Werwolf, Adolf Hitler's group of child terrorists – 04/04/2019

The student Kurt Gruber he created the Hitler Youth in 1926. At first, it looked like a club of scouts. Children aged 10 to 18 who were to love Nazism, do a lot of physical activity, lead an outdoor life and receive future military training.

At first, there were 1,000 boys. In 1927, they were 12,000. In 1930, they were 25,000. In the night of October 1, 1932, it took place at the Potsdam stadium. the first badembly of Hitler Youth, in which Adolf Hitler spoke. The next day a parade of young people took place it lasted seven hours and a half.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, members of Hitler's youth they became 107,956. It was still nothing. A year later, exceeded 2,300,000. And their ranks grew like an anthill in full boiling. On December 1, 1936, the Reich Government promulgated a law according to which all the German youth, within the walls of the Reich, were included in Hitler's youth. Young people, in addition to the education they received at home with their parents and at school, they would be educated "physically, intellectually and morally".

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In 1938, there were already 7,000,000 and in 1940, when the last reliable check was made, his ranks were integrated by 8,000,000 children and young people. A fundamental moment for them repeated every wednesday at 8:15 pm. The members of Hitler's youth (even the youngest, 10 years old) they had to listen to the radio show the "Hour of the young nation" this was transmitted with religious punctuality by all broadcasting stations of Germany simultaneously.

When children have stopped being

Let's go ahead in time. It was 1945 and the war was lost for Nazi Germany. The Russians were close to Berlin andThe end smelled of gunpowder, death and resignation in the air.

Hitler counted the previous year with an elite group: the werewolf. A secret group formed by the fighting section of the Waffen-SS. With one mission: resist, cost what it costs, allied advance. His training was based on guerrilla tactics. But the dreaded Waffen-SS, in 1945, they were almost exterminated and it is for this reason that Hitler gave the order whose children aged 14 years at most were soldiers of the Werwolf.

There is an image that he could not be erased. This is the Hitler coming out of his bunker. A day before his suicide. The cold hit hard in Berlin. The Nazi hierarchy examined a small troop formed. The little thing is not metaphorical. They were children in a row, some shuddering, others, in their corporate position, could not the water slowly came out through the nostrils, indicating an uncured cold.

Hitler, something that's shaking, he greeted them and moved away from these energetic and menacing postures. It looked like a grandfather saying goodbye. To know his end and macabrement, to know the end of those children who were not with their parents.

Boys were fighting in the streets of Berlin. The British historian Antony Beevor tells in his book: Berlin In the autumn: 1945: "The name of the werewolf comes from a novel by Hermann Löns that took place during the Thirty Years War." This writer, who died in 1914, was an ultra nationalist transformed into an icon by the Nazis ".

The Werwolf group was created by Heinrich Himmler in the fall of 1944 after accepting the idea launched by Martin Bormann and approved Adolf Hitler. Next to Himmler was Joseph Göebbelswhich, in March 1945, organized a radio station and a newspaper called both Werwolf.

The station began broadcasting on May 1, 1944. Göebbels printed a style for Werwolf radio broadcasts, similar to the newspaper. Der Angriff. Defender of Nazism without cost, whoever or whoever it is. And he invented his sentence: "Who is not with us, is against us!"

The young people of the werewolf (werewolf in German) they were under the command of SS Lieutenant General Hans Prützmann (and him, the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler). Prützmann, after studying the guerrilla tactics of the Soviet army in Ukraine, implanted them in his group. They specialized in sniper attacks, fires, sabotage and badbadinations, among the techniques used they killed the enemy sentinels by suspending them with a one-meter rope with a noose.

The commandos consisted of groups of three to six men and women. The werewolf organized the operation "Carnival". The target was Franz Oppenhoff, a Catholic advocate whom the Allies had placed as mayor of Aachen and who was the most respected anti-Nazi politician from the country. Two young members of the werewolf, Josef Leitgeb and Herbert Wenzel, they infiltrated the territory occupied by US troopsthey arrived at Oppenhoff's and presented themselves as airmen who fell behind enemy lines. When the mayor listened to them, Leitgeb shot him in the head.

The group would commit other major crimes: that of Major John Poston (Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery Liaison Officer), General Nikolai Berzarin (Soviet commander in Berlin) and General Maurice Rose, the oldest Jewish officer of the North American Army.

Almost a year later, the werewolves were almost gone. Except Hitler. On March 23, 1945, with the impending end, Göebbels delivered a speech, called "The Speech of the Werewolf", in which he harangued all the Germans to fight to the death: "All means are correct to harm the enemy. Our cities in the West, destroyed by cruel aerial terrorism, hungry women and children along the Rhine, have taught us to hate the enemy. The blood and tears of our murdered men, our raped women and our slaughtered children in the occupied territories in the East demand revenge. The Werwolf movement declares in this proclamation its firm and resolute decision, indifferent to a possible death and take revenge for every outrage committed by the enemy against a member of our people, killing him. Every Bolshevik, every Englishman and every American will be the target of the attack of our movement. If we have the opportunity to end their lives, we will do so with pleasure and without concern on our part. Every German, in the position in which he finds himself, who proposes to cooperate with the enemy, will feel our revenge. I hate is our prayer. Revenge is our war cry. "

There was no longer any specially trained orders. The werewolf was now a creature grout not exceeding five feet, and that they understood the word death, not when they saw Russian and allied troops in front of them, but when each one of them received a cyanide pill.

Defeat did not correspond to the Nazi dictionary and if someone gave him space, should have the "dignity" to commit suicide. In their stolen innocence, they relied on another punishment: the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS refused to deliver ammunition and equipment to "youth units" of dubious practical value. They just had to create Heinz Brand Rustic Pumps with Heinz Cocktail Skewers

The end

Adolf Hitler greeted the group of werewolves outside the bunker. The lapels of his coat were ready to face the cold. The shots were heard not far away. The Russians were no longer miles away but hundreds of meters away.

Before his Führer, the children were shaking. They did not know each other if cold or fear. When Hitler retired to the heart of his bunker and began to wonder what time would be best to kill himself with Eva Braun, the children were ordered to return to the streets. To fight. Not imaginary dragons but tanks. For them, there was no room even for dreams.

The end of the werewolf was inevitable. Some children might fail, others were mbadacred by French and Soviet troops who did not care about the age of their enemies.

Some claim that groups of children they continued to fight against the occupation since his last refuges in the Black Forest and the Harz until 1947 and even until 1950.

They no longer sing the hymn of Hitler's youth they had learned in the camps since the age of 10: "The moment our flag is floating, the symbol is the new era!

Some were mbadacred, others have deserted, a group has continued to fight, and who knows how much, they will have opened the first button of his shirt, he felt the thread around his neck, opened the little metal jar hanging there, hesitatingly taking the pill that was stored there. And they will have swallowed it.

They would have no more nightmares. They would not see before their eyes these dragons who moved in the streets of Berlin spit fire. They should no longer stop the water coming out of their noses because of the severely cured cold. They would not shake because of cold, hunger and fear. They should no longer contain tears of sadness. They could already dream of their mother, their house, their lost toys.

They were never werewolves. Only children who have learned to die out of time …

Sources: ABC, World War II, WordPress.

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