The REAL Werewolves of the SS

I was watching True Blood the other day (night, I mean night, I was watching it legally I swear) and they made a reference to werewolves, but not just any werewolves, Nazi werewolves. Then I thought about all of the other pop culture references of werewolves and Nazis: The comic book Fables had a issue where Bigby Wolf (A werewolf like character) fight some Nazis in WWII, Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, which had little to do with werewolves and everything to do with Ilsa raping men with her insatiable hunger for sex. I had to wonder where all this hot wolf-on-Nazi action came from. So today we will search for the real werewolves of the SS, it’s going to be like an episode of Monster Hunters but one in which we actually find some shit.

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler envisioned a force of elite troops trained to engage in clandestine operations behind enemy lines mirroring the Allied Special Forces Commandos. In the summer/early autumn of 1944 Unternehmen Werwolf (Operation Werewolf) was initiated. The name, Werwolf, came from the novel, Der Wehrwolf written in 1910 by author Hermann Löns and was also typical Nazi one-upmanship because it sounded cooler than Commandos. Hans-Adolf Prützmann was placed in charge of organizing the unit and was named Generalinspekteur für Spezialabwehr (General Inspector of Special Defence). Prützmann studied the guerrilla tactics used by Soviet partisans while being stationed in the Ukraine; he would apply these skills to the member of Operation Werwolf. Drawing from the SS and Hitler Youth, some 5,000 — 6,000 recruits were raised by the winter of 1944-45. They were trained in terror attacks and specialized in ambush, sniping, arson and assassination. They were like evil Chuck Norrises, if Chuck Norris was alive in 1944 and a Nazi. Their numbers would rise considerably in the following spring because of words; beautiful, crazy-assed, words.

By March of 1945 the Allies were on the advance into occupied Nazi territory. The fate of the world was shifting, the Nazis were losing the war and German leaders knew that their remaining forces had no chance of stopping them. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels decided it was time to do something about it. It was time for him to make a speech. The speech that called for all Germans in the occupied areas (even women and children because why be picky) to rise up and launch themselves at the enemy came to be known as the “Werewolf” speech. Because the Nazi leadership was involved in a bureaucratic war amongst themselves, bickering and bitching to each other about control over the project since it was coordinated by pretty much nobody. This lead to the Werewolf movement to exist in two ways: the first as a real force of specially trained SS, Hitler Youth and Nazi Party guerrillas; the second as an outlet for casual violence by fanatics, crazies and assholes. Unfortunately as a result of the “Werewolf” speech there is widespread confusion about which subsequent attacks were done by the professionals or and which by the jerks.

Nazi radio broadcast began to spread the word of Werwolf operatives’ exploits. Apparently they assassinated a number or Allied soldiers and officers and set off bombs that took out buildings housing the enemy. In reality however, the propaganda machine gave a credited a number of incidents to Operation Werwolf that they had nothing to do with. In the last few weeks of the war Operation Werwolf devolved into a terrorist group that managed to make themselves into a minor annoyance to the Allied troops. They failed to stop, or even slow down the Allied invasion and eventual occupation of Germany. Hard to blame them really; the Werwolf never actually had the necessary equipment, organization, morale or coordination to pull off what was expected of them. There were disorganized attempts to bury caches of explosives, ammunition and weapons in various parts of Germany to aide the Werwolf with their campain of terror (they were supposed to continue the fight in the event of a defeat) against the enemy. By this point however the materials they had left were astoundingly low, they were so disorganized that few actual members knew where the caches were, how to use them, what to do with them if they found them. The Russians actually found the vast majority of the depots and almost none of the ordinance was ever used by the Werwolf.

They did form into a resistance group after retreating into Black Forest and the Harz Mountains. The Werwolf continued resisting the sweet, sweet taste of American freedom up until 1947, possibly up until 1950, but was considered to be relatively minor and seen as a bunch of crazy fanatics living in huts in the forest. The more important aspect of their resistance was that they widened the distrust between the Germans the their occupiers. For every resistance attack the Allied and Soviets responded with extreme reprisals such as curtailing the right of assembly of German civilians or executions. This fostered resentments that allowed for Nazism to survive in Germany. The Werwolf’s final act of terrorism was to draw from their Nazi Youth beginning to create a new political youth movement to intended to outlast the war and was called, “Neo-Nazism”. Some current German Neo-Nazis still refer to themselves as Werwolf. 

I hope you return next week for another and hopefully less white supremacy laden installment of The History of the Nerd.