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Old 07-04-2010, 10:51 AM
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Muti Muti is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Central Italy
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A bit of history...

In the Germany Army of WW2 the Heer penal units were called Straftbattalionen and designed with numbers like 999. They were mainly used for near-impossible missions on the Eastern Front for suicidal sabotage acts, clearing minefields and to defend or assaults frontline (almost lost) positions.

I saw a german movie called "Stalingrad" dealing with such things. It was the story of some men from an engineer battalion transfered from the Italian Front to Stalingrad and sent to a penal unit because their officer tried to obtain preferential medical treatment for his men pointing a gun to a medic. After repelled a Soviet assault they earn the right to return to their unit.

Life in those penal units was very bad. They were treated like beasts and if injured they were simply left to die. Anyway if a soldier survived his sentence he would be released obtaining all the rights of a "standard" german soldier.

If I'm not making a mistake in the Waffen-SS there were no Straftbattalionen. Exceptions were made for foreign units like the 29th Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (the infamous SS-Sturmbrigade RONA led by Bronislav Kaminski) and, of course, the 36th Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS "Dirlewanger".

The cadre of the Dirlewanger's unit was formed from military prisoners, POWs and criminals including rapists, child molesters, murderers and even those that had been commited to asylums for the criminally insane. The officer in command himsel, Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger, was a psychopath and a child molester but he obtained a PhD in Political Sciences and got really powerful friends like Gottlob Berger. Fortunately Dirlewanger was captured in the last days of the war and sent to a jail in occupied Germany where he was recognized by polish guards and beaten to death.

Here's a list of the Heer penal units (if you can read german)...

http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/...iederung-R.htm
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