WOELCKY: “Tell me, what are you actually going to do here?” I told her: “We are going to man the West Wall here.” So she said: “Man the West Wall? Is a stand going to be made here?” I said: “Of course a stand is going to be made here.” I said: “At last we’ve got somewhere where we can establish ourselves a bit, where we can form a front.” Then she said: “That’s hellish. We were all so glad, because we thought that the Americans would advance quickly and that we should get it over at last, and now you came here, and there will be fighting here, and all we have will be smashed up again! What are we to do, where are we to go? Everything we have will be shot to bits!” Of course at first I was just flabbergasted. I said: “Now listen to me, you can go away from here; in fact you’ll have to.” I said: “Things will get pretty uncomfortable anyhow. You are 2 km. to the rear of the ‘Bunker’ here, and that means you’ll have to count on shelling or bombing every day.” So she said: “Well, where are we to go? We have no means of moving all our belongings.” I said: “Of course you can’t take all your worldly goods, that would be impossible.” Well, I could understand that attitude about the evacuation. But then she started: “We have been lied to, and cheated for five years, and promised a golden future, and what have we got? Now war has come upon us again, and I just can’t understand how there can be one German soldier left who will fire another shot” and so on. I picked up my brief-case, put it under my arm, and went out of the house. Actually I should have taken some action against the woman, but I could well understand her feelings.787
We have no way of knowing whether Woelcky’s tale was true or not. But the fact that he was taken prisoner a few days later near the village of Prüm in western Germany speaks for its veracity. Apparently, Woelcky felt little desire to fight “to the last gasp of breath.” Woelcky had joined Hitler’s praetorian guard in 1933. But by the final year of war, he divorced himself from the SS frame of reference, showing understanding for the war fatigue of a civilian and refusing to take action against her defeatism.
The surveillance protocols reveal that SS men maintained surprisingly heterogeneous views of the war. At the same time, there was an unmistakable
