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July 2 - July 3, 2023
God save us from witches and werewolves. That had come from an old, old prayer, but that wasn’t what they believed any longer, was it? Things had changed; the fatherland said witches and werewolves were good now. They came from deep within Germany’s traditions and had been deemed part of the country’s sacred heart. They were now seen as protectors of Germany.
Genocides are not possible without militias. Wannabe autocrats depend on armed thugs to lend them an air of legitimacy and intimidate the opposition. Think of Hitler’s brownshirts, the Interahamwe during the Rwandan genocide, the Kamajors in Sierra Leone.
As an intelligence analyst in the 1990s, I worked on genocides and mass atrocities. One thing I learned from that experience was that no one involved in this kind of violence believed they were
wrong. They always felt justified—until, like Uwe in this story, they were forced to confront the consequences of their actions. We studied the Holocaust to understand how genocides were possible. The central questions to the Holocaust were, How could German citizens have allowed it to happen? How could they have turned a blind eye to what was going on all around them, let alone participated in it? None of us working on atrocities believed we’d ever see something like this in America. We rather naively believed Americans were different. Not so easily fooled. America had a free press and checks
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elections. We believed in democracy. Then January 6, 2021, happened. I’ve written several novels that combine history with horror. The point of those novels, as with “The Wehrwolf,” is to show the danger that exists when we refuse to learn from history. And the main lesson history has to ...
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