PrГјtzmann had studied the guerrilla tactics used by Soviet partisans while he was stationed in the occupied territories of Ukraine, and the idea was to teach these tactics to the members of Operation Werwolf. PrГјtzmann was named Generalinspekteur fГјr Spezialabwehr (General Inspector of Special Defence) and assigned the task of setting up the force's headquarters in Berlin and organising and instructing the force. They were never intended to act outside of the control of the German High Command ( OKW), or to fight in civilian clothes, and they expected to be treated as soldiers if they were captured. As initially conceived, these Werwolf units were intended to be legitimate uniformed military or paramilitary formations trained to engage in clandestine operations behind enemy lines in the same manner as Allied Special Forces such as Commandos. In late summer/early autumn 1944, Heinrich Himmler initiated Unternehmen Werwolf (Operation Werwolf), ordering SS ObergruppenfГјhrer Hans-Adolf PrГјtzmann to begin organising an elite troop of volunteer forces to operate secretly behind enemy lines. ObergruppenfГјhrer Hans-Adolf PrГјtzmann (right) meets with ReichsfГјhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, during Himmler's visit of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking in Ukraine, September 1942. (The etymology of the name 'Adolf' itself carries connotations of noble ( adal Modern German Adel) wolf, while Hitler referred to his first World War II Eastern Front military headquarters as Wolfsschanze, commonly rendered in English as ' Wolf's Lair' (literally 'Wolf's Sconce').) In 1942, Adolf Hitler named the OKW and OKH field headquarters, at Vinnytsia in Ukraine, 'Werwolf', and Hitler on a number of occasions had used 'Wolf' as a pseudonym for himself. Indeed, Celle's local newspaper began serialising Der Wehrwolf in January 1945.

While LГ¶ns was not himself a Nazi (he died in 1914), his work became popular with the German far right, and the Nazis celebrated it. LГ¶ns wrote that the title was a dual reference to the fact that the peasants put up a fighting defense ( sich wehren, see ' Bundeswehr' вЂ“ Federal Defense) and to the protagonist's surname of Wulf, but it also had obvious parallels with the word WerwГ¶lfe in that Wulf's men came to enjoy killing. After marauding soldiers kill his family, Wulf organises his neighbors into a militia who pursue the soldiers and mercilessly execute any they capture, while referring to themselves as WehrwГ¶lfe.

Set in the Celle region ( Lower Saxony) during the Thirty Years' War (1618вЂ“1648), the novel concerns a peasant named Harm Wulf. How and by whom the name was chosen is unknown, but it may have alluded to the title of Hermann LГ¶ns' novel, Der Wehrwolf, first published in 1910. 2.4 Wartime capture of Werwolf personnel.

Commandos behind enemy lines german