More Bush Lies, Now About World War II History

Yesterday I received the following email from one “Jason Wilson”:

Mr. Rall,

While I have rarely agreed with any of the sentiments coming from a single

one of your cartoons or columns, I’ve always believed that you are a person

who states facts as they are – you just have a rather bizarre way of looking

at them. So I was quite disappointed with Saturday’s cartoon (yes, like

anyone who truly despises a person’s work – I read everything that you

write) when your typically self-righteous left-wing character attempted to

condemn our war in Iraq by stating “No U.S. troops died in Japan or Germany

after World War II ended.”

My friend, this is just not true. I assume you’ve probably already received

e-mail from others informing you of this fact, but if you haven’t then

please allow me. Following the surrender of the Nazis, Allied troops were

continuously being sniped at and sabotaged by neo-nazi guerillas known as

“werewolves.” This guerila were went on for three years following the

official end of the war (much longer than our current war, would you not

agree?) Allow me to give you a direct excerpt from a book entitled “Minutemen of the

Third Reich”:

“The Werewolves specialised in ambushes and sniping, and took the lives of

many Allied and Soviet soldiers and officers — perhaps even that of the

first Soviet commandant of Berlin, General N.E. Berzarin, who was rumoured

to have been waylaid in Charlottenburg during an incident in June 1945.

Buildings housing Allied and Soviet staffs were favourite targets for

Werewolf bombings; an explosion in the Bremen police headquarters, also in

June 1945, killed five Americans and thirty-nine Germans. Techniques for

harassing the occupiers were given widespread publicity through Werewolf

leaflets and radio propaganda, and long after May 1945 the sabotage methods

promoted by the Werewolves were still being used against the occupying

powers.

Although the Werewolves originally limited themselves to guerrilla warfare

with the invading armies, they soon began to undertake scorched-earth

measures and vigilante actions against German `collaborators’ or

`defeatists’. They damaged Germany’s economic infrastructure, already

battered by Allied bombing and ground fighting, and tried to prevent

anything of value from falling into enemy hands. Attempts to blow up

factories, power plants or waterworks occasionally provoked melees between

Werewolves and desperate German workers trying to save the physical basis of

their employment, particularly in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia.

Several sprees of vandalism through stocks of art and antiques, stored by

the Berlin Museum in a flak tower at Friedrichshain, caused millions of

dollars worth of damage and cultural losses of inestimable value. In

addition, vigilante attacks caused the deaths of a number of small-town

mayors and, in late March 1945, a Werewolf paratroop squad assassinated the

Lord Mayor of Aachen, Dr Franz Oppenhoff, probably the most prominent German

statesman to have emerged in the occupied fringes over the winter of

1944-45.”

Wouldn’t you say that this sounds much more like the situation we are

currently facing, than does any cooked-up comparison to Vietnam?

It’s one thing to be a left-wing nutjob, Mr. Rall. It’s quite another thing

to be a liar. Try not to let it happen again – and it would also be good of

you to admit this error in an upcoming cartoon.

Thanks for reading,

Jason Wilson

I didn’t reply because (a) I was working on the second draft of my new book WAKE UP, YOU’RE LIBERAL and I was too busy, (b) Wilson violated my email rules about not responding to people who insult me and (c) I’ve studied enough World War II history–my wife would argue, way too much World War II history–to know that no reputable historian believes that the Nazi holdover “Werewolves” ever caused a single U.S. soldier to lose his life after the surrender of Germany on May 7, 1945. On this particular point, I checked the details with a highly respected expert on the subject before doing the final artwork on that cartoon. So I felt pretty confident that I hadn’t gotten this detail wrong (though anything’s possible, obviously).

Then, today, I received the following badgering missive from the same dude. I mean, really. Since when do I owe a total stranger a prompt response?

I notice that you have added to you , but it was not to admit that

you lied in your Saturday cartoon with the false assertion that no American

died in Germany after World War II. As I explained in my previous e-mail,

many Allied forces were killed for up to three years following the war by

the feared Nazi “werewolf” guerilla forces. You really need to come clean on

this if you hope to maintain your professionalism.

By the way, I wanted to comment on your latest entry into your little blog.

You wrote that “it’s good to see that U.S. forces didn’t see fit to execute

Hussein as they did his two sons and grandson a few months ago.” While this

statement isn’t quite a blatant lie such as your one about the Nazis, it is

very much a mistruth. Saddam’s sons weren’t “executed”. They were killed

after they engaged in a firefight with Allied forces. Saddam, on the other

hand, went without a fight. Are you really going to tell me that our forces

don’t have the right to kill people who are shooting at them?

Come on, Ted. You’re coming apart at the seams.

Please admit to your lie.

Sigh. The only thing that makes me feel like I’m coming apart at the seams is my desire, futile no doubt, to set the record straight. Still, being called a liar when I know that I was dead on kinda bugs me.

As Daniel Benjamin wrote in Slate, my Republican correspondent been suckered by yet another Bush Administration lie: this one that the situation in Iraq is comparable to that of Allied forces serving in Germany and Japan after the end of combat in World War II. Here are some highlights that, I hope, will put this matter to rest once and for all.

Yeah, like a blog can do that. Anyway:

Condi’s Phony History

Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq.

By Daniel Benjamin

Rice-a-phony history?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.”

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.

And of course Qusay and Uday were executed. The house where they were staying was surrounded. All we had to do was wait for them to get hungry, thirsty and bored. They would have come out at some point. Surely some reservist who works as a cop stateside could have told his C.O. not to rush in there guns ablaze. As I wrote earlier today, I’m glad that they didn’t do this to Saddam.

He has so many interesting stories to tell, don’t you think?