Free Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor Page A

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