Re: Question for BUFDRVR

[Keith Willshaw]

"BUFDRVR" > wrote in message
...
> Scott MacEachern wrote:
>
> >A quick check on ProQuest using the search terms 'Germany' and
> >'resistance' comes up with a 20 January, 1946 article by Drew
> >Middleton and entitled 'Dark German outlook encourages resistance'.
> >But it's a prediction of how bad things are gonna get, and the only
> >attacks he talks about involve intimidation of pro-American Germans,
> >not attacks on American troops.
>
> According to this article, they killed U.S. soldiers as well:
>
> http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1373/is_10_50/ai_66157021
>
> There are more, however this one seems to be unbiased since it was written
in
> October 2000. Nearly every other article written on the subject is post
March
> 2003 and is either slated right (look Iraq is just like Germany) or
slanted
> left (this never happened, it's all a vast right wing conspiracy).
>

Trouble is the only actual event he mentions that caused American casualties
after the end of the war was the explosion in Bremen and a little
investigation discloses that the contemporary investigation
came to the conclusion that it was an accidental gas explosion.

Keith




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[Steven P. McNicoll]

(BUFDRVR) wrote in message >...
> Steven P. McNicoll wrote:
>
> >> Are you doubting that U.S. soldiers occupying Germany following VE day
> were
> >> killed by German resistance?
> >>
> >
> >Nope.
>
> Is that a "nope" you're not doubting or a "nope" you are doubting?
>

The question was "Are you doubting...", I responded in the negative.
I'm well aware that German resistance did not end with VE day.

[Scott MacEachern]

(BUFDRVR) wrote in message >...

> The book reference I posted a few days ago I picked up from another article
> on-line, but that book did mention U.S. fatalities as averaging 42 a month from
> V-E Day till an unspecified time. How many were accidents, the results of
> criminal activity or fatalities from a German resistance movement wasn't
> detailed in the article.

I've taken a look at Alexander Biddiscombe's book _Werwolf! : the
history of the National Socialist guerrilla movement, 1944-1946_.
Looks like a useful examination of the topic. One thing to note is
that this is essentially a history of partisan activity as a whole,
not merely of the groups formally constituted as Werewolf: one point
the author makes is that the relations between Werewolf and other
partisans were complicated and often chaotic, so they have to be
treated together. As such, it examines an analogue to the situation in
Iraq.

Another point he makes is that the historical data on this are hard to
pull together. For that reason, there are no collected tables of, for
example, casualties -- which would've made my search easier. However,
information on the 1945-1946 period is collected in Cahpters 5-8, and
I looked over those, attemtping to distinguish pre-armistice from
post-armistice incidents. Finally, it's difficult to distinguish the
results of attacks: when one person is said to be 'shot' and others
'killed', does that mean that the former was merely wounded?

Those caveats aside... there appear by Biddiscombe's account to be
fewer than five deaths identified among all American occupation
personnel in the post-war period, as a result of partisan activity,
not merely in Germany but in all of occupied Western Europe. The best
candidates are probably two soldiers who were founded garotted and in
a river (in Wurtemburg, IIRC) in mid-1945... but even there, there is
no explicit link to partisans. There were more deaths due to partisan
activity before Germany surrendered; more American soldiers were
wounded due to partisan activity during the post-surrender period;
other Allied troops were killed by partisans post-surrender (mostly
Soviets).

However, the picture that Biddiscombe paints is of a pretty
ineffectual and chaotic resistance after the end of the war, with
almost no American deaths incurred. It is I think compatible with the
conclusions of that RAND study that I quoted a couple of days ago.

Scott

[Cub Driver]

Scott, it might be interesting for you to take that material to the
moderated WWII newsgroup and raise the subject.

The word I think is "werwolf" especially in German (same word
basically as "wehr"). Did the author spell it werEwolf?

all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

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