WWII Allies feared Nazi Guerrilla Campaign In Alps ..

WWII Allies feared Nazi Guerrilla Campaign In Alps : NewsTime : World News

Allied forces feared the Nazis were planning to fight a guerrilla campaign from a base under the Alps as the tide turned against Germany in World War II, archives released Thursday showed.

The British Foreign Office documents show that the Allies believed that stocks which were being built up as part of the "national redoubt" would have allowed 60,000 men to hold out for two years in the mountains around Salzburg.

 

It's amazing isn't it. A whole facade was set about with the "Alpine Redoubt" and the "Werwolfs", but in reality they were not to be.

The loyal S.S had already made up their mind Germany was finished, and there was no way they (being the only "loyal" ones left) would have fought a defensive war there.

Although maybe if Hitler himself was there and still fighting some might have...

 

'Two-year last stand' in Hitler stronghold - Scotsman.com News

 

Pick up Charles Whiting's book on the the Werwolves and the Mayor of Aachen murder. It's actually a better study of the Alpine Redoubt Myth than it is of the Werwolves!

 

I saw a program on TV recently that purported that a fair bit of what we would call today 'terrorist' attacks took place in Germany for the first year after the war. Alledgedly some rough justice was metered out to bring it to an end.

 

Belasar, using the term "terrorist" to excuse/cover/diminish Werwolf activity ended in 1948; one Otto Kubus carried out a number of high-fatality bombing attacks, but was quickly turned in and put on trial in hamburg, at which point he claimed he was a Werwolf. Up until then there was still Werwolf activity, but declining fast after 1946...by 1948 however, there was simply no sympathy for it among Germans as a whole any more, hence his being turned in.

Using the term "terrosist" to diminish the publicity and reputation afforded the Werwolves was quite a smart tactic...and a complete turnround of what happened BEFORE the end of the war Up until May 7th 1945 there are plenty of anecdotes in the West about large, sometimes company-strength units of "werwolves" operating with regular Wehrmacht units in and around the Allied front line...which should rather have been referred to as Volksturm!

 

I am only repeating the tone of the program, in some ways it seemed merely criminal, rather than political.

 

Werwolf, a fine thing for the Nazis if it had ever worked. After the war the germans had no sense for this weird thoughts of the former leaders. And why should the allies fear a handfull of those idiots?

 

I have serious doubts that they could have conducted anything but the smallest of operations following the formal surrender. What with the number of men available to the allies, and a probable attitude that they would gladly kill anyone that continued the war, I believe their prospects of any formal resistance of any scale would have been quickly erradicated. It wasn't like the wars we see now, in that they would have been relatively confined and outnumbered on scale almost unimaginable. I don't think even caves or mines would have helped, as we could have used low level firebomb/napalm high volume raids to saturate any area they were found in, and simply have suffocated them. Maybe simplistic, but it sure did away with a lot of folks late in the war in Germany and Japan.

 

While all that is true...the Allies had to also plan to cope with a widespread resistance sheltered by/supported by the general populace. NOT to do so would have been stupid...if it had then appeared and decimated the occupation forces.

I've always wondered to what degree the near-famine in Germany (and of course other European countries) in 1945-6 did to stifle Resistance - A/ it made far more people dependent on jobs with/ rations from the Occupation forces, and B/ made a lot more Germans simply concentrate on where their next meal was coming from rather than anything more nefarious

But on the other hand - it's ALSO worth remembering that some "underground armies" lasted anything up to a decade behind the Iron Curtain....and I'd say the Red Army was JUST as brutal as you describe about suppressing them - probably far more so

 

This will sound simplistic to some, but I suspect the reason there were few 'werewolf' groups active in occupied Germany came down to the simple fact that they were ordered to surrender. Their habit of following orders, however hard or unpleasant, worked in the allied favor this time. Of course, it didn't hurt that by May '45 this was an order they would be happy to obey.

 

My statements were based on the assumption that they were a fairly large force, which would have required a large support base, even if decentralized, and would have to have been fixed points, and thus highly vulnerable. The statements I've always read implied they would be confined to the 'redoubt' area, which also made them vulneralbe by localizing themselves. I also was implying that The Russians would have been in this up to their necks, and they sure as hell would have stopped at nothing to get at the worst of the worst! I think even if the area was in the non Russian zones of occupation we would probably have welcomed their help in such a situation.

I think belasar's statement is very true, and no one but a fool could possibly think there was any result other than being killed if he took part in such an operation.

 

In actual fact, what did appear as "werwolf" activities were often wrongly categorised as such - attemps to bust loved ones out of POW cages, get food to them etc. where there were armed, identifiable "resistance" activities, it was clear there was SOME degree of forethought - as they had access to secreted arms caches for some time...tho' with the amount of small arms laying abandoned round Europe at any given time after the front line rolled over and passed any given spot it would be hard to find out even then if these were deliberately-left caches

The Allies feared TWO types of Resistance activity - the Alpine Redoubt...and the murder activities of the "Werwolves" Don't forget how long BEFORE the end of the war the assasination of the Mayor of Aachen occured So the Allies in the West already BEFORE the end of the war had some idea of how the Werwolves would intend to operate - "infiltration, action, exfiltration"....rather than embedded in the civilian population, as it turned out happened to a very limited degree afer VE Day.

As WE know, the Alpine Redoubt turned out to be a figment of their imagination or wilful intelligence analysis, but there's one thing you HAVE to remember...

The role that such an Alpine Redoubt had in guaranteeing Switzerland's survival during WWII There - an "Alpine Redoubt"....planned, occupied and working....was half of the Swiss strategy of Dissuasion I.E. making Switzeroand TOO expensive to invade and occupy against the value that an independent Switzerland was to Germany. Switzerland and it's Alpine Redoubt occupying half the country wasn't some backwater in WWII - it was home to some HUGE Allied intelligence missions, including Allen Dulles' major OSS mission in Berne. Exactly how successful an Alpine Redoubt could be even without fighting was in the forefront of Allied intelligence awareness