They were Hitler's equivalent of the Dirty Dozen and known as the 'worst of the worst' - an entire SS division made up entirely of psychopaths, murderers and rapists and led by a child molester.
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The 36th Waffen SS Grenadier Division, commanded by Oskar Dirlewanger, was initially created to wage war against resistance fighters in Poland, but soon became a weapon of terror used indiscriminately against civilians and armed combatants alike.
Over the course of the war the unit was implicated in campaigns of rape, mass murder and poisonings including injecting Jews with strychnine and watching as they died in agony. The first men invited to join the 36th were convicted poachers on the grounds that they could use their skills as woodsmen to track down guerrilla fighters in their countryside hideaways.
Each man was offered a pardon for his crimes should he survive the dangerous tasks he was to undertake, which in Hitler's Germany also meant earning their citizenship back. 55 men signed up for the job. But the missions were so dangerous, and Dirlewanger so given to executing his men for infractions, that he quickly ran out of recruits. It was then that the offer was opened up to all manner of criminals.
While offenders were typically banned from wielding firearms in the army, they were welcomed by Dirlewanger who amassed a band of several hundred murderers, rapists and those deemed criminally insane.
In one of their most infamous exploits, his men were asked to put down the Warsaw Uprising. What followed was the Wola Massacre, in which 40,000 civilians in that district were slaughtered in two weeks.