Prague - liberated from werewolves? by who...

jonniebgood1

I recently read an interesting account of commemoration events regarding the liberation of Prague at the end of WWII, ableit a newspaper article from almost 6 years ago.

By Stephen Weeks
For The Prague Post
May 19, 2005


"Good progress, this year" said a colleague at Czech TV who had been monitoring the Czech press and TV coverage of the V-E Day celebrations — also 60 years after the fall of Nazi Prague — for references to the Russian Liberation Army, the ROA, aka "Vlasov's army" after its leader, the renegade former Soviet general whose troops turned on their Nazi sponsors and made possible the liberation of Prague without the massive bloodbath and destruction that would have undoubtedly happened otherwise.


Vlasov was a controversial figure and his army a dangerous political tightrope-walking act. His role in May 1945 got a few mentions this year — the first time ever, but not one paper had the courage to print the full unvarnished story, suppressed by the communists and thus virtually unknown in the West too. The communist way of maintaining a secret was simply to eradicate it. People disappeared from photographs and historical facts were simply rewritten. If one looks at the current Web site of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, for example, not only are Vlasov and the ROA not mentioned, but neither are the Americans. ... Czechoslovakia was liberated solely by the Red Army.


Now the actual Soviet contribution to liberating the country is being rewritten, too. Two weeks ago Prague was awash with reenactments that paraded U.S. jeeps and the Stars and Stripes. It was a case of retrospective wishful thinking. Apart from a handful of sorties by U.S. reconnaissance personnel and chancers, the U.S. Army remained firmly behind their demarcation line at Plzeň 60 years ago.


Historians maintain that it was not part of the deal struck with Stalin at the Yalta conference earlier in 1945 for the other allies to let the Soviets take Prague — that instead it was Eisenhower's decision alone for separate political considerations. But then other facts have mysteriously disappeared into history's greedy quicksand: Why did Churchill stop the airdrop of arms to the Prague insurgents just two days before the uprising was due to start? British transport planes were already loaded at Bari in Italy for the job.


This cannot have had anything to do with letting Stalin take Prague — unless Stalin had admitted that he wanted a Prague where all the finest patriots (who might later object to totalitarianism) had been killed in a Nazi shootout. Stalin had performed this trick already by waiting outside Warsaw and later in Slovakia. Churchill's voluminous memoirs are silent on this. He must have known the likely consequences of starving the uprising of its means of fighting. His reputation would in the end be unsullied due to the timely arrival of the unlikely figure of General A. A. Vlasov.


The Churchill memoirs are also pretty quiet on the matter of the British loading the 25,000 men of Vlasov's 2nd Division onto rail wagons at Judenberg in Austria, knowing that these men would be murdered by the Soviets. (The excuse was that Yalta demanded the repatriation of all citizens to their home countries. Never mind that Stalin had earlier stripped all ROA members of their Soviet citizenship!)


At several of the key Prague celebrations over V-E Day this year, not only did Vlasov and the ROA not get a mention — but neither did the Soviets. Can we expect a Hollywood movie soon about the Americans (led by Tom Cruise) liberating Prague? After all, in a recent U.S. movie the British navy's important capture of the Enigma coding machine from a sinking U-boat was simply turned into an American exploit that just happened to have changed the course of the war — as well as warping history. How are young people supposed to deal with this distortion of the facts when they don't know the truth first?


Another way of rewriting history is to acknowledge yet belittle events. This May we have heard from a Czech historian that indeed the ROA existed but its contribution to the Liberation didn't add up to much — that statement in face of the facts that the Prague insurgents numbered about 30,000 badly or even unarmed (thanks to whatever demon was driving Churchill) men and women. Vlasov's ROA had 22,000 well-trained, fully armed and equipped men with armor and artillery and under excellent tactical leadership. But even if some historians reluctantly accept this truth, Vlasov's men are then condemned as "traitors" — the old communist word for them. The modern word for these anti-Soviet activists — who succeeded in bluffing the Nazis as well as readying themselves to fight communism — is dissidents ... far more history-friendly.


The commemorations took place at Olšanská Cemetery this year May 7 at the national military memorials — those of the British and Americans, the Soviet Russians, the Romanians. The bands, the stiffly marching wreath-bearers and the grateful passed in sight of the only memorial to the ROA but did not stop there — choosing to ignore it. Still the ROA does not exist. Under two wooden Russian crosses, right by the orthodox chapel, lie at least 184 of Vlasov's men — buried secretly by well-wishers in May 1945. A memorial stone was erected in recent years bearing the insignia of the ROA — the blue and white cross. It also lists two of its generals buried there who had been killed surprisingly enough by Czech partisans, already firmly under communist influence before the end of the uprising. Even the very first editions (May 9, 1945) of the Czech newspapers Mladá fronta and Rudé Pravo, printed on presses captured the day before from their German predecessors on the very day of the arrival of the Red Army, make absolutely no mention of Vlasov and the ROA. The fiction thus started before the bodies of Vlasov's men were even cold.


By diverting their course to liberate Prague, almost all the 22,000 soldiers of the ROA's 1st Division were to lose their lives. Those injured in the battle who had been left behind in Prague at the U Apolináře Hospital in the care of the International Red Cross were shot in their beds by Soviet troops. Those who managed to get to the American zone found the demarcation line mysteriously moved — and, unarmed, they were left to be dealt with by Stalin's murderous wrath.


Rewriting history goes on and on. It will never end. On May 9 this year President Putin claimed the Soviets had won the war as it had captured "80 percent of the German army." Eighty percent? Does that mean that only 20 percent fought across France, Belgium and Holland and defended Germany's western front? And what about those troops in Italy and Greece? But if you take the Wehrmacht as it existed at ceasefire in 1945, there were only those remnants defending Berlin and the odd pocket of diehards in Bohemia. Perhaps he means 80 percent of that? One can, of course, make facts fit whatever scenario one needs.


And if rewriting won't work, you can keep history down by punishing anyone disseminating the truth. Several weeks ago Turkey (soon to be an EU partner?!) strengthened its law governing "acts against fundamental national interests" to give jail sentences to anyone, not just Turks, who describe the 1915 mass execution of Ottoman Armenians as genocide. So if go for a holiday in Turkey and repeat that term, your stay may be longer than you expect.


As for Vlasov and his men, there is no official memorial, only the graves at Olšanská. There's no veterans' parade, there are no plaques and no wreaths in the streets where they fell. Around Beroun however, where the army was first encamped, they are still remembered. A gray-haired woman remembers — as a little toddler — being bounced on the knee of the young Russian soldier billeted in her family's house. Now he — and the rest of his lost army — is simply one of history's ghosts.

I think it would be interesting to look into the end of the war in Prague as it seems to have escaped the ruination that other cities suffered. It was also a centre for the proposed formations of 'werewolf' groups of diehard SD. I want to find out more about that having recently read of an SD officer who was in Prague at the end of the war.
Any input welcome from all perspectives to inform on this subject.

Morlar

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Any input welcome from all perspectives to inform on this subject.

For reference here is the link to the article you posted above:

http://mitchtemppiece.blogspot.com/2008/09/rewriting-history.html

(If this is the incorrect link feel free to correct it)


One aspect of the Czech liberation which is often overlooked is mentioned here :

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,698060,00.html

Spiegel Online International

Massacre in Czechoslovakia
Newly Discovered Film Shows Post-War Executions
By Jan Puhl
06/02/2010




It has long been known that German civilians fell victim to Czech excesses immediately following the Nazi surrender at the end of World War II. But a newly discovered video shows one such massacre in brutal detail. And it has come as a shock to the Czech Republic.

For decades, the images lay forgotten in an aluminum canister -- almost seven minutes of original black and white film, shot with an 8 mm camera on May 10, 1945, in the Prague district of Borislavka during the confusing days of the German surrender.


The man who shot the film was Jirí Chmelnicek, a civil engineer and amateur filmmaker who lived in the Borislavka district and wanted to document the city's liberation from the brutal Nazi occupation. Chmelnicek filmed tanks rolling through the streets, soldiers and refugees. Then, at some point, his camera also caught groups of Germans, who had been driven out of their houses and into Kladenska Street by Red Army soldiers and Czech militiamen.

Chmelnicek's film shows how the Germans were rounded up in a nearby movie theater, also called the Borislavka. The camera then pans to the side of the street, where 40 men and at least one woman stand with their backs to the lens. A meadow can be seen in the background. Shots ring out and, one after another, each person in the line slumps and falls forward over a low embankment. The injured lying on the ground beg for mercy. Then a Red Army truck rolls up, its tires crushing dead and wounded alike. Later other Germans can be seen, forced to dig a mass grave in the meadow.

A Shock to Czechs

The shaky images show an event that has been described again and again by eyewitnesses and historians: the systematic killing of German civilians. Yet the film comes as a shock to Czechs. "Until now, there was no footage whatsoever of such executions," says Czech documentary filmmaker David Vondracek, who showed the historical images on television. "When I watched this for the first time, it was like seeing a live broadcast from the past."

The only such images known before were taken by a US Air Force camera team. That footage showed injured Germans lying on the ground in Plzen, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in early May 1945. The images included some dead bodies, but they didn't show a liquidation, from beginning to end, like this one.

Vondracek's documentary about Czech atrocities, called "Killings, Czech Style," aired during primetime on Czech state television just two days before May 8, the anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender. The broadcast marks yet another milestone on the Czech road toward confronting a not-always-comfortable World War II past -- a path the country has been working its way down for years.

Even organizations representing "Sudeten Germans" -- ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovak territory after the war -- took notice. Horst Seehofer, governor of Bavaria, plans to pay an official visit to Prague soon, making him the first holder of his office to do so since World War II. "A great deal has come into the open where the Sudeten Germans are concerned," Seehofer commented recently.

Victim to Acts of Revenge

Following Nazi Germany's defeat, the Czechs and the Red Army expelled around 3 million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia. In the process, up to 30,000 civilians fell victim to acts of revenge. Only a small minority of them had been Nazi perpetrators. Germans and Czechs had lived side by side for decades before Hitler's 1938 annexation of Bohemia and Moravia, the two regions that make up the majority of the Czech Republic today.

No one knows who singled out the Germans in Borislavka, nor what crimes they were accused of committing. They were most likely killed by Red Army soldiers, perhaps also by "Revolutionary Guards" -- members of Czech militias. Those firing the shots may also have included former Czech collaborators, who had previously worked with the Germans and who wanted to clear their names with a show of anti-German brutality.

Helena Dvoracková, amateur filmmaker Jirí Chmelnicek's daughter, was one of the first to see the images of these executions. She doesn't remember how old she was when her father set up his projection screen and ran the film. "I don't remember either whether he said anything about it -- and really, there wasn't much to be said," she says.

'Under the Meadow'

Her father kept the film hidden at home for decades. Communist police even came calling -- someone had figured out that the footage existed. The police asked about the film and threatened Chmelnicek. But the filmmaker didn't turn over his reel. He wanted the world eventually to learn what had been done to defenseless people that day in May in Borislavka.


Ten years ago, long after her father's death, Helena Dvoracková offered the historical footage to a well-known Czech television historian, but the historian kept the film under wraps. "People will stone me to death if I show this," he supposedly said, and placed the reel in the state television station's archives. Documentary maker Vondracek found it there, after a cameraman who knew the amateur filmmaker's family told him about it.

Today Borislavka is one of Prague's nicer districts, and tall grass has grown over the meadow where the executions took place. Vondracek now wants to start a search for the Germans' mass grave. "It must be somewhere under the meadow," he says.

Likely not all that far away from a memorial plaque for two Czechs who fell in the battle against the Nazis on May 6, 1945.

Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein

See original link for photographs from the video footage, the video footage itself is also available on the web but you might need a strong stomach for it.

Morlar

There is some more information on the so-called 'werewolf' reports here :

http://books.google.ie/books?id=oGmTs2SceAgC

Redrawing nations: ethnic cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948
By Philipp Ther, Ana Siljak

Morlar

http://books.google.ie/books?id=oGmTs2SceAgC[/url]

Redrawing nations: ethnic cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948
By Philipp Ther, Ana Siljak

contd.

FiSe

Vlasov's army POA - or the Russian Liberation Army - is not forgotten, maybe officialy, but there are people and books who do talk about their contribution to the Prague uprising and their post war faith.
The remark about 'that mysteriously' moved demarcation line is out of context as the demarcation line in the south of Bohemia was closed to any German soldier, I think on the 9th at 12 noon - stand to correction here.
There is well known footage of German soldiers arriving into German captivity and between them are Vlasov's men flying the Russian Czarist flag on their vehicles.

Anyway the story goes that POA crowd turned their back to the Germans after some negotiations with the leaders of the Prague uprising, but turned back on the German side after heavy fighting and after it was obvious that communists will have large part in the post war Czechoslovakia and that their faith might not be as they've agreed on.
They didn't escape at the end.

And there red Army re-enactors in CZ as well as WH/SS/LW, US and British Army. Truth is that the organizers of whichever event could be a bit funny about who they will invite to the celebrations - maybe the French with their D-Day celebrations are standing as an example?


I never was quite sure what the term of werewolves refers to /could be wrong, but althoug the idea of Nazi guerrilas was there, the mass organization of those groups never happened/. Could this term be a name used for all those armed gangs, thieves and treasure hunters during the immediate post war period?

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

There is some more information on the so-called 'werewolf' reports here :

http://books.google.ie/books?id=oGmTs2SceAgC
[/IMG]

I read interesting references to the attempts to set up a werwolf group (it also called it a "ri-net") in the book- The Perfect Nazi by Martin Davidson about his Grandad, Bruno Langbehn(interesting book with alot of information on the build up of the Nazi state before the war). Langbehn was an SD officer in the radio section of the SD Prague division. He was mentioned in post war interrogations of a Gestapo officer in regard of preparations to provide radio communications for a proposed Werwolf unit that would act as partisans when the allies overran the area around Prague. Despite the preparations the unit never materialised as the chief organisers disappeared into hiding when the Russians got near to the city. The subject of the book escaped capture as he had not got the usual SD tattoo.

jonniebgood1

After the war the Soviets seem to have used the existance of the Werwolf division as a reason for heavier persecution of the remaining German population. They used the Usti Massacre as a reason to expel Germans from Czechoslovakia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Ast%C3%AD_massacre

More detailed information about the Werwolf is here in a PDF. It is just an essay but seems well referenced and has alot of interesting werwolf stuff particularly pages 304-306 cl.ff.cuni.cz/system/elekniho/outpt.php?ID=CL0&id=1060

Czech writers and, indeed, historians even of the highest
calibre, assume that such an organization of lone or small-group SS or Nazis fi ghting in
the forests after Germany’s unconditional surrender were extensively active in Bohemia and
Moravia. No one doubts that such desperate lone fi ghters or groups of fi ghters did exist, often
men attempting to fi ght their way home or to presumed sanctuary in western Germany, that
arms caches were found and that some murders behind the Allied lines were committed by
‘Werwölfe’ (for example, the murder of the lord-mayor of Aix-la-Chapelle), but that such an
organization was effectively fi ghting in Bohemia and Moravia is not supported by any
evidence.

Morlar

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

After the war the Soviets seem to have used the existance of the Werwolf division as a reason for heavier persecution of the remaining German population. They used the Usti Massacre as a reason to expel Germans from Czechoslovakia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Ast%C3%AD_massacre

I don't see any proof of the exsistence of a werwolf division whatsoever. What do you offer to substantiate that claim that there exsisted a werwolf division ? You mean exsisted on paper or in reality ? How many men were in this werwolf division you refer to ? Can you list off the actions they were proven to have been responsible for ?

Here is some of that wiki page you just linked :

Cause and Conflict

On July 31, at 15:30, an ammunition dump in the part of the city called Krásné Březno exploded. The death toll was 26 or 27 people (7 of them Czechs), dozens were injured.

Immediately after the explosion, a massacre of ethnic Germans, who had to wear white armbands after the war and so were easy to identify, began in four places in the city. They were beaten and bayonetted, shot or drowned in a fire pond. On the Elbe bridge, a German, Georg Schörghuber, shouted something provocative and was thrown into the river by the crowd, and shot by soldiers when he was trying to swim out. Soon other people, including a woman with a baby and pram, were thrown into the water and later shot at. The perpetrators were the Revolutionary Guards (a post-war paramilitary group), Czech and Soviet soldiers, and a group of unknown Czechs who had recently arrived from elsewhere. Local Czechs, including the mayor, Josef Vondra, tried to help the victims. Finally, a state of emergency and a curfew were declared, and by 18:25, streets had been cleared by the army.
[edit]

Count of Victims

The estimated number of victims is 80-2700, with 43 being accounted for specifically: 24 bodies gathered in the city were burned in the crematorium of the former concentration camp in Terezín on 1 August; a list was made of the 17 missing clerks from the Schicht factory, who were returning from work by way of the bridge at the time of the explosion; and two are mentioned in other sources. In Germany, several dozen bodies were recovered from the Elbe in the following days, however these could have come from elsewhere. The Sudeten Germans give much higher numbers, up to 2700.
[edit]

Subsequent Effects

The next day, 1 August, the government of Czechoslovakia established an investigation commission led by General Ludvík Svoboda. The commission was not able to discover the reason for the explosion but blamed it on the Werewolves (German saboteurs).

The explosion and subsequent massacre were used as a pretext by advocates of the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia. During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia (1948-89) details of the event were suppressed, to the point of it being almost unknown to most Czechs.
[edit]

Suspected Communist Involvement

After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, city archivist Vladimír Kaiser started to investigate the event, most recently publishing the results together with Jan Havel, another Ústí citizen, and German historian Otfrid Pustejovsky as Stalo se v Ústí nad Labem 31. července 1945 (Ústí nad Labem 2005, ISBN 80-86646-11-4; German translation Ein Nachkriegs-Verbrechen: Aussig 31. Juli 1945; ISBN 80-86067-70-X). While only indirect evidence survived, they conclude that the explosion and massacre were prepared by Communists within the Czechoslovak secret services, specifically Bedřich Pokorný, leader of Ministry of Interior's Defensive Intelligence (Obranné zpravodajství) department who earlier organised the Brno death march, in order to support the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by presenting to the Potsdam Conference an argument that further cohabitation of Germans with Czechs was impossible. (Kaiser's 2000 hypothesis that the motive was the Western powers' interest in destroying the new Daimler-Benz DB 605 airplane engines also stored in the dump was found far-fetched and untenable.)

Considering an estimated 12,000,000 ethnic Germans were displaced (or 'ethnically cleansed' depending on how you want to phrase it) by the soviets & partners in crime at wars end, and considering also that 3,000,000 ethnic German civilians were estimated to be 'missing' considering this volume of human tragedy I think it's likely that even without the usti explosion as an excuse (not a reason but an excuse) the Germans would have been ethnically cleansed regardless of whether or not they were blamed for that or some other event.

What was done to the ethnic germans was not incidental to inexplicable local events such as a suspicious explosion. It was systematic. 12,000,000 displaced persons is not a statistic that is compatible with it somehow being an incidental series of local events like suspicious explosions. Neither is 3,000,000 'missing' ethnic Germans compatible with that.

As an aside there was an article recently about the ethnic germans and plans to commemorate them, apparently jewish leaders objected to a plan in the German parliament to comemorate the 12 million ethnic germans displaced. The jewish telegraph page no longer seems to work :

http://jta.org/news/article/2011/02/17/2743020/jewish-leaders-condemn-memorial-day-for-expelled-germans

but the story was also picked up by the india news wire:

http://1click.indiatimes.com/article/0fuw8Cx4p16Zw?q=Berlin
& also some random newsgroup repeat it here:
http://groups.google.com/group/can.politics/browse_thread/thread/216e1a6f7ba303db/bb5fd44caa261522?lnk=raot

Jewish leaders condemn memorial day for expelled Germans

(JTA) -- A proposed national day of remembrance for the 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II is being condemned by Jewish leaders and political groups in Germany. The proposal was to be heard in parliament Thursday. ...

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

More detailed information about the Werwolf is here in a PDF. It is just an essay but seems well referenced and has alot of interesting werwolf stuff particularly pages 304-306 cl.ff.cuni.cz/system/elekniho/outpt.php?ID=CL0&id=1060

I read through those pages. In my view a reasonable summary of what was contained within those pages would be 'there was no werwolf division whatsoever'.

A friend of mine, his grandfather fought the Germans, then when they went he fought the Soviets into the 1950's in estonia. Bands of partisans fought soviet occupation into the 1950's in pockets of East Europe. The fact that random people were getting shot from time to time, here and there during soviet occupation (especially just after war's end) can not be taken as proof of german combatants being deliberately left behind the lines as saboteurs. So far the proof of actual large scale orchestrated 'werewolf' activity is either non exsistent (in any kind of a significant or meaningful way) or minimal at best.

Morlar

That web page now works :

http://jta.org/news/article/2011/02/17/2743020/jewish-leaders-condemn-memorial-day-for-expelled-germans

Jewish leaders slam memorial day for expelled Germans

February 17, 2011

BERLIN (JTA) -- Jewish leaders and political groups in Germany condemned a proposed national day of remembrance for the 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II.

The proposal was to be heard in parliament Thursday.

Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told reporters that "One could almost call [the proposal] a kind of retaliation" against remembrance of the victims of German war crimes.

The governing political coalition parties -- the conservative Christian Democratic Union, its sister party the Christian Social Union, and the center-right Free Democratic Party -- proposed the annual memorial day for Aug. 5. On that day in 1950, the association of Germans from the annexed regions signed a Charter of German Expellees in which they "renounce revenge and retaliation."

According to news reports, the parties argued that the memorial day would not dissociate the expulsion of ethnic Germans from German responsibility for the war and for war crimes, but they said it was time that the stigmatization in Germany of expellees and their descendants come to an end.

Opposition political leaders and a group of historians have condemned the proposal as revisionist and avoiding German guilt.

Kramer said such a memorial day could have a "catastrophic effect" on Germany's image abroad.

The president of the League of German Expellees, Erika Steinbach, told Deutsche Welle that the 1950 charter was about the expellees "overcoming their own justified resentment to say that they wanted to look forward and bring about a peaceful coexistence in Europe."

She said she expected "the sympathy of the German state ... for the particular fate of a substantial part of the German people."

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, called the proposal "a disgraceful distortion of history and
an abuse of truth and memory."

"In reality, ethnic Germans who colonized Eastern Europe during World War II were the unbridled instruments of the brutal Nazi plans for the conquest and plunder of Europe. They served as agents of an evil design," Steinberg said in a statement.

"To link their commemoration to the 1950 Charter of Expellees, which expresses no contrition for the victims of the Nazis, mocks the memory of all who were brutalized by the Hitler regime, Jew and non-Jew," he said.

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

I don't see any proof of the exsistence of a werwolf division whatsoever. What do you offer to substantiate that claim that there exsisted a werwolf division ? You mean exsisted on paper or in reality ? How many men were in this werwolf division you refer to ? Can you list off the actions they were proven to have been responsible for ?
.

The book I referenced showed evidence of attempts to set up communications for a werwolf group. The subject of the book was an SD officer and although he was involved in preparations for this, it never materialised.

Despite the preparations the unit never materialised as the chief organisers disappeared into hiding when the Russians got near to the city.

The second reference I made was

the Soviets seem to have used the existance of the Werwolf division as a reason for heavier persecution of the remaining German population

. This is detailed in the link I gave. It does not mean they physically had a division. It means that the Soviets used the aura around the possiblity of its existance as a reason to expel Germans. The idea of the Werwolf division was promoted in the last stages of the war by German propaganda, with the idea that it would operate behind allied lines when the time came. My understanding so far is that the Soviets used the fear that this had created in the civilian population to garner anti-German support in Prague and Czechoslovakia. The example used for this is the usti massacre.

What was done to the ethnic germans was not incidental to inexplicable local events such as a suspicious explosion. It was systematic. 12,000,000 displaced persons is not a statistic that is compatible with it somehow being an incidental series of local events like suspicious explosions. Neither is 3,000,000 'missing' ethnic Germans compatible with that.

As an aside there was an article recently about the ethnic germans and plans to commemorate them, apparently jewish leaders objected to a plan in the German parliament to comemorate the 12 million ethnic germans displaced. The jewish telegraph page no longer seems to work :

http://jta.org/news/article/2011/02/...pelled-germans

but the story was also picked up by the india news wire:

http://1click.indiatimes.com/article...p16Zw?q=Berlin
& also some random newsgroup repeat it here:
http://groups.google.com/group/can.p...61522?lnk=raot
.

I can't imagine that objections such as those in these reports are representative of a majority of people, rather a begrudging minority although I'm open to education on this. The reaction of the Czech people is interesting as they had not opposed the Nazi invader as much as some countries had. It was seen as one of the safer postings for SD officers in 1944/45.

Morlar wrote: »

I read through those pages. In my view a reasonable summary of what was contained within those pages would be 'there was no werwolf division whatsoever'.

A friend of mine, his grandfather fought the Germans, then when they went he fought the Soviets into the 1950's in estonia. Bands of partisans fought soviet occupation into the 1950's in pockets of East Europe. The fact that random people were getting shot from time to time, here and there during soviet occupation (especially just after war's end) can not be taken as proof of german combatants being deliberately left behind the lines as saboteurs. So far the proof of actual large scale orchestrated 'werewolf' activity is either non exsistent (in any kind of a significant or meaningful way) or minimal at best. .

Agree (a unique position for your post and my reply).
Considering however that any mention of Werwolf from 1945 to 1990 would have probably been punishable, it is hard to be definitive. While there was no largescale activity, it is possible and probable that some hardcore sections of Nazi hierarchy may have operated after the war, maybe even as they tried to flee into hiding.

BlaasForRafa

Morlar wrote: »

A friend of mine, his grandfather fought the Germans, then when they went he fought the Soviets into the 1950's in estonia. Bands of partisans fought soviet occupation into the 1950's in pockets of East Europe. The fact that random people were getting shot from time to time, here and there during soviet occupation (especially just after war's end) can not be taken as proof of german combatants being deliberately left behind the lines as saboteurs. So far the proof of actual large scale orchestrated 'werewolf' activity is either non exsistent (in any kind of a significant or meaningful way) or minimal at best.

Are you referring to the Forest Brothers? iirc 99% of them were native latvian/estonia/lithuanians.

jonniebgood1

Operation Carnival was the assasination of the Mayor of liberated Aachen by a 'werewolf commando' unit in March 1945. Hans Adolf Prutzmann, who had seen the activities of Russian partisans behind German lines in Latvia was in charge of training the Werewolf units. He planned this operation at Himmlers request.


Fuller info @ http://books.google.ie/books?id=5U5kXjVq6p0C&pg=PA244&dq=operation+carnival&hl=en&ei=3qxzTYfPGI-0hAed84ww&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=.&f=false

ejmaztec

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

The reaction of the Czech people is interesting as they had not opposed the Nazi invader as much as some countries had. It was seen as one of the safer postings for SD officers in 1944/45.

We've heard about the French, Belgian and Dutch resistance etc., ad nauseum, but the Czech resistance was also in business, carrying out acts of sabotage in the same way as the underground armies in other occupied countries.

Here's a piece from an interesting article that doesn't do much for Czech-Austro-German relations.

http://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/czech-wwii-resistance-fighters-remains-may-still-be-in-use-at-german-medical-faculties

Czech WWII resistance fighters' remains may still be in use at German medical facilities

23-11-2005 14:48 | Brian Kenety


The corpses of some of Czechoslovakia's most celebrated war heroes may be serving as models in anatomy classes in Germany and Austria to this day. Thousands of political prisoners were murdered at the Ploetzensee detention and execution centre outside Berlin during WWII. Among them were nearly seven hundred Czech and Slovak resistance fighters, whose bodies were immediately sent on to medical universities and institutions within the Third Reich.