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Werwolf (, German for "werewolf") was a Nazi plan which began development in 1944,Mazower, Mark (2008) Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe Penguin Press HC. p. 546, to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Nazi Germany in parallel with the Wehrmacht fighting in front of the lines. There is some argument that the plan, and subsequent reports of guerrilla activities, were created by Joseph Goebbels through propaganda disseminated in the waning weeks of the war through his "Radio Werwolf", something that was not connected in any way with the military unit.
In 1942, Adolf Hitler named the OKW and OKH field headquarters, at Vinnytsia in Ukraine, "Werwolf", and Hitler on a number of occasions had used "Wolf" as a pseudonym for himself. The etymology of the name "Adolf" itself carries connotations of noble ( adal; Modern German Adel) wolf, while Hitler referred to his first World War II Eastern Front military headquarters as Wolfsschanze, commonly rendered in English as "Wolf's Lair" (literally "Wolf's Sconce").
Prützmann was named Generalinspekteur für Spezialabwehr (General Inspector of Special Defence) and assigned the task of setting up the force's headquarters in Berlin and organising and instructing the force. Prützmann had studied the guerrilla tactics used by Soviet partisans while he was stationed in the occupied territories of Ukraine, and the idea was to teach these tactics to the members of Operation Werwolf.
According to German officers who were interrogated after the war, those who were familiar with Prützmann's central office said that it was, like its commanding officer, inefficient, weak, and uninspired, and that Prützmann himself was, in addition, "vain, idle and boastful". Walter Schellenberg, Heinrich Himmler's head of foreign intelligence, claimed to have told Himmler that the whole operation was "criminal and stupid".
The 27 January 1945 issue of Collier's Weekly featured a detailed article by Major Edwin Lessner, stating that elite SS and Hitler Youth were being trained to attack Allied forces and opening with a 1944 quote from Joseph Goebbels:
On 23 March 1945 Goebbels gave a speech known as the "Werwolf speech", in which he urged every German to fight to the death. The partial dismantling of the organised Werwolf, combined with the effects of the Werwolf speech, caused considerable confusion about which subsequent attacks were carried out by Werwolf members, as opposed to solo acts by fanatical Nazis or small groups of SS.
The Werwolf propaganda station " Radio Werwolf" broadcast from Nauen near Berlin, beginning on 1 April 1945. Broadcasts began with the sound of a wolf howling, and a song featuring the lyrics, "My werewolf teeth bite the enemy / And then he's done and then he's gone / Hoo, hoo hoo.""Hoo, Hoo, Hoo,' Lily the Werewolf Sings on Radio," The Washington Post, 6 April 1945; p. 1. The initial broadcast stated that the Nazi Party was ordering every German to "stand his ground and do or die against the Allied armies, who are preparing to enslave Germans.""Nazi Underground in Action, Foe Says: German Radio Asserts It Is Fighting in Occupied Areas, Issues 'Do or Die Order,'" The New York Times, 2 April 1945; p. 7. Every Bolshevik, every Englishman, every American on our soil must be a target for our movement ... Any German, whatever his profession or class, who puts himself at the service of the enemy and collaborates with him will feel the effect of our avenging hand ... A single motto remains for us: 'Conquer or die.' "
Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing not long after the end of the war, asserts that Radio Werwolf had no actual connection to the Werwolf military unit, and was instead organized and run by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, possibly in the hope of seizing control of the unit, which Goebbels deemed to be not radical enough. Trevor-Roper assesses Goebbels' Radio Werwolf as propagating "an ideological nihilism" which was not consonant with the limited aims of the actual unit. This disconnect between the broadcasts of Radio Werwolf and the purpose and actions of the military unit is, according to Trevor-Roper, the reason for popular misconceptions about the actual purpose of the unit, which was to attack the Allies from behind their lines, in parallel with the Germany Army fighting the Allies from the front, not to be a guerrilla-style resistance unit once Germany was defeated.Trevor-Roper Hugh (1995) 1947 The Last Days of Hitler (Seventh Edition) London: Pan Books. pp. 40–42
British and American newspapers widely reported the text of Radio Werwolf broadcasts, fueling rumors among occupation forces."Werewolves' Nuisance Value May Be Great," The Washington Post, 10 April 1945; p. 2. Armed Forces Radio claimed:
According to Belgian Resistance operatives, the Werwolf name held clout in the general population in Northern Austria. Using an alleged link with the group as cover they were able to reroute a train of "refugees" (Belgian and French Nazi collaborators running away from justice) from Innsbruck back to Switzerland and then Brussels.Lens Claire, "La guerre au pays des frontières", unedited
Werwolf originally had about five thousand members recruited from the Schutzstaffel and the Hitler Youth. These recruits were specially trained in guerrilla tactics. Operation Werwolf went so far as to establish front companies to ensure continued fighting in those areas of Germany that were occupied (all of the "front companies" were discovered and shut down within eight months). However, as it became clear that the reputedly impregnable Alpine Fortress, from which operations were to be directed by the Nazi leadership if the rest of Germany was occupied, was yet another delusion, Werwolf was converted into a terrorist organisation in the last few weeks of the war.
Attempts were made to bury explosives, ammunition and weapons around the country (mainly in the pre-1939 German–Polish border region) to be used by Werwolf in resistance fighting after the defeat of Germany, but not only were the quantities of material to be buried very low, by that point the movement itself was so disorganised that few actual members or leaders knew where the materials were. A large portion of these "depots" were found by the Soviets, and little of the material was actually used by Werwolf.
In the early months of 1945, SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny was involved in training recruits for the Werwolfs, but he soon discovered that the number of Werwolf cells had been greatly exaggerated and that they would be ineffective as a fighting force. Knowing, like many other Nazi leaders, that the war was lost, he decided that the Werwolfs would instead be used as part of a Nazi "underground railroad," facilitating travel along escape routes called "ratlines" that allowed thousands of SS officers and other Nazis to flee Germany after the fall of the Third Reich.
The following day a CIC unit led by Captain Oscar M. Grimes of the 97th Infantry Division captured about two hundred Gestapo officers and men in hiding near Hof, Bavaria. They were in possession of American army uniforms and equipment but had decided to surrender.Kurt Frank Korf, quoted in Patricia Kollander, I Must be a Part of this War: A German American's Fight against Hitler and Nazism, Fordham University Press, 2005; ; p. 109. "Bemedaled Ex-Nazi Youth Home from Europe Wars," The Salt Lake Tribune, 16 July 1945, p. 6.
In May 1945 CIC Major John Schwartzwalder arrested members of a Werwolf cell in Bremen whose leader had fled. Schwartzwalder believed that the Werwolf never constituted a threat to Allied personnel:
German historian Golo Mann, in his The History of Germany Since 1789 (1984) stated:
Historian Richard Bessel concurs that "'Werewolf' resistance to Allied occupation never really materialized," noting one exception in the form of the assassination of the American-installed mayor of Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff, on 28 March 1945, probably the most successful Werwolf operation. He highlights that the threat was nonetheless taken seriously by the Allies and that fear of the Werwolf among the Americans may have had hysterical characteristics, pointing to the "Intelligence Information Bulletins" issued by the American 6th Army Group which anticipated a guerrilla war and warned American soldiers of concealed explosives and hidden strongholds. Similarly, he observes that the NKVD appear to have believed that such an organization existed and posed a real threat to the Soviet occupation forces,See report of 22 June 1945 by the head of the NKVD in Germany, Serov, to L.J. Beria concerning Werewolf activity, printed in: with the Soviets using unfounded suspicions of Werwolf activity as a pretext to tighten police control and secure forced labor.
Perry Biddiscombe has offered a somewhat different view. In his books Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946 (1998) and The Last Nazis: SS Werwolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe, 1944–1947 (2000), Biddiscombe asserts that after retreating to the Black Forest and the Harz mountains, the Werwolf continued resisting the occupation until at least 1947, possibly until 1949–50. However, he characterizes German post-surrender resistance as "minor", and calls the post-war Werwolfs "desperadoes" and "fanatics living in forest huts". He further cites U.S. Army intelligence reports that characterized Nazi partisans as "nomad bands" and judged them as less serious threats than attacks by foreign slave laborers and considered their sabotage and subversive activities to be insignificant. He also notes that: "The Americans and British concluded, even in the summer of 1945, that, as a nationwide network, the original Werwolf was irrevocably destroyed, and that it no longer posed a threat to the occupation."
Biddiscombe also says that Werwolf violence failed to mobilize a spirit of popular national resistance, that the group was poorly led, poorly armed, and poorly organized, and that it was doomed to failure given the war-weariness of the populace and the hesitancy of young Germans to sacrifice themselves on the funeral pyre of the former Nazi regime. He concludes that the only significant achievement of the Werwolfs was to spark distrust of the German populace in the Allies as they occupied Germany, which caused them in some cases to act more repressively than they might have done otherwise, which in turn fostered resentments that helped to enable far right ideas to survive in Germany, at least in pockets, into the post-war era.
Nevertheless, says Biddiscombe, "The Werewolves were no bit players";Biddiscombe, The Last Nazis, p. 8. they caused tens of millions of dollars of property damage at a time when the European economies were in an already desperate state, and were responsible for the killing of thousands of people.
The German resistance movement was successfully suppressed in 1945. However, collective punishment for acts of resistance, such as fines and curfews, was still being imposed as late as 1948. Biddiscombe estimates the total death toll as a direct result of Werewolf actions and the resulting reprisals as 3,000–5,000.
The report, though referring to incidents where Soviet units came under fire from the woods, asserts that most of the arrested had not been involved in any action against the Soviets, which Serov explained with interrogation results allegedly showing that the boys had been "waiting" for the right moment and in the meantime focused on attracting new members. In October 1945, Beria reported to Joseph Stalin the "liquidation" of 359 alleged Werwolf groups. Of those, 92 groups with 1,192 members were "liquidated" in Saxony alone. On 5 August 1946, Soviet minister for internal affairs Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov reported that in the Soviet occupation zone, 332 "terrorist diversion groups and underground organizations" had been disclosed and "liquidated". A total of about 10,000 youths were interned in NKVD special camps, half of whom did not return. Parents as well as the East German administration and political parties, installed by the Soviets, were denied any information on the whereabouts of the arrested youths. The Red Army's torching of Demmin, which resulted in the suicide of hundreds of people, was blamed on alleged preceding Werwolf activities by the East German regime.
Eisenhower had previously also requested that the occupation directive JCS 1067 not make him responsible for maintaining living conditions in Germany under the expected circumstances; "... probably guerrilla fighting and possibly even civil war in certain districts ... If conditions in Germany turn out as described, it will be utterly impossible effectively to control or save the economic structure of the country ... and we feel we should not assume the responsibility for its support and control." The British were "mortified by such a suggestion", but the War Department took considerable account of Eisenhower's wishes. In addition, civilians held by the U.S. climbed from 1,000 in late March to 30,000 in late June, and more than 100,000 by the end of 1945. Conditions were often poor in the camps for civilians.
Prior to the occupation SHAEF investigated the reprisal techniques the Germans had used in order to maintain control over occupied territories since they felt the Germans had had good success. Directives were loosely defined and implementation of reprisal was largely left to the preferences of the various armies, with the British seeming uncomfortable with those involving bloodshed. Rear-Admiral H.T. Baillie Grohman for example stated that killing hostages was "not in accordance with our usual methods". Thanks to feelings such as this, and relative light guerrilla activity in their area, relatively few reprisals took place in the UK zone of operations.
A raid in March 1946 captured 80 former German officers who were members, and who possessed a list of 400 persons to be liquidated, including Wilhelm Hoegner, the prime minister of Bavaria. Further members of the group were seized with caches of ammunition and even anti-tank rockets. In late 1946 reports of activities gradually died away.
Former Clinton-era National Security Council staffer Daniel Benjamin published a riposte in Slate magazine on 29 August 2003, entitled "Condi's Phony History: Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq" in which he took Rice and Rumsfeld to task for mentioning Werwolf, writing that the reality of postwar Germany bore no resemblance to the occupation of Iraq, and made reference to Antony Beevor's and the US Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944–1946, where the Werwolf were only mentioned twice in passing. This did not prevent his political opponents from disagreeing with him, using Biddiscombe's book as a source.
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Further reading
American reprisals
Eisenhower believed he would be faced with extensive guerrilla warfare, based on the Alpine Redoubt. The fear of Werwolf activity believed to be mustering around Berchtesgaden in the Alps also led to the switch in U.S. operational targets in the middle of March 1945 away from the drive towards Berlin and instead shifted the thrust towards the south and on linking up with the Russians first. An intelligence report stated "We should ... be prepared to undertake operations in Southern Germany in order to overcome rapidly any organised resistance by the Wehrmacht or by guerrilla movements which may have retreated to the inner zone and to this redoubt". On 31 March Eisenhower told Roosevelt, "I am hopeful of launching operations that should partially prevent a guerrilla control of any large area such as the southern mountain bastions".
British reprisals
In April 1945 Churchill announced that the Allies would incarcerate all captured German officers for as long as a guerrilla threat existed. Hundreds of thousands of German last-ditch troops were kept in the makeshift Rheinwiesenlager for months, "mainly to prevent Werwolf activity".
Similar organizations
In Germany
From 1946 onward, Allied intelligence officials noted resistance activities by an organisation which had appropriated the name of the anti-Nazi resistance group, the Edelweiss Piraten (Edelweiss Pirates). The group was reported to be composed mainly of former members and officers of Hitler Youth units, ex-soldiers and drifters, and was described by an intelligence report as "a sentimental, adventurous, and romantically anti-social movement". It was regarded as a more serious menace to order than the Werwolf by US officials.
In Denmark
In 2015, Danish police uncovered files in their archives outlining the Danish part of Operation Werwolf under the command of Horst Paul Issel. Issel was arrested in Germany in 1949 and handed over to Denmark. Varulvene – et uhyggeligt netværk under Anden Verdenskrig A total of 130 stashes of weapons and explosives were placed around Denmark and personnel were inserted into strategically important parts of society.
In Yugoslavia
The remains of some military organizations which collaborated with Axis forces continued with
raid activities like Crusaders (guerrilla) (until 1950),
Balli Kombëtar (until 1950).
Comparison to Second Iraq War
The Iraqi insurgency was initially compared to the history of Werwolf by the Bush Administration and other Iraq War supporters. In speeches given on 25 August 2003 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld parallels were drawn between the resistance faced by the Multi-National Force – Iraq's occupation forces in Iraq to that encountered by occupation forces in post-World War II Germany, asserting that the Iraqi insurgency would ultimately prove to be as futile in realizing its objectives as had the Werwolfs.
In popular culture
“Europa” – Lars von Trier (1991), filmsufi.com
See also
External links
Categories: Aftermath Of World War Ii In Germany, Military History Of Germany During World War Ii, Stay-behind Organizations, Resistance Against The Allied Powers, Military Units And Formations Established In 1944, Anti-communist Guerrilla Organizations, Anti-communist Resistance Movements In Eastern Europe, Fascist Militant Groups, Neo-fascist Terrorism, Nazi Party Paramilitary Organisations, Neo-nazi Organisations In Germany, Paramilitary Organisations Based In Germany, Insurgent Groups In Europe, Insurgencies In Europe
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