Did any Germans keep fighting after the war, like Japaneese troops?

Question

What happened at the end of world war 2 to die hard nazis? I heard something about japaneese troops not knowing the war was ended due to being stuck on remote islands. I guess there were no similar things in Europe due to the geography?

Answer 1

Between 1945 and 1947 random and ineffective acts of sabotage were carried out by the SS Werewolf groups which had been formed in the last days of the war as it became apparent that the Third Reich was doomed. The brief of these former Waffen SS soldiers was to occupy and engage the enemy in partisan attacks, to what end was not clear but it may have been to convince the occupying powers to leave German soil. Supplies of weaponry and ammunition became increasingly difficult to find and with the restricted movement imposed on the country by partition the werewolves found their mobility severely restricted. Most of the die-hards were killed or captured and many of the senior officers realised there was no future in attempting to resuscitate the Third Reich and tried to influence the new Germany through politics or industry. The Odessa organisation evolved from this. You are quite right about the Japanese, the last one (Hiro Onada) surrendered in 1974 after being told to by his commanding officer who was fortunately still living. He was presented to the Emperor, given a medal and a pension and wrote a book. Though it is tragic that he wasted 29 years of his life like this, one of his companions was killed in the 1960s after shooting at some Americans and gave his life for a cause lost by 20 years.

Answer 2

Most handed themselves over to the allies. Some "die hard nazis", out of revenge, went into hiding and use sniper tactics.

Answer 3

They new the war was over, but there are still instances that US troops were being shot by a sniper several years after it ended.

Answer 4

There were similar instances, but basically only a short time after the official surrender. There were some offensives that lasted 3-4 days after the official cessation of hostilities, and incidents of sniping up to a couple of years later, but these were more likely from Nazi sympathizers rather thatn holdout soldiers. Nothing like the situation with the Japanese... the last reported instance was sometime in the mid 1970's when some relatives finally convinced a diehard Japanese soldier in Indonesia that the war was over. Unreal! There is an unconfirmed report going back to last year that there were two Japanese holdouts both in their 80's still in the Philippines...here's the 2005 article: (if true-wow!)

GENERAL SANTOS CITY, South Cotabato -- Japanese diplomats yesterday said they had reestablished contact with a mediator who promised to bring two elderly Japanese soldiers down from the mountains near this port city where they may have been in hiding, unaware that World War II ended 60 years ago.

"We have had several telephone conversations with him since Friday," Japanese Embassy press attaché Shuhei Ogawa told reporters, referring to the mediator, a Japanese trader who only gave his name as Asano.

"We are working out a plan to deal with this issue," said Ogawa, even as he downplayed reports that the two old soldiers may be the first cases in 30 years of war-time stragglers being found.

"You must understand that we get these reports all the time," Ogawa said in an impromptu press conference.

He said Asano had asked for more time due to poor security in the mountains and concerns about the throng of media waiting in General Santos City.

"It's enough evidence if he would bring to us the two stragglers. Our contact called us to finalize everything. Nothing is sure yet. We are still working it out," Ogawa said.

Hundreds of journalists, mostly from Japanese television networks and newspapers, have descended on this Mindanao city since the reports about the octogenarian stragglers emerged Friday.

Japan's Kyodo news agency, citing government sources, earlier said the men could be Yoshio Yamakawa, who would now be 87, and Tsuzuki Nakauchi, 83.

But the two old soldiers have not been seen.

A Japanese government welfare official, Suminori Arima, left Tokyo for the Philippines yesterday to join the Japanese diplomats in General Santos City making efforts to contact the two World War II stragglers.

"If the story turns out to be true, it would be tremendous," Arima, head of the research office at the welfare and labor ministry, said before boarding a flight to Manila.

"I want to meet them in person no matter how and ask about their health and other matters," said Arima, who is expected today in Mindanao.

Seiichi Ogawa, the Davao City-based Japanese consul, said there could a positive development in the next two days.

Ogawa said that, like everyone else, the Japanese Embassy wanted to know if the report was true but that the curiosity of journalists and concerns about the safety of the stragglers were delaying the process.

Japanese diplomats posted a note outside the journalists' hotel in General Santos City informing them that local authorities had warned them not to leave the city because the surrounding countryside was not safe.

The note, in Japanese, warned Japanese correspondents not to accept offers from people claiming to know the location of the "stragglers" and offering to guide them into the mountains.

It said that Japanese journalists risked being kidnapped.

"If a Filipino invites you, do not go with him because it could be a trap," was how a Japanese reporter translated the warning.

Police and the military reiterated a warning that communist and Moro rebels were active in the mountains around General Santos City. Moro rebels are known to have conducted kidnappings for ransom.

But some members of a Japanese television crew ignored the warnings and went with some Filipino journalists to Tupi town, about 30 km from General Santos City, to interview some descendants of Japanese in the town.

The mystery of how two Japanese World War II soldiers could remain in hiding during the decades of armed insurgency in Mindanao remained unanswered as Ogawa said the Japanese Embassy still had no details on the location of the two.

"There are many rumors of old soldiers hiding in the mountains or on islands but there is never any solid evidence," he said.

Asked why this case was different, Ogawa said it is "more concrete than the others" but he did not elaborate.

"We are told these men want to come to the city," he said.

The embassy has seen no documents or photographs to support reports that the two men were in hiding but has been working through the intermediary, Ogawa said.

"He [Osana] has many Filipino contacts and it is through these contacts that he became aware of the two soldiers," Ogawa said, adding that he did not think the intermediary had actually seen the soldiers.

"We are here to confirm the report," he said.

Skepticism

On Friday, a senior police intelligence officer in the area had expressed skepticism over the story of the war veterans.

"There is a possibility that this could just be a hoax. Somebody may just want to gain something," the officer said.

Japan was stunned in 1974 when former Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda was found living in the jungle on the island of Lubang in Occidental Mindoro province. He did not know of Japan's surrender 29 years earlier.

After being repatriated, Onoda emigrated to Brazil.

Another former Japanese soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, was found on Guam in 1972. He returned home and died in 1997.

The last known Japanese straggler from the war was found in 1975 in Indonesia.

Answer 5

no

Answer 6

The Werwolf Organization
by Russ Folsom

The Werwolf Organization's assassination of the Allied appointed Burgomeister of Aachen, Dr.Franz Oppenhoff in March of 1945, is probably the best known and most widely publicized exploit of this hapless band of politically indoctrinated youngsters who hailed for the most part from the ranks of the Hitlerjugend and the Bund Deutscher Maedel. Charles Whiting (aka Leo Kessler) wrote a book named "Werwolf" (recently re-printed) which details this very same mission, called "Unternehmen Karneval" (Operation Carnival). The leader of the assassination team was a veteran of the German Army's famous "Brandenburg" infiltration-specialist formation, named Herbert Wenzel, who had transferred to Otto Skorzeny's "SS-Jagdverband Friedenthal" and who, at the time of the operation, held the rank of SS-Untersturmfuhrer (2nd Lieutenant.)

According to a number of sources, the idea for a Werwolf Organization originated in the fall of 1944 at a meeting attended by Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler, Artur Axmann (HJ Jugendfuhrer), SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Hans-Adolf Prutzmann, RSHA chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Waffen-SS Obsturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny. At the meeting in Hohenlychen, Himmler appointed Prutzmann as plenipotentary in charge of the recruiting and training of Werwolf agents from skilled specialists in weapons and communications from among the armed forces and HJ, who would then be trained beneath the aegis of Skorzeny's SS-Jagdverband (Hunting-teams).

Once trained in sabotage and varying forms of deadly mischief, teams of these Werwolf Kommandos, comprised mostly of HJ volunteers, but commanded by older, battle-experienced hand-picked cadre from the German Army and Waffen-SS, would operate behind the enemy lines as guerrillas, creating deadly mishap amongst the occupying forces, and relaying useful intelligence to a central Armed Forces entity (Supposedly in un-occupied territory).

Training took place at the Schloss Hulchrath, near the small Rhenish town of Erkelenz. The castle was at the time the HQ of the HSSPF-West, Karl Gutenberger. Here Prutzmann set up his Werwolf Staff HQ. The first 200 trainees from the HJ arrived in late November and began their Werwolf training under the guise of W-SS volunteers. They were instructed in small-arms and demolitions skills, radio-communications, map-reading, and survival skills by instructors from Skorzeny's Jagdverband, experts from the Army, and agents of the SD and Gestapo. They were taught to sabotage vehicles and communications facilities, to poison wells and food supplies - large quantities of arsenic were issued to some squads. When recruits from the HJ or BDM arrived, most had already had preliminary training with rifles, pistols, and panzerfaust. Prutzmann's staff set up other training centers in the Berlin suburbs, and in the so-called area of the Alpine Redoubt in Bavaria.

Underground bunkers or dens in the Eifel and Bavaria were reserved for Werwolf squads, where food, munitions and other logistics were to be hidden before Allied units overran them. The Werwolf would operate at night, harrassing and sabotaging, and resurface by day and mix with the civil population in thier area of operations protected by false passes and papers supplied by the Gestapo. This at least, was the plan. What actually transpired is of course, quite different.

Despite the fanciful-mythological Werwolf name, at the outset of this joint SS-HJ undertaking in late 1944, a real spirit of military organization and discipline permeated the training and operational goals of the Werwolf-organization. The Germans knew well from first hand experience, just how much damage an organized and efficient partisan force could inflict upon an occupying army. The key feature to success in this scenario would of course, have been a solid base of supply and support - (eg. an un-occupied Germany). Fantastic dreams of an Alpine Redoubt re-considered - these Werwolf squads would have been the long-arm of any logistically viable resistance undertaken by a well defended German power-base in a moutain retreat, or Alpenfestung. Of course, as events transpired - there was very little action toward the establishment of an Alpine base of resistance by the Germans at this very late date.

And so, beyond the one efficacious Operation undertaken by a specifically -trained Werwolf hit-team at Aachen in March of 1945, where one might note that the resources of the OKW (A B-17 of KG-200, the Luftwaffe Special Operations), and the SS-Jagdverband were prominently involved; the later sporadic killings and instances of resistance by so-called Werwolf units, were not intended Werwolf operations as instructed by a higher command, but only isolated acts of last-ditch fanatical resisters, and as such cannot really be accredited to Prutzmann's Werwolf staff.

To explain the difference between actual Werwolf organized activity and those incidents attributed to it by the Allied Military authorities is not always an easy task . When Burgomeister Oppenhof was murdered in late March of 1945, Dr. Goebbels and Reichsleiter Martin Bormann (who were both, it might be noted, denizens of the surreal atmosphere of the Fuhrerbunker), saw it as a great propoganda coup, and took it upon themselves to proclaim a nationwide uprising of German youth against the Allied agressor. Goebbels christened the Werwolf-sender or Radio Werwolf with a call to all able-bodied Germans in the Reich and it's occupied areas to "strike the enemy" from behind the lines.

Radio Werwolf promised death to traitors and a direful fate to the Allied invaders. As a propagandistic ploy, it pandered to a fanatical belief in last-ditch resistance - ironically, it also bolstered a belief in the existance of an Alpine Redoubt among the Allied forces. Bormann's role in this farce was that as NSDAP Chief of the Gauleiterung, he believed that he commanded the activities of all Werwolf units originating in any Gau of the Reich. The truth was, in fact, that both Goebbels and Bormann had nothing at all to do with the training, organization, or employment of the Werwolf. As a crony of Himmler, SS-General Preutzmann had very little interest in taking orders from either Goebbels or Bormann. So, as the Allied Armies advanced, and eventually overran his Schloss Hulcrath HQ, in April of 1945, he seconded himself to Himmler's Hohenlychen headquarters in Mecklenberg - at this point, the Werwolf Organization, as a secret behind the lines formation, in effect, ceased to exist.

Despite the lack of direction from a higher headquarters, examples of spurious Werwolf activitiy continued well after the cessation of hostilities:

The former HJ-Gebeitsfuhrer of Mansfeld, now an SS-Sturmbannfuhrer barely recovered from wounds recieved in the battle of Kharkov, organized 600 HJ boys into Battle-Group Harz (Kampfgruppe Harz). They collected W-SS veterans from a military hospital, students from a NAPOLA, remaining members of the Luftwaffe-HJ, and boys from a nearby anti-tank-destruction unit. When the Werwolf Radio proclaimed defiance on April 1, they went into action against American troops. Within twenty days, seventy combatants were left, reduced to fifty shortly thereafter. A desperate attempt to ambush an American supplies convoy was unsuccessful. Most of these starving boys were wiped out by air-raids, when American patrols could not find them. Heinz Petry, sixteen, and Josef Schomer, seventeen, survived until 5 June, when they were tried as spies by American troops and executed.

North of Hamburg, toward the end of April, an entrenched group of Werwolves and their SS commanders refused to surrender to two battalions of the British Eleventh Armored Division. When Admiral Karl Donitz ordered them to lay down their arms on 1 May, they still persisted. A unit of the German 8.Fallshirmjager Division was finally brought in to subdue them. The German Paras found mainly dead bodies scattered around their fortified forest den. On the eastern side of the Elbe, isolated groups of youngsters from the Werwolf center at Berlin-Gatow offered feeble resistance to a swarm of Russian tanks. A few survivors remained hidden in bunkers and were later turned in by angry and hungry civilians, whom the Russian troops rewarded by allowing them to plunder the Werwolf food dumps.

Donitz finally made a proclomation on 5 May over Radios Copenhagen, Flensburg, and Prague: "The fact that at present an armistice reigns means that I must ask every German man and woman to stop any illegal activity in the Werwolf or other such organizations in those territories occupied by the Western Allies because this can only injure our people."

SS-General Hans-Adolf Prutzmann, who had previously been HSSPF of Riechskommisariat-Ukraine, and could expect no quarter from the victorious Allies, committed suicide in May of 1945.