Nicht zu jung zum Sterben: Die “Hitler-Jugend” im Kampf um Wien 1945

Werewolf operations behind the Western Front were often
carried through with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. This was caused in part by
a lack of conviction among the general public, and even among some Werewolves,
that the encroaching Allied powers would treat the population badly,
notwithstanding Nazi claims to the contrary. On the Eastern Front, such
psychological factors moderating Werewolf activity did not exist. Underpinned
by years of racial stereotyping, the Nazi propaganda machine succeeded in
convincing most eastern Germans of the ‘barbarity’ of the Soviet armed forces,
and unhappily, these images were often reinforced by advancing Red Army
soldiers, who spent much of their time pillaging and raping. Had Goebbels
picked out of thin air the most garish and lurid descriptions of Soviet
misbehavior that he could imagine, he could not have come up with better copy
than the Soviets provided through the actual comportment of their forces. From
the warped perspective of the Werewolves, however, this disastrous situation
could not be played solely for advantage. Although the intense hatred of the
enemy necessary for guerrilla warfare existed, more than half of the population
of the eastern provinces was either so frightened or so browbeaten by Nazi
authorities that they picked up and fled in the face of the Soviet advance.
This mass exodus both deprived eastern Werewolves of a support base and
interfered with the logistics and communication channels needed to sustain
Werewolf operations. In addition, civilians left behind in the
Soviet-controlled hinterland were often so shocked by Soviet outrages that they
slipped into a state of numb impotence and were rendered incapable of thinking
about active or even passive resistance.

Despite these impediments, Werewolves went into battle
behind the Eastern Front at an early date and some units were at least
intermittently active. Unfortunately, surviving accounts of these operations
are scarce. The nature of Soviet anti-partisan tactics determined that not many
Werewolves survived their encounters with Red Army and Soviet secret police
troops; captives taken in skirmishes were apt to be shot in the nape of the
neck, the treatment that the Soviet leadership deemed suitable for irregular
forces. Until the final weeks of the conflict, even Volkssturm troopers were
often dispatched in such fashion. As a result, interrogation records are
scarce, a situation made worse by secretive Russian archival control of
whatever material of this sort that still survives, and because of the
typically savage treatment of Werewolf opponents, Russian veterans have usually
not been eager to include accounts of Werewolf incidents in their memoirs. Thus
what we know of the Werewolf in the East we know very much in part; we see
through a glass darkly.

IN THE BEGINNING

While the Rhineland HSSPf were just starting to organize
Werewolf recruitment in October 1944, harried SS-police officials in East
Prussia were already fielding their first Werewolf detachments, and Prützmann
could report that these units were already operating ‘with some success.’ This
progress was achieved despite crippling organizational problems and personnel
difficulties. When Hans Prützmann had been sent to the Ukraine in 1941, he was
not completely relieved of his existing job as HSSPf in the East Prussian
capital of Königsberg. Rather, he was replaced by an Acting-HSSPf,
Gruppenführer Georg Ebrecht. As a result, when Prützmann was chased out of the
last German footholds in the Ukraine in the summer of 1944, it was unclear
whether he would reclaim his old position in Königsberg. The post was still
officially his, but the fact that he was an archenemy of the local Gauleiter,
Erich Koch, did not suggest much chance of a happy homecoming. This ambiguity
was resolved by the illness of Ebrecht, who became incapacitated in early
September 1944, a situation that seemed to demand that Prützmann walk back
through the door and replace his surrogate, at least temporarily. By 11
September 1944, Prützmann was back in Königsberg, functioning in this capacity.
Ebrecht’s illness, originally expected to last six weeks, eventually forced his
retirement, so that by October 1944 Prützmann found himself potentially saddled
with his old job. Since he was concurrently appointed as national Werewolf
chief and as plenipotentiary to Croatia, he lacked sufficient time for his
regional duties in East Prussia, and in early December, Otto Hellwig, a
hard-drinking former member of the Rossbach Freikorps in the Baltic, was
appointed as the new Acting-HSSPf-North-East. Hellwig had worked closely with
Prützmann in the Ukraine, although in 1943 he had been sent back to East
Prussia to become SS-police commander in the newly-annexed frontier region of
Bialystok. At the time, rumours abounded that Hellwig’s alcoholism had prompted
the recall.

When Prützmann was in Königberg in September 1944, he began
work on mobilizing small Werewolf groups, which were tasked with allowing
allowing themselves to be overrun by any imminent Soviet advances into the
province. As his Werewolf Beauftragter, Prützmann chose Obersturmbannführer
Schmitz, a senior official with the Security Police in Königsberg. A darkhaired
native of the Eifel district who constantly struggled to stay one shave ahead
of his heavy beard, Schmitz had been stationed with Prützmann’s staff in Kiev
and had been cultivated by the SS general as a protegé. Schmitz ran the East
Prussian Werewolves until February 1945, when he was released because of
illness. One Werewolf recruited during this period later remembered that the
headquarters staff referred to itself as ‘First Military District Command,
Abwehr Office – Königsberg.’

The pace of developments was soon forced by the Russians. In
mid-October 1944, with Soviet armies already bearing down on the northern towns
of Memel and Tilsit, Third Byelorussian Front suddenly sliced into the boundary
regions east of Insterburg, briefly capturing Goldap and throwing the entire
province into an uncontrolled panic before German forces staged a successful
counter-attack, partially destroying the Red Army’s 11th Guards Rifle Corps at
Gumbinnen. Goldap was retaken by the Wehrmacht on 5 November, although the Red
Army retained control of several hundred square miles of German territory along
the East Prussian frontier.

These events resulted in the enemy capture of the
operational zones plotted for several of Schmitz’s Werewolf units. One of
these, a nine-man ‘Special Kommando’, had been formed in early October and was
recruited from the ranks of the Luftwaffe’s ‘Hermann Göring’ Division, a
detachment of which was in the area in order to guard Göring’s country estate
on the Rominten Heath. Major Frevert, the commandant of the Göring residence,
was charged by the Königsberg ‘Abwehr Office’ with choosing and training a
Werewolf team, and with preparing three hidden caches in the woods, each
supplied with three months’ worth of ammunition and food stocks. The unit was
also equipped with two radio transmitters and ten carrier pigeons. Feldwebel
Bioksdorf was placed in direct command and was responsible for leading the Werewolves
in battle.

Although the Soviet offensive threw Werewolf plans into
flux, cutting short the time needed for training and preparations, Bioksdorf’s
unit was deployed in the large area overrun by the Soviets in mid-October, and
remained active in the smaller strip of territory retained by the Russians
after their retreat. By November, the unit was one of six similar formations in
operation behind the lines of Third Byelorussian Front. Its mission was to
report on the nature of Soviet transport passing through the Rominten area and
to harass this traffic whenever and wherever possible. Bioksdorf also had a
mandate to organize small groups of bypassed German soldiers and thereby create
new guerrilla bands. Finally, the unit was also supposed to report on relations
between Soviet forces and German civilians who had failed to evacuate the
frontier region. Investigations of this sort produced a shock: along with
counter-attacking German troops, Werewolves were among the first Germans to see
the initial evidence of atrocities in areas overrun by Soviet troops: women
raped and then crucified on barn doors; babies with their heads smashed in by
shovels or rifle butts; civilian refugees squashed flat by Russian tanks that
had overtaken their treks. In areas recovered by the Wehrmacht, the Germans
were quick to call in observers from the neutral press in order to witness what
had been done. Third Byelorussian Front also evacuated almost all remaining
German males and most females from areas in the rear of the front, a tactic
which, according to Hellwig, was extremely effective in isolating partisans.
Werewolves, he reported, ‘only [had] a very short time in which to commence
their work.’ Anyone who looked to the Soviets even vaguely like a partisan was
killed immediately. This paranoia was probably a factor in the deaths of fifty
French POWs, dressed in semi-military garb, whose bodies were discovered in the
Nemmersdorf area.

During the brief period in which the Bioksdorf Werewolves
were free agents, they managed to send ten radio massages back to Königsberg
and they also attempted to blow up two bridges, although in typical Werewolf
fashion they lacked sufficient charges to finish the job in either case. On 14
November 1944, Soviet Interior Ministry troops spotted three guerrillas on the
Rominten Heath, and although two of these men were killed, the third was taken
alive and thereafter provided the Soviets with full details about the Werewolf
‘Special Kommando.’ At the same time, the Soviets also seized over fifty pounds
of Werewolf explosives and twenty-five hand grenades. Shortly afterwards,
soldiers of 11th Guards Rifle Corps overran the remaining members of the unit,
including Bioksdorf himself.

ANOTHER MISSION BEHIND RUSSIAN LINES

In addition to East Prussia, Austria served as another
Werewolf stronghold. After German reverses along the front in Hungary, most
notably the Soviet encirclement of Budapest, Prützmann decided to prod the
Austrians into taking some precautionary measures. In early January 1945, he arrived
in Vienna and met with the local HSSPf, Walter Schimana, and the Gauleiter of
Lower Austria, Hugo Jury. Neither of these Austrians possessed the iron will
for which the Nazis were supposed to be famous. Schimana was a narrow-minded
little man already on the way towards a collapse that would eventually see him
sent home to rest and recuperation with his family in the Salzkammergut; Jury
was a tougher nut but was strongly opposed to the recruiting of Hitler Youth
boys for guerrilla warfare, a distinct impediment to the kind of local
organization envisioned by Prützmann. Both men, however, gave Prützmann their
grudging compliance, and they agreed to appoint a local party official and
Volkssturm commander named Fahrion as Werewolf Beauftragter. Shortly after
Prützmann returned home, Karl Siebel also showed up in Vienna and met with the
local Brownshirt commander, Wilhelm von Schmorlemer, in an effort to get him to
cooperate in the project.

In mid-January Fahrion attended a four-day Werewolf course
in Berlin and returned home eager to get to work on Werewolf matters. Early in
the following month, he convened a meeting of local Kreisleiter at Heimburg and
requested their help in making manpower available.4 It was through the party’s
subsequent recruitment campaign that a dedicated Hitler Youth activist, the son
of a local party official, was swept into the movement. This young man, who was
interviewed after the war by the British historian and museum curator James
Lucas, had an extremely interesting story to tell. Feeling that Werewolf
training would be more exciting than the alternative – serving as a Flak gunner
– he volunteered in February 1945 for a special training course at Waidhofen,
on the Ybbs River. Entrants into the five-week program were immediately stripped
of their personal possessions and were refused any chance to maintain contact
with their families; they were told that they now belonged only to the Führer.
They were trained in the use of German and Soviet weapons, demolitions,
survival techniques and basic radio precedure. Rigorous field exercises
included prolonged night-time marches which culminated in the participants
having to dig narrow foxholes, which were supposed to be so well camouflaged as
to be undetectable in daylight. Trainees who performed below standard were
beaten by their SS instructors.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, the failure of Wehrmacht
counter-offensives in Hungary had been met in March 1945 by seemingly
unstoppable drives by Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts, a turn of events which
by early April had carried the Red Army into eastern Austria. Fahrion had been
ordered in March 1945 to report his preparations to Wehrmacht army group
intelligence officers as soon as German combat forces were pushed back into
Austria, and when rear echelons of Army Group ‘South’ appeared, he sent a
representative to make contact with them. The main plan, at this stage, was to
field about twenty small detachments of ten persons each, although it is not
clear that all of these were ready before the Soviets arrived. Fahrion’s people
were also short of radio equipment because Prützmann had failed to deliver a
number of devices that he had promised, all of which made it difficult for
field detachments to stay in contact with a regional Werewolf signals centre at
Passau. Nonetheless, some available manpower was sent to the Leitha Mountains,
south-east of Vienna. Schimana later remembered that Fahrion repeatedly bragged
about the exploits of a ten-member group based at Oberfuhlendorf, near the
Hungarian enclave of Sopron.

When these operations were launched, Lucas’s informant was
sent northward as part of a four-man group to monitor Soviet troop movements in
the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia (now the Czech Republic). This was a
precarious assignment because it was assumed, quite rightly, that if the
guerrillas were detected by Czech civilians, they would be readily betrayed to
the Soviets. As a result, the group had to stay concealed in the woods,
constructing small and inconspicuous cooking fires as prescribed in the
Werewolf handbook. Although they were supposed to ‘smell of earth’, their lack
of bathing facilities soon left them smelling more like sweat, a danger since
body odour could serve as a give-away for Soviet pursuers and tracking dogs. Supplies,
however, were plentiful: when Lucas’s source was selected to accompany the
group leader to a supply cache, he was surprised to see a small mountain of
weapons, food, clothing and bedding – enough to keep the unit going for years.
And it was so well hidden that the spot where it was stored was literally
invisible from a yard away.

Reconnaissance outposts were manned by one Werewolf who
maintained a tally of passing Soviet tanks, trucks and guns, while a second
guerrilla kept a watch over his partner. The great masses of Soviet men and
material, moving day and night, inspired nothing short of awe, particularly in
view of the fact there was no local trace of any German troops or aircraft.
Such was the Soviet sense of security that vehicles travelled at night with
headlights blazing. In one case, however, this sense of complacency was rudely
disturbed. When a small patrol of motorized infantry came too close to the
Werewolves’ hideout in the woods, the guerrillas decided to use force in
eliminating the threat. Mining a deep gorge through which the Soviet vehicles
were expected to pass, the partisans took up lateral firing positions – once
again a textbook maneouvre described in the Werewolf manual. When the small
Russian convoy passed through the defile, the lead vehicle hit a mine and as
the driver of the last truck shifted into reverse, he hit a mine as well. The
Werewolves then shot up the trapped vehicles and the soldiers inside them.

After swinging further north one night in mid-April, the
guerrillas then hooked southward, back into Austria, moving closer to the
Werewolf concentration point in the Leitha Mountains. It was while observing
northward-bound armour near Bruck-an-der-Leitha that the unit’s good fortune
finally ran out. Three of the guerrillas were dug in foxholes on the slope of a
hill overlooking the road; the fourth, Lucas’s witness, was in another hole
over a thousand feet further up the slope, sending radio messages back to his
Werewolf controllers. Suddenly, for reasons still unclear, some of the tanks
swerved off the road and began clambering up the slope toward the Werewolf
foxholes. At this terrifying sight, one of the guerrillas panicked, jumped out
of his hole and began running headlong away from the tanks. He was promptly
shot down and the Soviets then began methodically searching the hill for other
foxholes. When the other two entrenchments in the forward line were discovered,
T34 tanks ran over them and spun their treads, crushing the occupants and
burying them in their own graves. Then, as the horror-struck radio operator
crouched in his hidey-hole, the tanks rolled further up the hill, looking for
more trenches and firing their machine guns furiously. The armoured crews got
out and searched around on foot, until they finally tired of beating the bushes
and drove away. Lucky to be alive, the sole survivor of this engagement stayed
covered in his foxhole until dark, whereafter he crawled out and slunk away
without checking on the condition of his comrades’ bodies.

Having dodged the proverbial bullet, Lucas’s informant then
headed south, mainly with the intention of contacting other Werewolves
operating along the Austrian-Hungarian frontier. He saw another Werewolf
loitering outside a train station, and then launched into one of the cloak-and-dagger
recognition rituals so beloved by secret organizations, rolling a coin over his
fingers and exchanging other elaborate signs and countersigns before contact
could safely be made. Once he had established his bona fides, he began
operations with a new Werewolf group, the main mission of which was mining
Soviet transportation routes and painting threatening mottoes in order to
intimidate local civilians. ‘Slogans reminded them,’ he later recalled, ‘that
the Werwolf was watching and that Hitler’s orders were still to be obeyed, even
under foreign domination.’ Needless to say, such activity made the Werewolves
unpopular among rural villagers, most of whom wanted the war to end and cared
little about which occupying power was garrisoning the cities.

After several weeks of minelaying and sloganeering, the
Werewolf group leader decided that the unit had become stranded too deeply in
the Soviet-occupied hinterland, and that it was necessary to shift their zone
of operations westwards. While on the move through a village east of Linz, the
Werewolves were accosted by a party of drunken Russians who shouted that Hitler
was dead and the war was over. To learn this ‘devastating’ news through such
means was considered the ultimate humiliation, particularly since the
guerrillas were encouraged to toast their leader’s death and their country’s
defeat. With the final capitulation soon confirmed, the Werewolf unit
disintegrated. Lucas’s narrator went to Linz and subsequently made his living
trading supplies from secret Werewolf caches on the black market. ‘It was’, he
claimed, ‘a miserable and ignoble end to what had begun as a glorious national
adventure.’

THE VIENNA FOREST DIVERSION

While the HSSPf-Vienna was directly training and deploying
Werewolf troops, Hans Lauterbacher, the Hitler Youth district leader in the
Austrian capital, was launching efforts on a much larger scale. Two local
battalions of Hitler Youth fighters were codenamed ‘Werwolf’, and although they
were attached to an SS ‘Hitler Youth’ Division and were intended to serve
mainly in conventional combat, some of their cadres were trained in guerrilla
warfare and were available for deployment in ‘Jagdkommandos’, that is, raiding
detachments formed for operations behind Soviet lines. Hugo Jury and the Vienna
Gauleiter, Baldur von Schirach, were both opposed to such preparations, but
Siegfried Ueberreither and Friedrich Rainer, the Gauleiter of the south-eastern
provinces of Styria and Carinthia, were both strongly supportive, and much of
the prospective guerrilla war was expected to be fought in their Gaue.

One of the recruits for Hitler Youth Werewolf training was
sixteen-year-old Fred Borth, an enthusiastic young man from Vienna who had made
rapid progress through the ranks of the Hitler Youth despite being raised by a
great uncle who was a staunch Austrian republican. Although Borth had dreamed
of becoming a pilot, local Hitler Youth chief Walter Melich got the Luftwaffe
to release him for ‘particularly important military tasks’, and in January 1945
he sent him for training in anti-tank warfare at a camp near Hütteldorf. Once
the decision was made – given the continuing Soviet threat in Hungary – to
prepare all Austrian Hitler Youth boys for battlefield service, Borth, as a
Hitler Youth leader, began training as an officer candidate. Melich then
instructed him to attend a special Werewolf camp at a hunting lodge near
Passau, a facility established under the aegis of HSSPf Schimana. Melich
vaguely described the mandate of the camp as teaching ‘the art of survival’;
Borth did not stop to think about why it was called a ‘Werwolf’ facility.

The young recruit got quite a surprise at Passau. The camp
commandant was a psychopathic SS Sturmbannführer popularly known as ‘the
Bishop’ because he was an ordained Eastern Orthodox priest. A veteran of the
Austrian imperial military intelligence service, ‘the Bishop’ had later served
as an advisor to the fascist dictator of Croatia and had been sent from there –
through the intervention of Prützmann – to run the school at Passau. ‘The
Bishop’s’ idea of training was to get his charges to lie on railway ties and
let trains pass over them, or to show his students how to commit suicide by
folding back their own tongues over their throats. The pièce de résistance of
the training schedule was a wild run through an obstacle course that started
with ‘the Bishop’ tightening a noose around the necks of the participants, so
that were choked nearly to a point of unconsciousness and had to navigate the
course in this condition. To add to the sport, live machine-gun ammunition was
fired at the trainees, and grenades were tossed behind them in order to keep
them moving.

‘The Bishop’s’ political instruction had similarly extremist
tendencies. He handed out photographs of the October 1944 Soviet atrocities in
East Prussia, and he showed films about Anglo-American bombing raids on German
cities. He also had lots to say about rapes and unprovoked shootings, some of
which were currently being reported from areas across the border in Hungary. Joseph
Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt’s son, Elliot, were alleged to have talked about
the need to shoot 50,000 Germans; American Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau
reportedly wanted to turn Germany into a ‘de-industrialized’ medieval cowpatch,
to sterilize its adult population and to ship Germans to Africa and other parts
of the world in order to perform forced labour. ‘The Bishop’ admitted that the
Germans themselves had made mistakes in Eastern Europe, and that the growth of
anti-German resistance had been solely related to this factor. However, ‘we
can’t wrack our brains about what should have been done differently.’ ‘We
must,’ he argued, ‘come to terms with the facts.’ It was true that Germany
would probably be overrun and that the Werewolves would eventually have to
operate on an entirely ‘illegal’ basis, but ‘we presently see,’ he claimed,
‘the same prerequisites that have set the stage for partisan warfare

[elsewhere]

.’

Having finished his guerrilla training on 7 February, Borth
was returned to Hütteldorf and to his Hitler Youth company, which he
accompanied into battle when the Soviets smashed into Austria in early April
1945. Borth performed well during the heavy fighting in Vienna, being awarded
first and second class Iron Crosses, but he was not brought along when the
Hitler Youth companies were eventually withdrawn to Bisemberg along with the
rest of 6th Panzer Army. Instead, on 10 April he was ordered to report to a
provisional SS Security Service headquarters in the besieged Austrian capital.
There he was surprised to find some senior SS officers waiting to greet him,
including ‘the Bishop’ and HSSPf Schimana. These officers told Borth that he
had been selected to command a 65-man Jagdkommando’ drawn from a Hitler Youth
‘special duties’ batallion, a unit that would henceforth function under the
joint control of the SS Security Service and the Prützmann organization.
Several Security Service men and a Ukrainian specialist in guerrilla warfare
would be attached to the company as advisors; ‘the Bishop’ would be Borth’s
contact man at headquarters. The job of the unit was to create unrest in the
enemy hinterland and thereby provide indirect help to beleaguered Wehrmacht
forces at the front, since the Soviets would presumably have to redirect
resources in order to sweep clean their own lines of communication. ‘You’ll be
the game rather than the hunter’, he was told. He was instructed to operate at
night, not only to protect his forces, but to make the unit’s numbers seem more
significant than they really were. Contacts with the population were to be kept
to a minimum, and he was expressly warned to beware of ‘spies and traitors.’ He
was shown a general staff map of secret supply caches in enemy territory, but
he was advised that the preparation of many dumps had not been completed in
time, and that supplies were limited. Therefore, he ought to make moderate
demands upon the caches, since he might need to come back to them later.

Several additional problems were also discussed. Although
Borth’s formation was given a wireless set, there was no replacement for the
highly trained radio operator who had been part of Borth’s former unit, and he
only received one medical attendant, not much help for over sixty boys, none of
whom had ever taken a first aid course. Borth confessed that he had no idea
what to do with anyone badly wounded during the enterprise. His superiors
expressed sympathy with Borth’s concerns, but they noted that they were not
allowed to draw specialist personnel from the front, and that radio monitoring
– not operating – was the only thing that SS security and police personnel were
properly trained to do. In addition, there was only a small cadre of trained
radio operators who had to be divided amongst various guerrilla units using the
Austrian radio network. As for medical problems, it was pointed out that
Wehrmacht field hospitals and dressing stations were no longer being evacuated
– medical staff were now being left for Soviet captors along with the badly
wounded – and this practice was causing shortages of highly trained personnel
that could no longer be made good. Given this situation, it was almost a
miracle that this ‘unloved Prützmann unit’ had been allotted any medical help
at all from the Waffen-SS. Sending a full-fledged doctor with the ‘Jagdkommando’
was out of the question. In any case, physicians could hardly perform difficult
surgery in a wood or a bunker. There was always the possibility of recruiting
local country doctors to assemble ad hoc operating rooms, but the SS trusted
neither the doctors nor their neighbours not to betray Nazi partisans to the
enemy. As a result, Borth was told to depend on his own resources, however
inadequate these might seem. In the final analysis, heavily wounded Werewolves
could be given cyanide capsules rather than being allowed to suffer and die in
pain.

Later in the day, Borth was directed to the Augarten section
of Vienna and introduced to his new troops. Most of them were fifteen- or
sixteen-year-old boys from Vienna who had already been deployed in Augarten,
carrying shells for the artillery of the SS ‘Das Reich’ Division. Borth’s main
advisor was a rugged Ukrainian bruiser named Petya Orlov, a man whom Borth
liked but never entirely trusted, seeds of doubt having already been planted by
‘the Bishop.’ On the night of 10 April, Borth took his group to an abandoned
factory near the switching yards of the North-West Railway Station, whereafter
they advanced to some ruins and hunkered down to sleep. ‘The Bishop’ showed up
around noon, bringing with him a police officer from the Vienna Canal Brigade
who was assigned to serve as a guide to the labyrinth of subterranean Vienna.
During a lull in the fighting, the company crossed the Danube Canal over a
bridge partially obscured by smoke, and they then descended into a network of
sewage tunnels and run-off drains, hoping to infiltrate Soviet lines by walking
under the feet of Red Army troops on the surface. It was a hellish, pitch black
environment, swarming with rats and contaminated with nearly unbearable odours
from excrement and the bodies of dead animals dumped into the tunnels after
bombing raids. A few human bodies were also floating in the slime. During the
passage through this stygian maze, one of Borth’s Security Service escorts
slipped in the muck and injured his knee so badly that he could no longer walk
without aid. There was talk of bringing him to a civilian hospital on the
surface, but the SS man knew that the Soviets were sweeping hospitals in search
of wounded SS troopers, so he drew his pistol and shot himself through the
head. A Hitler Youth guerrilla was bitten so badly by rats that he too required
medical attention. He was led to a hospital after the Werewolves emerged from
the tunnels, but the lad never escaped the impact of his subterranean tribulations;
his right arm was amputated below the elbow and he later took his own life.