The operation's aim was to counter the Allied Operation Loyton, to disrupt the local French resistance, the Maquis, to destroy local villages in order to prevent them serving as shelter for Allied forces in the upcoming winter and to deport all men of fighting age in the area to Germany as forced labour.

[1][4] Planned as a massive fortification stretching from southern Belgium to the Swiss border, in practice little of it was completed because of a lack of resources, but also because of harassment of the work groups by the Maquis.

[5] The German plan was to destroy all villages in front of this protective wall to eliminate any shelter for Allied forces in the upcoming winter.

[1] A subsequent order by Hermann Balck, commander of the Army Group G, from 2 November 1944 stated that all German forces in the Vosges mountains were to withdraw to the pre-determined defensive line.

[1] The region east of the ridge line of the Vosges mountains had become part of Germany after 1940, as it had been from 1870 to 1918, and was, at the time, predominantly German-speaking.

[6] The importance of Waldfest can be seen in the fact that Heinrich Himmler himself took part in a conference at Gérardmer on 6 September 1944 to ensure that the German border in the west was defended at all costs.

[8] Waldfest 1 began in September 1944, under the command of Isselhorst and his deputy, Wilhelm Schneider, and was organised from Strassburg, after the Wehrmacht had been unable to defeat the local resistance movement.

[4] The operation was carried out by small Einsatzkommandos, varying in strength from 30 to 100 men,[4][5] which were supported by Wehrmacht Jagdkommandos (Hunting commandos) under Generalmajor Franz Vaterrodt, based in Strasbourg.

[1] The Vallée du Rabodeau [fr], which had already been targeted in the first phase on 24 September, when 424 civilians were deported to concentration camps, of which 362 were killed, was hit a second time on 5 and 6 October.

The leader of the execution commando, Karl Beck, thought it unwise to leave mass graves of shot allied soldiers in an area so close to the front line.

[1] Over 11,000 civilians from the Vosges mountains were deported to Germany as forced labour, either directly or as part of the Service du travail obligatoire.

[13] After the end of the war, Major Eric Barkworth of the 2nd Special Air Service Regiment was tasked with establishing what had happened to the missing captured SAS members.

[18] Hermann Balck was sentenced by a French military court in Colmar to 20 years of hard labour for his role in the scorched earth operations but never extradited.

[19] Hans-Dietrich Ernst, involved in the deportation of the Jews of Angers, was also part of Waldfest and sentenced to death in absentia on three occasions by France, but never extradited.