A go to to the German prison battalions, by Sven Hassel to the Diriwanger Brigade | Culture | EUROtoday

The information of combatant items composed of former presidiaries on either side of the Ukraine War – just like the Alcatraz Ukraine Battalion – have taken me again to the previous novels of Sven Hassel, starring troopers of a prison regiment of the German military in World War II, and I’ve learn one which I nonetheless had pending of the 14 that he wrote, The bloody route (within the 1977 version of Plaza & Janés). Following the disciplinary thread I’ve ended up unexpectedly immersed in one other very completely different novel, the terrifying Divided (1971), by Alés Adamóvich, who has simply printed Edhasa in Spanish and on which the well-known and horrible movie was based mostly Massacre (come and look), of Elem Klimov, held by the very best refinement within the motion of Nazis demise squads. In Divided I’ve met the path of the Diriwanger brigade of the SS, exactly a prison unit of the Hitler military, the “black hunters” because the historian of Nazismo Christian I eat nazism baptized it because it was composed of convicted of convicts by poaching.

I assumed that after a lot time to learn Sven Hassel I could possibly be curious about him. I began within the late sixties with Punishment Battalion At faculty, the place the black cassocks of the cures guards evoked the uniforms of the SS, the inexperienced of the blackboards to the NKVD and the noise of the brutal video games within the patio the warmth of the T-34. Then they got here THE LEGION OF THE CONSENDED (The first collection of the collection), The Panzers de la Muerte, comrades of the entrance, General SS, Liquidad Paris!… In 1996 I interviewed him at his home (he lived in Barcelona with Turó Park, surrounded by navy memorabilia) and, closing the circle, I wrote his obituary in 2012. At that point we already knew what number of issues Sven Hassel was invented (which stays to be printed in Spanish an unfinished novel), beginning together with his feather title (It was truly referred to as Borge Willy Redsted Pedersen), and that it was inconceivable that, as occurred in GPU jaila prison firm can be allowed to triple the valuable Tiger tanks, for instance. But with Sven Hassel and his characters (Porta, Hermanito, Barcelona, ​​the Legionnaire, the Elder, the Odious Heide, his personal alter ego Sven), it occurs the identical as with so many stays of the previous that they’ve been adhered to you: you by no means simply obtained away from them, as of the previous issues piled up within the altillos.

In The bloody route We observe the characters of the Criminal Company in a tremendous march by the Balkans between decomposed corpses, such with their burden of oscillating, warmth, thirst and scorpions. They go to Athens, Thessaloniki, Belgrade, presence of mass executions, wildly fight melee in Russia. In a picaresco portesco episode and the Wolf mechanical chief are about to be shot by offering the military with an English tea that causes a disabling diarrhea and is aware of Marshal Model himself. The firm (which in different novels has had pets just like the cat Stalin and the black panther Ulrich) adopts right here an important brown bear, Rasputincoming from a damaged Russian circus and shares the penalties of the group and fight by its facet, lined with metal helmet and even throwing hand grenades (!). Another episode, that of a captain stretched, cowardly, arrival and plug present The Iron Cross “The phrase” right here the heroes are ineffective “could be perfectly from Sergeant Rolf Steiner (James Coburn). There are things that grind, such as that, in their eagerness to get more soldiers, the German army recruits even “a unit of German blacks.” Also that the Russians use “Kalashnikovs”, something unlikely because the AK-47 is, as its name indicates, of 1947, after the war.

I have read The bloody routehe said, with the excuse of the news of the criminal battalions, and I have done it in parallel to an illuminator essay on those German units in World War II, Criminal battalion, Hitler’s Penal Batallions (Fonthill, 2017), of the American military historian Walter S. Zapotoczny, which explains in detail its operation in the context of the German army and the penitentiary system of the III Reich. The criminal battalions, composed of convicted military (undisciplined, deserters and accused of insubordination or cowardice) and also for political and common prisoners, arose to rise the increasingly high losses of German soldiers in the course of the contest. The idea was to take advantage of that bag of inactive combatants that were prisons.

The Strafbattalions offered the possibility of leaving prison (or not entering it after committing a crime) and theoretically even redemption. Zapotoczny points out how some convicts took the opportunity and behaved heroically on the front, although he also recounts how others persisted in their criminal habits, committing atrocities for which the Nazi army did not stop providing a very appropriate framework. Actually, the criminal units, as can be assumed, were cannon meat and, stress Zapotoczny, were often used in suicidal missions (“journey missions to heaven”, they called them), to clean mines fields or recover corpses from the front. It is estimated that their casualties exceeded 50 %, there were very hard punishments and did not endow the best weapons (of course nothing of Tigers). They were often under the control of the Military Police (Feldgendarmerie, the nicknames Kettenhunde, “chained canines”, by the metallic gargueras who looked). Up to three criminal battalions disappeared completely and the documentation describes them as “destroyed in battle.” Among the disciplinary troops were probation units such as those of convicted soldiers called with the number 500 (including the 500º Parachute Battalion of the SS), or those of civil prisoners with 999 (such as the 999th African light division). No 27 Panzer Criminal Regiment comes out (the invented disciplinary unit in which Sven Hassel’s characters fight). It is not bad to remember two of the occasions when criminal units have appeared in fiction (apart from the film version of The Panzers de la Muerte): In the series Children of the Third Reich And in the movie (and the novel) Eagle has arrivedin which Kurt Steiner and his men are sent to disciplinary troops.

Zapotoczny dedicates ample space to speak of 36th Granaderos Division of the Waffen SS, which is the denomination upgraded At the end of the war of the sadly famous Brigade Dirlewanger, named for his commander, Oskar Dirlewangger, an alcoholic, murderer and rapist (convict before the war to violate a 14 -year -old girl and sexual assault) who became even too brutal for the standard (high, how he can imagine) of the SS. The sinister formation, composed of true murderers, participated in some of the most frightening acts of the Nazis in the East, burning living populations in Belarus and the reputation of the most criminal unit of the Hitler’s war machine, and looks that there was competition. The brigade was created in 1940 in the Waffen SS as an antipartisan group, initially with condemned by poaching – for its ability to track the enemy and their ability as shooters – and expanded recruiting criminals of the most vile until becoming a band of heartless and sadistic slaughterrs worthy of the worst scenario of the war of the thirty years. The way they devastated the busy Belarus when he unleashed them on her was creepy. “Where there’s a hearth, there may be Dirwanger,” he said in the German army.

The Dirlewanger Brigade, to which Christian Ingrao dedicated her exciting and anthropologically illuminating unit study of the unit Black hunters (Perrin, 2009), unites the three books: Penal battalion, The bloody route y Divided. In Sven Hassel’s novel, in which numerous references appear to “the five hundred”, the classical disciplinary troops, to a captain of the SS is sent to disobey the orders and kill an important Russian prisoner to the Dirwanger brigade, where “you possibly can shoot as a lot as you need, I guarantee you”, it threatens its superior, “however you’ll begin on the lowest degree.” Divideddestruction is described in 1943 by German genocidal troops from the Belarusian villages such as Jatyn herself (nothing to do, although sometimes it is written the same, with the massacre of Katyn, where the Russians murdered in 1940 the Polish official), Borki, Borívka or Zábalotie represented in the novel by Perejodi’s novel, where he is the young man of Perejodi, where he Flyora, involved partisan and witness of atrocities.

In the novel, a complex, disturbing and restless book, like the war itself, there are many things that appear in the film that was based on it (the script of Massacre Adamovich and Klimov wrote it together). There is the hallucinated horror of destruction of the town and the burning of its inhabitants locked in the barn, is the same German plane that sees everything-an extravagant Focke-Wulf FW-189 Ear (owl) recognition – are the ruthless mixed troops of foreign Germans and auxiliaries (described as “punishment battalions” in the novel). And there is the German commander who carries a monkey (data historically accredited by a surviving witness of the destruction of the village of Levischi), turned into the film into a rare tarsio, the small Asian ape similar to the lemurs.

The Einsatzkommando of the SS that Jatin destroyed in reality was the 118 º Battalion of the Schutzmannschaft (a help squad), a Nazi police unit that included Ukrainian collaborationists, Russian volunteers recruited in the prisoners and forces of the Dirlewang Battalion. The novel is not explicitly mentioned to the battalion, but for the film Klimov wanted the character of the SS commander, who magnificently embodies the Latvian Viktors Lorencs actor, was based on Oskar Dirlewang. Actually, the Criminal leader Nazi did not die at the hands of the partisans after capturing him in an ambush (as in the novel and the film) but still had time for massacre Poles with his troops of savage lansquenetes brown in the survey of Warsaw in 1944. He was beaten until death by Polish guardians in the field of prisoners of Altshausen in June in June 1954.

The variations between the undisciplined, jaraneros comrades and typically Antinazis of Sven Hassel and the furtive beasts of Dirlewanger are nice and notable. But it’s nonetheless disturbing to be in each circumstances of prison items and struggle on the identical facet, with equal uniform and beneath the identical flag.