Foreign News: Wolves of Vengeance

Organized lycanthropy had become an instrument of the disintegrating Nazi State. Last week a female fanatic broadcast its lupine howl:

I am so savage, I am filled with rage.

Hoo, hoo, hoo.

Lily the Werewolf is my name.

I bite, I eat, I am not tame.

Hoo, hoo, hoo.

My Werewolf teeth bite the enemy.

And then he’s done and then he’s gone.

Hoo, hoo, hoo.

The Werewolf Song did not sound silly to the Nazis. Even in defeat, they said, the new underground Werewolf movement “will have the satisfaction of causing havoc among occupation authorities and chaos in the heart of Europe.”

Like the medieval werewolves that still roam through horror fiction, the Nazi Werewolves are partial to human flesh. “Brave as lions and cunning as serpents,” they are a secret group of avenging terrorists, pledged to destroy both Allied invaders and German “traitors.” Already they have assassinated the Allied-appointed Mayors of Aachen and Meschede (TIME, April 9) and killed three U.S. officers in Frankfurt.

Their tough leaders are Gestapomen like Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Kurt Daluege, who have mastered the technique of terrorism. If anybody can put fangs on fanatics, these professional killers will.

The Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano called the Werewolves the war’s “epilogue of hate.”