Condi's Phony History - Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq

[DealMonkey]

Is the administration now pandering to the U.S.'s "Greatest Generation" for support in Iraq?

As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number, the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will," President Bush told an American Legion convention.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers?called 'werewolves'?engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them?much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."

Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted,

One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?

Well, no, it doesn't. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts.

Werwolf tales have been a favorite of schlock novels, but the reality bore no resemblance to Iraq today. As Antony Beevor observes in The Fall of Berlin 1945, the Nazis began creating Werwolf as a resistance organization in September 1944. "In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured British time pencils," Beevor writes. "? Werwolf recruits were taught to kill sentries with a slip-knotted garrotte about a metre long or a Walther pistol with silencer. ?"

In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen was assassinated on March 25, 1945, on Himmler's orders. This was not a nice thing to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. 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.

So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford's Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going around.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/

 

[CaptnKirk]

Why don't we just make things up whether or not there is actually any facts ? Sound Familiar ?
Fuzzy Math ? WMD in Iraq ? An imminent threat to attack on our nation ?
This George couldn't speak the truth about any tree, let alone a cherry tree.

 

[Random Variable]

The first year or so of post-war occupation (before the Marshall Plan) was viewed as an utter failure by the American press and pundits of all political persuaions. But it's not like anyone knows any history.

 

[BaliBabyDoc]

Vespasian, I guess the point is that Bush Leaguers can consider media coverage as analogous but not the actual situation. I know for a fact that postwar reconstruction in Germany and Japan sux big donkey balls and many civilians died during the first 12-18mo afterwards due to starvation, lack of potable water, healthcare, etc. The administration wants none of the blame for what goes wrong (lack of reliable power, potable water, or security) and all of the credit for anything good (relative stability in Basra, Kurdish North, few refugees). If they are going to claim the press is giving them a raw deal then they should make a case based on the facts in Iraq . . . not an historical analogy of specious relavence.

 

[sandorski]

How can you tell when the Bush admin is lying?....

 

[BOBDN]

Their lips are moving.

 

[phillyTIM]

heh heh ... true dat!

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: BOBDN
Their lips are moving.

teh winnar! :beer: :gift:

 

[colonel]

Their lips are moving.

:wine::beer: roger that

 

[PatboyX]

Originally posted by: Vespasian
The first year or so of post-war occupation (before the Marshall Plan) was viewed as an utter failure by the American press and pundits of all political persuaions. But it's not like anyone knows any history.

i think my big problem with this is the media's instant desire to remind us of this fact. it suggests a number of unsettling things, not the least of which is the goal of keeping the american people from becoming uneasy with the outcome of the war.

 

[etech]

Werwolf!

Werwolf!
The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946
by Perry Biddiscombe
University of Toronto Press, 1998
455 Pages, US$ 39.95
ISBN: 0-8020-0862-3


"What did the Werwolf do? They sniped. They mined roads. They poured sand into the gas tanks of jeeps. (Sugar was in short supply, no doubt.) They were especially feared for the "decapitation wires" they strung across roads. They poisoned food stocks and liquor. (The Russians had the biggest problem with this.) They committed arson, though perhaps less than they are credited with: every unexplained fire or explosion associated with a military installation tended to be blamed on the Werwolf. These activities slackened off within a few months of the capitulation on May 7, though incidents were reported as late as 1947.

The problem with assessing the extent of Werwolf activity is that not only official Werwolf personnel committed partisan acts. Much of the regular German fighting forces disarticulated into isolated units that sometimes kept fighting, even after the high command surrendered.. In the east, units that had been bypassed by the Red Army tried to fight their way west, so they could surrender to the Anglo-Americans. In the west, the final "strategy" of the high command was to stop even trying to halt the Allied armored penetrations of Germany, but to hit these units from behind and cut off their supplies. Perhaps the most harrowing accounts in the book are those relating to the expulsion of the ethnic German populations from the Sudetenland and the areas annexed by Poland. The latter theater in particular seems to have been the only point in the European war in which a civilian population was keen about a "scorched earth" strategy.
"


Minutemen of the Third Reich.(history of the Nazi Werewolf guerilla movement)

"...
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.

Several sprees of vandalism through stocks of art and antiques, stored by the Berlin Museum in a flak tower at Friedrichshain, caused millions of dollars worth of damage and cultural losses of inestimable value. In addition, vigilante attacks caused the deaths of a number of small-town mayors and, in late March 1945, a Werewolf paratroop squad assassinated the Lord Mayor of Aachen, Dr Franz Oppenhoff, probably the most prominent German statesman to have emerged in the occupied fringes over the winter of 1944-45. This spate of killings, part of a larger Nazi terror campaign that consumed the Third Reich after the failed anti-Hitler putsch of July 20th, 1944, can be interpreted as a psychological retreat back into opposition, even while Nazi leaders were still clinging to their last few months of power.
"

 

[etech]

an explosion in the Bremen police headquarters, also in June 1945, killed five Americans and thirty-nine Germans.

Does anyone thing that sounds familiar? Perhaps bin laden read that bood.

 

[syzygy]

Originally posted by: Vespasian
The first year or so of post-war occupation (before the Marshall Plan) was viewed as an utter failure by the American press and pundits of all political persuaions. But it's not like anyone knows any history.

these hapless leftists spin today's headlines to fit their skewed sense of their world. the ugly details that clash with their manias are ignored. heck,
many of them probably walk into situations prepared to erase, add, obscure, and re-arrange events until they have allayed their insecurities. when
they are not ignoring history they're nervously re-writing it until they achieve the right degree of self-delusion. essentially the problem for them is
history becomes more difficult to edit the further it recedes into the past. the present is still up for grabs, or so they believe

 

[DealMonkey]

Perry Biddiscombe's book "The Last Nazis," a bit of revisionist nonsense written a few years ago attempting to trace the genealogy of Germany's recent skinhead and neo-Nazi movements.

Postwar Iraq Is No Germany, Historians Say
By Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writer

(2003-08-27) WASHINGTON--As violence continues in Iraq, Bush administration officials have increasingly compared the postwar situation there to that of Germany after World War II. In particular, they have likened the guerrilla-type attacks on U.S. forces to actions by the die-hard Nazis known as Werewolves.

"SS officers -- called Werewolves -- engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants," national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said in a speech Monday.

But historians and military analysts take issue with that comparison.

"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.

The most notorious documented Werewolf attack was the assassination of the mayor of the town of Aachen before the end of the war -- on March 25, 1945. The perpetrators were tried by U.S. authorities for the crime, Biddiscombe said.

But there was never an attack on the scale of last week's bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, in which 23 people died, including the head of the U.N. mission.

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."

It's possible, Biddiscombe said, that some isolated Werewolf cells or officers may have continued to operate for a few months after the war. Guerrilla-style attacks did take place against U.S. soldiers --wires strung across roads to decapitate soldiers or sand poured in gas tanks, for example -- and there were several suspicious deaths of U.S.-appointed mayors. In some towns, leaflets and posters threatened Germans who cooperated with the U.S. occupiers. But none of that activity can be directly attributed to the Werewolves, historians say.

"The Army put bars on jeeps to prevent decapitation by wires, but that was the only action taken by the Army," said Farrell. "There's very little evidence of the Werewolves offering effective resistance."

Moreover, historians say, the comparison between postwar Germany and postwar Iraq is questionable because of the scale of events taking place now in Iraq.

In particular, the rate of attacks against U.S. occupation forces in Germany was lower than is the case in Iraq.

There were about 1 million U.S. troops in occupied Germany -- a territory slightly smaller than Iraq -- compared with nearly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the first month or two after the Nazis' surrender, there were about the same number of sabotage and sniper attacks in Germany as in postwar Iraq. But in Germany, such attacks dropped off after June 1945, a month after the surrender, and for the rest of that year deaths of U.S. troops subsided to "tens," historians said.

"Certainly, there weren't American troops dying at the rate that they are in Iraq," Biddiscombe said.

Another difference is the alleged involvement by foreign fighters and international terrorists in the violence against U.S. forces in Iraq.

"You can't compare the Werewolves to the Baathists in Iraq, because the Werewolves would not have had any outside support," said Geoffrey Megargee, a historian with the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

In the end, historians say, the Werewolves had far more bark than bite.

"The movement was a dismal failure," Farrell said.

"The fear of them was much greater than the actions that actually took place."

Copyright (c) 2003 Los Angeles Times

Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

http://publicbroadcasting.net/wnyc/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=538738

 

[Zebo]

Did'nt that loon try and make the comparision to the civil rights stuggle recently in front of a black audiance recently too? Whatever works I guess.

 

[FluxyLady]

Originally posted by: BOBDN
Their lips are moving.

oh yeah, tell it like it is!

 

[villager]

Anybody remember the final episodes of Band of Brothers? Sitting around and drinking alcohol all day. Oh wait, Rice would have a better case comparing the German occupation to Stanford in that case.

 

[DealMonkey]

It's particular fitting that Condi & Rummy would relate post-war Iraq to post-war Germany and bring up the "Werwolf" fairy tale, considering the rest of the crappy intel they've spewed over the past year. Given the fairy tale we were told about Iraq before invading, those two will seize on any BS to support their flimsy storyline. It's like they're just flailing around looking for some truth to grasp onto. Pathetic.