Occupied Germany, 1945- two Americans sit on a jeep watching a quiet country road. A young
teenager riding a bicycle rides towards them, but the boy seems like no threat and is largely
ignored. As he passes the jeep, the boy suddenly comes to a stop, and from underneath his jacket
brandishes a submachine gun. One empty magazine later, both American military police are dead.
The boy- no older than fifteen- uses a thick grease pencil to write a symbol on the hood of
the jeep- a straight vertical line intersected by a horizonal line with a hook at the end. This
is the symbol of the Werewolves, Nazi Germany's last ditch effort to repel the invading Allies.
It had started weeks ago, with news that French, American, and British forces had broken through
the last defenses on the homeland's border and were now streaming into Germany. In the
east the situation was equally grim- all the glorious victories against the communists had
been reversed in a year, and now it was the Soviets who were invading the Fatherland.
In sheer desperation, Hitler and his senior advisors scramble to find a way to motivate
a largely demoralized and exhausted German army. They once more turn to the occult
as they have so many times throughout the war. This time though they seek to inspire
their soldiers to victory with the legend of the werewolf. As the Nazis would tell it, the werewolf
was not a bloodthirsty monster out to devour hapless villagers and travelers on a full moon-
the werewolf was actually a seriously flawed and misunderstood, but well meaning individual,
who used their supernatural powers to defend the forests of Germany.
They were a savage last line of defense for the German fatherland, noble in their
ferocity and righteous in their fury against any interlopers who dared threaten their woods.
Now the Nazi party tried to turn real men into
werewolves who would themselves become the last line of defense for Germany.
Two werewolf movements are started simultaneously. The first is an official paramilitary force,
drawn from surviving veterans of the long war, many of them scarred and bloodied,
but veterans through and through. They would engage in sabotage, espionage, assassinations,
ambushes- anything they could do to slow the Allied war machine and grind it to a halt. This
unit of Nazi werewolves would still be under the command of Hitler and his military leadership,
directed with precision and extreme violence at high value military targets.
In late summer and early autumn of 1944, Heinrich Himmler initiated Operation Werewolf, and began
to gather an elite troop of soldiers. Various werewolf units would operate behind enemy lines,
in exactly the same style as the highly successful British and American commandos,
and harass the enemy's rear areas. They would destroy supply caches, assassinate high level
military leadership, and spread demoralizing disinformation throughout the Allied ranks.
SS Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann was placed in charge of what would become
several German werewolf units. For his part, Prützmann had studied the tactics employed by
Soviet guerilla forces, and was assigned to teach these same tactics to German soldiers.
Unlike Soviet guerillas though, German werewolves would still wear military uniforms
and operate within the bounds of German High Command- thus if captured behind enemy lines,
the expectation was that they would still be treated like enemy combatants
and not guerillas- which could be punished with execution if caught.
However, this first attempt at creating German werewolves was doomed by Prützmann
and his leadership team. Captured German officers after the war related that Prützmann was a weak,
inefficient, and uninspiring commander. Further, he was quote- vain, idle and
boastful- a damning judgment of a man in charge of creating an elite unit of commando fighters.
The whole plan was so mismanaged that even Walter Schellenburg, Heinrich Himmler's head
of foreign intelligence, told Himmmler that the entire operation was “criminal and stupid”.
The second unit of German werewolves however would not be an official military unit, but rather,
an unofficial guerrilla movement made up of civilian volunteers. A few military advisors
would see to their training and equipping, but the movement would rely largely on word of mouth
to spread across the countryside, and everyone from children to women were invited to join in
on it. The goal was simple- German civilians were to rise up with the ferocity of the legendary
monster itself and rip, rend, and tear the invading Allied armies. They would strike
at targets of opportunity, carrying out acts of sabotage, murder, and espionage,
but largely undirected by military leadership. Instead, each civilian werewolf was to act of
their own initiative, and make the allies pay dearly for every inch of land they violated.
The first werewolf volunteers began to form into unofficial units late in 1944,
as it became clear that the Germans were going to lose the war. While the military
would do what it could, Nazi leadership began to prepare for an allied invasion of the fatherland.
It was their hope that a force of civilian partisan fighters could be raised to meet
the Allied threat as it crossed into the Fatherland- but this would not be
a standing army, rather the civilian guerilla resistance would be decentralized in nature,
thus giving the Allies no clear command structure to target and eliminate. Resistance cells would
act largely of their own accord, carrying out opportunistic acts of sabotage and assassination.
The goal was not to defeat the Allies militarily, but rather to bleed and weaken them
with a protracted fight and slowly weaken their resolve. Then, given enough time and
harassment from German werewolves, the Allies could be brought to the negotiation table
and work out a peace settlement as favorable to Germany as possible. Even with the noose
tightening around Germany, Hitler still held on to the hope that Britain and America could
be coerced to sign a peace deal with Germany, and then actually join the fight against the Soviets.
On paper, it wasn't a very crazy idea at all- the Western allies had very little in
common with the Soviets, and the Soviet Union's sponsoring of worker's strikes
and attempted communist uprisings across Europe was something that put
the western allies and the Soviet Union at great odds. Ideologically speaking,
Britain and the US had more in common with Nazi Germany than with the Soviets.
But Hitler misunderstood how little appetite for continued war the western allies had,
and while they would do what it took to crush Nazi Germany and ensure the Nazi party never
rose to power again, nobody wanted to continue the war with the Soviet Union if such a thing
could be averted. Further, after years of bitter fighting and a previous war against
Germany twenty years ago, the British and American public would never stomach allying
with the Germans to fight a campaign that would largely benefit Germany in the end.
Hitler had an even bigger problem than trying to convince the western allies to join him
in a fight against the Soviets- the werewolf movement was collapsing before it even began.
With the Nazi bureaucracy in chaos as defeat inched ever forward, contradicting
orders and general confusion crippled the attempt to organize the partisan movement.
A much bigger problem though was the fact that by now, German factories had been bombed nearly into
oblivion, and German industry was struggling to keep up with the needs of the regular army.
Outfitting a massive, national partisan movement was near impossible at this point.
By 1945 though it was clear that the Germany army would be pushed back over the Rhine,
and the allied invasion of the homeland was inevitable. This time,
Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels took over the effort to raise an army of
German werewolves, who would meet the oncoming Allies with teeth and claws.
With Goebbels firmly in charge of the movement, much of the confusion and chaos of the first
attempt was eliminated. The propaganda minister quickly set to work on a national campaign
that would play on German fears of the vengeful allies, as well as fierce patriotism.
On March 23rd, 1945, as the allied war machine pressed into Germany,
Goebbels gave what would become known as the “Werewolf speech”, urging German citizens to
rise up against the invaders and fight to the death for the fatherland if necessary.
A week and a half later, a Werewolf propaganda station, “Radio Werewolf”,
began to broadcast from outside Berlin. Each broadcast would begin with the sound of a wolf
howling, and then play a song with lyrics like “My werewolf teeth bite the enemy/ And then he's done
and then he's gone”. German citizens were commanded to resist the enemy in all possible
ways, and Goebbels' propaganda even attempted to convince the
Germans that the allies had plans to enslave the German people at war's end.
Goebbel's orders to the German people were simple: “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'.
As the war grew ever more desperate, attempts to form proper military werewolf units and grow
a partisan movement began to blur. Some official units were created from the SS
and Hitler Youth reserves, and these received direct support and training.
They were even instructed to lay low as the Allies pushed into Germany,
and then rise up from behind their ranks as a cohesive fighting unit. These 'front companies'
of secret soldiers however were all discovered and dismantled by the Allies within months.
The supply problem plagued the German werewolf effort though, and civilian partisan fighters were
left to fend for themselves- often attempting to take on allied military personnel with old hunting
rifles and improvised explosives. Originally, large caches of equipment and explosives were to
be buried in secret places throughout the country, so that at war's end the werewolves could rise
up and carry out a guerrilla campaign against the occupiers. However, not only were supplies
critically low for the German war machine in 1945, but the highly disorganized nature of the werewolf
movement meant that what supplies could be hidden away were only known to a small number of
individuals. Unable to get the location of these caches out to the werewolf movement as a whole,
most of these caches would end up simply being discovered by the allies- specially the Soviets,
as the bulk of these caches were built close to the Polish border.
Goebbels knew that previous efforts to create a true commando and paramilitary force had failed
spectacularly, and thus in early 1945 he brought in the legendary Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny to
train the new werewolf movement. Skorzeny was a highly decorated German soldier, and responsible
for some of the most legendary deeds of daring of the entire war- including the rescue of Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini from an impenetrable mountaintop fortress surrounded by enemy forces.
His tactics and missions are still studied by special forces soldiers around the world today.
Skorzeny however quickly discovered that the number of Werewolf units had
been greatly exaggerated, and that the recruits he was meant to train largely
consisted of fresh-faced teenagers who were until recently Hitler Youth.
Compounding the manpower problem was the abyssal supply situation,
and inevitably Skorzeny concluded that the werewolf movement was doomed to failure. Instead,
he restructured what official werewolf units there were into a sort of underground railroad
that would help sneak thousands of Nazi officers out of the country towards the end of the war.
In the end, few German citizens answered the call to become Nazi werewolves. The
civilian population was simply exhausted from years of war,
and two years of heavy bombing of their cities and infrastructure. Much to their surprise,
they found that many of the western allied forces treated them relatively well- much unlike
the enslavement and slaughter that Goebbels had tried to convince them would take place.
While the threat of the German werewolf would be overblown in the post-war years, a few actual
attacks were carried out by remaining fanatics. Of these attacks, fewer yet were successful.
By and large, the German people were ready for peace, and had little stomach left for continued
bloodshed. In fact, after the German surrender there were no reported American combat casualties,
and the German people proved ready to work with their occupiers to rebuild their homes and nation.
Now go check out what actually happened to Nazi leaders after world war 2,
or click this other video instead!