Reviewed by Lawrence D. Stokes

Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946, by Perry Biddiscombe. Toronto, Ontario, University of Toronto Press, 1998. xi, 455 pp.

Among students of twentieth-century German history the term “Werwolf” evokes images of fanatical Nazis ringing down World War II by retreating to a so-called “National Redoubt” in the Alps for a last-ditch stand against the already victorious Allies, or sallying forth to kill those fellow-countrymen who dared show any inclination to accept defeat and “collaborate” with their conquerors. The most notorious instance of the latter behaviour was the assassination in late March 1945 of the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first large city in western Germany to be liberated, though Perry Biddiscombe notes ironically that Oberburger-meister Oppenhoff “had frequently been criticized … for giving Nazis jobs in his administration” and only effected democratic reforms in civic government under direct pressure from an envoy of President Roosevelt (p. 38). Such ambiguities are rife in this first comprehensive, scholarly account of German planning for, and haphazard implementation of, guerrilla operations during the last few months of the war. Thus, the author takes issue (p. 375 n. 92) with the reliability of some sources upon which the hitherto standard work by Rodney Minott, The Fortress That Never Was (1964), is based, without disputing that “the mother of all redoubts, the supposed “Alpine Fortress” was incomparably more significant for the influence it exercised upon the imaginations of Germany’s enemies than it ever was in reality. Biddiscombe, who teaches at the University of Victoria, nevertheless succeeds in transforming a subject that might seem to have been at best a byway into almost a highway through the final bizarre course of the “Third Reich.”

He accomplishes this first of all by amassing a truly impressive body of primary documentation drawn from the archives of at least a half-dozen countries and in as many languages (including Russian, Polish, and Czech); the book’s thin bibliography does not do justice to the over 100 pages of endnotes which cite among other secondary works numerous obscure but revealing British, U.S., and Canadian regimental histories from the denouement of the European campaign. This research encompasses a far wider range of topics than merely an organization comprising five to six thousand Werwolves whose activities were coincidentally responsible for about the same number of violent deaths (p. 34, 276) — neither figure, as Biddiscombe readily concedes, was of great significance in a conflict involving millions of combatants which spilled torrents of blood. He therefore draws into his analysis inter alia traditional evaluations of the role irregular formations are thought to have played in the military history of Germany, the importance of which leading theorists and practitioners alike since Clausewitz had summarily downgraded. Among foreigners General George Patton declared in September 1945, after the threat had passed, that it had been “inconsequential” because the ex-enemy was “incapable of individual initiative action” (p. 293). Notwithstanding such authoritative strategic and biological dismissals of the “Werwolf” as an institution, Biddiscombe persists in examining its often contradictory relations with a succession of sponsors — principally the SS and the Hitler Youth — as well as other agencies that sought to absorb or exploit the radical proclivities of the membership: the Nazi Party with its mass conscripted rival, the Volkssturm (Home Guard); the Ministry of Propaganda headed by total war advocate Joseph Goebbels; and the Wehrmacht (armed forces) which to the end remained in charge of the fighting fronts. The author thereby demonstrates once again not only the ineradicably polycratic structure of Hitler’s dictatorship, which lasted into its death throes, but also its essentially self-defeating (that is to say, nihilistic) nature. For while threats of being massacred no doubt frightened the general populace into displaying stronger hostility toward the invaders, they also helped further discredit National Socialism beyond the point of its physical rout on the battlefield.

That postwar dimension provides Biddiscombe’s study with its most convincing claim to a relevance over and above the narrow theme of the “Werwolf’ alone. In describing its regional involvement with both domestic and external opponents (the decentralized organization fought and murdered in every wooded, mountainous, or otherwise less accessible area within the Reich, besides being engaged around its periphery) the author treats, too, the impact which guerrilla warfare had upon populations subjected to Nazi terror yet simultaneously victims of high-level Allied policy. These comprised primarily the German-speaking inhabitants of what was to become a reconfigured Poland and of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. They were fated to pay the steepest price for the misperception that the criminal apparatus created by Heinrich Himmler and others would simply dissolve following the demise of the “Fuhrer,” which to the astonishment of most observers is indeed what it did. The harsh manner in which Germany itself was initially occupied also reflected fears that armed struggle would in some form continue after the nation’s formal surrender; hence, Biddiscombe argues, “a brief period of profound psychological and social dislocation, when German society might otherwise have been most open to new influences” (p. 263) was irrevocably lost amid decrees ordering non-fraternization, the expulsion in several locales of recalcitrant villagers from their homes, and even the summary execution of a few misguided teenaged killers by firing squads of the Allies. This conclusion seems somewhat overdrawn, as is perhaps the author’s view that Berlin was allowed to fall to the Soviets because the “Werwolf” diverted Anglo-America attention toward the south. Biddiscombe nonetheless makes a thoughtful case that this ultimate undertaking of the dying Nazi Reich deserves the extended investigation he has accorded it.

The book, on the whole, is written with considerable verve and over-long stretches read almost like an adventure story. Unfortunately, it is also marred by the use of a great many colloquialisms (such as, “brainwave” and “non-starter”) and by the misspelling, particularly in the notes, of German words (umlauts are often omitted) and the names of authors (Steinert regularly appears in two different forms). Biddiscombe repeatedly writes “breeched” when he means “breached” even in a useful supplementary article on “The End of the Freebooter Tradition: The Forgotten Freikorps Movement of 1944/45″ he just published in Central European History, volume 33, no. 1 (1999), pp. 53-90; but there he employs the more recognizable Fehme (= Feme) for the secret German medieval vigilante courts rather than Vehme that appears in his book. Still, a volume that can persuasively link wartime “Werwolf” propaganda to Germany’s terrorist groups of the 1970s (see p. 150) deserves to be applauded.

Lawrence D. Stokes

Dalhousie University

About the Author
Perry Biddiscombe is Professor of History at the University of Victoria, he lives in Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He is the acknowledged world expert on the guerilla forces of the Third Reich. His other books include The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerilla Resistance in Europe 1944-47 (‘Throws fresh light on the Third Reich’s last days’ BBC History Magazine) and Werewolf: The History of the Nationalist Socialist Guerilla Movement 1944-1946 (‘The most complete history of the Nazi partisan movement’ The Independent). He lives in Canada.