Theories as to why there was no postwar German resistance

[Marcus Wendel]

A few posts discussing the claim that "The initial Russian Soldiers were welcomed in Germany" was moved to a thread of their own.

/Marcus

[Marcus Wendel]

A nonsense post was removed.

/Marcus

[ejstuczko]

My father was a member of the US Constabulary from July 1946 to December 1949. From his commentary, and those of other troopers I've contacted, the Russians were more of a menace than the post-war German resistance. Hunger, fatigue, lack of equipment and weapons were all factors making their efforts virtually ineffective. Yes, there were some instances of isolated bombings and revenge killings, but the US Army took care of them piece meal. The Russians, on the other hand, were known to shoot small arms or lob a few shells across the Austrian or Russian Zone borders just to let our boys know they were there. Dad did arrest a few Nazi officials caught in hiding during that time, but do not have names or dates.

[stellung]

Of course there was post-war German resistance. From a formerly Secret Weekly Intelligence Summary dated 10 July 1945, not only were there Werewolves bur those classified as Renegades - soldiers who did not put down their arms. See the following:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Nazis-Gu ... 0752423428

[CJK1990]

The more I think about it the more I've come to believe that the Germans were simply too afraid to resist after the surrender. There were numerous instances of fanatical resistance by Nazi diehards in the closing days of the war. Those people did not simply disappear after May 1945. Out of some 10-15 million troops who survived the war, at least 100,000 would have had to have been fanatical enough to mount a post-war insurgency if they thought they could get away with. There was almost certainly enough ammunition lying around to at least mount small scale attacks. And it isn't totally unprecedented in Germany, there was a lot of political violence that went on during the Weimar era, with the Nazis participating heavily. Basically what happened is that people were so shocked by the extreme devastation the Allies wrought in their cities that they were unwilling to contest the occupation lest it be met by indiscriminate force.

[ReinhardH]

Well, for one, after the war, most who had served in the Wehrmacht were either dead, or a prisoner, or sick of the whole mess … and honestly … what delusional idiot among those who managed to survive it all could have been stupid enough to attempt to mount an organized revolt. What other real veterans would have gone along with such a scheme, anyhow? The whole idea is ridiculous.
Were stacks of German munitions left behind after the troops left an area? You bet. But anyone who thought they could just walk right up and pick stuff out of a 'discarded' munitions pile for use sometime later was most likely in for a very rude awakening, because the retreating troops booby-trapped piles of stuff like that whenever they were able to, as a 'special' surprise for the enemy.

[Sid Guttridge]

There is also a question as to what they would resist in favour of, and who or what would lead any resistance.

With the exception of some prominent suicides, the Nazi political leadership and military high command had largely survived the war and those who had not surrendered were more intent on ensuring their own escape than leading any quixotic resistance movement.

The Gauleiters in most cases had conspicuously failed to die the heroic death they had urged on the old men and boys they had organized into the Volksturm and the military high command had suffered few wartime fatalities compared with the combat troops and was largely Allied hands. Neither they, nor the suicides, were a conspicuous example of fighting to a literal death.

Cheers,

Sid.

[ReinhardH]

Plenty smallfry who were 'the' best most loyal loud boastful nazi fanatics before and during the war became 'the' best most loyal loud boastful fanatical supporters of whatever occupation force they found themselves under the control of after the war .. for no more reason than to plain save their own spineless hides.

[phylo_roadking]

at least 100,000 would have had to have been fanatical enough to mount a post-war insurgency if they thought they could get away with.

You can't mount a mid- or long term operation of THAT size without some degree of outside support...a support that was conspicuously absent. It's FAR too big a force or operation level to be embedded in the population at large and remain secure; look at, say, the PIRA campaign in Northern Ireland - no more than a few dozen "active service volunteers" per county, and only six counties Embedded in the Nationalist population, PIRA had to feed/fund them I.E. kept them off state benefits and tax records by the proceeds of racketeering and major crime of all sorts from controlling a large slice of the province's drugs trade to laundering fuel to counterfeit goods to "tiger" kidnappings.

A 100,000 men would be reduced to a fraction of that in one winter - hiding in woods, up mountains, under hedgerows....they were already half-starved by the end of the war and Germany as a whole sort of food, and unable to get winter clothing except what they pilfered their numbers they would be decimated by any one of a dozen diseases that they would have no medical care for. That's why unsupported resistances/insurgencies/"free armies" fail - they spiral down into banditry, having to put SO much effort into "just" feeding themselves and keeping on running, one step ahead of their enemies....that they simply have no time/strength to actually "resist" ....

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi CJK,

You write, "...at least 100,000 would have had to have been fanatical enough to mount a post-war insurgency if they thought they could get away with it."

You illustrate precisely why post-war armed resistance in Germany was negligible. Even your supposed 100,000 fanatics would only risk it if they could get away with it.

Germany had been so thoroughly defeated that they couldn't get away with it, so very few even of the fanatics risked it.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Pingpongtweet]

I've always been puzzled as to why there was no German resistance movement after the war. Based on everything I've read, the Nazis were relatively popular and the vast majority of Germans supported the war effort. Furthermore, Allied occupation policy in the first two years was harsh, with low food rations, a massive refugee crisis, and little hope of economic recovery from devastation.

True, people were sick of the fighting and the resistance might not have been that effective. But that hasn't stopped lots of other resistance movements past or present.

My theory is that Germany took so many casualties in the war that there just weren't that many people left to resist. Resistance movements are usually composed of strongly motivated young men who are physically fit. By mid-1945, a huge portion of ideologically motivated physically fit young men were either dead or disabled. As a result, a resistance movement couldn't get off the ground.

In many ways it seems like the allies just paid the price of resistance upfront rather than after the war. The Germans killed more American soldiers and airmen in April 1945 alone (9,273) than insurgents have killed in nearly eight years of Iraq and Afghanistan combined (less than 6,000, including noncombat deaths).

Does anyone have an alternative theory?

Professor David M. Edelstein of Georgetown University argues that it was fear of Soviet invasion and occupation that led the western Germans to accept occupation by the U.S., Britain, and France. "Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation (Cornell University Press, 2008)."

Biddiscombe argues that the decision to keep the German soldiers prisoner despite the war being over was a fear (on Eisenhowers part) that they would join the resistance. (werewolf, page 253) It also influenced Eisenhowers decision to move towards the Alps instead of Berlin. In any case, a lack of people for a resistance.

My theory is that the few men who were left were too hungry, and too busy trying to somehow feed their families. The families where the fathers/husbands/brothers/sons were in the camps probably were in even more desperate straits. And if they all looked liked like this when they were released then I doubt they had the energy to make trouble for a few years.
http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/57jnwx.htm

You can find a list of examples of resistance here:
http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~roehner/occupation.html

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi pingpongtweet,

I have been reading the list of examples of resistance in your link and was struck that virtually none of them are attributable to ideological "resistance". The most serious case listed occurred not long after the war in Bremen when five US personnel were killed by what was probably a delayed action bomb, though it is not clear when it was set. Jealous squabbles over German girls and accidents in munitions stores seem to be the main cause of death. The list tends to emphasise the paucity of active German resistance.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Pingpongtweet]

Hi pingpongtweet,

I have been reading the list of examples of resistance in your link and was struck that virtually none of them are attributable to ideological "resistance". The most serious case occurred not after the war in Bremen when five US personnel were killed by what was probably a delayed action bomb, though it is not clear when it was set. Jealous squabbles over German girls and accidents in munitions stores seem to be the main cause of death. The list tends to emphasise the paucity of active German resistance.

Cheers,

Sid.

Hi Sid

I'd recomend reading Werewolf, by Perry Biddiscombe. There you will find many more examples. Biddiscombe also provides an addendum at the end where he tries to analyze why so little was publicly known about the resistance, e.g. through media censure etc.

As to the list by professor Roehner, you have to remember that he bases it mainly on what was reported in the global press, and I think the first paragraph in Chapter 3, Censorship, explains the apparent paucity of events.

"On 31 May 1946 a British Army captain was killed by automatic gun fire in an operation against one of the German groups which roamed the British zone. While this information can be found in the “North China Daily News”, it cannot be found in the Times or in the New York Times. This example suggests that in addition to the censorship which is known to have existed in Germany itself, there was also a kind of self-censorship in western medias.

In the spring of 1946 there were numerous attacks on trains in the British zone of occupation that were carried out by German people who tried to get some additional food or coal. Pointing in the same direction as the previous observation, is the fact that there many articles about such attacks in the “North China Daily News” or in the “Shanghai Herald” but only one or two very sketchy articles in the London Times.

In 1946 and in subsequent years a number of German industrial plants and buildings were dynamited and/or dismantled. In spite of the fact that local populations were well aware of such operations (in many cases they staged protest demonstrations) they are hardly ever mentioned in the newspapers of Allied countries. As illustrations one can mention the cases (cited in Gollancz 1947, p. 22) of the Rheinmetal B¨orsig works, the Schiess-Defries machine-tool plants, the Blohm and Voss installations in Hamburg15. According to Gollacz (1947. p. 21) by late August 1947 about 70,000 tons of material had been removed by the Disarmament Team and 20,000 tons remained to be removed until the deadline of June 1948. The fact that Allied newspapers do not mention the reparation question (except in general terms) is not specific to Germany; it can also be observed during the occupation of Japan."

Essentially, if you as historian just look at the official publications, press reports and newspaper articles then you are liable to seriously fool yourself. Roehner makes the case even clearer in the file looking at the occupation of Japan. Here he states.

"At the beginning of this chapter we explained that the historical presentation of the occupation which was shaped and publicized by SCAP headquarters was largely at variance with historical evidence. Clearly, however, SCAP and Eighth Army commanders had knowledge of the true picture for instance through G-2 reports which gave a more reliable account. In other words, this was an instance in which an organization used a double language pattern: a fairly trustworthy version was reserved for internal usage whereas a sanitized version was sold to the outside world.
To set up such a double language standard and to stick to it over time could seem a difficult challenge. However, this task was made easier by two circumstances.

• All parties involved had a common interest in promoting the fiction of an occupation without incidents and marked by a genuine collaboration between American and Japanese authorities. For the Allied side this version confirmed the success of the occupation; for the Japanese ruling class, it justified and vindicated its role during the occupation years.

• In the course of time the fiction story gained widespread acceptance (even among historians), so that the real story receded in the background and was progressively forgotten even in government circles. Thus, the need for a double language vanished. Incidentally, this may have led the US government to start other occupations (e.g. in Irak) on false assumptions and rosy expectations which did not materialize.

How can one explain that all published biographical accounts written by veterans upheld the fiction story? Far from being special to the case of the occupation of Japan, it appears that misrepresentations by omission are a fairly frequent phenomenon. Just for the purpose of illustration, three episodes are mentioned below; they have been
selected on a much longer list because of their similarity with the present case."

And then he goes on to show the very extensive US involvement in the disastrous French Indochina campaign that ended in Dien Bien Phu, and how both French and US memoirs downplayed US involvement, the French for ego reasons (that they were essentially being controlled by the US was not pleasant to admit), the US personnel likewise preferred not to be associated with such a failure. And then he goes on to give 2 other examples, from very different fields.

The key conclusion given by Professor Roehner, well worth to take to heart, is:

"In conclusion it can be said that when all parties involved (with the exception of the victims) have a common interest in presenting a biased account, it is this story which is likely to prevail and to become the accepted truth. It is only by resorting to comparative analysis that such “anomalies” can be detected. Naturally, another obvious implication is that historians should not blindly trust official statements even when they have been accepted for a long time."

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Pingpongtweet,

I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the occupations were "without friction".

The point is that, for the most part, these incidents appear not to be residual Nazi-inspired or -organized ideological resistance, but the result of the daily frictions that almost necessarily result from innumerable interactions with a large foreign presence in residence.

I would be most interested to know why the “North China Daily News” or “Shanghai Herald” were considered authoritative on the subject of post-war occupied Germany, especially, "if you as historian just look at the official publications, press reports and newspaper articles then you are liable to seriously fool yourself." Where did the Chinese press get its information from, one wonders?

Cheers,

Sid.

[Pingpongtweet]

Hi Pingpongtweet,

I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the occupations were "without friction".

The point is that, for the most part, these incidents appear not to be residual Nazi-inspired or -organized ideological resistance, but the result of the daily frictions that almost necessarily result from innumerable interactions with a large foreign presence in residence.

I would be most interested to know why the “North China Daily News” or “Shanghai Herald” were considered authoritative on the subject of post-war occupied Germany, especially, "if you as historian just look at the official publications, press reports and newspaper articles then you are liable to seriously fool yourself." Where did the Chinese press get its information from, one wonders?

Cheers,

Sid.

Hi Sid,

I would tend to agree with you on the apparent lack of ideology in the reports. However, you will find deliberate ideology in the events chronicled in "Werwolf! the History of the Nationalist Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946", University of Wales Press, 1998, by Perry Biddiscombe.

As to the Chinese press collecting stories in Berlin I suppose they did it the same way the Times and others collected stories in Beijing and Shanghai at the time, through foreign press-corespondents.

If the "western" media is practicing self-censorship on certain topics, then the Chinese press does become "authoritative" in this area by the simple reason that they are part of the "free press" in this particular area. And the question of being "authoritative" is imo misplaced here, unless you believe the stories you read in the list to be made-up?