Looters & Rapists of Ochota: The Kaminski Brigade or SS-RONA
- balvarez1812
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
When people speak of Warsaw’s agony in 1944, they often recall the heroism of the Polish resistance, and they talk about how the city was destroyed. But few talk about HOW it was destroyed. Most guides mention Old Town, Śródmieście, and the soldiers of the Home Army. I talk of Dirlewanger Men in Wola and Kaminski’s RONA men in Ochota, some other guides mention mass executions in Wola but no one talks about Ochota, a district not executed by firing squads but by drunken looters and rapists who turned every home, hospital, and courtyard into their own hell.
As the swine of the Dirlewanger brigade are turning Wola into their own hell for the Polish civilians. Another SS group was using its own form of terror in the upscale Ochota district of Warsaw. The Kaminski Brigade or the SS-RONA had also perfected their anti-partisan skills in Belorussia under Bach-Zelewski alongside and just like Dirlewanger and his men, however they were quite different from the Dirlewanger men. They were not German but Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian.
Who Were They
The SS-RONA (Russian National Liberation Army) a large force of foreign SS men from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine who were led by Bronislav Kaminski who was an anti-communist collaborator and other men who “believed in a national socialist Russia” they did not have such aims they just hated Stalin and wanted anyone but him. They were a force of 2,000 strong soldiers. Mostly used in anti-partisan warfare just like Dirlewanger and never fought in major cities or have seen modern cities. On August 4th Kaminski and the RONA men were just outside Warsaw and had orders from 9th Army to go into Ochota and fight through the Poniatowski Bridge and with their numbers and brutality and experience in anti-partisan warfare they believed these men will get there much sooner than the rest, however they did no such thing….
Arrival of RONA
RONA men arrived in Warsaw already drunk, already broken veterans not of battle but of butchery. When the first RONA trucks rolled into Ochota on August 4th, they brought no order, no plan, only fire, vodka, and thought they were being “awarded” Warsaw’s wealthy district for their great work in Belarus. The people of Ochota thought they looked silly different color uniforms of different sizes and hats of postmen and didn’t match unlike traditional SS and Wehrmacht soldiers who were orderly, weapons hung from strings of rope not leather, they all had looted items on them like clothing and lots of looted watches on their wrists. The thought of them being “circus characters” as a resident said, wore off quick…
In Ochota, women were dragged from cellars, raped, and shot. Children were thrown from balconies. Hospitals burned with patients still in their beds. And as the smoke rose over the Radium Institute, the soldiers drank, laughed, and dragged furniture into the street to trade for bottles of alcohol. On Grojecka 104 a RONA man took a Polish man and shot him in the back of the head with a revolver for no reason at all. The Grojecka buildings were swarmed with dozens of RONA men looting and looking for alcohol. They herd 160 boys and men into a cellar and shot them all in the back of the head and then threw in grenades. This was repeated in other buildings then they would set it on fire. They shot boys, men, people hiding, elderly women, and marched families towards their makeshift camp. In the first wave of attacks almost all the young men had been executed immediately.
The following is an excerpt from the book Warsaw 1944 by Alexandra Richie;
“The killing was often carried in a particularly sadistic fashion: Jadwiga Freistadt was being marched down the street when she watched, horrified, as a RONA soldier took a young woman and her baby from the crowd. ‘He held the baby's legs and smashed the body on the wall’”.
Radium Institute
The morning of August 5th the famous hospital the Radium Institute of Marie Curie was attacked, around a 100 RONA soldiers approached from Ulica Wawelska. The men rushed into the hospital yelling at terrified patients shooting at random.
“First the RONA men raided the pharmacy and drank all the rubbing alcohol when that ran out they got into the ether. By now raging drunk they went from room to room, looting and stealing valuables from terrified victims. Then they started raping staff and patients; many were bedridden women suffering from terminal cancer but that made no difference. Another group, mostly staff, were driven into the hospital garden and forced to march to Zieleniak camp in Grojecka Street, many of the women were taken away at night and raped. 90 patients and staff were trapped in the hospital building. RONA soldiers guarded the complex and shot at anyone trying to leave. They returned to rape all of the women patients on the ground floor; the victims were then shot and their mattresses covered in petrol and set alight. Three women, X-Ray assistant, a nurse, and a patient, managed to slip out of the building, two were caught, taunted, repeatedly raped and then murdered. Their blood soaked bodies were dumped in the garden. The Kaminski men then set the hospital on fire but didn’t go down, the 60 or so surviving patients and staff tried to shield themselves from the smoke and heat. Over the following days the RONA men came took younger women away; again they would be raped and then killed in the garden. At other times they would try again to set the building on fire. They were always drunk.
The events of the Radium Institute confirmed that all around 170 patients and staff were murdered, the women often after having been raped, and the hospital was finally burned.”
Those who lived nearby could hear the screams and sometimes see what was going on and it would only get worse as only a couple days have passed…I can’t possibly imagine how such these happened and how humans could act in such a way.
According to historical sources and as described in Warsaw 1944 the crimes committed by RONA in Ochota were systematic, widespread, and brutal. The period of atrocity in Ochota lasted roughly 4-25 August 1944. After looting raids men would often come back with at least 20 watches on their wrists as they were in the wealthy district they ditched less valuable items like toys, clothes, plumbing and kitchen utensils.
Zieleniak
Zieleniak was land once used as Warsaw’s biggest farmer’s market but turned into RONA’s makeshift transit/rape/prison camp. It reeked of death and decay. For days, thousands of civilians were trapped there dying of thirst, beaten for amusement, the screams of girls and women being raped echoing across the war torn streets. By the end of August 5th over 8,000 people were crammed in and the number would grow to 20,000 in the coming days. The Germans were wary of the RONA soldiers,
“They were always drunk, they were dirty and had watches from their wrists to their elbows and their quest for alcohol was ceaseless”
Civilians would often give them vodka in exchange to live and agreed. The German SS and Wehrmacht were so disgusted by the RONA men that they executed Kaminski on August 28th along with his top officers. Dirlewanger was just as bad and did similar acts but they were faster and more “efficient” than RONA going through Wola.
Silence of Ochota
Since I first learned the reality of the Warsaw Uprising in late 2024, I’ve been haunted…. I visited Warsaw in June 2025 for 1 week stood in the places in Wola where things were done and this September of 2025 I visited Warsaw for 3 weeks standing again in Wola and other parts of the city and by this time I am so in depth knowledge wise and emotional trauma wise when it comes to the brutality Warsaw and Belarus saw, this time I made it to Ochota, finally standing where the Kaminski RONA men were….I couldn’t speak. I felt like Florya in Come and See lifeless, hollow. My stomach turned. My eyes lost focus. The quiet was unbearable, I sat on the grass next to the rebuilt Radium Institute listening to Mozart’s Requiem Lacrimosa… there's only a few plaques dedicated to people who died in Ochota but nothing of great detail makes sense because the reality was so brutal you can’t show it, but I am. Quiet warm overcast day, people in the park, couples walking dogs, normal Thursday at 3:00PM….I could barely think, the emotions of being here were wild, the silencing was hurting me crying but no tears of weeping just mental, then walking past the grocery store “Zieleniak” I felt weightless, sick, eyes, distant, dead feeling in my face…..why…..images of what it could’ve looked like impossible to imagine, barn scene from Come & See and scenes from Warsaw 44 come into my head, this city deserves more than what the tourism office and popular tour guides tell tourists. I do not look at Warsaw the same as other people I would say all others. I repeat the names daily. I am obsessed with this history. “Belarus, Khatyn, Volyhnia, Galicia, Warsaw, Wola, Ochota, Dirlewanger, Kaminski, RONA.” …my belief in God shatters when I think of this…Why…
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