a doubt that it was actually Dirlewanger’s earthly remains that were there.
Read also: Olaf Scholz pushes to give tanks to Ukraine
Not investigated
The members of SS-Dirlewanger – the department changed its name several times – who survived were never held accountable for their misdeeds.
At the turn of the millennium, German historians stumbled upon lists of the names and post-war addresses of 80 former Dirlewangers. At least 20 of them were still alive, but no investigation was ever launched.
The Wagner group and the Waffen-SS have many similarities, and there can be little doubt where Vladimir Putin and his chef – Yevgeny Prigozhin – found inspiration and role models. The “chef” must have Heinrich Himmler as a role model. The SS chief used the SS system to gain ever greater power in Nazi German society – no Yevgeny Prigozhin uses Wagner to achieve in Russia.
“The Commander”
The Norwegian authorities will treat the defected “Wagner commander” safely Andrei Medvedev with gentleness.
The man signed up – according to his own explanation to the police – for service in Wagner at a time when Putin’s assault on Ukraine had been going on for several months.
That he stuck was simply due to the man’s superiors extending the contract period from four to six months, without Medvedev agreeing to stay longer at the front.
Here, then, we are not talking about someone at the beginning of repentant sins – but a guy who volunteered to join a notorious group and who at the time could not have had any objections to participating in the assault on a neighboring country.
Pictured above: Dmitry Utkin was absolutely central at the start of the Wagner Group’s history.
Andrej Medvedev is referred to in several Norwegian media as “commander”. In reality, he was in command of a group of ten men. So he was at worst a “squad leader” – a corporal or possibly a sergeant.
Is it possible?
The cover story that he is ready to say through several military areas and be shot at by SFB people while crossing the Norwegian border is almost a little too fantastic.
Perhaps Medvedev is in fact an agent sent out, who has been trained to find out what happens to Russian deserters who manage to escape?
Medvedev must also expect to be scrutinized with a view to whether he himself has broken the laws of war during his service in the Putin version of the Waffen-SS.
One of the central questions becomes whether it is at all possible to serve in Wagner without breaking written and unwritten lovers. But it is conceivable that Medvedev is ready to talk about the misdeeds of the Wagner comrades, if he himself gets the promise of mild treatment.
As a German spy chief in Trondheim during the war once told me:
“We loved the betrayal, but we hated the traitors”.