Free Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor

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.
    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