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By Root 979 0

the lines against the Western allies, failed miserably. Ten-year-old Jutta Dietze and her schoolmates in Saxony were instructed not to approach a certain local wood, because werewolves were digging in there, but when the time came and the Americans arrived, there was no resistance. It was the same across much of Germany. Helmut Lott, a fifteen-year-old junior Hitler Youth leader in Griessen, near Frankfurt, was mobilized for the Volkssturm in January. He was initially excited by the promise of a chance to fire live ammunition, and became even more so when he found that he was an instructor for his eighty-strong group, which included his own grandfather. Reality proved disappointing. They possessed only dummy fausts, a single MG42, and two machine-pistols. “For the first time, I sensed the absurdity of what we were doing.” His father, an infantry captain who was also a Nazi Party member, was taken to hospital suffering from wounds he had received in Courland. When the boy went to visit him, proud in his uniform, and described the preparations to resist the Allied armies, his father exploded: “Now I really believe the war is lost!” he said. “This is ridiculous. Stay as far away from it as you can.” The boy was deeply shocked: “I still thought we could win.” His Volkssturm unit was never mobilized, for there were no weapons to arm the men, “and I doubt whether they would have obeyed a call-up anyway.” The boy was only grateful that he and his family survived unscathed when the Americans came.

Almost the only visible success for werewolves was the assassination of the American-appointed mayor of Aachen on Palm Sunday 1945. Other isolated attempts were made: on 16 March Dr. Alfred Meyer, gauleiter of Westphalia, appealed to the local SA commander for “a few selected personnel of 17 and over . . . fanatical Nazis who will not hesitate to make the supreme sacrifice, to offer their lives. Absolute secrecy [is necessary] even to their immediate families. I expect every district leader to designate three men who fulfil the above specification. The selected men should be equipped with clothing which can stand abuse, strong shoes, one change of underwear, eating and cooking utensils, food coupons and identity cards. Heil Hitler!” There is no evidence of any response to this appeal. The guerrilla concept was alien to the German military tradition. Only a few teenagers fulfilled Berlin’s hopes. Peter Carrington of Guards Armoured once took over a farmhouse for his squadron headquarters and relegated its German occupants to the cellar. On waking next morning, “I was dismayed to look out of the window and see the German son of the house attempting to fix a charge to my jeep. I decided to commit an atrocity. I gave the family five minutes to clear out, told my sergeant-major to pour ten gallons of petrol on the house, and put a match to it.” Carrington, epitome of English aristocratic good nature, recalled bathetically, but without evident regret: “The fire went out.”

As the German armies fell back mile by mile and day by day, one of Captain Karl Godau’s gunners in 10th SS Panzer, a gloomy Westphalian, observed: “I’m going to end up defending the rabbit hutch at the end of my garden.” A relative of Heinrich Himmler serving at a corps headquarters in the west continued to proclaim noisily: “Those who weaken must be broken!” But his commander eventually found these protestations intolerable, and had the officer transferred. During the last months, even in a crack regiment such as the Grossdeutschland, morale became perilously fragile. Lieutenant Tony Saurma’s loader jumped down from their tank during an action, supposedly to clear their gun. Once on the ground, he mysteriously disappeared. The crew heard a Russian propaganda loudspeaker urging seductively: “Come this way, comrade—this way to freedom.” Saurma assumed that the loader had seized the opportunity to desert. His troop sergeant, a Mecklenburger, often teased him: “Aren’t you afraid of dying?” Saurma said afterwards: “When a soldier had time to think, he began to brood about home,