Werwolf (, German for "werewolf") was a Nazi plan which began development in 1944, to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany, in parallel with the Wehrmacht fighting in front of the lines. It is widely misconstrued as having been intended to be a guerrilla force to harass Allied forces after the defeat of Germany, a misconception created by Joseph Goebbels through propaganda disseminated in the waning weeks of the war through his "Radio Werwolf,” which was not actually connected in any way with the military unit.
Nomenclature
How and by whom the name was chosen is unknown, but it may have alluded to the title of Hermann Löns's novel, Der Wehrwolf, first published in 1910. Set in the Celle region (Lower Saxony) during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the novel concerns a peasant named Harm Wulf. After marauding soldiers kill his family, Wulf organises his neighbors into a militia who pursue the soldiers and mercilessly execute any they capture, while referring to themselves as Wehrwölfe. Löns wrote that the title was a dual reference to the fact that the peasants put up a fighting defense (sich wehren, see "Bundeswehr" – Federal Defense) and to the protagonist's surname of Wulf, but it also had obvious parallels with the word Werwölfe in that Wulf's men came to enjoy killing. While Löns was not himself a Nazi (he died in 1914), his work became popular with the German far right, and the Nazis celebrated it. Indeed, Celle's local newspaper began serialising Der Wehrwolf in January 1945.
In 1942, Adolf Hitler named the OKW and OKH field headquarters, at Vinnytsia in Ukraine, "Werwolf", and Hitler on a number of occasions had used "Wolf" as a pseudonym for himself. (The etymology of the name "Adolf" itself carries connotations of noble (adal; Modern German Adel) wolf, while Hitler referred to his first World War II Eastern Front military headquarters as Wolfsschanze, commonly rendered in English as "Wolf's Lair" (literally "Wolf's Sconce").
Operations
In late summer/early autumn 1944, Heinrich Himmler initiated Unternehmen Werwolf (Operation Werwolf), ordering SS Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann to begin organising an elite troop of volunteer forces to operate secretly behind enemy lines. As initially conceived, these Werwolf units were intended to be legitimate uniformed military or paramilitary formations trained to engage in clandestine operations behind enemy lines in the same manner as Allied Special Forces such as Commandos. They were never intended to act outside of the control of the German High Command (OKW), or to fight in civilian clothes, and they expected to be treated as soldiers if they were captured.
Prützmann was named Generalinspekteur für Spezialabwehr (General Inspector of Special Defence) and assigned the task of setting up the force's headquarters in Berlin and organising and instructing the force. Prützmann had studied the guerrilla tactics used by Soviet partisans while he was stationed in the occupied territories of Ukraine, and the idea was to teach these tactics to the members of Operation Werwolf. According to German officers who were interrogated after the war, those who were familiar with Prützmann's central office said that it was, like its commanding officer, inefficient, weak, and uninspired, and that Prützmann himself was, in addition, "vain, idle and boastful". Walter Schellenberg, Heinrich Himmler's head of foreign intelligence, claimed to have told Himmler that the whole operation was "criminal and stupid".
Propaganda and Radio Werwolf
Rumors of a secret Nazi guerrilla organization began to surface soon after the Allied invasion of Normandy. Time ran an article containing speculation that the Germans would try to prolong the war indefinitely by going underground after their defeat. The 27 January 1945 issue of Collier's Weekly featured a detailed article by Major Edwin Lessner, stating that elite SS and Hitler Youth were being trained to attack Allied forces and opening with a 1944 quote from Joseph Goebbels: "The enemy (invading German territory) will be taken in the rear by the fanatical population, which will ceaselessly worry him, tie down strong forces and allow him no rest or exploitation of any possible success."
On 23 March 1945 Goebbels gave a speech known as the "Werwolf speech", in which he urged every German to fight to the death. The partial dismantling of the organised Werwolf, combined with the effects of the Werwolf speech, caused considerable confusion about which subsequent attacks were carried out by Werwolf members, as opposed to solo acts by fanatical Nazis or small groups of SS.
