The Allied Occupation of Germany, Post-WWII
Some notes on the fighting and attacks that occurred in Germany through 1947.
| Minutemen of the Third Reich.(history of the Nazi Werewolf guerilla movement) | The Werewolves specialised in ambushes and sniping, and took the lives of many Allied and Soviet soldiers and officers — perhaps even that of the first Soviet commandant of Berlin, General N.E. Berzarin, who was rumoured to have been waylaid in Charlottenburg during an incident in June 1945. Buildings housing Allied and Soviet staffs were favourite targets for Werewolf bombings; an explosion in the Bremen police headquarters, also in June 1945, killed five Americans and thirty-nine Germans. Techniques for harassing the occupiers were given widespread publicity through Werewolf leaflets and radio propaganda, and long after May 1945 the sabotage methods promoted by the Werewolves were still being used against the occupying powers.
Although the Werewolves originally limited themselves to guerrilla warfare with the invading armies, they soon began to undertake scorched-earth measures and vigilante actions against German `collaborators’ or `defeatists’. They damaged Germany’s economic infrastructure, already battered by Allied bombing and ground fighting, and tried to prevent anything of value from falling into enemy hands. Attempts to blow up factories, power plants or waterworks occasionally provoked melees between Werewolves and desperate German workers trying to save the physical basis of their employment, particularly in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia. |
| Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946 by Perry Biddiscombe University of Toronto Press, 1998 455 Pages, US$ 39.95 ISBN: 0-8020-0862-3 |
What did the Werwolf do? They sniped. They mined roads. They poured sand into the gas tanks of jeeps. (Sugar was in short supply, no doubt.) They were especially feared for the “decapitation wires” they strung across roads. They poisoned food stocks and liquor. (The Russians had the biggest problem with this.) They committed arson, though perhaps less than they are credited with: every unexplained fire or explosion associated with a military installation tended to be blamed on the Werwolf. These activities slackened off within a few months of the capitulation on May 7, though incidents were reported as late as 1947.
The problem with assessing the extent of Werwolf activity is that not only official Werwolf personnel committed partisan acts. Much of the regular German fighting forces disarticulated into isolated units that sometimes kept fighting, even after the high command surrendered.. In the east, units that had been bypassed by the Red Army tried to fight their way west, so they could surrender to the Anglo-Americans. In the west, the final “strategy” of the high command was to stop even trying to halt the Allied armored penetrations of Germany, but to hit these units from behind and cut off their supplies. Perhaps the most harrowing accounts in the book are those relating to the expulsion of the ethnic German populations from the Sudetenland and the areas annexed by Poland. The latter theater in particular seems to have been the only point in the European war in which a civilian population was keen about a “scorched earth” strategy. |
| WERWOLF IN WEST | The activities of Werewolf in the areas of the British Army in Germany were limited to isolated incidents, but one of these killed Major John Poston, who had been with Field Marshal Montgomery in the desert, in Sicily and in northwest Europe. As one of the Field Marshal’s Liaison Officers, it was Poston’s practice to drive about collecting for the British Commander those small items of military Intelligence upon which the leader planned his battles.
In the last weeks of the war, Poston, driving along a quiet country road back to Montgomery’s headquarters from a liaison mission, was attacked by a group of Hitler Youth Werewolves. Their bursts of bullets struck his jeep, which then skidded off the road. Although wounded in the first volleys, the British Officer returned fire with his pistol until he was hit again by a long burst of machine pistol bullets and was killed. There were many clashes between the young partisans and men of British armoured divisions. The other western ally, the United States, met more opposition from the Werewolf bands. On 24th March, 1945, the Lord Mayor of Aachen was assassinated by Werewolf agents. He was not the only US appointed official to die at the hands of the partisans, but he was the most important, and the broadcast announcing his death on 1st April gave Reich Minister Goebbels the opportunity to gloat that the arm of the National Socialist Party was long and that its agents, the Werewolf, were vigilant, ruthless killers. |
| 100th Infantry Division | First, all Division cantonments, command posts, and other positions had to be secured. There were also about 280 former enemy installations in the Division’s zone, from barracks to supply dumps to power stations, that had to be guarded. In addition to the dangers of looting and other crime, there was the threat of the “Werwolf,” a German resistance network that was supposed to conduct terrorist operations against the occupying Americans, even after the capitulation. Conceived and nominally coordinated by the SS, this movement was to have begun as early as late 1944, when the first sizable sections of German territory were seized by Allied units in the west. In reality, the German nation was so thoroughly defeated, and the vast majority of German civilians so destitute, that very little came of this brainchild of Heinrich Himmler. Nevertheless, like the threat of the Alpine Redoubt — another Nazi pipe dream that very deeply concerned the Allied high command at the end of the war in Europe — measures had to be taken to prevent the realization of this continued belligerence. About 3,000 Centurymen were committed ’round the clock to the tasks of patrolling and guarding these sites. |
Thanks to Alan for additional info posted at The Command Post
Often forgotten are the Baathist Party ties to Nazi Germany. The tactics described in these quotes and the articles that they come from could be describing the Sunni heartland of Iraq today. And, please, please, don’t forget that the reporting is biased. Reporters are not going to the 3/4 of Iraq where there are no attacks. It would be too far from the air conditioned hotel.
The news that we are forming more Iraqi police and paramilitary units is also just like we did it in Germany. Patience, people, just have patience.
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