Exorcising Hitler (8 page)

The name
Werwolf
for such a force seems to have been adopted in the autumn of 1944, exactly at whose behest remains unclear. The word itself may have been based on a nationalistically flavoured popular novel,
Der Wehrwolf
, by Hermann Löns. First published in 1910, after its author’s martyr-like death in the opening weeks of the First World War the book went on to sell almost a million copies. It recounted the romantically imagined exploits of a group of guerrillas operating during the Thirty Years War against foreign occupation forces in the rugged heathland around Lüneburg. This was a theme peculiarly well suited to the National Socialist era, during which it achieved enormous sales.

The changing of the spelling to
Werwolf
(the word
Wehr
with an ‘h’ means to protect or defend) may have arisen from some Nazi boss’s desire to add a lycanthropic chill, or simply been due to political expediency. An organisation called the ‘Wehrwolf League’ –
Bund Wehrwolf
– had competed with the fledgling Nazi Party for nationalist support in the 1920s, so the SS planners may have wanted to avoid stirring up old memories.

The official foundation on 25 September 1944 of the so-called
Volkssturm
militia, drawing on all German males between sixteen and sixty not yet serving in the regular Wehrmacht, was a crucial step by the regime in universalising and radicalising the war as it approached German soil. The Wehrmacht had been attempting to set up a kind of fallback militia for some time, but the regime’s political leadership had consistently refused to consider any such thing. Crucially, when the
Volkssturm
was actually founded – ominously late in the day – Hitler stipulated that the organisation of this militia was to be a Party, not a Wehrmacht matter, reporting to local Kreisleiters (District Leaders) and Gauleiters.

Military training was, of course, provided to these often hapless recruits, but the main emphasis was on morale, on tapping into the alleged fanaticism of the population. Certainly, by this point the
Werwolf
idea was circulating in high SS circles. In his speech of 18 October 1944 to the hurriedly formed East Prussian
Volkssturm
, a rambling oration broadcast on the radio, Reichsführer Himmler himself referred to the fact that the German people, having fought over every town, every village and farm, would proceed to fall upon the enemy’s rear ‘like werewolves’ should their land be conquered.

An announcement in Munich by the Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria, Paul Giesler, caught the drastic flavour of the Nazis’ appeal to the population:

We shall not succumb to the spell cast by the momentary material superiority of the enemy, but shall destroy all the enemy’s hopes through the long-desired escalation in our power provided by the German
Volkssturm
. In this we see the great, never to be repeated opportunity to transform our racial spirit into martial spirit, to defend the National Socialist people’s state with all fanaticism.
²

This kind of appeal – half deluded, fantastic ‘you-can-have-anything-if-you-want-it-enough’ motivational rant, half desperate call to arms – became more and more common during the final phase of the war as the Nazi state, frantically aware that it was both outgunned and outmanned, abandoned all but the barest shreds of distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. It thereby revealed its essentially nihilistic nature. The notion that such an ill-armed and ill-trained ragbag army of children and old men, thus inspired, could prove decisive against the enemies that Germany faced at this time was mad enough, but the
Werwolf
enterprise stumbled further still into the dark and treacherous forest of unreason on whose fringes the National Socialist movement had long dwelt.

If the
Volkssturm
project was hindered by the problematic nature of its human material and shortages of arms and equipment, then its
Werwolf
counterpart was even more deeply flawed. Although the idea had originated inside the offices of the RSHA, the proposed
Werwolf
structure was designed to bypass the normal military and SS chains of command. It was, instead, made directly subordinate to Himmler via the regional police commands organised in the form of HSSPF (
Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer
= Higher SS and police leaders). A classic example of the almost anarchically decentralised power structure of Nazi Germany, the HSSPF was an extra network that the Reichsführer had established deliberately in order to bypass the burgeoning, often chaotic SS bureaucracy centred in Berlin, and which he used to progress personal ‘special projects’.

Himmler’s linkman, named in September 1944 as ‘General Inspector of Special Resistance’, went by the name of SS General Hans-Adolf Prützmann. At forty-three, the East Prussian-born Prützmann was an experienced SS bureaucrat and a veteran commander of killing squads on the Eastern Front. There he had been deeply and ruthlessly involved in the liquidation of the Jews, in terroristic anti-partisan actions and the ‘scorched earth’ policy that accompanied the German retreat. He rapidly put together a staff of around two hundred. His entourage included an SS colonel by the name of Karl Tschiersky, who earlier in the Russian campaign had been responsible for Operation Zeppelin, an attempt to infiltrate anti-communist guerrillas behind Soviet lines. The General also assembled propaganda and partisan warfare experts and a certain Frau Maisch, who would recruit female operatives. Prützmann boasted that his efforts would cause ‘a rapid improvement in Germany’s military situation’.

On the positive side, therefore, the
Werwolf
organisation was effectively run by an expert in the very guerrilla warfare techniques with which it would need to operate. On the negative, the fact that it was deliberately intended to be independent of Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s SS empire meant that, despite the desperate situation of the Reich, Kaltenbrunner and his intelligence chief, Walter Schellenberg, did everything they could to block the notoriously ambitious Prützmann’s path.
³

Moreover, like so many leading Nazi bureaucrats, especially towards the end of the war, Prützmann found himself with an almost absurd number of multiple responsibilities – including reinstatement as active head of the HSSPF in his native East Prussia, and from December 1944 an assignment as Himmler’s military plenipotentiary in the embattled Nazi satellite state of Croatia.

So, despite Himmler’s support and Goebbels’ excitement,
Werwolf
began as – and, for all the sound and fury, remained something of – an orphan. Each region had its Commander of Special Resistance, selected from among the local
Polizeiführer
. Appointees from the Hitler Youth and the Brownshirts (SA) would provide liaison functions and – theoretically, at least – ensure a flow of recruits for training. In the event, however, this organisation remained skeletal. The big reserves of money, power and equipment remained with the conventional SS bureaucracy.

All-powerful as Himmler might appear to be, the new
Werwolf
organisation, operating apart from this all-embracing network, could only really be kicked into life in response to specific ‘special orders’ from the Reichsführer. It lacked a self-sustaining apparatus that could assert itself in the relentless and brutal contest for material and political clout within the sprawling power structure of the late-Nazi state.

Nevertheless, the Inspector General managed to set up a substantial headquarters just outside Berlin, before moving to even grander surroundings at the moated Schloss Rheinsberg, 100 kilometres to the north-west of the capital. This was where Frederick the Great had lived while still Crown Prince of Prussia in the 1730s. Prützmann even commandeered an official private train to take him on tours of his nascent resistance empire.

On both the western and eastern borders of the shrinking Reich, arms and food supply dumps were created. To the west, in the as yet unoccupied area beyond Aachen, up to thirty bunkers were built by construction teams co-opted from the Ruhr mining industry. In these the
Werwolf
teams were to sit out the Allied military tide and, if and when it had washed over them, emerge and begin their work of mischief.

And what exactly would this work be? As planned in the latter part of 1944, it would involve harassment of the enemy’s supply lines and rear, so as to disrupt his operations and to draw vital combat troops away from the front line. In this way, the
Werwolf
would lighten the burden of the conventional German forces defending the fatherland. Small teams of between six and ten guerrillas would form a disciplined and skilled, not to say fanatical, hardcore around which others, whether patriotic civilians or Wehrmacht troops who had managed to evade capture, could coalesce. The kits with which these teams would be provided were to include small arms, grenades and mines, crude bazooka-like
Panzerfäuste
(anti-tank weapons) and various plastic explosives suitable for sabotage operations against bridges, railway lines and parked enemy vehicles.

At this stage, what
Werwolf
seemed not (yet) to be was some kind of post-defeat resistance movement along the lines of the Polish Home Army or the French
Maquis
. Rather, like the
Volkssturm
, it would be part of the glorious, historic
levée en masse
of the German people that would supposedly drive back the enemy. Combined with Hitler’s promised wonder weapons and the inevitable (to the Nazis) split between the capitalist Western Allies and their communist Soviet counterparts, such a nationwide uprising would bring for Germany the victorious peace that the Führer still promised his supporters even at this perilously late hour.

The first
Werwolf
unit to undertake clandestine activities against the enemy was not typical. It consisted not of civilians or brainwashed Hitler Youth but of nine regular troops chosen from the ‘Hermann Goering’ Division, whose duties included guarding the Reich Marshal’s hunting preserves at Rominten, East Prussia, now close to the ever-encroaching Eastern Front. Their targets were, in fact, the spearhead units of the Soviet Army that managed to penetrate the Reich in October 1944. Nemmersdorf, where the first major massacre of German civilians occurred, lay around twenty-five kilometres to the north-east.

The unit, led by a Sergeant Bioksdorf, was supplied with explosives, radios and carrier pigeons. Under orders to report on Soviet movements and recruit any Wehrmacht stragglers and willing civilians to the struggle behind the lines, the small band slipped into Russian-held territory in early November. Its operatives transmitted ten messages and failed to blow up two bridges before being captured by the Soviets.

South of this area, in Silesia, the rich industrial province that bordered on Poland and the Czech lands,
Werwolf
bunkers and supply dumps were also built up. In the new year this would prove to be one of the movement’s most active theatres of operations. In the west, although some kind of clandestine infrastructure was also coming into being, during the winter there was little actual activity. Perhaps this was because of the massive conventional military confrontation that took place in the Ardennes over the period between mid-December and mid-January (or February, when the Allies actually successfully regained all the territory they had lost). There was, however, a lot of talk on both fronts about the resistance effort that the Allies would encounter as they inevitably advanced.

Although the practical military consequences of Prützmann’s plans might turn out, in the scheme of things, to be minimal, their psychological effect on the occupiers was not. In fact, fears of fanatical Nazis lurking round every corner and behind every dark thicket of pines, ready to launch treacherous attacks on ‘our boys’, were widespread. They would seriously affect Allied attitudes and, consequently, plans for the occupation of the Reich.

At around the time when the first
Volkssturm
units were going into action and the first guerrilla infiltrations were in preparation, in London
The Times
noted Himmler’s announcement that the German people would fall upon the invaders’ rear ‘like werewolves’.
The
Times
noted dryly and, in its internationally assumed role as mouthpiece of the British establishment, a little menacingly:

A werewolf is a human being who transforms himself temporarily into a wolf. There is no Hague Convention for the protection of werewolves.
⁴

There was sense in this. Prussia-Germany’s retaliation against those who resisted its armies’ occupations, be it the French
francs-tireurs
of 1870–71 or the recalcitrant Franco-Belgian population during the First World War, had traditionally been harsh. The same went for the Wehrmacht’s dealings with the resistance movements in Western Europe, Poland and the Balkans, and especially after June 1941 the large-scale partisan activity behind the German lines in the Soviet Union. Hitler’s notorious 1942 ‘Commando Order’ had mandated the execution of enemy combatants operating in German-occupied Europe or behind German lines, even if uniformed, in direct contravention of Germany’s continuing obligations under the 1929 Geneva Convention.