The DirleWagner Brigade
Hardened criminals turned loose, given guns, and sent to war. This sounds familiar...
Cathy Young shines a spotlight on some of Russia’s new military heroes, fighting for [reason TBD] in Ukraine:
[The Russian Ministry of Defence] attributed the apparent success in Soledar to the cooperation of several types of troops and, in particular, praised “the courageous and selfless actions of the volunteer assault units of the Wagner private military company” in street fighting. This was the first time an official Russian source had acknowledged the Wagner PMC—which, coincidentally, was officially registered this week in Russia as the “PMC Wagner Center Joint Stock Company.” Meanwhile, Prigozhin is feeling sufficiently confident to publicly accuse unnamed government officials of being disloyal to the Russian cause and to threaten them with “the Wagner sledgehammer”—an allusion to the sledgehammer execution of Wagner defector Yevgeny Nuzhin in November.
This mainstreaming of the Wagner group in all its thuggish glory is happening even as other news reports in Russia offer a shocking glimpse of the sort of people Prigozhin’s company recruits—and, in some cases, will release into society. Recent dead and honorably buried “heroes” from Wagner ranks include several gang leaders and hit men, including one who was serving a 22-year sentence for the murder of a woman and her father, as well as a man who had beaten his disabled mother to death in a drunken rage. That man is not to be confused with the fellow “Wagnerite” who had beaten his 87-year-old grandmother to death with a hammer to steal her money: the grandma killer, Dmitry Karyagin, is alive and will soon be part of the first batch of Wagner fighters to be freed with a full pardon after six months on the front lines in Ukraine.
Such a pity. The guy who beat his mother to death might have become a general in the Russian armed forces someday, in no small part because positions keep opening up. (You know your war is not going as planned when there’s a Wikipedia entry for how many generals you’ve lost.)
For a country fanatically obsessed with the Great Patriotic War (aka World War II) you’d think the Russians would know about the the “Dirlewanger Brigade” named for commander Oskar Dirlewanger, a convicted sex criminal who would be turned down for the role of a Nazi in a war movie because he looked too obviously evil.
Officially known as the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division, it was made up of criminals who were given guns and uniforms and told to go out and do, well, Nazi stuff. They don’t appear to have distinguished themselves in combat against people who actually shot back, but their treatment of civilians was pretty much what you’d expect. Actually, probably worse.
Dirlewanger maintained unit discipline through beatings and shootings. Desertions were common. He gave his men free reign to loot, rape and pillage. If a civilian or soldier displeased him, Dirlewanger shot them them in the hand. If one of his men grabbed loot that he wanted, he would execute him on the spot.
[…]
…Dirlewanger’s group killed 30,000 people in Belarus. His favorite method of suppression was to round up dissidents in a barn, set it on fire and machine gun anyone who fled.
The ranks of the group swelled and it officially became a regiment. The Dirlewanger Brigade began to accept the criminally insane into its ranks.
When the Soviets pushed West, the Germans retreated and Dirlewanger and his men returned to Poland. It was here the unit would commit its most horrible war crimes during the Warsaw Uprising and Wola Massacre.
The witness testimony of the events reads like something from a horror film. One witness described Dirlewanger ordering his men to execute 500 young children. He wanted his troops to save their bullets and demanded they do the bulk of the work with rifle butts and bayonets.
Another description of the rape and murder of a young woman by Dirlewanger himself is so surreal, violent and awful that it’s believable only because of the man’s past atrocities and convictions. The rapist indulged his basest desires in Warsaw.
How bad was the Dirlewanger Brigade? This bad: other SS commanders actually complained about them for being too bloodthirsty.
Other German soldiers — and especially the other Waffen SS — found Dirlewanger and his men detestable. They made several attempts to remove the dangerous man from the battlefield and prosecute the soldiers for atrocities. But [SS official Gotlob] Berger always interceded and squashed the complaints.
Nazis demanding their fellow Nazis be prosecuted for wartime atrocities is like…honestly, I can’t even think of an analogy that does it justice, because these analogies usually involve comparisons to the Nazis.
Far from turning the tide of war, the very existence of the Dirlewanger Brigade was more a sign of desperation by a military force bogged down in a conflict that hadn’t gone anything like it had expected.
I’ll just leave this here:
Propagandist-for-hire Oliver Stone is at Davos talking about nuclear power and he’s actually…kind of…right?
The environmental movement’s stance on nuclear power was “wrong” and derailed the sector’s development, according to the filmmaker Oliver Stone.
During an interview with CNBC’s Tania Bryer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Stone — who’s made a new documentary called “Nuclear Now” — was asked where his passion to tackle the climate crisis came from.
“Passion comes from the fact that … it’s my children, hopefully grandchildren soon,” Stone, who was speaking to CNBC on Tuesday afternoon, replied.
“But what are they going to do? It’s going to be a miserable existence if we have worse and worse hurricanes, fires, droughts. It’s frightening.”
“We had the solution [nuclear power] … and the environmental movement, to be honest, just derailed it. I think the environmental movement did a lot of good, a lot of good ... [I’m] not knocking it, but in this one major matter, it was wrong. It was wrong.”
“And what they did was so destructive, because by now we would have 10,000 nuclear reactors built around the world and we would have set an example like France set for us, but no one … followed France, or Sweden for that matter.”
JFK remains completely full of shit, though.