Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

No werewolves in Iraq

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An excellent piece today on the History News Network by Perry Biddiscombe, who teaches history at the University of Victoria and is the author of The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944-1947 and Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946.

Nearly a decade ago, I published two books, Werwolf! and The Last Nazis, both of which have since been cited by right-wing pundits and opinion-makers in order to establish a point of comparison for the current war in Iraq.

First point: size matters.

Some proponents of the insurgency/”Werwolf” comparison have admitted differences in scale, but claim that the two circumstances are thematically similar.  However, the differences in scale owe precisely to the fact that there is a dramatic lack of symmetry between the two resistance movements.  In Germany, the “Werwolf” — if defined loosely — consisted of 5000+ trained guerrillas, as well as an uncertain number of sympathetic civilians and army stragglers.  With a few exceptions, they really were the detritus of the old regime.  In Iraq, some of the insurgency has been fueled by choleric Baathists — here there is a definite point of comparison — but the movement has reached far beyond this base to include nationalists, tribal levies and sectarian extremists of both a Sunni and Shiite variety.

Second point: allies matter.

In addition, it must also be reckoned that “Werwolf” resisters in occupied Germany were totally isolated.  They might have hoped for support from distant Japan, but Tokyo sued for peace a mere three months after V-E Day, while Falangist Spain had enough to do in preserving the character of its regime against (initial) demonstrations of Allied hostility.  With regard to the current conflict in Iraq, however, the insurgents seem to enjoy considerable sympathy throughout the Middle East and Iraq has relatively open borders.

Would that Rumsfeld had followed the advice he gave on 3 March 2006 in an interview with Plum TV in Vail, Colorado: “I think the biggest problem we’ve got in the country is people don’t study history any more. People who go to school in high schools and colleges, they tend to study current events and call it history. … There are just too darn few people in our country who study history ….”

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  2. …article about some presumed similarity between Himmler’s Werwolf operation at the latter days of WWII in the European theater and ongoing civil war in Iraq.

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    Let’s get back to reality, shall we?  The only thing that Himmler’ Werwolfen accomplished was the assassination of the (Allied-implanted) mayor of Aachen in March 1945, two months before Germany’s surrender.

    • Here is a relevant exchange between Rumsfeld and George Will at the end of 2003:

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      George Will: You’ve stressed that in Iraq we’ve made much faster progress than we made in post-war Germany in establishing police, army, currency, central bank. That’s all true. One difference is that in 1945, in May, when Hitler died, fascism died. It was no longer a fighting faith. If Saddam dies, there will still be the fighting faith of militant Islam. So might it make zero difference at all?

      Donald Rumsfeld: Oh, I wouldn’t say a zero difference. First of all, the Nazi faith did linger. And there were people in Germany who kept trying to kill the allies, as we were called then, as opposed to the coalition.

      Will: Did they have casualties — inflict casualties comparable to this?

      Rumsfeld: Not comparable, but there were casualties, to be sure. There were mayors who were cooperating with the allies that were killed. There were Nazis who escaped and went to South America and other countries. It took years to track them down. Hitler, fortunately, killed himself.

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      The fact is that until relatively recently, this was a standard talking point for many, and it still is trotted out from time to time. It is always useful to set the record straight.

      • Himmler’s Werewolf operation was a creation of the Nazi government.  The insurgents fighting the civil war in Iraq are not creations of the government (such as it is), or at least appear not to be.  They are private militias maintained by parties vying for power in a civil war.  Therein lies the difference.

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        Will’s comments I tend to dismiss out of hand.  Rumsfeld is a bit overboard when he said that “There were mayors who were cooperating with the allies that were killed”, when in fact there was only one mayor who was assassinated by the Werewolf operation, that of Aachen, which, as I indicated above, occurred two months before the end of the war.  The idea that Werewolf operations continued after capitulation day is nonsense.

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        Rumsfeld’s point There were Nazis who escaped and went to South America and other countries is certainly correct.  Some Nazis, and some who cooperated with the Nazis, even were admitted into the US.

          • …he had to be to be employed by government.

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            So was Herbert von Karajan, Director of the Berlin Philharmonic.

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            So, probably, was Werner Heisenberg, he of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, who undoubtedly stymied the Nazi attempt at an atomic bomb.

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            Who I was referring to, primarily, was the (I believe it was) Ukrainian, who a guard at a concentration camp and was allowed entry into the US, and who was allowed US citizenship.  After he was discovered (I believe it was in MA, but it might have been in Ohio) a few years ago, he was stripped of his citizenship and deported.

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