During the Weimar Republic, he joined the Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, the precursor to the National Socialist German Workers Party, and the paramilitary group Freikorps of Franz Ritter von Epp in 1919.

Outnumbered by Norwegian, British, French and Polish forces, his skilful defence utilized ammunition, food and sailors (re-drafted as infantrymen) from the sunken ships.

[4] Historian Klaus Schmider remarks that Dietl had too much political baggage to compensate for his admirable record as a mountain troops leader.

What has led the Bundeswehr and the German federal government to reverse honours towards Dietl, though, is his recently discovered view on marriages between Scandinavian women and his soldiers, which was "extreme even by the standards of the Third Reich": after Dietl circulated an order that called Norwegian and Finnish women "racial flotsam", Himmler himself had to intervene to rescind it.

The so-called probation program included the walk from Rovaniemi to Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean, in which tired penal soldiers were killed with shots in the neck.

From the summer of 1942 onwards, there were arbitrary shootings and sadistic abuse of German penal soldiers by Wehrmacht guards in Finland and northern Norway.