Kurt Daluege was head of Nazi Germany’s uniformed Ordnungspolizei (Orpo), which became involved in the murders of Soviet Jews from 1940 onward. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, he served as deputy protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
Kurt Max Franz Daluege was born on September 15, 1897, in Kreuzburg, Upper Silesia, the son of a Prussian civil servant. He completed high school in 1916 and joined the German army. In October 1917, he commenced officer training, but he was severely wounded in combat in the head and shoulder. Hospitalized and declared 25 percent disabled, he was decorated for bravery.
From 1918 to 1921, Daluege took part in an Upper Silesia militia unit fighting Polish irregulars. After working briefly in Berlin as a factory hand, he studied civil engineering at the Technical University of Berlin between 1921 and 1924, graduating as an engineer. During 1922, he served in the Freikorps Rossbach, and in 1923, he became a member of Berlin’s Teuto-Rugia, a German American fraternity. Also in 1923, Daluege joined the NSDAP.
From 1924, he organized Berlin Frontbann, a front organization for the SA, since both the SA and NSDAP were then banned in Prussia. In March 1926, he openly joined and became leader of Berlin’s SA. He rejoined the NSDAP once it was reinstated, becoming Joseph Goebbels’s deputy gauleiter in Berlin.
On October 16, 1926, Daluege married Käthe Schwarz. In 1937, they adopted a son, after which Käthe had three biological children. Between 1927 and 1933, Daluege was department head of a construction firm.
In July 1930, Daluege resigned from the SA and joined the SS with the rank of SS-Oberführer, as Adolf Hitler had tasked him to scrutinize the SA and political opponents within the party. The next month when Berlin SA leader Walter Stennes’s men attacked the Berlin NSDAP headquarters in what became known as the Stennes Revolt, Daluege’s unit overpowered the attack. In an open letter thanking Daluege for his service, Adolf Hitler declared, “SS man, your honor is loyalty,” which became the motto thereafter adopted by the SS.
In November 1932, Daluege was elected to the Reichstag, a seat he retained until 1945. In May 1933, Hermann Göring moved him into the Prussian Interior Ministry, where he took charge of the regular police force. In this capacity, he purged the force of “social democratic” elements and filled it with SS men.
Daluege played a key role in the notorious Night of the Long Knives, during which Ernst Röhm and many leaders of the SA were purged between June 30 and July 2, 1934. This neutralized the SA and shifted power within the NSDAP to the SS. After this, Daluege was assigned by Göring to reorganize the SA throughout north Germany. In August 1934, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler promoted Daluege to SS-Obergruppenführer.
Kurt Daluege, chief of Nazi Germany’s uniformed SS Ordnungspolizei (Orpo), offers a salute during a march in Munich in 1938. Later he became an integral element in the regime’s plans to “cleanse” the Soviet Union of Jews and communists after Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. (Hugo Jaeger/Timepix/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
By November 1934, Daluege’s authority covered all German uniformed police. He commanded municipal police forces, the rural gendarmerie, traffic police, the coast guard, the railway police, the postal protection service, fire brigades, the air-raid services, the emergency technical service, the broadcasting police, the factory protection police, building regulations enforcement, and the commercial police.
Despite a heart attack in 1936, Daluege became Himmler’s deputy as German chief of police and head of the Orpo, which he commanded until 1943.
In 1936, the entire German police force was reorganized; administrative functions were now under the actual control of Himmler’s SS. There were two main branches: under Heydrich were the political police (Gestapo) and the criminal police dealing with nonpolitical crimes (Kripo), and under Daluege was the Orpo, which covered the municipal police, the rural police, and the community police.
By 1938, Daleuge had over 62,000 police officers under his command. With the indication that enlisting in Orpo might be an alternative to regular military service, by mid-1940, this had risen to 244,500. As it turned out, many Orpo units were transferred into the regular army, as they had become an essential source of manpower for holding down occupied Europe. Daluege also established a unit of police officers responsible for the suppression of internal revolt.
Daluege was an integral element in the Nazi plans to “cleanse” the Soviet Union after Operation Barbarossa. At Hitler’s command, this war was to be considered a war against Bolsheviks and Jews, and Daluege’s police battalions were told to pursue their tasks ruthlessly. During the summer of 1941, mass shootings were frequent all over the occupied territories, and Daluege was present at several. In one, a mass execution of 4,435 Jews took place at the hands of the 307th Police Battalion, near Brest-Litovsk.
In mid-July 1941, a second Aktion at Białystok, which was nearly 50 percent Jewish, was instigated from the highest SS levels. Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski, Kurt Daluege, and Heinrich Himmler had met shortly before it commenced. On July 9, 1941, Daluege congratulated his troops for participating in the defeat of Bolshevism, and on July 12, male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 were brought to a sports stadium. A day later they were taken to antitank ditches, and by the end of the Aktion, about 3,000 Jews had been killed.
Shortly afterward, on September 1, 1941, Daluege attended another mass execution of Jews near Minsk, in occupied Belarus. In October 1941, he signed deportation orders for Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Riga and Minsk.
The direct involvement of the Orpo was pervasive. The massacre in Minsk occurred immediately after Daluege met with Bach-Zalewski in that city, and it was obvious that Daluege was inciting, not forbidding, involvement of the Orpo in these massacres.
Daluege then authorized a new role for the Orpo: they would guard transports organized by Heydrich’s SD. Between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1945, hundreds of deportation trains took German, Czech, and Austrian Jews to death camps and ghettos in the East, together with many additional transports from Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovakia, France, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, and Croatia—a vast number under the control of Daluege’s Orpo.
When Governor Hans Frank in occupied Poland failed to take sufficient action after Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in May 1942, Hitler and Himmler sent Daluege to Prague to become deputy protector of Bohemia and Moravia (and acting protector in all but name). In June 1942, he ordered the villages of Lidice and Ležáky razed to the ground in reprisal for Heydrich’s assassination. The destruction of Lidice saw the murder of all 173 male inhabitants, with the village’s 198 women and children deported to Ravensbrück.
Daluege then attended a conference on July 7, 1942, organized by Himmler. This discussed an extension of Aktion Reinhard, the Nazi secret plan for the mass murder of Polish Jews in the General Government. Named for the assassinated Heydrich, it was in some respects a revenge Aktion but also the ultimate phase of the previously decided Final Solution.
Daluege acted as deputy protector of Bohemia and Moravia from 1942 until May 1943, when he suffered a massive heart attack; he resigned in August 1943 and took no further part in the war.
In May 1945, Daluege was arrested by British troops in Lübeck. He was interned in Luxembourg and then tried at Nuremberg as a major war criminal. In September 1946, after being extradited to Czechoslovakia, he was tried for crimes against humanity committed in the Protectorate. Throughout his trial, he was unrepentant, claiming that he was beloved by “three million policemen,” only following Hitler’s orders, and had a clear conscience. He was convicted on all charges and sentenced to death on October 23, 1946. Aged 48, Daluege was hanged in Pankrác prison in Prague the next day.
DANNECKER, THEODOR (1913–1945)
Theodor Dannecker was an SS captain who administered the Final Solution in several countries during the Holocaust, including overseeing the arrest of Jews by French police during the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup that resulted in the deportation of more than 13,000 Jews to Auschwitz, where most were murdered.
Dannecker was born in Tübingen, Germany, on March 27, 1913. His father, who ran a menswear business, died in November 1918, leaving two sons: five-year-old Theodor and his older brother. Theodor attended the High School of Commerce in Reutlingen and commenced an apprenticeship in Stuttgart in 1930, curtailing this after only a few months when his mother died. He ran his family business as a textile dealer for two years after her death, until he joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932.
Dannecker joined an SS special combat support unit in 1934, and in 1935, he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS and the Nazi Party. In March 1937, he joined the staff of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann at the Judenreferat (Department of Jewish Affairs) in the SD’s main office in Berlin, where Dannecker was put in charge of the section controlling assimilated Jews.
In 1938, Dannecker helped create the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, he helped set up the Lublin Reservation, a concentration camp compound near the borders of Lublin and Nisko, designed by the SS to resettle Poland’s Jews. In the spring of 1940, Dannecker created a system for Jewish emigration in Prague like that in Vienna.
In September 1940, given Dannecker’s expertise with assimilated Jews, Eichmann chose him to direct the Jewish Affairs Department in Paris. Dannecker headed its French bureau and Judenreferat, receiving his orders directly from Eichmann, although he was placed under the authority of Helmut Knochen, a senior commander of the Security Police and SD in Paris. Knochen was responsible for rounding up French Jews and deporting them to concentration camps. The task of deportation enabled Dannecker to oversee the names of the French Jews who were arrested in May and August 1941. He formulated the regulations for the deportations of nativeborn French Jews and Jewish immigrants, referred to as “stateless Jews.”
Dannecker claimed credit for being the first to propose continuous Jewish deportations from France to the East and constantly pressured the Vichy authorities to take more active antisemitic measures. Xavier Vallat, the coordinator of Jewish Affairs in Vichy responsible for launching and implementing France’s anti-Jewish legislation, created the Union of French Jews in late 1941 on Dannecker’s initiative. The two men clashed over Dannecker’s extreme antisemitism and Vallat’s unwillingness to be subservient to the Nazis.
On July 10, 1942, Dannecker telexed Eichmann about the coming roundup of French Jews to occur at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Vel’ d’Hiv) stadium in Paris, prior to their deportation to Drancy and eventually Auschwitz. Dannecker said the raid would be from July 16 to 18, conducted by the French police, and include about 4,000 children in the arrests. The French police agreed to collaborate and organize the roundup under German control. Jean Leguay, of the National Police in Vichy, and René Bousquet, the Vichy police secretary-general, agreed to negotiate with Dannecker. However, the French police, not the Germans, ran the whole roundup operation.
Dannecker’s ongoing differences with Knochen and Vallat over his extreme views on Jewish deportations, together with his unwillingness to collaborate with Vichy authorities, became a management problem. In early August 1942, following the roundup of Jews in Paris, Dannecker was recalled to Berlin for abuse of power and misuse of his position. SS officer Heinz Röthke took over the Paris branch from Dannecker.
In January 1943, Dannecker was transferred to Eichmann’s office in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he continued to oversee deportations and implement the Final Solution there in all the Bulgarian territories. During March 1943, Dannecker arranged for 11,343 Jews to be deported from the German-occupied Bulgarian-annexed territories of Greece and Yugoslavia to Auschwitz and Treblinka. Only 12 are known to have survived.
Dannecker’s attempt to deport Jews with Bulgarian citizenship from old Bulgaria, a collaborationist ally, failed due to widespread opposition led by King Boris III, supported by the heads of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, metropolitan bishops Stephan from Sofia and Kiril from Plovdiv, and vice president of the parliament, Dimitar Peshev.
In October 1943, he was posted to Verona, Italy, as commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Prior to the German occupation of Italy, Benito Mussolini refused to turn over Jews to the Nazis except those in areas annexed or occupied by the Italians in the Balkans. Between September 1943 and January 1944, when Italy surrendered to the Allies and Germans occupied Italy, Dannecker deported Italian Jews. He was responsible for the transport of 1,259 Jews from Rome to Auschwitz.
After Germany occupied Hungary, Dannecker and the Hungarian establishment deported more than a half a million Hungarian Jews between early 1944 and summer of 1944.
Under the tutelage of Adolf Eichmann, Dannecker developed into one of the SS’s most ruthless and experienced experts on the Jewish question, and his involvement in the genocide of European Jewry was one of primary responsibility. Dannecker became Jewish commissary for Italy in October 1944, remaining with the Eichmann commando to the end of the war.
Arrested by Allied troops at the end of the war, Dannecker committed suicide in an American prison camp in Bad Tölz on December 10, 1945.
DIRLEWANGER, OSKAR (1895–1945)
Oskar Dirlewanger commanded the infamous Nazi SS Dirlewanger Brigade during World War II. His name and that of the unit are closely linked to wanton SS war crimes.
Dirlewanger was born on September 26, 1895, into a middle-class family in Würzburg, northern Bavaria. In 1913, at the age of 18, he enlisted in the German army and received a commission as lieutenant. He fought as a machine gunner on the Western Front, where he met Gottlob Berger, who later became head of the SS Main Office (SS-HA). Dirlewanger was wounded six times, leaving him partially disabled, and was awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class.
After experiencing the violence of the Western Front, Dirlewanger was described in a postwar police report as being “a mentally unstable, violent fanatic and alcoholic, who had the habit of erupting into violence under the influence of drugs.” Unable to adapt to peace, he joined the Freikorps paramilitary militia and created an armed formation of students, a militia called the Württemberg Highway Watch. They deployed to the town of Sangerhausen, which had been occupied by communists. Many years later, in 1935, Dirlewanger was made an honorary citizen of Sangerhausen and was celebrated as its “liberator from the Red terrorists.”
In 1922, Dirlewanger was awarded a doctorate in political science from Goethe University, Frankfurt. He joined the Nazi Party in 1923, just two years after it was formed. The fact that he had been in trouble with the law for possessing a firearm illegally and “anti-Semitic incitement” aided his standing in the party. From 1928 to 1931, Dirlewanger was an executive director of a textile factory in Erfurt (owned, ironically, by a Jewish family), and although he renounced active service in the SA, he supported it financially.
By 1932, Dirlewanger held a senior office in the SA, but in 1934, he was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment in Dachau prison for the statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl from the League of German Girls (BdM). He lost his job, his professional title, and all military honors, and he was expelled from the NSDAP.
Upon his release, Dirlewanger was reinstated in the SS general reserve through the auspices of his former army comrade Gottlob Berger. He then volunteered to join the German Condor Legion in Spain, fighting for General Franco from 1936 until 1939 against the leftist Republican government. He was wounded three times and awarded military honors for, among other things, the death of 15 Republicans.
Returning to Germany, Dirlewanger found preparations for the Nazi invasion of Poland well underway. Owing to Berger’s lobbying with SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Dirlewanger rejoined the SS and was made a lieutenant in the Waffen-SS. His doctorate was also restored by the University of Frankfurt.
In 1940, Dirlewanger was tasked with creating his own unit and formed SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, initially from a few convicted poachers as well as conventional soldiers. Later members would be German convicts and concentration camp criminal prisoners. Both Hitler and Himmler considered that by using ex-convicts in policing, bullying, and terrorizing the populace of their newly conquered lands, they would instill order through fear.
Initially the unit carried out security duties in German-occupied Poland, where Dirlewanger was commandant of a labor camp at Stary Dzików. Here, and in the nearby Lublin ghetto, he was accused of committing sadistic cruelties, including injecting strychnine into naked young Jewish female prisoners to watch them die in convulsions.
After investigating these reports of abuse and cruelty, the SS Court Main Office (Hauptamt SS-Gericht) sought to investigate Dirlewanger and to ensure that the unit was under control. The allegations of atrocities were investigated by SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who found Dirlewanger guilty of murder, corruption, and race defilement (having sex with racially unacceptable people). Berger and Himmler were little concerned; Dirlewanger was instead simply relocated, while Judge Morgen was punished for his findings.
Berger and Himmler needed units such as the Dirlewanger Brigade to keep “sub-humanity” under control. Odilo Globocnik wrote to Himmler that Dirlewanger, in charge of the Jewish camp of Dzików, was an excellent leader.
In summer 1941, Dirlewanger directed his unit to supervise the Polish Jewish population forced to slave labor in the construction of military facilities along the River Bug. In autumn, the unit was involved in pacification of the Lublin region and was thus directly involved in the violent removal of thousands of villagers from around Lublin to make room for ethnic Germans. This area would later serve as the site for a Waffen-SS concentration camp.
At the beginning of 1942, the unit was assigned to “antibandit” operations, fighting Soviet partisans in Belarus. Now designated as a “volunteer” formation, Dirlewanger’s men brutalized partisans, suspected collaborators, or anyone who got in their way, and engaged in looting, raping, and extortion. Allegedly, a favorite method was to herd the local population of a suspected “bandit” village into a barn, set the barn on fire, and then machine-gun anyone who sought to break free from the flames. Civilians were used from time to time as human shields or marched over minefields. Dirlewanger and his force raped and tortured young women and slaughtered Jews in Belarus beginning in 1942. Overall, it is estimated that the Dirlewanger Brigade killed at least 30,000 Belarusian (and likely many more) civilians. Himmler, aware of Dirlewanger’s deeds, awarded him the German Cross in Gold on December 5, 1943, in recognition of his unit’s actions.
All antipartisan activities were committed to paper in the form of written reports, and after one two-day operation, Dirlewanger reported taking 33 bunkers, killing 386 “bandits” and 294 “bandit suspects.” Further, it was reported that the unit “harvested” 3 men, 30 women, 117 horses, 248 children, 140 sheep, 14 pigs, and 120 tons of food. In Operation Swamp Fever, during September 1942, the brigade reported killing 8,350 Jews, 389 “bandits,” and 1,274 “bandit suspects.”
By August 1944, the Dirlewanger unit was a full battalion, made up of criminals, court-martialed SS troops, and even former political prisoners. As the Red Army advanced west, though, many in the unit unsurprisingly defected to the Russians. In mid-1944, when the Germans were being driven out of Belarus, Dirlewanger’s Brigade suffered heavy losses in rearguard fights against Soviet regulars. Reconstructed as a storm brigade, the unit was used to suppress the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944. Dirlewanger participated in the Woła massacre; together with police units, the brigade rounded up and shot around 40,000 civilians in just two days of mayhem, torture, and atrocities. Despite this, Dirlewanger’s unit suffered severe casualties in Warsaw, losing massive numbers in only two months of fighting.
Dirlewanger received his final promotion, to the rank of SS-Oberführer, on August 15, 1944. In October 1944, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, and the same month, he led his men to put down the Slovak National Uprising, eventually being posted to Hungary and eastern Germany to fight the advancing Red Army.
In February 1945, the unit was expanded and redesignated as an SS grenadier division. That same month, Dirlewanger was shot in the chest while fighting against the invading Soviet forces near Guben in Brandenburg and sent to the rear. It was his 12th and final war injury.
On April 22, 1945, Dirlewanger went into hiding. By the end of the war, he had overseen and personally taken part in the torture, rape, and murder of many thousands of civilians in Germany, Belarus, and Poland, all under the guise of eliminating “bandits” behind the front line.
He was arrested by French occupation authorities on June 1, 1945, near the town of Altshausen in Upper Swabia. After this, his fate becomes cloudy. The exact cause of his death is unknown, which over time has led to speculation. His death certificate, issued by French authorities, shows him to have died on June 7, 1945, of natural causes. However, a Luftwaffe lieutenant named Anton Füssinger later claimed he was Dirlewanger’s cell mate and said that he witnessed Dirlewanger being gravely beaten by Polish guards in French service on the night of June 4 to 5, 1945, resulting in his death. No one, however, confirmed any of Füssinger’s statements. The lack of corroborating evidence led to even more rumors after the war ended, and there were many presumed sightings of Dirlewanger around the world over the years.
Rumors and tabloid stories persisted, suggesting that Dirlewanger had escaped and lived on, including one popular story of Dirlewanger serving with the French Foreign Legion in Vietnam during the First Indochina War and later defecting to Egypt to join Gamal Abdel Nasser’s army (in another variation, to Syria). In response, the Department of Public Prosecution in Ravensburg arranged the exhumation of Dirlewanger’s corpse to confirm his identity in November 1960. The place of his burial was suppressed.
Hermann Dolp was born on September 12, 1889, in Türkheim, Bavaria. After service in World War I, he joined one of the many right-wing paramilitary Freikorps units active in Bavaria, and as an early adherent to the ideas of Adolf Hitler, he became one of the initial SA street fighters; as such, he served time in prison for beating up political opponents. In November 1923, he took part in the Beer Hall Putsch. Entering the National Socialist Party in 1928, he joined the SS in October 1929 as an unpaid Untersturmführer. In September 1930, he was promoted to SS-Standartenführer, commanding Hitler’s protection squad in Munich.
In late 1933, he was sent to assist in organizing the construction and further development of Dachau concentration camp (which had opened in March of that year), and he remained there through the summer of 1934. From January 1935 onward, he served as an officer at SS headquarters, and in August 1939, he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, not far from Berlin, as garrison commander.
Married and the father of four children, Dolp was a good organizer although not highly endowed with intellect. He had a weakness for alcohol, which he consumed in large quantities. After the German attack on Poland in September 1939, he was given command of local ethnic German paramilitary units there and then headed the Gestapo in Kalisch (Kalisz). It was here that his drinking got him into trouble. On November 1, 1939, he was caught drunk trying to rape a young Polish woman, who happened to be the girlfriend of another German official. The case was investigated at the order of the inspector of concentration camps, Theodor Eicke, and Dolp was arrested on January 9, 1940. He was tried before an SS court on February 4, 1940, found guilty, and militarily degraded. He was demoted to SS-Sturmbannführer, removed from Sachsenhausen, and forbidden from touching alcohol for two years. On February 8, 1940, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler wrote to Dolp and pointed out expressly that any disregarding of the alcohol ban would result in him being drummed out of the SS.
By mid-February 1940, Dolp was transferred to the command of SS chief of the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik, the primary architect of the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland. One of Dolp’s first tasks was to accompany a march of Jewish forced laborers to work in the city of Biała Podlaska, during which hundreds of Jews died. Globocnik then placed him in charge of organizing the construction of a labor camp on Lipowa Street, Lublin. In the late spring of 1940, Globocnik sent Dolp to supervise the installation of trench-work defenses along the border with the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. It was in this context that he set up forced-labor camps around Bełżec, prior to the establishment of a death camp there in late 1941.
Keen to redeem his reputation, Dolp threw himself into his task with zeal and saw that his orders were carried out ruthlessly. At Bełżec, he was assisted by Franz Bartetzko, the commandant of another forced-labor camp, Trawniki. Dolp was notorious for his cruelty, even sadism, toward the prisoners, as well as his corruption; prisoners assigned to camp workshops were forced to produce everyday items such as clothes and shoes at Dolp’s command, after which he was known to sell them on the black market.
After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Globocnik sent Dolp as his SS and police (SS- und Polizeiführer, or SSPF) representative in Minsk and Mogilev in the occupied Soviet Union, working in the construction of police and SS bases. He remained in the region until May 1942, after which he was sent from May 1942 to August 1943 to serve as commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp at Osen-Elsfjiord, Norway, also overseeing Norwegian forced-labor camps. Until February 1944, he served at SS headquarters in Berlin, following which he became a battalion commander of the Latvian 19th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division. Reestablishing his former rank, on June 21, 1944, he was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer and Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer.
Hermann Dolp was reported as missing in action, believed killed, in Romania late 1944. His body was never found.