WORLD HISTORY 1 -- Mr. Joyce

Members of the Hitler Youth swore to continue to fight on against the Allies approaching Germany from all sides. They called themselves, "Werewolves."

Joseph Goebbels had created the Werewolves, a desperate gamble to continue the war through guerilla warfare. It would rely on German youth that had been reared in Nazi doctrine. These young guerilla fighters, some younger than twelve, would hold out and strike at the Allies behind the lines. Author Michael Kater states "in order to inure HJ adolescents to inhuman acts, to make them complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich, and to bond them to their murderous reputation, its leaders ordered them to commit atrocities." Escaped concentration inmates were hunted and killed, Allied soldiers were sniped at, and wire was strung across roads in order to decapitate soldiers driving down German roads. Kater claims: "Werewolves, by the more narrow and technically correct definition, were small suicide commandos of boys and sometimes even girls who were dropped behind enemy lines on what was already foreign-occupied German soil, to reverse the conquest…." Werewolf commandos of the HJ were organized and trained by the SS. The most successful Werewolf attack was the assassination of the anti-nazi lord mayor of Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff. An SS man, two HJ boys, and a BDM girl parachuted into Aachen, entered the mayor's home, and shot him to death in March 1945. All were killed on their way back to Germany after stepping on land mines.


Many other young HJ members were parachuted behind enemy lines, either Russian or American, to wreak havoc. Two Hitler Youths were captured by the Americans near Brunswick, and were executed on 1 June 1945. They were sixteen and seventeen years old. The Werewolf program was ultimately a failure and never really got off the ground, due to lack of weaponry and coordination, but not because of lack of will on the part of the HJ. Many of the most fanatical HJ members were regrouping towards Berlin for the final battle.