The SS Dirlewanger Brigade: The History of the Black Hunters by Christian Ingrao & Phoebe Green

Author:Christian Ingrao & Phoebe Green [Ingrao, Christian & Green, Phoebe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: War, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781620876312
Google: D2EtAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1620876310
Goodreads: 12645242
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2011-10-31T23:00:00+00:00

Female game, however, arouses only contempt. Never shot face-to-face, does are called “cows” or “mares” by the hunters, who meet their hunting plan by killing a set number of them before the hunt every year. They complete this task grudgingly, fulfilling their social responsibility as hunters by organizing battues. In Germanic countries, a battue is used only to fulfill a hunting plan and is devoid of any social prestige.28 It is the only space in which the hunter consents to kill females.

What of the Partisanenbekämpfung? The situation was much less simple. Certainly the Spähtruppen, who practiced the “man-Pirsch,” almost never killed women, which would tend to support the coherence of the cynegetic view. But in large-scale operations, women were treated in radically different ways, depending on context. In the case of assault on partisan camps, during major sweep operations, women were shot exactly like men who possessed weapons. On September 9, 1942, the Sonderkommando Dirlewanger reported: “A newly built camp two kilometers south [of the operation area] was attacked by Hauptsturmführer Weber on his own initiative and taken by assault, with the guard remaining inside the camp. There were four enemy dead, and four women found in the camp were also shot.”29 We do not know if these women were interrogated before being shot, but their chance of survival in this situation was almost nil.30 In such a case, in which death is the logical outcome of the battue and where the analogy between battue and sweep operation is in full effect, the coherence of the cynegetic model is preserved.

However, few women were captured in assaults on entrenched camps. Most of the thousands of women who fell into the Sondereinheit’s hands did so during the village encirclements during the last phase of sweep operations. This phase consisted of returning to the units’ starting point after having reached the determined topographic objective, systematically searching the villages passed during the advance. It was during this phase, as Christian Gerlach noted, that civilian massacres were the most frequent31 and that deportations were performed. This last phase, however, had no equivalent in the battue. Doesn’t this represent a limit to the cynegetic model? Two possible configurations suggest themselves. In the unit’s operations reports, women, rarely separated from children in the unit’s statistics, are mentioned under two headings: those “suspected of belonging to a partisan band” (Bandenverdächtige), executed en masse; and those Erfassung, inventory for removal, or, in other words, deportation. In the first case, unit practices aimed to kill all members of the category. In the second case, they were to be removed, with two distinct objectives: either they were to be relocated in sectors beyond partisan reach, or they were to be sent to forced labor.

If we examine the case in which the victims were kept alive, we see the recurrence of a new category of violence. It is in this case, and we are tempted to say in this case only, that violence of a sexual nature appears in the written sources.

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