Why General Patton Ordered His Jeeps to Have “Wire Cutters” 

March 25th, 1945. Palm Sunday, the city of Aken, Germany. The war was supposed to be over in this part of Germany. The Americans had captured the city months ago. The rubble was being cleared. A new mayor, France Oppenhof, had been appointed by the US Army to bring peace. It was a quiet night. Oppenhof was having dinner with his wife and children. He thought he was safe.

 He thought the Nazis were gone. But outside in the shadows, three figures were creeping through the garden. Two men, one woman. They were wearing American flight jackets, but they weren’t Americans. They knocked on the front door. Oppenhof got up. He opened it. He saw a man in a pilot’s uniform.

 “We are American aviators,” the stranger said in perfect English. “We crashed. We need help. Oppenhof was a kind man. He stepped forward to help, but then he saw the eyes of the woman standing behind the man. They were cold, dead. The stranger pulled a pistol with a silencer from his jacket. Oppenhof fell, shot in the head, murdered in his own hallway.

The assassins didn’t run. They walked calmly back into the night. They had completed their mission. The first strike of Operation Werewolf. This wasn’t just a murder. It was a message to every German who cooperated with the Americans. And it was a message to General Eisenhower. The war is not over. We are still here.

This is the true story of the Nazi werewolves. Hitler’s secret army of assassins, spies, and fanatics, and the brutal, relentless manhunt the Americans launched to wipe them out. To understand the fear that gripped the American occupation forces, we have to look at the radio broadcast that started it all.

 Late 1944, the Third Reich was collapsing. Hinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, knew he couldn’t win on the battlefield. So, he decided to fight a different kind of war, a gorilla war. He went on national radio. His voice was high-pitched and fanatical. We will be the werewolves. We will strike from the shadows.

 We will kill the traitor who works with the enemy. We will kill the American officer in his jeep. We will make their lives a living hell. They will fear the dark. The concept was terrifying. Werewolf, named after the mythical creature, human by day, monster by night. Himmler ordered the creation of secret bunkers hidden in the Black Forest.

 He ordered weapons to be buried. He recruited the most fanatical boys from the Hitler youth and the most ruthless girls from the League of German Girls. He told them, “You are the resistance. You will fight until the last breath. American intelligence heard the broadcast. General Patton heard it. And for the first time, the American generals were worried.

 They weren’t afraid of tanks. They knew how to kill tanks. But how do you fight an enemy who looks like a civilian, an enemy who is a 16-year-old girl with a grenade in her basket? Aen was the first major German city to fall to the Allies. It was a symbol. If the Americans could make Aken peaceful, they could rebuild Germany.

They chose France Oppenhof as the mayor. He was a lawyer, a Catholic. He hated the Nazis. He was the perfect man to lead the new Germany. But in Berlin, Joseph Gerbles, the propaganda minister, was watching. He was furious. He declared Oppenhof a traitor to the fatherland. He ordered a femur, a secret tribunal.

They sentenced Oppenhof to death. But how to get him? Aen was deep inside American territory. It was guarded by tanks and MPs. They needed a special team, a suicide squad. The SS selected their best young killers. The leader was Herbert Venzel, a hardcore SS officer. But the key to the plan was a 22-year-old girl, Elsa Hirsch.

 She was a leader in the League of German Girls. She knew the area around Aen. She was fanatical. She was willing to die for Hitler, and she looked innocent. Who would suspect a pretty young girl walking down the road? The team was trained in sabotage, silent killing, and American slang. They were given a captured B17 Flying Fortress bomber.

 On the night of March 24th, the plane flew over the American lines. The assassins jumped. They landed in the woods near the Belgian border. They buried their parachutes. They put on their disguises and they began to walk toward Aen. They passed American checkpoints. Ilsa Hirs smiled at the American guards. The GIS, lonely and tired, smiled back.

They let her pass. They didn’t know she had a map of the mayor’s house in her pocket. The night of the murder was carefully planned. They cut the telephone wires to the mayor’s house. They watched the patrols. When Venel pulled the trigger and killed Oppenhof, it sent a shock wave through the Allied command.

 The next morning, the American military police found the body. They found the cut wires. They realized this wasn’t a random crime. It was a professional hit. Gerbles went on the radio the next day. He celebrated. The traitor Oppenhof has been judged. The werewolves are watching. Anyone who helps the Americans will suffer the samefate.

 Panic spread among the German population. Civilians who were helping the Americans suddenly stopped. Translators quit their jobs. Shopkeepers refused to sell to soldiers. They were terrified. The werewolf myth was working. The Nazis tried to turn Germany into a land of terrorists. Imagine the fear of the American soldiers not knowing who to trust.

 This is the hidden history of 1945. If you want to see how the Americans hunted these killers down, hit that subscribe button. The justice is coming. General Eisenhower was not a man to be intimidated. When he heard about the werewolves, he didn’t hide. He got angry. He issued a directive. Stamp them out.

 The Counter Intelligence Corps, CIC, was unleashed. They were the FBI of the Army. They started hunting. But the werewolves weren’t just killing mayors. They were targeting soldiers. One favorite trick was the decapitation wire. They would tie a thin, strong piano wire across a road at neck height. When an American jeep drove by with the windshield down, it would take the heads off the driver and the officer.

 Patton’s third army faced this threat constantly. Patton loved to ride in open jeeps. He ordered his mechanics to weld a steel bar, a wire cutter, onto the front of every Jeep. It looked like a vertical iron rod sticking up from the bumper. That iron rod saved hundreds of American lives.

 But Patton did more than just defend. He attacked. He issued an order to his troops. If you catch a sniper in civilian clothes, shoot him. If you catch a sabotur, shoot him. We are not playing games with terrorists. The rules of war protect soldiers in uniform. They do not protect spies in civilian clothes. The Americans stopped taking chances.

 Despite the fear, the reality of the werewolves was pathetic. Hitler promised an army of elite gerillas, but mostly it was just children, teenage boys brainwashed, given a panzer fouust, rocket launcher, and a bicycle. They were told to attack Sherman tanks. In one tragic incident, a group of 14-year-old werewolves attacked an American convoy.

 The Americans fired back with heavy machine guns. The boys were wiped out. When the American soldiers checked the bodies, they were sickened. They found candy in the pockets of the dead soldiers. They realized they were killing kids. This made the Americans hate the SS even more. They saw the werewolf program not as a military strategy, but as child abuse.

 The Nazis were sacrificing their own children to buy a few more days of survival. But what about the killers of Mayor Oppenhof? Did they get away for a while? Yes. Ilsa Hirs and the team escaped back into Germany. They thought they were safe. But American intelligence never forgets. After the war ended, the CIC started tracking them down.

 They found the pilot of the plane. He talked. They found the support team. They talked. Finally, they found Elsa Hirsch. She was living a normal life. She had married. She had children. She thought her secret was buried in the rubble of Aen. The Americans arrested her. They put her on trial in 1949. The werewolf trial. It was a sensation.

The pretty girl who was a cold-blooded killer. But here is the twist. The court was a German court. The Americans had handed control back to the new West German government, and the German judges were lenient. Ilsa Hirs was acquitted of murder. She was found guilty only of being a member of a criminal organization. She walked free.

 It was a bitter pill for the Americans, but it taught them a lesson. You cannot kill an ideology with a gun. You have to kill it with prosperity. By late 1945, the werewolf threat had vanished. Why? Because the German people didn’t want to fight anymore. They saw the Americans bringing food. They saw the Americans rebuilding the roads.

 They saw Patton restoring order. The guerilla war that Himmler promised never really happened. The Americans were too efficient and the Germans were too tired. General Patton had predicted this. He said, “The German is a disciplined man. Once he knows he is beaten, he will work for you.” Patton’s strict martial law destroyed the werewolves faster than any bullet.

 He imposed curfews. He arrested leaders. He made it impossible for the assassins to hide. Operation Werewolf was the last gasp of the Nazi regime. It was a campaign of terror. It killed good men like France Oppenhof. It killed careless American soldiers. And it killed thousands of German children who were tricked into fighting a lost war.

But it failed. It failed because the American army refused to be terrorized. They adapted. They hunted. And they won. Today, if you look at a vintage World War II Jeep and you see that strange metal bar welding to the front bumper, you know what it is. It is the scar of the werewolf war.

 A reminder of the time when the enemy wasn’t an army, but a ghost in the woods. The female assassin, Ilsa Hirsch, was never punished for her role in the murder. Do you think justice was served,or did she get away with it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. And if you want to see the video about the stairs of death, where prisoners took their own revenge, click here.