Iraq Attacks Recall Nazi 'Werewolves', Part 2 /1

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history lesson The history behind current events.

Condi's Phony History
Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq.
By Daniel Benjamin
Posted Friday, August 29, 2003, at 4:04 PM PT 

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. 

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