Beginning early in 1945, national radio broadcasts urged German civilians to join the Werewolf movement, fighting the Allies and any German collaborators who welcomed the enemy into their homes. The second attempt at recruiting “werewolves” came from Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels-and this time it was more successful.

But that plan failed, in part because of confusion over where the group’s orders came from within the chaotic Nazi bureaucracy, and also because the military’s supplies were dwindling. “The original strategy in 1944-5 was not to win the war by guerrilla operations, but merely to stem the tide, delaying the enemy long enough to allow for a political settlement favorable to Germany,” writes historian Perry Biddiscombe in Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-46. Skorzeny had already proved the value of such a specialized strike in 1943, when he successfully led a small group of commandoes to rescue Benito Mussolini from a prison in Italy. It was an image Hitler harnessed repeatedly, from the name of one of his Eastern front headquarters-the Wolf’s Lair-to the implementation of “Operation Werewolf,” an October 1944 plan for Nazi SS lieutenants Adolf Prützmann and Otto Skorzeny to infiltrate Allied camps and sabotage supply lines with a paramilitary group. “They represented German strength and purity against interlopers.” “According to some 19th and early 20th century German folklorists, werewolves represented flawed, but well-meaning characters who may be bestial but are tied to the woods, the blood, the soil,” Kurlander says. Among those mythological fascinations were werewolves. High-level Nazis researched everything from the Holy Grail to witchcraft, as historian Eric Kurlander describes in his book, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Though neither achieved any monumental gains, both proved the effectiveness of propaganda in sowing terror and demoralizing occupying soldiers.įrom the start of the war, Hitler pulled from Germanic folklore and occult legends to supplement Nazi pageantry.

Out of desperation, they turned to the supernatural for inspiration, creating two separate lupine movements: one, an official group of paramilitary soldiers the other, an ad hoc ensemble of partisan fighters.

In the final months of World War II, as the Allied troops pushed deeper into Nazi Germany and the Soviet Red Army pinned the German military on the Eastern front, Hitler and his most senior officials looked to any last resort to keep their ideology alive. To him, the mark referred to the Werewolves, German guerrilla fighters prepared “to strike down the isolated soldier in his jeep, the MP on patrol, the fool who goes a-courting after dark, the Yankee braggart who takes a back road.” “Most members of the Counter Intelligence Corps were of the opinion that it was merely a hastily drawn swastika,” Manuel wrote in a memoir. American intelligence officer Frank Manuel started seeing the symbol near the end of World War II, etched across white walls in the Franconia region of Germany: a straight vertical line intersected by a horizontal line with a hook on the end.

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