So why the fondness for recruiting criminals again?

So why the fondness for recruiting criminals again?

I know they were expected to die on the front lines. But this mofo just kept adding worse and worse criminals as the war went. The most degenerate (seriously) ponces Germany had to offer. For what feasible reason? What exactly went on in this troglodyte's head that made him consider this idea and say to himself "yeah, yeah, that seems reasonable?" And the results were just as you would expect them to be. All to the point that even other divisions of the SS feared them.

With that being said, has anything like the Dirlewanger Band of Merry Rapists and Pillagers ever happened before in history? I don't want to believe this was an isolated incident.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo3649905.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Village
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

They needed men. Killers wouldn't have reservations about traipsing through Eastern Europe and murdering civilians

Because all the more reliable sources of manpower had already either been drafted or were in some sort of essential non-combat function already.

You recruit criminals because you're out of better options.

Because he was a degenerate criminal himself.

Naughty men for naughty work. Fuck partisan terrorists.

They were short on men, that's all. Still better then sending hitlerjungen kids to death.

>partisan terrorists.
t. Goebbels

You know shit about counter-terrorism ops.

>buring entire villages of people to death is "counter "terrorism""

>Nazis are evil
>Criminals are evil

Birds of a feather flock together

Of course it is. Soviets loved that practice as well.

You wouldn't support the partisans if you knew the whole village is going to burn,

>counter-terrorism

I guess "killing everyone in the area of operations" is a way to stop partisans, sure. Most nations usually want to hold onto the populations they invade for their own gain, but you Nazis keep doing your own bad selves. I'm sure it will work out for you and not utterly backfire in every possible fashion.

There wasn't such a thing as an idle Slav.

>>burning entire villages of people to death is "counter "terrorism""
Are you a child?

Of course it is.

Everybody does it.

If a village is constantly fucking with your occupying forces you wipe it out.

Pic related.

It's fucking My Lai in Vietnam.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

>
>>>burning entire villages of people to death is "counter "terrorism""
I mean the fucking Romans sowed salt in Carthage's fields for fuck's sake.

>CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED

Everybody grow the fuck up already.

>Dirlewanger
Fucking amateur
>The city of Carthage was indeed finally razed by the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus after the Third Battle of Carthage in 146 BC, and its entire remaining population was sold into slavery.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est

>oh gosh golly gee Nazis so much worse than everyone else in history

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE Veeky Forums PULL YOUR SHIT TOGETHER

>killing everyone regardless if they're a partisan or not
>hurts the legitimacy of the war overall
>becomes propaganda for the partisans
>makes the homefront not want to keep fighting
>divides your army into monsters and nots

I'm not sure that helps your case.

>With that being said, has anything like the Dirlewanger Band of Merry Rapists and Pillagers ever happened before in history?

Muslims in Ibera, Turks in Eastern Europe

It certainly helps counter terrorism.
People going against a violent oppressor usually have signed off their own life as lost but (probably) still care and have hope for others/their loved ones.
Slightly different case but why do you think Best Korea is still closed off? Because they don't just kill you to death, they also punish your entire family to the third damn link.

Triggered former enemies of the State in 3, 2, 1...

ITT: People who unironically think that harsh reprisals help to prevent resistance and partisan activities.

>It certainly helps counter terrorism.

No it does not. If an army decides to shoot everybody on the opposing side who surrenders, none of them will surrender and therefore more soldiers die in harder fighting. Likewise if you just go around locking entire villages into barns and setting them on fire it means nobody is ever going to cooperate of their free will and will always work against the occupier.
North Korea is a completely different story, it has an east asian beehive mentality which stamps out any individual action or thought from birth (same in Japan, China etc). Combined with this, their top 5% political elites continously persecute 10-15% of the population using 20% of the population as prison guards to keep the other 60% in line in a delicate balancing act of divide and conquer, also they are not foreign occupiers but native Koreans.

The same people who say that turn around and call "Come and See" Soviet propaganda, despite it depicting exactly what they say is the "correct" way to fight an insurgency.

Who surrender, yeah, sure. I wouldn't quite call partisans/terrorists/freedom fighters (truth is in the eye of the beholder you know) - or people who help partisans - people who have surrendered.
If you just shoot up villages at random then surely resistance will grow since, as you point out yourself, there is no benefit to surrender anyway. Only shooting up people who have (seemingly) wronged you would deter others from helping partisans.
And yes, Best Korea is different as was already stated when it was brought up but the theory is the same: deterrence through fear of reprisals to others.

>but the theory is the same: deterrence through fear of reprisals to others.

This does not work though, its like trying to put out a fire by pouring oil on it

All the prime manpower was in the army, and they were busy on the front lines. Even 2nd and 3rd rate troops were needed to bulk up German forces on paper.

So they turned to the next available source: locals and criminals, or both. And because many were criminals, they didn't have qualms about committing atrocities, unlike most Wehrmacht soldiers (though they weren't exactly innocent either).

Plus they're expendable. Who cares what happened to them. They were used as cannon fodder in the Warsaw Uprising.

Plus they were very unreliable in frontline combat, and generals didn't like using cowardly criminals in their ranks.

>brutality is an effective way to subjugate
Ah this meme. No, it doesn't work. Maybe for the Mongols, maybe for the Romans, but modern warfare, culture and ideology is much much different, and even before then being a brutal conqueror had mixed results.

German brutality in the USSR didn't hinder resistance, it encouraged it. Many people greeted them as liberators, sure, but when the Germans began to violently punish civilians through wanton killing, rape and plunder, not to mention the whole "Hunger Plan" thing, many actually started to miss soviet oppression.

See, the Germans were very effective in alienating many of the local populations with these anti partisan operations, causing more people to turn to them. Very counterproductive.

So... do we have any effective ways to perform counter-insurgency? At all?

Hearts and minds clearly doesn't work, but it's pretty obvious that conquering foreign populations successfully is completely possible. I mean look at china/tibet. How the fuck is this done? Is genocide the only option?

>Hearts and minds clearly doesn't work
It does. But you have to have to actually mean it and actually follow through on your promises.

An insurgency is like gangrene.

It simply doesn't happen if there isn't an underlying problem with the host body.

As such, the correct way to counter an insurgency is to develop an effective government, that provides effective public services and commands proper legitimacy.

You can see the obvious problem with trying to make such a government out of Afghans or South Vietnamese.

Killing the insurgents wasn't hard at all, capitalizing on that success by creating a functional government is very difficult.

And it's always easier to prevent an insurgency than to stop one.

I guess they should have just gathered the villagers on the square and have a serious talk and discussion about the situation and ask them politely not to resist the occupying forces. I mean, there's not reason to kill anyone, Jesus.

The only effective way to perform counterinsurgency is to set up a local government that is capable of taking care of itself, and having your troops saturate areas until said local government is set up.

The problem, if you're working from a modern, American point of view, is that America is an ideology-state, and one of the very few. American politicians keep thinking ideological states work, despite the fact that they usually don't. So they keep trying to set up ideology states where they want toe expand, blithely ignoring how there's very little support for any of these experiments on the ground where they're trying them. So you get something like Vietnam, where even after the U.S. spent god knows how much blood and treasure beating the shit out of the North Vietnamese, were unable to hold off the NVA after the Americans pulled out.

So at that point, you either try to directly occupy the place indefinitely, or you pull out.

Honestly, "having realistic expectations" is the most simple but at the same time most often tripped up part of these expeditions.

>Is genocide the only option?

Because it worked so well for the Nazis in Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, and Belorussia? Or the Soviets in Afghanistan?

If anything, the Nazis didn't kill enough civilian opposition. The Soviets did it and held Eastern Europe.

The US failed in Vietnam because the South Vietnamese were inept cunts.

That has very little to do with the US itself, so much as the blistering incompetence of French administration and the incredible stupidity of Ngo Dinh Diem and the generals.

There's a reason literally every other country in the region beat communist insurgents.

To clarify, Field Marshal Templer there is the man who coined the phrase "hearts and minds" in regards to his plan to defeat the Malay Emergency. It worked well enough to become the model on how to fight insurgencies: as it turns out people aren't willing to support a Communist insurgency if the government is willing to meet all their needs fairly and put them on an equal footing with the rest of the population.

This is also why South Vietnam collapsed. The NVA and Viet Cong kept their support so high as it was because of just how corrupt and divisive the Saigon government was. When the vast majority of your population is Buddhist, passing laws that give preference to Catholics is going to piss people off.

>The US failed in Vietnam because the South Vietnamese were inept cunts.

Precisely. But WHY were the South Vietnamese such inept cunts? Why were they backing idiots like Diem and his military? The pro-Catholic, pro foreigner, pro modernity and foreign influence were all things that Washington D.C. liked but weren't so hot for your average Vietnamese, which is why so many of them were going over to Hanoi's side.

Unless you want to make some argument as to how South Vietnamese people are psychologically incapable of government (but North Vietnamese are) you can't just shrug it off and say "They were retards" without going into why they were retards and better people didn't rise to the top.

>There's a reason literally every other country in the region beat communist insurgents.

Like Cambodia? Laos? China?

Are insurgencies ever NOT funded and organized by outside powers? The best way to defeat an insurgency is to have the people on your side to begin with

You have a VERY few. The Mau Mau in Kenya are the only ones I can think of at the moment, but there are probably a few more.

But pretty much. Every nation-state has enemies, and most of those will jump at the chance for a bit of an easy, cheap, and often low visibility strike by supporting someone else who is fighting that enemy.

>Many people greeted them as liberators, sure, but when the Germans began to violently punish civilians through wanton killing, rape and plunder, not to mention the whole "Hunger Plan" thing, many actually started to miss soviet oppression.

Pure clichee. Your idea that the Germans created the partisan movement by themselves out of sheer stupidity doesn't hold much truth. Firstly, there was a social basis for a partisan movement from the beginning: Staunch communists, Jews, dispersed soldiers who wanted to avoid captivity. And the partisan movement didn't emerge spantanousely because of German brutality but because of orders and support from the Soviet government. Secondly, it's easy to say that the Germans should've just tried to win the hearts of the population; however, the German army needed acquire food from the occupied territory to feed itself and the German economy needed workers to keep the factorys going. The interest conflict between occupiers and locals is unavoidable here as the local obviously don't want to give away foodstuffs and don't want to be transported abroad as forced laborers.

Well, I was referring to the period after 1949.

In the case of Indochina, the French made the classic mistake of suppressing all opposition, both peaceful and violent, and then realizing too late that they can't stay there forever, and hastily scrambling together a government.

The classic tactic is to allow moderate, peaceful political opposition to exist while suppressing violent political opposition, so that the country develops a moderate ruling class that is capable of resisting the insurgents and governing the country after you leave.

To some extent, Vietnam's woes were simply down bad luck, as Ngo Dinh Diem was actually stupid enough to crack down in Buddhists in a majority Buddhist country.

Of course, the Viet Minh had been happy to slaughter any nationalist forces that weren't under their control, that is, the ones that the French had missed.

I must emphasize that states ranging from Burma, to the Phillippines, to South Korea, to Indonesia were all capable of surviving communist insurgents.

In the end, even South Vietnam was capable of doing so, albeit far too late to prevent the US from getting sick of their shit and pulling out of the region, which left them vulnerable to the purely conventional Spring 1975 offensive.

>Hearts and minds doesn't work

It does work though. It didn't work in Vietnam, obviously, because we didn't do a very good job.

>however, the German army needed acquire food from the occupied territory to feed itself and the German economy needed workers to keep the factories going. The interest conflict between occupiers and locals is unavoidable here as the local obviously don't want to give away foodstuffs and don't want to be transported abroad as forced laborers.

The Germans didn't take food from the locals because of "muh bombed supply convoys" meme. They deliberately had a plan to starve the Slavs out of existence. They even had an official hierarchy of where food went to first: at the top were ethnic Germans.

And are you seriously trying to justify forced labour? FFS if the Germans were smarter they would have transitioned to a war economy earlier than '43 and allowed women to work in factories. But they didn't, because women were for making more aryan babies.

give a SINGLE example of when hearts and minds has ever worked in history

Malaya, Sri Lanka, Kenya 1950s

Not even him.

If you were doing it properly, an insurgency literally wouldn't start in the first place.

But yeah, the British did a pretty good job in Malaya by gaining the trust of the locals and providing government services.

See: The Malay Emergency is where the phrase was coined, and its actual implementation is the major reason the Communists there were defeated.

Malaya was only won because it's not bordering with China.

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo3649905.html

To all the fucks defending Dirlewanger and the general strategy.

By 1944 AK numbered 400 000 active members

AL numbered 60 000

NSZ numbered 75 000

The two latter organizations did not even need any non-combat personel because they were either supplied by Soviets (AL) or supplied themselves via robbing the population and stealing from Soviet convoys (NSZ)

So tell me, how is it possible, that the country which suffered the most opression from the occupant and lost 20% of its civilian population had the most developed resistance movement, even with three factions struggling for power? How did Dirlewanger's destruction of Warsaw help the Nazi "counter"-terrorism?

No, it was won because the British and Malayans were able to cut off support for the insurgents. No random Chinese peasant is going to bother fighting when all of his grievances have been met.


>Chinese minority feels oppressed and ignored by Malay government
>grant millions of them citizenship and equal rights status
>resettle peasants to take them out of insurgency breeding grounds
>put them in newly built villages that are actually good places to live so they don't immediately become hotspots of disgruntlement
>roll in plentiful fresh food and water for villages that don't harbor any support for the insurgents
>offer amnesty so that those who were laid astray by insurgents can lay down their arms and not feel obligated to keep fighting for their own personal survival

WOAH LOOK AT THAT NOW NOBODY WANTS TO JEOPARDIZE THE GOOD THING THEY KNOW THEY HAVE HOW CAN THIS BE

>resettle peasants to take them out of insurgency breeding grounds
>put them in newly built villages that are actually good places to live so they don't immediately become hotspots of disgruntlement

This is a nice way to say "force half a million people into camps" but they were at least nice camps.

They weren't camps in the traditional sense, like the German concentration camps or the American internment camps. They may have been closed and heavily policed towns, but they were actual towns.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Village

Increasing the quality of life was the crucial difference. If they had just thrown them all in internment camps it wouldn't have done shit to prevent the spread of the insurgency.

>mfw the US tries to imitate this and ends up with the Strategic Hamlets

>In the best case scenario, restructuring peasant villages to create a defensible perimeter would require the forced relocation of some of the peasants on the outskirts of the existing villages. To ease the burden, those forced to move were supposed to be financially compensated, but they were not always paid by the GVN forces. To make matters worse, their old homes were often burned before their eyes.

>Each hamlet was given a radio with which to call for South Vietnamese army ARVN support, but in fact ARVN forces were unreliable in responding to calls for help, especially when attacks occurred after nightfall. The villagers were also given weapons and training, but were only expected to hold out until conventional reinforcements arrived. Once it became clear that ARVN could not be relied upon, many villagers proved unwilling to fight even small Vietcong detachments, which could then capture the villagers' weapons. "Why should we die for weapons?" asked one Vietnamese peasant.

This sort of shit is exactly why South Vietnam failed. People can say whatever the fuck they want about the hippies making the US lose, but when this is how South Vietnam operated there was no fucking hope of actually maintaining their legitimacy.

>"killing civilians totally wins you the war bro"
>Americans education

Oh, I forgot the best part.

>President Diem and his brother Nhu, who oversaw the program, decided -— contrary to Hilsman's and Thompson's theory—that in most cases they would relocate entire villages rather than simply restructuring them. This decision led to large-scale forced relocation that was deeply unpopular among the peasantry. The mostly-Buddhist peasantry practiced ancestor worship, an important part of their religion that was disrupted by being forced out of their villages and away from their ancestors' graves and their ancestral homes. Some who resisted resettlement were summarily executed by GVN forces

>resettle peasants so they don't support insurgents
>execute the ones who don't want to move

WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING

HOW DID THEY THINK THIS WOULD MAKE THEM LOOK LIKE A BETTER OPTION THAN THE VIET CONG

See, in many cases trends and forces, and complex interactions between different institutions decide history.

Sometimes you have have a guy with his head up his ass.

Ngo Dinh Diem was one of these people.

Just read his bio.

I mean, damn.

When you go so far you make SS commanders uncomfortable.

The fuck that this man was considered a good soldier really says something about the dehumanizing nature of total war.

>Some who resisted resettlement were summarily executed by GVN forces

Perfect plan

Funny thing is, this sounds pretty SoP for Counterinsurgency at the time. It worked in Kenya.

But that's not how they won in Malaya.

Because it was badass and evil as fuck.

We've never won a war where we didn't massacre the civilian population.

>"killing civilians totally wins you the war bro"

Sometimes it does.

Secret police of course
That or genocide

>The Germans didn't take food from the locals because of "muh bombed supply convoys" meme.

You are the meme lord here. The German army was dependent on the food that they confiscated from the country; the food was needed to supply the home front as well; if you actually read Backe's notes on the issue this would become clear to you. The goal was to take the food necessary to keep the war going; starvation of locals was a predicted side effect and NOT the reason behind it.

>and allowed women to work in factories.

They did, read a book for once. They're economy still needed foreign laborers from all of Europe, they didn't transport millions into the Reich for shits and giggles.

That wasn't indiscriminate, though. It's not like the Army Air Force just decided one day "You know what? I'm going to destroy a city because I'm bored."

Um? Actually yes it entirely was faggot?

Those were military targets, broseph.

>Hiroshima was the headquarters of the army charged with defending Japan
>also a major logistics hub for said army

Hiroshima was a valid military target. It was not comparable to a random village being slaughtered and being burned to the ground because there was an unrelated band of partisans operating 15 miles away.

Well I suppose I got told, I'll just go and forget the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives dead, but hey ho, the headquarters and logistics hub is gone.

That's how international law worked at the time though.

There were no proportionality requirements for force.

As long as a military target, any military target was harmed, it was legal.

This is why no German or Japanese forces were prosecuted for terror bombings, which were by comparison much less useful militarily.

Just admit you were dumb to try and compare the two. If you wanted to compare the atomic bombings to something, you should have picked any number of bombings the Germans did, not them raping and pillaging their way across the Ukraine and Belarus.

Sounds like a major logistics hub for said partisans.

The key thing here being that if you can access a target with ground forces, you can stop the civilians there from supporting the enemy without killing them.

This is incidentally why killing soldiers who are shooting at you is perfectly legal, but killing POWs isn't.

>The key thing here being that if you can access a target with ground forces, you can stop the civilians there from supporting the enemy without killing them.
This is why irregular warfare has never been successful.

You made this exact same thread last week and were BTFO in it

Kill yourself

It's almost never successful.

Really, it only matters when the opponents are wheelchair retarded, such as the DRA or GVN, and there's conventional support.

But yeah, you can totally take civilians out of the game without killing them.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Village

Like so, or with internment schemes.

Just like you can remove a surrendered enemy soldier from play by putting them in a camp rather than killing them.

>He ACTUALLY thinks "come and see" is an accurate representation of what went down

Dude you are BEYOND delusional. Seriously it's not even funny. Fuck off back to /r/leftypol where you belong and fucking stay there for good.

You probably believe (((Ellie Weasel)))'s """""testimonies""""" aswell.

Go suck on Ehrenburg's dick fucking faggot

In The Ukraine alone approximately 11 million Ukrainians were systematically murdered and/or deliberately starved to death under the Judeo-Bolshevik government in Moscow, which practically reduced the whole of The Ukraine to a gigantic death camp for the millions of souls who perished there. Others were transported to Magadan in Eastern Siberia where horrific medical experiments were carried out on Ukrainian children as young as 3 without anaesthesia, while others still were deported to various parts of the Soviet Union to be used as slave labour.

In some areas of German Liberated Ukraine where there was a security crisis with Jewish and Communist partisans carrying out terrorist actions in unsecured pockets, the German liberation forces were forced into deputizing local anti-Communist paramilitaries and armed police, to counter the Red terrorist insurgency. This inevitably led to wholesale reprisals against Jewish communities on the part of the armed native population which the Germans ultimately had very little control over.

There is no substantial evidence whatsoever that any large volume of Jewish non-combatants were deliberately killed at the hands of Germans alone on the Eastern Front, or indeed anywhere else during World War II.

The so-called “torch-men order” (Fackelmännerbefehl) is the command No. 0428, issued November 17th 1941 by Stalin. It declares that Russian partisans in German uniforms, particularly those of the Waffen-SS, were to destroy all settlements within a swathe of about 40- 60 km depth from the main battle lines and to ruthlessly kill the civilian population. With these tactics it was important to leave a few survivors, which would report the supposed German terror attacks. This method of warfare was also confirmed by German soldiers, who captured many Russian partisans wearing German uniforms.

>No tears, back to revleft now.jpg

There are people IN THIS FUCKING THREAD saying that "Come And See" is the correct way to fight an insurgency you fucking faggot.

You can't call it made up Judeo-Bolshivek propaganda and then say that's how you pacify a region you fucking moron.

Oh wow, just look at all those objective and not-obviously-biased sources for this.

I am 100% sure this actually happened and was not totally made up.

But it does. That's how the communists crushed resistance to Soviet rule in Eastern Europe after World War II.

And that's how they pacified Afghanistan too, right?

The Malay Emergency was a race war. All the communists were Chinese.

And how did they defeat the Chinese communists? By giving the Chinese minority equal rights and citizenship while increasing their quality of life, thereby cutting the reason for the communists to exist off at the knees.

The difference is that no one cared about Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic resistance after World War II, while the mujahideen had intellectuals and journalists sympathetic to them, and were funded by the United States.

The lesson here is that to win counter-insurgency you must first kill all intellectuals and journalists who sympathize with the insurgents. Otherwise any tactic you use will be considered "human rights abuse".

Even if you win the war in the battlefield, the maintenance of sympathetic intellectuals will ruin your victory in the long term. Colombia destroyed the FARC during the Uribe regime, they retreated into the mountains and were on the brink of collapse. But the Colombian left-wing intelligentsia still sympathized with their cause, so when another President took control, a President who yearned for the approval of polite society, the intellectual, media and artistic classes, he capitulated to the FARC and now these terrorists who were defeated by 2010 will run the country.

I like the way Algeria dealt with their Islamist rebels.

>use the secret police to infiltrate extremist organizations
>make them commit so many massacres that common people and international community start sympathizing with the government again
>crush everyone, but extremists as moderates with full support from the entire world

There is a theory that Assad did nothing against ISIS at first because he was aiming for that. Let ISIS destroy the other rebels, so he can present himself to the world as the sole alternative.

It's entirely possible that AIG was simply that crazy.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Italy in the 1970s which says the government did exactly that regarding communist rebels. Infiltrating student organizations and stimulating the creation of Maoist circles and terrorist groups like the "Red Brigades", in order to boost support for the mainstream centre-right parties.

Of course, this theory can just be Italian leftists saying they "dindu nuffin", and how all those left-wing terrorists they supported in the 1970s were just government infiltrators. It's never really clear with Italian politics.

Er, no it was through an absurd amount of airdropped munitions, artillery, foot patrols, and a a massive village resettlement program designed to cut insurgents off from their village supply lines. Standard COIN, really.

The Nazis wanted to clear out the East as a second land for Germans to work. No room for locals in that plan

Just FYI: the German Wikipedia confirms the Fackelmännerbefehl as the sort of scorched earth approach practiced by the red army as Moscow grew closer.
This plan would of course leave civilians physically unharmed.
The alleged false flag operations wearing SS uniforms however are debunked as groundless lies in the following sentences.

If Germany had won the war, what would have happened to him?

His behavior, though savage, able to be overlooked in a time of war. After the war was over, I think his usefulness would have expired and he would have been imprisoned.

I think Germany winning the war and the partisan activity ever ending are mutually exclusive.