Draft:Black Wolves

Loups Noirs
Elsässische Kampfgruppe Die Schwarzen Wölfe
Founders	Pierre Rieffel (1928–2022), also known as Yvan Le Loup Noir
Leader	Pierre Rieffel (1928–2022)
Active regions	France (Alsace)
Ideology	Independentism Ultranationalism Anti-imperialism Anti-colonialism Francophobia
Political position	Far right or catch-all (disputed)
Status	Inactive
Size	3

The Elsässische Kampfgruppe Die Schwarzen Wölfe (French: Groupe de combat alsacien des Loups Noirs, "Alsatian Combat Group of the Black Wolves") was an Alsatian independentist group which, from 1976 to 1981, drew attention through a series of arson and dynamite attacks against symbols of "French imperialism" in Alsace. It was the first and only time that Alsatian independentist activism resorted to violence. The group consisted of fewer than ten individuals, all of whom had very serious personal grievances against the French administration.

Members

• Pierre Rieffel, born in 1928 in Breitenbach, Alsace, France and died on 24 October 2022.
• René Woerly, born on 15 February 1928 in Albé, Alsace, France, died on 19 October 2012 in Albé.
• Ewald Jaschek, born in 1923, died on 6 April 2016.

Struthof fire

During the night of 12–13 May 1976, the museum hut of the Struthof camp was destroyed by a fire of criminal origin. An inscription, "27 January 1945", was then found on the watchtower. This date corresponds to the internment of 1,100 Alsatians suspected of collaboration with the Nazi occupier.

From 17 May, a silent march was organised in Strasbourg, ending with the laying of wreaths at the city's war memorial. Although the population saw the fire as a neo-Nazi attack, Pierre Rieffel denied this in a 2011 interview. According to him, he was disgusted by the way the camp's history was presented in the museum, since only the Nazi concentration camp was mentioned, with no trace of the French internment camp for Alsatians.

During the reconstruction, the employee in charge of ticket sales received death threats, and the camp was vandalised a second time in 1979.

Turckheim bombing

The first bomb attack claimed by the Loups Noirs was carried out on 9 December 1980 against the monument to Marshal Turenne in Turckheim. In 1975, the monument had already been daubed with paint on the occasion of the tercentenary of the marshal's death. The monument, a sandstone obelisk about fifteen metres high, glorifies the victory of Turenne's armies over the Imperials at Turckheim. First erected in September 1932, it bears three inscriptions on its pedestal:

• To the glory of Turenne, mourned equally by soldiers and peoples, 1611–1675
• Alsace to the French armies
• Victory of Turckheim, 5 January 1675

Considered a provocation, this tribute caused a fierce controversy in Alsace. Marshal Turenne is the bête noire of the autonomists. The passage of the troops of Louis XIV, and then the annexation of the region, did not take place without violence: massacres, rapes and destruction. However, the worst atrocities occurred further north, in the Palatinate. It should also be stressed that the wars of the 17th century, particularly the Thirty Years' War, were on the whole extremely deadly. Nevertheless, the autonomist movement, which was strong and structured in the 1930s, made him the highest symbol of France's colonisation of Alsace. In 1940, the obelisk was removed by the Germans. It was inaugurated again on 6 July 1958.

The day after the explosion, the prefects of Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin each received two letters, one in French and the other in German. The French letter violently criticised "the assimilation and exploitation of [the] Alsatian homeland", while the German one demanded that German be taught from nursery school.

First Thann bombing

The night of 16 March 1981 marked a new stage in the escalation of violence. The Loups Noirs blew up the Staufen monument (a summit overlooking the town of Thann), a 12-metre-high concrete Cross of Lorraine honouring the Alsatian Resistance, whose foundation stone had been laid by General Charles de Gaulle. A letter in German, signed Alsatian Combat Group the Black Wolves (in German Elsässische Kampfgruppe, die schwarzen Wölfe), was found at the foot of the memorial. The Loups Noirs reproached the monument for having been "erected by the colonisers and the collaborators in order to recall forever the hatred against the German nation". Indeed, a bronze plaque set into a low wall of the memorial bore the following sentence: "Faced with the invader, our loyalty braved force, as three centuries testify: 1648–1948". They demanded the generalised teaching of German in Alsace.

Shortly afterwards, a public subscription was launched by the town of Thann. The Loups Noirs responded by launching their own (parodic) subscription, in which the amounts were replaced by "30 kilos of dynamite".

Second Thann bombing

At the Staufen, a new monument, faithful to the original, was quickly erected thanks to the success of the public subscription. It was inaugurated on 18 June 1981, the anniversary of Charles de Gaulle's appeal. But on 20 September 1981, the Loups Noirs struck again. As the alarm meant to protect the monument had not yet been installed, the group took advantage of this and blew up the cross for the second time. In the claim of responsibility sent to the newspapers L'Alsace and Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, the Loups Noirs wrote, again in German:

No monument dedicated to the so-called Liberators for as long as politicians do not satisfy our demands. The conquest of Alsace and Lorraine was at the time not a liberation but an abduction contrary to the rights of peoples. We demand the teaching of German in all the schools of Alsace and Lorraine. We will not let our mother tongue and our culture be annihilated. We want to be a free people in our own country.

Arrest and trial

A few weeks later, on 14 October 1981, the Loups Noirs were arrested. Alsace discovered, stunned, the identity of the group: three men with clean criminal records, in their fifties, active and socially integrated. The head of the group was Pierre Rieffel, a distiller in the Val de Villé, and his accomplices were Ewald Jaschek and René Woerly. A clue left behind (a cardboard box with traces of TNT, thrown into the Fecht during the Turckheim attack) as well as a telephone tap led to their arrest.

The trial opened on 12 June 1982 in Mulhouse. It reopened the debate on the loss of Alsatian identity and on the singular history of this region. It could not fail to offer the autonomists a platform. It also shed light on the past of the Loups Noirs, a painful past that largely explains their resentment towards France.

• Ewald Jaschek, a German from Upper Silesia, was mobilised into the Kriegsmarine and married an Alsatian woman who was then a nurse in a German hospital. At the Liberation, the Jascheks suffered humiliation at the hands of the purgers, in particular his wife Augustine. She, who was to be of great help to the Loups Noirs, was denounced as a collaborator by the person who had stolen her flat while she was away at work. She was shaved and beaten in public. Ewald was himself mistreated because of his German origins. Their children were later also called "dirty Krauts" ("sales boches").
• Like many Alsatian teenagers of his time, René Woerly experienced compulsory enrolment in the Hitler Youth. One evening in 1945, he was beaten on a street corner by the FFI, his only fault being an older brother who had enlisted in the Waffen-SS.
• Pierre Rieffel was, at the time of the conflict, just as young as René Woerly. His father had been mayor of Breitenbach in 1938 and remained in office (as Bürgermeister) until 1943, when he resigned. Accused of collaboration, he was handed over to the FFI and interned at Struthof. Rieffel recounted that he went to Struthof to bring food to his father, which displeased the camp commandant. The latter struck him so hard that the boy lost consciousness. He was picked up by an American patrol, which dropped him off at home.

The defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 7 months to 3 years, and to pay damages of one million francs to the public treasury and the town of Thann.

Were the Loups Noirs a neo-Nazi group?

When the Loups Noirs were formed, the members of the group were first and foremost autonomists: their demands revolved around bilingualism and greater freedom for Alsace. As the region had been strongly marked by French assimilation (notably the ban on speaking Alsatian at school) and the Loups Noirs themselves had been victims of a heavy past, the political side of their actions was easily explained without any need to resort to a far-right affiliation.

However, it was not only a question of revenge. Alsatian autonomism had already been tainted during the Second World War, as some of its members collaborated with the Nazi regime. In the 1970s, some autonomists were still linked to the far right, the most famous being Dr Marcel Iffrig. He was markedly anti-French, and it was under his influence that the MRAL, the dominant Alsatian regionalist movement of the time, drifted towards neo-Nazism. Iffrig testified (in German) at the Loups Noirs trial, before disappearing from the political scene. Many MRAL activists had left the movement because of this, and then founded a new party on new foundations, the Rassemblement des Alsaciens-Lorrains in 1976, followed by the Mouvement populaire alsacien, which was autonomist but not separatist. The Loups Noirs took part in anti-French protest movements and became increasingly radical until their arrest, attending meetings of neo-Nazi splinter groups in Germany. In his 2011 interview, Rieffel himself admitted that, although he regarded the Nazis as fanatics whose ideology he scarcely liked, he had enjoyed his youth in the Hitler Youth. He also added that he now feels like a stranger in his own country.

The historian Romain Blandre states: What also emerges from the research is the collusion between Alsatian ultra-regionalism and Holocaust denial. There are ramifications with German neo-Nazi circles. We therefore know that the Loups Noirs were not only pro-German, but also pro-Nazi.

Origin of the name

The origin of the group's name remains disputed. It was thought, notably through press articles, that "Loups Noirs" was a tribute to the Werwolf, the German clandestine groups that carried out subversive acts (sabotage, bombings, assassinations) against the Allied armies and German civilians. The inclusion of the word Kampfgruppe (German for "combat group") and the relations the Loups Noirs maintained with certain German far-right splinter groups certainly contributed to supporting this thesis.

The Turkish ultranationalist movement of the Grey Wolves was also mentioned, but Pierre Rieffel confided that he did not even know of that group's existence.

Finally, Rieffel personally gave the key to the mystery, which only he held: Alsatians after 1945 who did not see France as a liberating country but as a colonising one were regarded as "black sheep" among a flock of "white sheep" (the Alsatians). These "black sheep" wanted to become wolves, "black wolves".

Bibliography

• Bernard Fischbach, Roland Oberlé, Les Loups Noirs : autonomisme & terrorisme en Alsace, Alsatia-Union, 1990, 216 pp. ISBN 978-2-7032-0192-2.
• Roland Oberlé, "Le temps de la violence", in Les Saisons d'Alsace, Strasbourg, Éditions de la Nuée bleue, no. 65, September 2015, pp. 116–121.
• Jean-Pierre Stucki [in French] (4 April 2025). "1975-1995 : le choix des armes". France Télévisions. Les loups noirs d'Alsace : l'histoire falsifiée (in French). Retrieved 16 April 2025.
• Romain Blandre, Jean-Pierre Stucki-Darsch, Les loups noirs d'Alsace, enquête sur un groupe autonomiste et terroriste d'ultra-droite, 1976–1982, Éditions de la Nuée bleue, 2026.

Notes and references

Category:Far-right politics in France