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 Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann to begin organising an elite troop of volunteer forces to operate secretly behind enemy lines. Operations Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann (right) meets with Reichsführer-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 Löns was not himself a Nazi (he died in 1914), his work became popular with the German far right, and the Nazis celebrated it. Löns wrote that the title was a dual reference to the fact that the peasants put up a fighting defense ( sich wehren, see " Bundeswehr" – Federal Defense) and to the protagonist's surname of Wulf, but it also had obvious parallels with the word Werwölfe 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 Wehrwölfe. Set in the Celle region ( Lower Saxony) during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), 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 Löns's novel, Der Wehrwolf, first published in 1910. It is widely misconstrued as having been intended to be a guerrilla force to harass Allied forces after the defeat of Germany, a misconception created by Joseph Goebbels through propaganda disseminated in the waning weeks of the war through his "Radio Werwolf,” which was not actually connected in any way with the military unit. Werwolf ( pronounced, German for " werewolf") was a Nazi plan which began development in 1944, to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany, in parallel with the Wehrmacht fighting in front of the lines. Werwolf pennant with the Wolfsangel symbol in horizontal form For resistance against the Nazis, see German resistance to Nazism. For one of Hitler's military headquarters, see Werwolf (Wehrmacht headquarters). For the mythological shapeshifter, see Werewolf.
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