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 contrav
ention of Germany’s continuing obligations under the 1929 Geneva Convention.
So, for the Volkssturm, with their civilian outfits and armbands, or home-made Ruritanian uniforms, the omens were doubtful. For the Werwolf recruits, they were ominous in the extreme.
Despite the brief false hope of the Ardennes offensive, there seems little doubt that by the end of 1944 most Germans were war-weary and disillusioned. Their once-proud army was in full retreat on every front, the Reich’s all but defenceless cities were being continually devastated by the Allied bomber fleets, and now enemy armies had set foot on German soil. Only the most fanatical or the most gullible Germans (groups which perhaps overlapped) still really believed in the ‘final victory’ that the Nazi leadership continued to promise.
The most bizarre aspect of the German people’s descent into hell was, nonetheless, that so many continued to fight and work for victory right up to the end. There were almost no strikes, no mutinies, no stirrings of popular revolution as there had been at the end of the First World War. This was partly because, unlike during the First War, no Germans starved – though many in the occupied countries did, so that Germans might eat – and partly because Hitler’s Germany, especially towards the end of the war, was a far more tightly run and ruthlessly policed country than the Kaiser’s had been. In 1944–5, executions were routine and even mildly defeatist talk incurred the severest of punishments.
The early experiences of Russian incursions into East Prussia reinforced this apocalyptic view of Germany’s fate, should she be defeated. Widespread, if not always precise, knowledge of the horrors that had been perpetrated in the occupied countries and in the concentration camps, within the Reich and abroad, also played a role in the German people’s apparent willingness to fight on at all costs. A conversation between two workers in Berlin was reported to the SD (SS intelligence) in the final weeks of the war. In this exchange, one said: ‘We have only ourselves to blame for this war because we treated the Jews so badly. We shouldn’t be surprised if they now do the same thing to us.’5
In fact, along with recognition of the inevitability of defeat, it seems that the majority of the German people felt anger against both the Allies – especially for the relentless bombing of German cities – and their own Nazi masters, in the latter case mingled with disappointment.
Already, self-excusing themes were developing that would dominate the immediate post-war discussion of the German plight. The ‘idealistic’ people had trusted Hitler and the Nazis to create a powerful, prosperous Germany, had been prepared for any ‘sacrifices’ necessary, but had been ‘lied to’ and ‘betrayed’.
Even the above conversation between the two Berlin workers, while seemingly acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for its own misfortunes, also contained grains of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Semitism that the regime had fed the population for the past decade or more. The powerful Jews and their Allied friends were now returning, determined to punish the Germans. From now on, this attitude implied, everything would be the fault of these alien people, bent on revenge – the destruction of German towns and cities, the violence, the expulsions from the old German territories in the east, the post-war deprivation.
Meanwhile, in the first days of 1945, the Reich remained in a state of expectant hiatus. And, in absolute numbers, there were still enough fanatics to give the Nazi leadership the semblance of what it wanted.
Among these was Obergruppenführer Karl Gutenberger, the Higher SS and Police Leader West. On 20 September 1944, with the forced evacuation of Aachen all but complete, Gutenberger summoned the city’s Gestapo chief to his headquarters at Erkelenz. The thirty-nine-year-old Gutenberger was brutally clear in his orders. ‘Plunderers, deserters and assorted riff-raff’ found in Aachen were to be shot summarily and without trial.6
So many innocent civilians and soldiers paid with their lives for failure to show sufficient enthusiasm for the pointless defence of Aachen, a pattern that was to be repeated in countless towns and cities throughout western Germany as the Allies advanced.
In accordance with the rules laid down by Himmler, it was Gutenberger who automatically became Inspector of the Werwolf movement in northern Rhineland and Westphalia (Defence District VI). Like his colleagues elsewhere, he set up a small staff headed by a Werwolf commissioner, the fanatical Standartenführer Karl Raddatz. Because of its closeness to the front, District VI was, of course, a more important and above all potentially active theatre for undercover guerrilla warfare.
As early as the first week of October, while the Americans prepared to lay siege to Aachen, the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, saw fit to issue bloodcurdling threats against any Germans who might accept administrative posts from the Allies:
In the occupied parts of German territory, there would be no ‘German’ civil administration, no ‘German’ authority, no ‘German’ legal judiciary, because such office holders and administrative organs would scarcely survive their first month. No official would be able to obey enemy orders without experiencing the certainty that he would soon sit cold and sightless behind his desk, no one would carry out the enemy’s will without finding himself on the yawning edge of a grave, and no judge would condemn a German in accordance with enemy wishes without ending up dangling prettily from his own window bars one night . . .7
At the time, such collaboration remained a merely theoretical possibility. In the event, as transpired weeks later, there did turn out to be Germans prepared to accept such posts. And when this became clear, the big bosses in Berlin began to demand the punishment of Germans who ‘collaborated’ with the Allies in the still-limited occupied areas of the Reich.
It was in early November that the Werwolf supremo Prützmann visited Gutenberger. He came straight to the point. Himmler and Goebbels, Prützmann told the SS and Police Leader, were both furious that Oppenhoff, a collaborator, possibly a Jew (sic), had accepted the post of Lord Mayor of Aachen from the Americans. An example must be made. The traitor must be killed, and Gutenberger must organise this mission.8 The Obergruppenführer was not enthusiastic. With more important problems on his plate, he simply ignored the instruction and hoped it would lapse. He was, in this case, to be disappointed.
Within a few weeks, a telex arrived from Reichsführer Himmler, demanding an update on progress with mission planning. Shortly after, an emissary from Prützmann appeared, bearing a formal warrant for the Lord Mayor’s execution. Following this, phone calls and cables arrived in increasingly insistent profusion. Gutenberger was forced to fall back on a plea of ‘personnel difficulties’ and to complain about how hard it was to infiltrate teams through the confusion of the front line.
Prützmann, aware of how much of his own status was riding on this matter, now decided to force the pace. At his personal behest, training began. In charge was Untersturmführer (Lieutenant) Wenzel, a mysterious character variously thought to have been co-opted from the notorious Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny’s commando group (which had famously rescued the deposed Italian dictator Mussolini from his mountain prison in September 1943) or to have been a former member of the Aachen Gestapo.
The rest of the would-be assassination squad was drawn from Werwolf volunteers undergoing training at Schloss Hülcrath on the outskirts of Düsseldorf. It included an Austrian-born SS-trained radio operator by the name of Leitgeb, an eager Hitler Youth leader from the Aachen area, Erich Morgenschweiss – at sixteen little more than a child soldier – and Ilse Hirsch, twenty-two, a League of German Girls organiser. Fräulein Hirsch came from just a little farther away, the border town of Monschau, in the Eiffel, which by November 1944 was already in American hands. Morgenschweiss and Hirsch would be responsible for reconnoitring the city and identifying and locating the American-appointed Lord Mayor. Wenzel and Leitgeb would carry out the actual murder. Two former border policemen-turned-Gestapo men, Hennemann and Heidorn, who knew the area around Aachen well and had already been back and forth between the lines several times, would act as guides.9
In the new year, the pressure on Gutenberger increased. The Führer himself was said to have taken a personal interest. Moreover, the Luftwaffe had agreed to fly the team to a suitable point west of Aachen. They were given parachute training.
The codename for the operation was Karneval, which implied that it had originally been planned for the beginning of Lent in mid-February 1945. However, it was not until mid-March, a time when the German military position had suffered a serious deterioration and the front line had moved many kilometres to the east, that, after a small farewell party sponsored by Gutenberger, the team finally embarked on its 400-kilometre trip to an air base at Hildesheim, near Hanover. From here they would take off on their mission.
On the evening of 19 March 1945, Wenzel and his motley crew boarded a captured American B-17 (with German Luftwaffe markings). Their target was a drop zone in Dutch territory, apparently on the supposition that security would be less tight outside Germany.10
In the second half of January, the Anglo-Americans had begun to push the Germans out of the areas they had occupied during the Ardennes battle. By mid-February, the Allied air offensive was achieving new levels of destruction. Central Berlin was devastated on 3 February. Historic Dresden was ravaged on 13–14 February, with upwards of 25,000 civilian dead. The Russians were once more advancing into eastern Germany. The prospect of German underground resistance within the rapidly increasing areas of occupation had now become a serious Allied concern.
One of the Allied planners’ chief worries was the extent to which German youth might have been fanaticised by the Nazi system. Any young German still under military age had known only the Hitler regime. Twelve years of brainwashing in the Nazi Party’s youth movements and the Reich’s increasingly politicised school system would, it was thought, have turned them into willing tools of last-ditch Nazi bosses such as Himmler and Goebbels.
Exorcising Hitler Page 6