Endkampf by Stephen G. Fritz

Author:Stephen G. Fritz [Fritz, Stephen G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-81317-190-6
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2004-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

7

STRUGGLE UNTIL FIVE AFTER TWELVE

During the Thirty Years War, that disastrous period of chaos and calamity between 1618 and 1648, German peasants grew increasingly weary of having their farms plundered and burned, their wives and daughters raped, and their sons taken away by the various marauding bands who fought in the service of one or another of the Great Powers of Europe. To the long-suffering peasant, it seemed irrelevant whether Catholic or Protestant laid waste in order to save his soul, or whether French, Austrian, or Swedish troops ultimately gained ascendancy. Driven to despair, a number of farmers on the Lüneberg Heath gathered in secret, swore sacred oaths of unity, and formed themselves into a vigilante force for mutual protection of their homes and communities. Farmers by day, at night they struck at isolated mercenaries, raided enemy encampments, and exacted vengeance on those who had wrought havoc on their lands. Using the sign of the Wolfsangel (wolf trap) as both a menacing warning and proud acknowledgment of its actions, this first Werwolf group hoped to deter further destruction by playing on primal anxieties of the savage and relentless ferocity of the wolf. The term was likely meant as well to draw on ancient fears of lycanthropy, a fear of people who appeared ordinary by day but were driven by a powerful blood-lust at night.1

Popularized in 1910 in a hugely successful novel by Hermann Löns, Der Wehrwolf, the Werwolf legend took on overtones of völkisch romanticism in the pre–World War I period. The compelling adventure story emphasized the struggle for survival of individuals caught in the grip of powerful forces, and Löns also suggested that only in the Volk, the close-knit racial community, could one find the necessary qualities of heroism and steadfastness needed to surmount a great crisis. In order to protect their homes and communities, moreover, Löns’s simple peasants demonstrated a willingness, when required, to go to the limits of brutality and terror, actions one of his characters described as “terrible but beautiful.” This image of a united, resolute racial community struck responsive chords among Nazi officialdom, who fantasized howls of vengeance rising from a chorus of Werewolves as enemy forces violated the sacred soil of Germany.2

None was more smitten than propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Disappointed with the initial Nazi incarnation as a group of SS partisans whose task was to harass enemy lines of supply and communication, Goebbels dreamed of a Werwolf movement issuing from diehard Nazi fanatics among the populace, true revolutionaries who would exact revenge on the enemy as well as insufficiently zealous Germans. Moreover, as the journalist Curt Riess noted in late April, the Nazi propaganda minister hoped further to create chaos in postwar Germany. “The worse things become,” Riess emphasized, “the greater is the chance that the Germans will forget how bad it was under Hitler. Future generations will believe that things were wonderful under Hitler.” Calling Goebbels’s propaganda a “hidden time bomb,” Riess continued,

Conditions will be quite terrible in defeated Germany…. Hitler may look wonderful to many Germans in retrospect.

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