Adolf Hitler: Werewolves and Vampires

 

Adolf Hitler was known to have had a lifetime fascination with Germanic folklore.  Anything that glorified the "Aryan" race was useful to promote his particularly racist version of Fascism.  In his speeches and propaganda, he frequently associated his people with the image of the werewolf.  He saw this as a positive thing, possibly using his own distorted understanding of Friedrich Nietzche's concept of "supermen."  Instead of the destructive image of the werewolf that we are familiar with, he pushed the image of a being that has great internal strength and the will to carry out violent actions if necessary for a greater end.

     In the closing years of the Second World War, the Nazis began to promote the idea of an elite military force of Germans, known as the Werewolves, that would infiltrate behind allied lines as a resistance force.  Later there was some effort to convert these Werewolves into an underground movement that would continue to fight the war after official hostilities had ended.  Not much actually came of the idea.  It proved to be much more of a psychological tool to menace the minds of allied soldiers.
     In the same speeches where Hitler promoted his Werewolves, he also referred to the Jewish people as the Vampires.  In this creature of folklore he did not see any positive qualities.  To him, the Vampires were treacherous leaches that sapped the vitalities of a people.  So this is similar to many movies such as the Underworld series, where there is a constant competition between Werewolves and Vampires.  Mr. Sidney D. Kirkpatick recently wrote an interesting book called Hitler's Monsters that studies these ideas in some depth.