Condi's Phony History...
Marian
history lesson~Condi's Phony History
Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq.~ By Daniel Benjamin
August 29, 2003~Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/
As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number,
the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our
strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will,"
President Bush told an American Legion convention.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what
former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation
pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's
experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the
Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some of you
here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945
through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately
stable or prosperous. SS officers—called 'werewolves'—engaged in sabotage
and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with
them—much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."
Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld noted,
One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi
regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who
cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the
American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be
liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and
leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted
sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations
and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that
were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?
Well, no, it doesn't. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of
Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts.
Werwolf tales have been a favorite of schlock novels, but the reality bore no
resemblance to Iraq today. As Antony Beevor observes in The Fall of Berlin
1945, the Nazis began creating Werwolf as a resistance organization in
September 1944. "In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins
of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured
British time pencils," Beevor writes. "… Werwolf recruits were taught to kill
sentries with a slip-knotted garrotte about a metre long or a Walther pistol
with silencer. …"
In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen was
assassinated on March 25, 1945, on Himmler's orders. This was not a nice thing
to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. It's hardly
surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the
war was over. And as the U.S. Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the
Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was "probably the
Werwolf's most sensational achievement."
Indeed, the organization merits but two passing mentions in Occupation of
Germany, which dwells far more on how docile the Germans were once the
Americans rolled in—and fraternization between former enemies was a bigger
problem for the military than confrontation. Although Gen. Eisenhower had been
worrying about guerrilla warfare as early as August 1944, little materialized.
There was no major campaign of sabotage. There was no destruction of water
mains or energy plants worth noting. In fact, the far greater problem for the
occupying forces was the misbehavior of desperate displaced persons, who
accounted for much of the crime in the American zone.
The Army history records that while there were the occasional anti-occupation
leaflets and graffiti, the GIs had reason to feel safe. When an officer in
Hesse was asked to investigate rumors that troops were being attacked and
castrated, he reported back that there had not been a single attack against an
American soldier in four months of occupation. As the distinguished German
historian Golo Mann summed it up in The History of Germany Since 1789, "The
[Germans'] readiness to work with the victors, to carry out their orders, to
accept their advice and their help was genuine; of the resistance which the
Allies had expected in the way of 'werewolf' units and nocturnal guerrilla
activities, there was no sign. …"
Werwolf itself was filled not so much by fearsome SS officers but teenagers too
young for the front. Beevor writes:
In the west, the Allies found that Werwolf was a fiasco. Bunkers prepared for
Werwolf operations had supplies "for 10-15 days only" and the fanaticism of the
Hitler Youth members they captured had entirely disappeared. They were "no more
than frightened, unhappy youths." Few resorted to the suicide pills which they
had been given "to escape the strain of interrogation and, above all, the
inducement to commit treason." Many, when sent off by their controllers to
prepare terrorist acts, had sneaked home.
That's not quite the same as the Rumsfeld version, which claimed that "Today
the Nazi dead-enders are largely forgotten, cast to the sidelines of history
because they comprised a failed resistance and managed to kill our Allied
forces in a war that saw millions fight and die."
It's hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that
the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news.
According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new
study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia,
Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND
Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat
casualties in Germany—and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases—was zero.
So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany
get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford's
Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of
an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some
intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as
the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going
around.
Daniel Benjamin was a Germany correspondent for Time and the Wall Street
Journal from 1990-1994 and served on the National Security Council staff from
1994-1999. He is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror.
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Political cartoons~Saturday August 30
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cramer
> In case you swallowed this latest from W's foreign policy advisor... Marian
>
> history lesson~Condi's Phony History
> Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq.~ By Daniel Benjamin
> August 29, 2003~Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/
>
> As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number,
> the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our
> strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will,"
> President Bush told an American Legion convention.
>
> National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what
> former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation
> pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's
> experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the
> Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some of you
> here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945
> through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately
> and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with
> Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald
> Rumsfeld noted,
>
> One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi
> regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who
> cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the
> American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be
> liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and
> leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted
> sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations
> and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that
> were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?
>
> Well, no, it doesn't. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of
> Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts.
>
Nothing political but there was surely a vigorous and often violent
black market all over europe. Remember Orson wells in the Third man.
Lorries were ambushed and contents stolen and I believe drivers
killed.
People would do a lot for pain killers , morphine and the like, then
- lots of painful wounds around then.
Marian
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Political cartoons~Updated -LABOR DAY~
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