The SS Dirlewanger Brigade by Christian Ingrao

Author:Christian Ingrao
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Quarry and Spoils

These poachers, waging war as though they were hunting, carefully noted the number of their victims and detailed the spoils collected, an accounting at first glance inconsistent with the cynegetic model, beginning with the question of the treatment of women by the men of the unit. Bertrand Hell has shown that the gendered dimension of cynegetic activity was central in the European imagination of the Wild Man. The Pirsch is an exclusively masculine activity and tends to take as its target only the ten-pronged King Stag, dominant and at full sexual maturity. At the belling hour, two virilities confront each other, and if the tracking and traces to which the hunter devotes himself constitute the essence of selecting a hunt-worthy beast, calling the stag is at least as important as analyzing his spoor. The hunter must challenge his future victim by counterfeiting his belling, but he must do so with discernment: the imitation of too young a stag will evoke only the scornful silence of a dominant male; that of too powerful a stag will intimidate the younger specimen. Thus, everything depends on the hunter’s evaluation of the age and sexual power of the quarry. A successful Pirsch compels the stag to come forth to the forest’s edge at dawn, prepares him to confront a potential rival, and allows the hunter to bring him down at that very moment.

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

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