A Bunch of Wangers: The Nazi Unit Who Were so Awful, Even the Nazi SS Were Disgusted by Them

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this episode is brought to you by curiosity stream curiosity stream is a subscription streaming service that offers over 2000 documentaries and nonfiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals so look you don't need me to tell you that there's gonna be lots of war content on curiosity stream world war two the nazis pretty much anything r in the 20th century before that after that it's all gonna be on curiosity stream the best thing is for you to go see for yourself I think there's pretty much zero chance he only ever treated me like wow I wish there was more stuff about 20th century war curiosity stream is available on many platforms web app Roku Android Xbox one Smart TVs iOS chromecast Amazon fire Amazon Kindle Apple TV that's a lot of platforms and worldwide get unlimited access starting at just two dollars 99 a month and for you guys the first 30 days are completely free if you sign up a curiosity stream com forward slash brain food and use the promo code brain food during the signup process it's a great way to support this show and keeps us making more videos and I really couldn't think of a better fit for sponsorship given they're all about educational content as well and let's get into it [Music] the SS storm brigade are Lavanya better known to historians simply as the Darla's Vanger brigade holds the dubious distinction of being amongst the most reviled units of the Nazi war machine that is truly something infamous for its brutality and the open sadism displayed by its commanding officer the man previously imprisoned for raping a young teen girl the unit's and their actions were so detested that even many among the upper echelon of the Nazi High Command itself were disgusted by them if you are disgusted by Nazi High Command you know you're fairly disgusting so how did this unit come to be why were they so particularly brutal and why were they allowed to continue with their horrific acts that horrified pretty much everybody except for themselves officially the 36 waffen grenadier division of the SS or more aptly under SS control they were formed in 1940 as an indirect response to an order from Hitler to bolster German man with convicted criminals initially those convicted of minor crimes however as the war went on and Nazi Germany became desperate the ranks of these battalions became decidedly more eclectic with some like the delivering a brigade filling out their ranks with the worst of the worst of criminals as well as mental institution patients and this is obviously gonna go great considered by many to be a death sentence these units were often tasked with the most dangerous jobs that the vir market could think of such as acting as shock troops and losing battles or marching across minefields to clear them any of these soldiers who refused were simply shot dead on the spot when they weren't being thrown into the meat grinder staff battalions were forced at gunpoint to perform back-breaking manual labor and could expect to be executed for even minor infractions men who found themselves serving in straf battalions additionally had no rankin's fought wearing plain uniforms the payoff however assuming they managed to survive was that if they served with the distinction they could potentially have their criminal records expunged and even be given more traditional ranks and reassigned to units that weren't more or less just suicide squads with these strapped Italians however one unit distinguished themselves via a level of brutality that would make even the most twisted of minds squeamish something the upper echelon of the Nazi war machine found to be particularly beneficial for the war effort you see having a rabid dog at their disposal came in handy in certain situations and incidentally here it's not totally hyperbole it's noteworthy that one tactic the Darla's van has used was to release starved and abused dogs among civilians with the dual benefit of some good family-friendly fun for the soldiers getting to watch the dogs tear people apart as well as to instill the appropriate fear in the rest of a local given populace as to what would happen to them if anyone further stepped out of line this brings us to the commanding officer of the Darla's vana Brigade Oskar Dirlewanger close friends of leftenant general Gottlob burg are one of the 12 apostles of heinrich aka the architect of the Holocaust doll Vanga had previously served in World War one where he was wounded six times and otherwise seemed to have served with distinction rising to the rank of left tenants however after the war the official report on the men noted he had become to quote mentally unstable violence and alcoholic and an abuser of drugs in his time between the world wars he took part in various things like suppression of the German Revolution got his doctorate in political science and was frequently convicted of various crimes such as embezzlement things got even more serious when in 1934 he was convicted of raping a fourteen-year-old girl then immediately after stole the government Karen's promptly crashed it as he was quite drunk at the time he was then imprisoned for a couple of years before being released rather than live as a law-abiding citizen from there he almost immediately was convicted of sexual assault once again Oh what point no he like let's just you know throw away the key having friends in high places such as Gottlob berger however comes in handy and not long after he managed to get released and then went to fight in the Spanish Civil War under General Francisco Franco thanks to his service during that war when he went back to Germany he was reinstated and eventually given a group of criminals to commands his unit was initially composed of a few dozen of these individuals including poachers the idea here being that their tracking and hunting skills would translate well to hunting and tracking resistance members and fleeing Jews thanks to their success towards this end in the early going the dallof anger brigade grew out over the course of the war to comprise 4,000 men at its peak a group whose numbers eventually included some of the worst of the worst of criminals as well as men deemed mentally unstable including asylum patients as I said earlier how on earth could this go wrong Darla Vanga took full advantage of his position as leader of this ethically challenged unit engaging in acts of cruelty on just an incomprehensible scale beyond the aforementioned rabid dog tactic and other even more horrific was gathering together very young girls stripping them all naked whipping them to near death and then injecting them with strychnine after this it was reported that he and men enjoyed among other things watching them convulsed to death another tactic was to gather groups of people and cram them into a building then set it on fire anyone who fled the building after it was set aflame would be immediately shot beyond these sorts of more elaborate methods the bangers were also known for terrorizing local civilian populace via gang rapes beatings robbings extortion indiscriminate murder gutting children in front of their parents etc etc naturally even some of the most ardent Nazi ideological supporters got a little squeamish at some of these acts needing to frequent calls for delve angers arrests or at least the reassignment of the Ranga brigades to the front instead of overseeing civilians in fact at one point SS Police Judge Advocate George Morgan was so fed up that he took it upon himself to issue a warrant for the arrest of Darla's Vanga naturally Darla Vanga appealed to Berger who in turn appealed to Himmler ROM Taliban as the half reasoning to Himmler in a letter defending Taliban his actions better to shoot two poles to many than two too few a savage country cannot be governed in a decent manner Himmler apparently agreed and Darla's Vanga was allowed to continue on and he was even promoted in another case general Heinz Guderian appealed to Hitler himself to get della bangers unit withdrawn reportedly with one of Himmler's officers backing up Guderian's assertions about the wagons Hitler however apparently felt the opposite about the unit and rejected the police in a nutshell the bangers got results when it came to quelling uprisings tracking down those fleeing and instilling an extreme amount of fear among the civilians that they were let loose upon on their notes as alluded to given their strength was not so much and having well-trained soldiers but rather ones who seemed to lack even an ounce of empathy or a moral compass the duties of the DA Lavanya brigade throughout most of the war were the suppression of civilian activity throughout Nazi controlled Eastern Europe with the unit mostly operating in Poland and Belarus perhaps the most infamous events of the war that the der LaVon brigade took part in was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 during what came to be known as the volar massacre the unit slaughtered thousands of unarmed civilians and engaged in thinkable acts of cruelty for example reports tell of dull of anger and his men burning Hospital patients alive gutting screaming women in front of their families and killing an entire preschool full of children with bayonets and rifle butts so you might wonder why'd this instead of shooting the kids German army sapper Matthias shank describes this last events and the reasoning behind the method of killing as such after the door of the building was blown off we saw a daycare full of small children around five hundred all with small hands in the app even Taliban has own people called him a butcher he ordered to kill them all the shots were fired but he requested his men to save the ammo and to finish them off with rifle butts and bayonets blood and brain matter flowed in streams down the stairs the brutality of the Taliban our brigades is such that we don't even know how many people they killed during the war with information gleaned from reports generally estimating the number at between a thirty thousand and a hundred and twenty thousand civilians in Belarus and thought to be more definitively around fifty thousand people in Poland the unit itself lost a small number of men during this period at least as the book blood lands Europe between Hitler and Stalin somebody notes as it inflicted its first fifteen thousand mortal casualties the special commander Darla's Vanga lost only ninety two men many of them no doubt to friendly fire and alcoholic accidents a ratio such as that was possible only when the victims were unarmed civilians for anyone watching this video who feels like they need a little schadenfreude right now to wash all of that information out of their brains well towards the end of the war the Wangers were forced to go up against non civilians in the form of the Soviets and well let's just say the Red Army sorted that these bastions of humanity were held accountable for their crimes almost completely and extremely rapidly wiping them out down to just a couple of hundred survivors and the only thing that I would have done differently there is make there wiping out a lot slower and more painful that said although it was the Soviets I'm sure they were pretty mean about it that's it de lavaz brigade numbers were briefly replenished by a few thousand additions to bring them back up to about 4,000 strong but once again was soon after slaughtered by soldiers who actually knew what they were doing is estimated that only about 700 Wangers we'll survive the war 700 too many as for Oscar De La Vanga his unit was decimated the second time he promptly swapped his uniform for civilian clothing flared and started going by a different name thankfully he was recognized by a Jewish concentration camp survivor while staying at a hunting lodge not long after French soldiers promptly arrested him On June the 1st 1945 now officially dalla vanga died about a week later of injuries sustained prior to being captured in southern Germany however this is largely thought to just be a story to protect a handful of Polish guards at the prison that he was being held at you see these men allegedly took it upon themselves to beat durla Vanga until he promptly died of the wounds he sustains before being arrested oh no what a shame and I really hope you enjoyed at least that ending the rest of this video was just horrible so well yeah at least he got beaten to death if you did like it smash that like button please do check out curiosity streaming and thank you for watching
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Channel: Today I Found Out
Views: 1,151,702
Rating: 4.9060817 out of 5
Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know, The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, Dirlewanger Brigade, Oskar Dirlewanger, The Horrific War Record of Oskar Dirlewanger, The SS Butcher of Warsaw, The SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger
Id: Lp9KAFLQJ1A
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Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)
Published: Fri May 15 2020
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