Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  There was some proof of this. The New York Times reported the commutation of the death sentence on a sixteen-year-old Hitler Youth leader, Karl Arno Puzeler, also of Monschau, the place where the would-be assassins’ helper, Ilse Hirsch, had grown up. ‘Hitler Youth learns of American Justice’ read the headline over a photograph of the blond-haired boy as he learned, in his cell at Aachen prison, that he would not die a martyr’s death but be condemned instead to life imprisonment. His crime was ‘reporting American troop movements to the enemy’.11

  An even more widely covered case, found in both the American and British press and guaranteed to make readers’ flesh creep and AMG officers lock their billet doors, was that of another painfully youthful enemy of the Allies from picturesque Monschau, seventeen-year-old Maria Bierganz. Fräulein Bierganz was soon dubbed by Anglo-American journalists, with their profession’s taste for alliteration at all costs, ‘Mary of Monschau’.

  This new focus of anxiety was, by all accounts, an attractive, sweet-seeming girl with typical ‘Aryan’ looks of exactly the kind most GIs quickly developed a soft spot for. She and her family, along with around 1,500 of Monschau’s 2,000 permanent residents, had chosen to stay behind when the Allies advanced into the quaint half-timbered town on 14 September 1944. During the Ardennes offensive, the main German thrust passed a few kilometres to the south. For a while there was fighting right on the outskirts of the town. Attempts to retake the town by the Wehrmacht’s 326th Grenadier Regiment, and even the dropping of some paratroopers to the west of Monschau, cost much German blood, but in the end failed to deliver the prize. Monschau remained in American hands.12

  Even after the Wehrmacht had been driven back almost to its starting point, in mid-January 1945, Monschau remained just a few kilometres on the Allied side of the front line. More than four months of such a frustrating situation seems to have piqued those citizens of the little town who had remained Hitler loyalists, and young Maria, a keen member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) was one of them.

  She was discovered after being spotted by officers of the American army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) talking to a teenage Hitler Youth leader in the street shortly before his arrest for sabotage. He was named in newspaper reports as a suspiciously generic-sounding ‘Karl Schmidt’ – only Maria’s first name was mentioned. In fact, possibly due to some kind of censor-enforced obfuscation, he was the same Karl Arno Puzeler who would be convicted and finally reprieved for similar offences during this period. Despite the girl’s protestations of innocence – why shouldn’t she talk to a school friend in the street? – the CIC searched her bedroom and found her diary. It told a very different story.

  Maria Bierganz was, it seemed, the brainwashed BDM girl from every Allied soldier’s nightmares. She had a sweetheart in the SS by the name of Peter, and the diary took the form of unsent letters to him. Her defiant observations showed that she was filled with hate for the Allies, and determined to do what she could to resist them. She and a handful of other young die-hards had founded a clandestine organisation named ‘The Homeland Loyalists’ Club’ (Klub Heimattreue) where they expressed outrage at ‘collaboration’ by other Monschau residents (including BDM leaders rumoured to have been seen dancing with GIs), listened to Goebbels and other Nazi leaders on the radio, angrily watched newsreels of German cities consumed by flames in the Allies’ final, apocalyptic air offensive, and longed for a change in the tide of war.

  On 29 October, Maria wrote contemptuously in her diary: ‘In the distance we hear another V1. The Amis [Americans] just have to hear one of these monsters, and they dive for cover.’ She continued:

  The American is a comical soldier, he stands guard with an umbrella. When one stared at me so stupidly yesterday, because I grinned at him, I had to laugh out loud . . . they are not soldiers – jitterbugs and tango lovers, but ‘fight’ and ‘advance’ are foreign words to them . . . I hate the Americans. One thing they cannot take away from us. We shall start our new life under the old principle that we have been taught – to live is to fight . . .13

  Although her secret thoughts were revealed to the press by the CIC in mid-February, Maria had actually been arrested on 6 January 1945. ‘At around half past one in the afternoon, heavy steps thudded up the stairs at our house,’ she recalled years later. ‘Two armed MPs and several CIC people stood before me. “Are you Maria Bierganz?” “Yes!” “Mitkommen! Let’s go, go on!”’ They then searched her room and found her diary. To Maria’s mother’s anxious questions about what they planned to do with her daughter, the intelligence officers answered curtly ‘Court-martial!’

  In fact, Maria was never put on trial. The ‘thought crimes’ of the diaries were just that, and American justice retained sufficient integrity even in wartime to refrain from prosecuting her. She certainly served a propaganda purpose, as the articles in the press showed – details were also widely disseminated among American and other Allied troops to make them wary of German womanhood.

  On 4 March 1945 Maria was returned to her home and parents, still clinging to her idealism but increasingly disillusioned with the patent cynicism of the Nazi leadership and decreasingly convinced that Germany’s ‘final victory’ would ever come. At one point, a senior American officer had even offered Maria a job on his staff as an adviser on German youth. She turned it down, though she was also forced to admit that the American military men she came into contact with behaved in a ‘fair and friendly’ fashion.

  Goebbels lost no time in exploiting the story of Maria Bierganz’s arrest, embellishing it with mendacious detail to create a youthful martyr figure for the ‘resistance’. In a radio speech in late February, he invented a fictitious trial, at which she had ‘behaved like a heroine in the shadow of death’, defying her American judges, confronting them with their alleged crimes ‘in holy anger’, and repeating that the German people would bear any suffering and create a new world. ‘We all know,’ he thundered, ‘that this girl spoke in our name, and that this child of our people spoke for the whole Volk.’ His pronouncements were illustrated with ‘artist’s impressions’ of the Aryan maiden staring down her would-be executioners.

  If Goebbels’ shameless misrepresentation of the facts about Maria Bierganz’s rather mild two-month spell in custody was supposed to rouse the Reich’s youth against the wicked Allies, there is little sign that it was widely successful. There were, however, exceptions, and three weeks later, on 19 March, two of them joined their comrades aboard a captured B-17 at Hildesheim air base and took off in the direction of the Dutch border.

  It was dark when the team parachuted, successfully, close to the drop zone on the Dutch side of the German border. They hid their parachutes and collected food – canned goods, pumpernickel bread, chocolate and two bottles of water each – from the supply canisters that had also been dropped nearby. Then they settled down within a clump of fir trees to wait out the remainder of the night and the dangerous hours of daylight.14

  As the light faded the next day, the group set off, on a zigzag path aimed at taking them unobserved, by woodland trails and logging paths, across the border into Germany. Their goal was to be at a pre-arranged hiding place just outside Aachen by morning.

  It was late in the evening when the team rounded a bend in the trail and encountered a uniformed member of the Dutch border police. The guard, a young man called Jost Saive, from a German-speaking village just inside Holland, levelled his rifle and called on them to halt. After a few moments of shocked silence, the frontier guard’s challenge was answered with a hail of fire. Some reports maintain that it was Morgenschweiss, the sixteen-year-old Hitler Youth boy, who fired first.15 Saive collapsed and lay bleeding on the path.

  Ilse Hirsch, who was unarmed, had already fled. Suspecting that there would be other police in the vicinity, her male companions did not look for her but quickly plunged into the woods, eager to distance themselves from the scene.

  Saive’s comrades had heard the shots and rushed to his aid. The grievously
wounded young man was carried back to the Dutch border post, where he was able to tell his superior little, other than that the perpetrators had been German. He bled to death at around a quarter to ten that evening. Operation Karneval had already cost one life. Jost Saive’s would not be the last.

  Ilse Hirsch reached the outskirts of Aachen much more quickly than the men. Instead of resting up until morning, she stepped out of the coveralls she had worn for the jump and hid them on the thickly wooded hillside. Now underdressed for the chill of a March dawn, she tramped down into Aachen wearing just a skirt and blouse, with a knapsack slung over her shoulder. Although she had no idea where the rest of the team had got to, Hirsch set about identifying and locating the collaborationist Lord Mayor.

  For their part, the men, having evaded capture, duly arrived a little later at the so-called ‘Three Country View’ (Dreiländerblick) outside the city. From there it was possible to gaze out over the frontier areas of Germany, Belgium and Holland.

  Heidorn, whose family home was very close to the border, suggested they take refuge in thick forest just on the Belgian side. This was where they spent the risky daylight hours. At nightfall, they moved back into the Aachener Wald, the forest immediately around the city, near the suburb of Köpfchen. Leitgeb, the radio operator, and the boy Morgenschweiss were delegated to go into the city and carry out the reconnaissance work that Ilse Hirsch, whereabouts unknown, had been earmarked to perform.

  Hirsch had neither been captured nor lost her nerve, as her comrades had feared. She had spent the previous day and night in the city, sleeping at the apartment of a former BDM acquaintance and then making enquiries about the Lord Mayor’s personal details. They had not been hard to discover. The Amis might have avoided publicly naming him, but everyone who had remained in the still sparsely populated city knew Oppenhoff.

  Ilse Hirsch would later claim that she had begun, by this time, to assume that her comrades had been arrested. Her next task should therefore be to acquire papers and, if possible, a job in Aachen. This was why, that next afternoon, she found herself in the vicinity of the city labour exchange.

  However, any such intentions, if they existed, disappeared when Hirsch heard a voice whispering her name and turned to see Erich Morgenschweiss nearby. Leitgeb was hovering on the street corner not far away, one hand thrust into a pocket and curled around the butt of a revolver.

  Hirsch asked Morgenschweiss where the rest of the group were. He answered that they had found a hiding place in Köpfchen. As she knew from her enquiries, this was close to where Lord Mayor Oppenhoff lived. Hirsch followed the men to their hiding place. There was no going back now.

  In fact, the next day, Saturday, Wenzel decided to move camp once more, this time back over the border to woods near the small Belgian village of Hauset. The attack on the Lord Mayor would take place on the evening of Palm Sunday, 25 March. They would reassemble at their hiding place here after the operation, and then try to get back to German-held territory. The Allies had recently crossed to the east bank of the Rhine, so this would not be easy.

  Herr and Frau Oppenhoff spent Sunday in the vegetable patch at their house, with their children playing in the garden behind. The war was drawing to an end, but this was unlikely to improve the food situation, and, like most Germans who had a little land, they thought it prudent to prepare spring plantings of vegetables. However, they had been invited to a small party that evening just along the street, hosted by a colleague at the city administration (one of the deputy Lord Mayors), Dr Faust.

  When Wenzel and Leitgeb, guided by Hennemann, arrived at the door of the Oppenhoff house shortly before 11 p.m., there seemed to be no one at home. The trio were dressed in Luftwaffe coveralls and carrying knapsacks. According to their story, they were German aircrew who had been shot down behind Allied lines.

  The two would-be assassins entered by the garden, leaving Hennemann keeping lookout just down the street. Leitgeb cut the telephone wires to the property. They then forced a window that led into the basement, and made their way up into the main part of the house. Searching room by room, when they reached the second floor they found a terrified young woman in bed with the sheets pulled over her head. She was, it turned out, the Oppenhoffs’ teenage maid, Elisabeth Gillessen. Having assumed that the intruders were American GIs intent on burglary or possibly rape, when she heard herself being addressed in German the girl relaxed a little. Asked the whereabouts of the Lord Mayor, she answered truthfully that he was out. She would go and get him if they would just withdraw long enough for her to get dressed.

  The social event that Oppenhoff was attending with his wife crystallised the situation in which occupied Germany found itself. It was a farewell party for some members of the city hall staff, appointed by Oppenhoff, who had been forced to resign when their Nazi connections were revealed.

  Eventually, Oppenhoff appeared, in the company of the maid and of his neighbour and colleague, Dr Faust. They asked the intruders, who by now were standing on the street near the house, what they wanted. Wenzel came out with his prepared story – that they were Luftwaffe fliers who had been forced to land near Brussels. They needed Oppenhoff’s help, in the form of guidance and papers, to make their way through the enemy lines to ‘safety’.

  Oppenhoff said he could not help them with documentation, and advised them to hand themselves over to the Americans. However, after some thought he decided that, as a patriotic German, he should at least give them something to eat. Fräulein Gillessen was instructed to go back to the house and make some sandwiches.

  After Faust bade them goodnight, Oppenhoff and the two ‘fliers’ (Hennemann had been instructed to stay on the street, minding their rucksacks) walked into the garden. They waited while their visibly nervous host went to the cellar to check on the maid’s progress with the food preparation.

  It was when Oppenhoff began to climb the steps up from the cellar that he found Wenzel and Leitgeb blocking his way. Wenzel held a silenced Walther pistol in his hand. But he did not fire, and nor did he inform the Lord Mayor of his condemnation to death in absentia, as he had been ordered to do. The squad leader had lost his nerve at the last moment. As the terrified Oppenhoff opened his mouth to speak, it was Leitgeb who snatched the Walther from his co-conspirator’s grasp, levelled it at the Lord Mayor and wordlessly put a bullet through his left temple. Oppenhoff toppled backwards down the steps and crashed to the ground. Leitgeb and Wenzel turned and ran, making for the street, where Hennemann would be waiting with the rucksacks. As they did so, more shots rang out in the night.

  Cutting the house’s telephone connection had been a mistake. The shots had been fired by an American army signals unit, which had come to investigate the break in the line. The assassins fled, scattering as they did so. Wenzel and Hennemann, the guide, became separated from Leitgeb. The burly radio operator decided to return alone to the hiding place where Ilse Hirsch, the Hitler Youth boy Morgenschweiss and the sickly Heidorn were waiting.

  There was a delay before the news was released to the international press. The story appeared in both London and New York four days later, on 29 March. The Associated Press report in the New York Times said that the killing of Oppenhoff had been carried out ‘gangster fashion’. ‘Hitler,’ the report continued, ‘has often threatened retaliation against Germans who cooperated with the Allies, and some persons believe the killing was the first manifestation of this policy. Military intelligence investigators, however, said they had established no motive yet.’16

  Meanwhile, the Nazi propaganda machine, still running at full tilt, did all it could to exploit the propaganda value of the Oppenhoff murder. At the beginning of April, there were reports that German planes had been dropping leaflets over the Allied-occupied Rhineland, warning that the Wehrmacht would be back before long and that all ‘collaborators’ would then be held to account.17 At the same time, Goebbels’ broadcasters set about putting ‘Werwolf Radio’ on the air.

  Despite the assassination of Oppenhoff –
which was given great prominence in the written and spoken media throughout the Nazis’ shrinking empire – it had for some time been clear, as Goebbels’ diary gloomily reported telling the Führer on 22 March, that ‘our troops in the west are not putting up a proper fight any more’.18 Five days later, while the Propaganda Minister wrote in his diary that he was busy ‘organising in grand style the so-called “Werwolf Action”’, in stark contrast he also noted reports that in some parts of the western theatre of conflict ‘. . . the population are approaching the Americans bearing white flags; some of the women abase themselves to such an extent that they even greet and embrace the Americans. In the light of these circumstances, the troops don’t want to fight any more and either retreat without offering resistance or surrender themselves into enemy hands.’19

  This was the atmosphere in western Germany as the killers of Burgomaster Oppenhoff went on the run. Ilse Hirsch, Erich Morgenschweiss and the remaining guide, Heidorn, had been preparing to break camp and head for the Rhine when an anxious, panting Leitgeb appeared at their hideaway in the woods. The man who had shot Oppenhoff explained how he had become separated from Wenzel and Hennemann. They might, he said, have been killed or captured, so the group decided quickly to start the march east. Despite his poor state of health, Heidorn led them through the thick Eiffel woodland in the dead of night. By dawn the next day they were many kilometres from the scene of the crime.20

  In the end it was not the vigilance of Allied patrols that caused the little group’s downfall, but the deadly legacy of recent fighting. Hiding for much of the next day in a shooting blind and pressing on again through the next night, at daylight they reached the edge of the village of Rollesbroich. As they crossed an innocuous-looking meadow, there was a powerful explosion and Leitgeb was flung into the air. Morgenschweiss bravely picked his way through the possible minefield, only to find the Austrian dead. Half his face had been blown away.