Most people assume that WW II ended and that was that but renegade SS units attacked allied occupation forces long after Germany's surrender.
It was perfectly rational for the Germans to resist what was to become possibly the deadliest and most brutal foreign occupation in history. The Morgenthau Plan which was intended to destroy Germany(1) was American policy at the time and the other Allies were as criminal as they were vicious. At the same time Stalin's horde of mass murdering rapists were slaughtering, raping and enslaving German civilians and POWs for hard labor in the USSR, Eisenhower's squalid, true death camps made Auschwitz look like a 4 star resort. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians were slowly and painfully murdered by deliberate starvation, exposure, untreated wounds and for "fun".(2), (3) German civilians and POWs who were not murdered or incarcerated were enslaved and sent to work in one of the victor nation. As late as March 1947, about 4 million Germans were doing forced labor(4) for the victorious Allies. Another proposal as to how the Allies should handle a post WW 2 Germany was put forward by Theodore Kaufman, chairman of the American Federation for Peace. It is another disturbing reality that his proposal to sterilize all Germans met with approval in the American press(5) and, I imagine, compelled the Germans to resist to the extent that they did. Any thought that the Germans might be treated justly according to the Geneva Convention quickly disappeared after the first farcical Nuremberg "trial" where confessions were extracted through torture, castration, threats to families and other criminal means. I hope that the information I have provided helps to explain why many able bodied men and, I suppose women, decided to fight on rather than face torture and / or a slow death far from home. Thanks, (1) "The US plan to completely destroy Germany after World War II" https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/morgenthau-plan-postwar-germany-wwii/ EXCERPT "Morgenthau wanted not only subdivide Germany into smaller parts, he wanted to wreck all of its industrial capabilities. In order to keep Germans from making armaments, he wanted to keep them from making anything at all. Industrial facilities were to be destroyed, mines were to be wrecked and filled, experts in production and manufacturing would be forcibly removed from the region and put to work elsewhere. Germany was going to become an agrarian state, set back almost a thousand years." CONTINUED (2) “Buried Alive Screaming In The Night: German POW Survivors Describe Eisenhower’s Extermination Camps After WWII Had Ended” https://wearswar.wordpress.com/2018...ers-extermination-camps-after-wwii-had-ended/ EXCERPTS “This is one of a series of published and planned articles detailing aspects of the Western Allies deliberate intention to murder approximately 1 million disarmed German POWs by means of unnecessary starvation, exposure, and illness. “The Western Allies deliberately murdered approximately 1 million disarmed German POWs by means of starvation, exposure, and illness. This Allied atrocity was first publicly exposed in 1989 in the book Other Losses by James Bacque. Bacque estimates in Other Losses that the victims undoubtedly number over 790,000, almost certainly over 900,000, and quite likely over a million. The prisoners’ deaths were knowingly caused by army officers who had sufficient resources to keep these prisoners alive. Relief organizations such as the Red Cross that attempted to help prisoners in the American camps were refused permission by the army. “CONTINUED (3) “Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II” https://www.amazon.com/Other-Losses-Investigation-Prisoners-Americans/dp/0889226652 EXCERPT “Other Losses caused an international scandal when first published in 1989 by revealing that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s policies caused the death of some 1,000,000 German captives in American and French internment camps through disease, starvation and exposure from 1944 to 1949, as a direct result of the policies of the western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949. Bacque flew to Moscow to examine the newly-opened KGB archives, where he found meticulously and exhaustively documented new proof that almost one million German POWs had indeed died in those Western camps.”CONTINUED (4) “Forced labor of Germans after World War II” https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II EXCERPT “Forced labour of Germans after World War II refers to the Allied use of German civilians and captured soldiers for forced labor in years following World War II (and in some cases much longer). The topic of using Germans as forced labour for reparations was first broached at the Tehran conference in 1943, where Soviet premier Joseph Stalin demanded 4,000,000 German workers.[1] Forced labour was also included in the Morgenthau Plan draft from September 1944, and was included in the final protocol of the Yalta conference[2] in January 1945, where it was sanctioned by UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In March 1947, an estimated 4,000,000 Germans were being used as forced labour.” CONTINUED (5) "Germany Must Perish!" https://www.ihr.org/books/kaufman/perish.shtml EXCERPT "Kaufman's fervent proposal for the systematic sterilization of the entire German population was given respectful attention in the American press, including reviews in a number of newspapers. A review in the weekly Time magazine, March 24, 1941, called Kaufman's plan a "sensational idea." CONTINUED
Such things always happen after a war. Hell, there were still Japanese soldiers fighting into the 1970s. However, the large scale plans like Operation Werewolf never materialized.
I do believe those (or the singular 'he') Japanese were "hiding out" .... not fighting. The SS in my OP were attacking allied troops and even passive Germans who accepted the Nazi surrender. They caused several hundred American lives - I think.
No, actually they were fighting. One of the largest was Captain Sakae Oba, who continued fighting with another 46 soldiers on Saipan until December 1945. On Lubang Island in the Philippines 30 continued fighting until they were cornered, and after an intense firefight they were killed, along with 8 Americans and 2 Filipinos. In March 1947 Lieutenant Ei Yamaguchi and 33 others attacked a Marine patrol with hand grenades, and took refuge in a cave. They managed to get a Japanese Admiral on the scene who convinced them to surrender. It was hardly "singular", they were constantly finding groups into the 1950s, often of 30 or more individuals. And one Division sized force was still operating in China until 1948. Cut off from Japan by the warring between the Communists and Nationalists in Manchuria, they continued to fight both sides until they were eventually wiped out. And even the most famous Hiroo Onoda was still fighting until the 1950s, until the last of their ammunition was gone. Of his last companions, Shoichi Shimada was shot after a firefight in 1953, then after recovering was killed in another firefight in 1954. Kinshichi Kozuka was killed in a firefight in 1972. You seem to not comprehend that most of them fought for as long as they could. And what happened in Germany was just as unorganized for the most part. They simply were not isolated on islands so had more resources.
Nazi's genocide folks, then Nazi's get defeated, then folks generalize all Germans into Nazi's, folks genocide Germans, Germans say 'hey, it wasn't me' and resist. Tis human nature to stereotype others into groups, and is also human nature to resent being stereotyped into the wrong group. Its always been going on. We just been keeping better records of it the last century or so.
Sorry about that.... Participation in this forum is supposed to be enjoyable so just take your time and please let me know if anything I wrote or cited needs clarification. Thanks,
Supposedly a lot of the Japanese holdouts simply thought the order to surrender was a western propaganda trick. When they recieved the order to surrender from someone with authority they recognized, they did so.
Europeans have been generalizing each other and stereotyping each other since the beginning of recorded history. Some historians consider WW 1 and WW 2 to be just one war, others trace the same hostilities back to the Franco-Prussian War but a WW 2 was guaranteed by Stalin's plans for "M Day" (Mobilization Day) (1) in June of 1941. In spite of these realities, Germany is blamed for "starting" WW 2 when there was already fighting from Spain to Manchuria. Since the victors write the history, we are not told that Germany appealed to the League of Nations dozens of times to stop the Polish massacres of German citizens (2). While Poles had been murdering ethnic Germans by the thousands since WW 1, I believe that it was the Danzig Massacre that finally compelled Germany to invade about 1/2 of Poland. Stalin, of course, seized the other 1/2 of Poland without a whisper of outrage from the rest of the world. It is also not commonly known that Hitler appealed to the Western Allies for peace in order to more effectively fight Communism. Historian, Peter Padfield writes that Hitler sent Rudolph Hess with a peace proposal to meet with Churchill through members of the "Cliveden Set". Churchill, who was confident of US support and more interested in destroying Germany than peace, rejected the peace offer and the rest is history. Thanks, (1) "Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe:…" https://www.counter-currents.com/201...onquer-europe/ EXCERPT "In Icebreaker, Suvorov details the deployment of Soviet forces in June 1941, describing just how Stalin amassed vast numbers of troops and stores of weapons along the European frontier, not to defend the Soviet homeland but in preparation for a westward attack and decisive battles on enemy territory. Thus, when German forces struck, the bulk of Red ground and air forces were concentrated along the Soviet western borders facing contiguous European countries, especially the German Reich and Romania, in final readiness for an assault on Europe. In his second book on the origins of the war, “M Day” (for “Mobilization Day”), Suvorov details how, between late 1939 and the summer of 1941, Stalin methodically and systematically built up the best armed, most powerful military force in the world — actually the world’s first superpower — for his planned conquest of Europe. Suvorov explains how Stalin’s drastic conversion of the country’s economy for war actually made war inevitable. Stalin instead wanted the Soviet regime to take advantage of occasional “armistices” in the global struggle to consolidate Red military strength for the right moment when larger and better armed Soviet forces would strike into central and western Europe, adding new Soviet republics as this overwhelming force rolled across the continent."CONTINUED (2). "The 1939 Danzig Massacres of ethnic Germans which caused Hitler to invade Poland" (2)http://fr.soc.histoire.narkive.com/...-germans-which-caused-hitler-to-invade-poland (3) "Nazis ‘offered to leave western Europe in exchange for free hand to attack USSR" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/...in-exchange-for-free-hand-to-attack-USSR.html EXCERPT The academic said Hess had brought with him the proposed peace treaty, expressed in numbered clauses and typed on paper from the German Chancellery. An English translation was also included, but the British also wanted the original German translated. Mr Padfield, who makes the claims in a new book, Hess, Hitler and Churchill, said: “This was not a renegade plot. Hitler had sent Hess and he brought over a fully developed peace treaty for Germany to evacuate all the occupied countries in the West.” CONTINUED (4) "Hitler didn't want world war" http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/hitlernowar.html EXCERPT "Hitler didn't want a world war, and had no stomach for fighting England, according to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Louis Kilzer, author of "Churchill's Deception" (Simon & Schuster, 1994). Hitler believed the future of Western civilization depended on the cooperation of Germany and her Aryan cousins: England and the United States. His territorial demands were limited to conquering Communist Russia, which he regarded as a proxy for Jewish world ambitions. He was determined to avoid fighting a war on two fronts. The "miracle at Dunkirk" was in fact an extraordinary peace overture to England. We don't normally associate Hitler with such magnanimity. In May 1940, the British were on the verge of defeat. The English army was trapped at Dunkirk. Rather than take them prisoner, Hitler halted his generals for three days allowing 330,000 men to escape. "The blood of every single Englishman is too valuable to shed," Hitler said. "Our two people belong together racially and traditionally. That is and always has been my aim, even if our generals can't grasp it." (Kilzer, p.213) Rudolph Hess, the Deputy Leader of Nazi Germany, was in contact with the Cliveden group and flew to England May 10, 1941 to negotiate peace. According to Kilzer, Hess had Hitler's complete blessings. CONTINUED
I actually do not blame them at all. Japan and Italy had already been fighting for almost a decade prior to that. Germany was simply the first nation to attack another that had alliances with other European nations. The Second Italo-Abyssinian War had been going on since 1935. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and created the puppet territory of Manchukuo in 1932. And of course the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Germany was actually the last of the major Axis powers to go to war. And yes, for some reason they unfairly get singled out for "starting" it in history. Especially when one realizes that the Winter War of 1939 is somehow completely ignored, where the Soviet Union tried to gobble up Finland.
Which is something I often laugh about as I point out to those that claim that Japan was about to surrender, even though not a single Allied soldier had landed on their home islands. Most simply do not comprehend how fanatical the Japanese people can be, and that surrender was almost unheard of by them. The vast majority would fight to the death even in hopeless suicide charges rather than surrender. They were finding holdouts on the islands into the 1970s and 1980s. But most had few supplies left and were little more than bandits by then. But they still refused to surrender until somebody could be found in authority in Japan to finally order them to stop fighting.
They would've surrendered when their Emporer told them to. By some accounts, the emporer was ready to do just that for some time in exchange for a deal where he wouldn't be imprisonned or executed. The deal was refused, though it would turn out he wasn't punished anyway, probably in the interest of a smoother transition for the Japanese people who had lived their whole lives with him as 'god'.
