Posted on 09/04/2003 8:50:03 PM PDT by Burkeman1
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 officerscalled 'werewolves'engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with themmuch 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
Despite its failure, however, the Werewolf project had a huge impact, widening the psychological and spiritual gap between Germans and their occupiers. Werewolf killings and intimidation of `collaborators' scared almost everybody, giving German civilians a clear glimpse into the nihilistic heart of Nazism. It was difficult for people working under threat of such violence to devote themselves unreservedly to the initial tasks of reconstruction. Worse still, the Allies and Soviets reacted to the movement with extremely tough controls, curtailing the right of assembly of German civilians. Challenges of any sort were met by collective reprisals -- especially on the part of the Soviets and the French. In a few cases the occupiers even shot hostages and cleared out towns where instances of sabotage occurred. It was standard practice for the Soviets to destroy whole communities if they faced a single act of resistance. In the eastern fringes of the `Greater Reich', now annexed by the Poles and the Czechoslovaks, Werewolf harassment handed the new authorities an excuse to rush the deportations of millions of ethnic Germans to occupied Germany.
Ah, clearly the situations in Iraq 2003 and Germany 1945 are TOTALLY different ... maybe we should be glad the Russians and French arent 'helping' us.
That is a HIGHLY distorted view of the allied occupation of Germany in 1945. The Allies included the Soviet Union. How many ALLIED combat troops were attacked (include attacks on Russians in your numbers). Your list of casualties must include RUSSIAN casualties as they were an Allied occupying power in addition to the US, Britain, and France.
In the Slate article, Rice and Rumsfeld do not limit themselves to attacks in the American zone. They specifically referred to the "allied troops" which included the Russian zone. There were significant attacks on Russian troops (allied troops) in the Russian zone after the formal end of the war.
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 Germanyand Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan caseswas zero.
So we have a disagreement between two historians. Yours claims 5 American post-war deaths, and the lead article's author claims zero post-WWII deaths. A small but significant difference, but still well below the occupation deaths for Americans in Iraq.
Good catch.
And while at the NSC he became quite friendly with the artful use of words and the building of majestic tales. Too bad he doesn't realize that it was unique to the administration he served not to all administrations.
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Who said anything about Muslim terrorists? It's the religion of peace.
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Those are not foreign forces. The reality is we are not fighting Saddam Hussein, but most of the Mohammadan world.
I believe the London Bridge is for sale too. Got MasterCard? Consider the source, please.
AMBASSADOR JAMES F. DOBBINS
Ambassador Dobbins has headed the European Bureau of the State Department since May 26, 2000. He has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Acting Assistant Secretary for European and Canadian Affairs. In Europe, he served as Ambassador to the European Community, Deputy Chief of Mission in Bonn, Political-Military Officer in London, and Political Officer in Paris. Ambassador Dobbins has also acted as the Department of States senior manager for peace operations in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia. From 1999 until his current assignment, he served as Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for Kosovo and Dayton Implementation, with lead responsibility for management of the Balkan crisis throughout the Kosovo conflict. Earlier, Ambassador Dobbins served as the Administration's coordinator for Haiti, overseeing the diplomatic and civil aspects of the intervention. He filled a similar role in overseeing the disengagement of U.S. forces from Somalia. From 1996 until 1999 he was Special Assistant to the PresidentCLINTON and Senior Director on the National Security Council Staff responsible for Latin America. Earlier, he served with the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Department of States Policy Planning Staff, and with the U.S. Delegation to the Vietnam Peace Talks. In addition to his official posts, he has held appointments as a Senior Fellow with the Rand Corporation, and occupied a similar position with the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Ambassador Dobbins served three years as an officer in the United States Navy, including two tours of duty in the Vietnam theatre aboard the USS Bon Homme Richard (CVA 31). He received a Bachelors degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
Oh yeah, I trust THAT dude. A clinton butt-boy, State Dept hack, who manages two tours in a three year career? Another ticket punching liar, if you ask me.
And we, and the Russians even more so, utterly destroyed the German soldiers on the battlefield. There were very few die-hard combatants left after it was all over. Those that were caught were disarmed. Contrast that with Iraq where most all of them just disappeared and went home (taking their weapons with them). Do you think it would have turned out any different if the Waffen SS soldiers were to have changed into civilian clothes and slipped away back into the Hartz Mountains while keeping their weapons?
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