Familiar Headlines

[Shady]

Germans Declare Americans Hatred

U.S. Investigators Discover Mounting Bitterness Over Our Occupational Practices

By Kathleen McLaughlin, The New York Times

December 3, 1945

Bitter resentment and deep disappointement was voiced over the American's first six months of the occupation.

Loss of Victory in Germany Through U.S. Policy Feared

By John H. Crider, The New York Times

November 18, 1945

Grave concern was expressed today by informed officials that the United States might soon lose the fruits of victory in Germany through the failure to prepare adequately for carrying out its long-term commitments under the Potsdam Declaration.

Germans Reveal Hatred of Americans

By Drew Middleton, The New York Times

October 31, 1945

The German attitude twoard the American occupation forces has swung from apathy and surface friendliness to active dislike.

According to a military government official, this is the finding expression in the organization throghout the zone and in a rapid increase in the number of attacks on American soldiers.  There were more such attacks in the first week of October than in the preceding five months of the occupation, this source declared.

American's Clashes With Germans Grow

October 10, 1946

Reich Girls Want Return of Nazism

By Drew Middleton

October 22, 1945

Reports on the survey revealed that girls up to 18 years of age and women in their early twenties yearned for "a strong new Fuehrer," opposed denazification, and were ready to excuse Hitler as a good man with "bad advisors".

I found these past articles fascinating, as well as the parallels between post-war Germany and post-war Iraq.

[BHS]

Nice work, shady. Good luck convincing the lefties, thought. I'm sure that if they bother with this tread at all, it will be to point out that your stories are a little out of date and other such inanities. Of course, if these stories backed up their arguments, some people would have been linking to them incessantly a long time ago.

[Riverwind]

Nice work, shady. Good luck convincing the lefties, thought. I'm sure that if they bother with this tread at all, it will be to point out that your stories are a little out of date and other such inanities. Of course, if these stories backed up their arguments, some people would have been linking to them incessantly a long time ago.

No comparison. The Germans may have disliked the Americans (as did the Japanese), however, they were intelligent enough to co-operate long enough to get the country rebuilt. No suicide bombers, no kidnappings and murders, no resistance movements blowing up public utilities. I think part of the reason is most Germans realized that they brought it on themselves. Muslims, on the other hand, see the invasion of Iraq as unprovoked attack (which it was).

[Shady]

Nice work, shady. Good luck convincing the lefties

Thanks, I'll try. Although there hatred of all things Bush is usually very hard to overcome, even with facts.

No comparison. The Germans may have disliked the Americans (as did the Japanese), however, they were intelligent enough to co-operate long enough to get the country rebuilt. No suicide bombers, no kidnappings and murders, no resistance movements blowing up public utilities. I think part of the reason is most Germans realized that they brought it on themselves. Muslims, on the other hand, see the invasion of Iraq as unprovoked attack (which it was).

Wrong. The main comparison is the defeatist attitude of the press during the post-war Germany occupation and now the post-war Iraq occupation. The exact same doom and gloom headlines of the 1940's are now being recycled today, almost word for word. You're also wrong about no resistance movements. There were resisitance movements, that in some cases lasted several years. Example:

Nazi Guerrillas

In the months and years following the end of the World War Two, Allied forces faced a series of bombings and attacks in occupied Germany.

Nazi loyalists attempted to derail the rebuilding process by killing any Germans collaborating with the enemy. And the mysterious SS-Werewolves underground organization boasted of the coming rebirth of the Party.

Today, little is known about the activities of the Werewolves and other groups who opposed the Allied forces during this postwar period. And while the Nazi resistance effort did eventually fail, many of its methods and the harsh Allied response to them have real world implications for the present situation in Iraq.

"The Last Nazis" will explore how the SS-Werewolves terrorized military and civilian targets behind enemy lines such as industrial plants, fuel depots, supply lines, and stray soldiers.

We'll hear from a former Werewolf as he describes his motivation and role in the guerilla movement. In addition we'll travel to Aachen, where Werewolves assassinated the pro-Allied mayor, and Penzberg, the site of the "Night of Murder" - a senseless rampage aimed at preventing any German collaboration in which more than a dozen German civilians were killed.

We'll also explore the Allied attempt to purge Germany's Nazi past through denazification tribunals - an increasingly unpopular set of trials that was hit by a wave of bombings.

The History Channel

The Werewolves specialised in ambushes and sniping, and took the lives of many Allied and Soviet soldiers and officers -- perhaps even that of the first Soviet commandant of Berlin, General N.E. Berzarin, who was rumoured to have been waylaid in Charlottenburg during an incident in June 1945. Buildings housing Allied and Soviet staffs were favourite targets for Werewolf bombings; an explosion in the Bremen police headquarters, also in June 1945, killed five Americans and thirty-nine Germans. Techniques for harassing the occupiers were given widespread publicity through Werewolf leaflets and radio propaganda, and long after May 1945 the sabotage methods promoted by the Werewolves were still being used against the occupying powers.

Although the Werewolves originally limited themselves to guerrilla warfare with the invading armies, they soon began to undertake scorched-earth measures and vigilante actions against German `collaborators' or `defeatists'. They damaged Germany's economic infrastructure, already battered by Allied bombing and ground fighting, and tried to prevent anything of value from falling into enemy hands. Attempts to blow up factories, power plants or waterworks occasionally provoked melees between Werewolves and desperate German workers trying to save the physical basis of their employment, particularly in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia.

Link

[Black Dog]

In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing

It's hardly surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the war was over. And as the U.S. Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was "probably the Werwolf's most sensational achievement."

Indeed, the organization merits but two passing mentions in Occupation of Germany, which dwells far more on how docile the Germans were once the Americans rolled in—and fraternization between former enemies was a bigger problem for the military than confrontation. Although Gen. Eisenhower had been worrying about guerrilla warfare as early as August 1944, little materialized. There was no major campaign of sabotage. There was no destruction of water mains or energy plants worth noting. In fact, the far greater problem for the occupying forces was the misbehavior of desperate displaced persons, who accounted for much of the crime in the American zone.

The Army history records that while there were the occasional anti-occupation leaflets and graffiti, the GIs had reason to feel safe. When an officer in Hesse was asked to investigate rumors that troops were being attacked and castrated, he reported back that there had not been a single attack against an American soldier in four months of occupation. As the distinguished German historian Golo Mann summed it up in The History of Germany Since 1789, "The [Germans'] readiness to work with the victors, to carry out their orders, to accept their advice and their help was genuine; of the resistance which the Allies had expected in the way of 'werewolf' units and nocturnal guerrilla activities, there was no sign. …"

Werwolf itself was filled not so much by fearsome SS officers but teenagers too young for the front. Beevor writes:

In the west, the Allies found that Werwolf was a fiasco. Bunkers prepared for Werwolf operations had supplies "for 10-15 days only" and the fanaticism of the Hitler Youth members they captured had entirely disappeared. They were "no more than frightened, unhappy youths." Few resorted to the suicide pills which they had been given "to escape the strain of interrogation and, above all, the inducement to commit treason." Many, when sent off by their controllers to prepare terrorist acts, had sneaked home.

That's not quite the same as the Rumsfeld version, which claimed that "Today the Nazi dead-enders are largely forgotten, cast to the sidelines of history because they comprised a failed resistance and managed to kill our Allied forces in a war that saw millions fight and die."

It's hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news. According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany—and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases—was zero.

Postwar Iraq Is No Germany, Historians Say

"The Werewolves existed more in the idea or the fantasy stage than ever as a real phenomenon," said Lt. Col. Kevin Farrell, a historian at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.

The Werewolves were founded in September 1944 by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who saw them as a special force that would work behind U.S. lines to sabotage equipment and kill U.S. troops. About 5,000 SS officers were trained as Werewolves.

But according to Perry Biddiscombe, a historian of postwar Germany who wrote a 1998 book on the Werewolves, the force was designed only to assist the German army in winning the war. It was not created to be an underground movement after a German defeat.

As a result, Biddiscombe said, Rice is correct that the Werewolves attacked U.S. troops -- but the only documented assaults took place before the Nazis capitulated on May 7, 1945.

"After the end of the war there's a lot more ambiguity," said Biddiscombe, who teaches European history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

One reason for that ambiguity is that a few days before the Nazi surrender, the SS officially disbanded the Werewolves. But in the last month of the war, as Germany collapsed, Nazi radio propaganda called on Germans to take up arms to resist the occupying forces. Members of the Hitler Youth vowed to join the Werewolves in attacking Allied troops, and some other Germans who resisted after the surrender adopted the term "Werewolves" to describe themselves

...

In addition, the U.S. Army warned American GIs about the danger posed by the Werewolves, contributing to their mythology, said Volker Berghahn, a professor of German history at Columbia University. This was enhanced by the fear that Nazi units would retreat to the Alps, build a redoubt and refuse to surrender.

"There was a lot of talk before the end of the war, especially within the Army, about underground units, fanatical Nazis who would hold out and commit sabotage and snipe at U.S. soldiers. But when it actually came to the point, there was some resistance -- but it was not Werewolf resistance," Berghahn said.

...

Tom Schlesinger, a retired Army major and professor at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire who served in Army intelligence in occupied Germany, described the Werewolves as "almost a deliberate urban myth."

"I was in Germany all through the surrender and, although at lower rank, had access to all classified intelligence distribution as part of the occupation security force," Schlesinger said. "The Werewolf story turned out to be mostly a hoax, perhaps some wishful thinking of a few SS officers, though it caused us a few inconveniences due to the phony alerts."

The main comparison is the defeatist attitude of the press during the post-war Germany occupation and now the post-war Iraq occupation.

Other recent defeatist headlines:

MUSAYYIB - The death toll reached 98 in a suicide fuel truck bombing overnight in the town of Musayyib south of Baghdad, a senior hospital source said, making it the deadliest incident since the government took power in April. A suicide bomber exploded a fuel truck near a crowded market outside a Shi'ite mosque.

BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomb targeted an Iraqi Police patrol in New Baghdad, to the east of the capital. A police source said that three policemen were killed and nine people were injured, including five civilians, in the attack.

BAGHDAD - One policeman and one civilian were killed and three civilians were wounded in a suicide car bomb targeting a police checkpoint in Saydiya, southern Baghdad, a police source said.

*BAGHDAD - Five members of the election commission were killed in a suicide car bomb attack outside one of its headquarters in southeast Baghdad. Earlier, a police source said that three policemen were killed and two civilians were wounded in the attack.

*MOSUL - The headquarters of a political party representing the Turkmen ethnic group, in the Kafa'at District north of the flashpoint city Mosul, was destroyed by fire after a raid by Iraqi troops, the party said. Witnesses said troops had earlier been fired at from near the building and one soldier was killed.

*RAMADI - Bodies of two Iraqi contractors working with the U.S. Army were found dead by a police patrol in the north of the town, policeman Rabia Mhana said.

MAHMUDIYA - One person was killed and two were injured when gunmen fired on a funeral procession driving to Najaf on the express highway south of Baghdad, one of the injured told Reuters at a hospital in Baghdad.

*ISKANDARIYA - U.S. forces disclose the death of a soldier from wounds sustained in a car bomb in Iskandariya on the highway south of Baghdad on Friday. The attack was one of 11 in a wave of such strikes in the capital and the highway leading south.

Violence marches on

TAJI - Two policemen were killed and one wounded when gunmen shot at their car in the town of Taji, north of Baghdad, a police source said.

BASRA - Gunmen shot dead a Sunni academic at Basra University on Sunday evening, his father said. Professor Alaa' Dawoud was head of the history department.

BALAD - One U.S. soldier was killed and two wounded on Sunday by a roadside bomb near Balad in Salah Ad Din Province north of Baghdad, the military said in a statement.

MOSUL - A police major was killed by gunmen in the city of Mosul, a hospital source said.

More.

Gunmen kill 24

Anyone who thinks there's any comparison to be made between the levels of post war violence in Iraq today and Germany 60 years ago is just plain wrong.

[Shady]

Anyone who thinks there's any comparison to be made between the levels of post war violence in Iraq today and Germany 60 years ago is just plain wrong

I could agree more. Obviously post-war Iraq is much more violent then post-war Germany. However, I was simply responding to this particular statement:

suicide bombers, no kidnappings and murders, no resistance movements blowing up public utilities

Which is incredibily inaccurate. There were kidnappings and murders, there was a resistance movement and they did attempt and succeeded in destroying public utilities, etc. These are historical facts.

Again, the most significant comparison between post-war German and post-war Iraq is the doom and gloom headlines which are being recycled on almost a word for word basis. To say there are absolutely no comparisons is just plain wrong.

[Black Dog]

Again, the most significant comparison between post-war German and post-war Iraq is the doom and gloom headlines which are being recycled on almost a word for word basis. To say there are absolutely no comparisons is just plain wrong.

What's your point? Simply because predictions of doom and gloom in Germany after the war were not borne out, it does not stand to reason that the same is true of Iraq.