Hitler's Girls: Doves Amongst Eagles

by Heath, Tim

  Our defences had been prepared to the far east of the residential area of the city near to the main railway track. Anything and everything had been used to form defensive features, including barbed wire, upturned cars, lorries and trams. We had prepared holes and ditches and could fall back farther amongst the buildings if necessary. If our position came untenable, we were to fall back farther, and if necessary would fall back into the main reinforced-concrete air-raid shelter that lay one thousand metres south of the industrial area near to our homes.

  Our task was to cause as many enemy casualties as we could and to remain elusive. Those were the basic orders we were given. There were a large number of our soldiers and Hitler Youth around the city and we felt confident that we might prevent the enemy from capturing the city. Just before the Americans began their attack on the city, I recall a reading that took place at our very last meeting with our maidens’ league about a week ago. Our group head explained about the virtues of being either a Volkssturm or Werewolf member.

  She said:

  Girls, German girls, you are like the grey slender wolves of our nation. As she-wolves in the great wilderness, the human female is also a natural predator, provider and protector. She will provide, protect and kill according to her needs. As wolves you shall roam the shadows and leave no enemy safe, our enemy shall drown in their own blood and that of ours if necessary.

  That was something I have never forgotten, it was funny, because when the fighting started that group head was nowhere around. I found out that she had donned civilian clothing and had gone to ground, surrendering to the first American patrol she encountered – so much for her being a leader of wolves!

  On 11 October, American artillery fired 5,000 shells into the city, which was followed by aerial bombardment by the USAAF until the 13th. The 1st (American) Infantry Division could only afford one infantry regiment to take on the task of taking the city – the understrength 26th Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel John Seitz.

  As planned, the attack on Aachen began at 9.30am on 13 October 1944.

  The 2nd Battalion, the 26th Infantry Regiment had taken up position along a fifteen-to thirty-foot-high railway embankment that bordered the city to the east. At 9.30am, the American battalion threw grenades over the top of the embankment, before throwing themselves over the top with guns firing. The German defenders were caught completely off their guard. All hell broke loose as bullets and grenade shrapnel flew in all directions. It took over thirty minutes for the Germans to organize themselves and begin to return effective fire.

  Already, the screams of wounded civilians, and American and German soldiers could be heard over the sounds of battle. Two American Sherman tanks then came over the railway embankment and entered the fray, followed closely behind by the battalion’s remaining vehicles, which drove through a railway station concealed beneath the track and sited within the embankment itself. The German forces defending the periphery soon found themselves in an untenable position, coming under sustained and increasingly heavy rifle, grenade, machine-gun and artillery fire.

  Barbie Densk vividly remembers the onslaught that began to draw ever closer to her Werewolf unit:

  The night of 12–13 October had been relatively calm, and I do not recall any artillery fire either during the night or the early hours prior to the American attack of that morning. We had been moved out of some buildings that we had been using as temporary shelter and had to take refuge in a series of small trenches. It was pretty cold and we had huddled together as a group with our blankets and were trying to sleep. We were not accustomed to having to sleep in a trench out in the open air, and we had not had the chance to get used to this. It was an unpleasant experience in many ways and the sanitary conditions were also very poor. We were warned to take great care when going to defecate or urinate, as American snipers might shoot us dead. Men of the Volkssturm had often used mess tins or helmets to defecate in, and they would then throw the contents out from their positions – it was not pleasant at all for a female.

  The American attack was very sudden, loud and startling. There was a series of muffled explosions, followed by the sound of rifle and machine-gun fire, followed by shouts and screams. We threw the blankets from off ourselves, and as instructed, I blew my whistle several times and grabbed the steel helmet and put it on. There was a tremendous commotion in the positions ahead of us that were occupied by men of both our navy and army forces, and bullets could be heard ricocheting above our heads. The steel helmet I had put on kept slipping over my eyes, so I took it off and threw it aside.

  A short distance away, a field telephone began to ring, and an ageing Volkssturm, we had nicknamed ‘Der Ratte’ [The Rat] because of his long nose and beady eyes, scrambled across to answer it. I watched his trembling frame and I could see that he was in a slight panic and was shaking from fear. After a brief exchange of words with whoever was on the other end, he slammed down the telephone and scrambled back out of sight before returning some minutes later.

  In the meantime, we grabbed our weapons. The Rat came scrambling back along to us on his hands and knees, and he came over and said in a trembling voice, with a string of spittle running down from the corner of his mouth, ‘The Americans are here and they are coming, they are coming now, we must not allow them to break through, now get your weapons and start shooting.’

  We nervously peeped over the wall of our small trench, and The Rat shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake, start shooting, or God damn the lot of you!’

  I slung the rifle to my side and looked through the binoculars and could see enemy soldiers spilling over the steep railway embankment. I could see the steel-helmeted heads of our soldiers in their holes firing away, though the view soon became obscured in the overcast morning gloom and by smoke.

  My rifle was already loaded and ready to fire. I clicked off the safety catch and the other girls followed suit, and we then began to fire our rifles. I could make out figures darting from one position to another. The Rat was still panicking and shouting at us, and I shouted back at him, ‘How the hell are we supposed to know whom we should be shooting at?’

  The Rat grabbed hold of my head with both of his hands and said, ‘Look, can you see the flashes directly ahead of you, those little fucking yellow sparks?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, those are the muzzle flashes from enemy weapons, if they come any closer you will have an even better view of them as a dead person, now start shooting.’

  I fired then reloaded the rifle again, swinging along to the next muzzle flash before firing again. I was surprised at how poor the light was, even though it was morning. I could not be sure if I killed anyone – I aimed at the flashes and pulled the trigger.

  After a few minutes we were firing quite steadily toward the American advance. Because of the adrenalin, it was very difficult to keep the rifle sight steady and my hands shook as I pulled back the rifle bolt after each shot, and sweat coursed down through my dirty hair and into my eyes. I had to keep rubbing my eyes, which made things worse as they became very sore.

  In what must have been a split second, there was a flash, followed by a very loud bang. I was thrown back hard against the back wall of our shallow trench, and fell – completely stunned with my eyes full of soil and my ears ringing – to the floor. Everything seemed to be swirling around me in slow motion, and the noises of battle around me seemed dull and distant. I stared around and saw the blood-spattered bodies of my friends; some of them lay across my legs convulsing violently with blood running from their mouths and nostrils, some of which spilled in a warm stream onto my legs. Little funnels of smoke rose out of the holes in their bodies and steam rose out from their torn stomachs. I felt winded and it was difficult to breathe, and all I could do was lie there and gasp for air. The smell of cordite burned my nostrils, along with the strong stench of stale urine.

  Still in slow motion, I remember one of our soldiers looking down at me and then he jumped down into the trench, he star
ed into my eyes and slapped either side of my face with his hand. Realizing I was not seriously injured but severely concussed, he picked me up and threw me over his right shoulder and ran along the trench with me. I remember seeing the floor of the trench and pieces of skin and bone lying there with dark stains made on the brown soil by blood. The ground became a blur and I must have passed out, because I woke some hours later and found myself in the big air raid shelter back with my mother and father looking down at me with tears streaming down their faces.

  My hearing had been damaged and was not very clear, and I learned that a shell had landed close to our trench and that I was one of the survivors in that particular section where there had been at least six of us. Apart from being severely concussed by the blast, I had received only a couple of relatively minor shrapnel wounds to my forehead and some bruising to my ribs and back. I developed a slight fever that quickly brought on a nasty cold, and I remained wrapped in blankets and was being cared for at the rear of the shelter where all of the wounded had been placed. I had been tended by a member of the Deutscher Ritte Kreuz [German Red Cross], and was told that I would be alright in a few days. The fever had probably been caused by being out in the trench the night before without adequate cover or bedding.

  I could hear explosions and the dull crack of rifle fire. The only other recollections I have after that is of the 15th of October when many German soldiers began to cram themselves into the shelter and take up various positions within. I remember their faces, dirty and gaunt, and the dark blue metal of their weapons gleaming in the dull light inside the shelter, and the smell of unclean bodies mixed with cigarette smoke that grew ever worse. Because of the nature of my fever and lapses into deep sleep, I had missed all of the action.

  When I awoke next, I found myself in a tent, and as Mother and Father had said, that the Americans later came and encircled the shelter. There were some exchanges of gunfire from our soldiers inside, but they gave up and surrendered when the Americans brought in flame-throwing guns and grenades and threatened to burn us all alive and throw the grenades in if we did not come out with our hands raised. Someone had shouted that there were wounded people and kids inside, and the Americans ordered that the wounded should be brought out one at a time and between two people only.

  The fighting was still raging on in other areas of Aachen, but Mother and Father said the city would fall very soon, and they were right. It was strange really, as I remember, in between bouts of feverish sleep, receiving medical attention and being given medicine from the Americans.

  I recovered quickly and was briefly questioned by a German-speaking American man. He wanted to know how I came to get wounded; it would have been useless to tell lies and so I told him the truth. He said that he already knew that children of the Hitler Youth had been involved in the fighting in and around Aachen as he had seen their dead bodies. He also asked if the Nazis had encouraged and taught me to shoot and I told him that yes, they had. Lastly, the American wanted to know if I liked Hitler and if I wanted to continue fighting. I told him that I only wanted to stop enemy soldiers from killing or hurting my friends, family and to stop them from destroying my city, my home. The American said that no American or British soldier would shoot innocent Germans or deliberately destroy our property. Asked again about whether I liked Hitler I told the American that I did not really know as I had never met him, and had only seen him in films and pictures. No further questions were asked and all civilians had to be moved out of the city into camps.

  My war was over, and in a way I was glad, but was also very fearful for what the future of Germany was to be and what was going to happen to us now.

  Other Werewolves had been more successful, and in the face of superior firepower had still managed to inflict substantial casualties upon the Americans. As the fighting progressed farther into the city, the Werewolves split up and hid inside ruined buildings. Some even disappeared into the underground sewerage network, where they would wreak further havoc upon those sent down to flush them out. In many cases, the American forces were compelled to block up sewerage manhole covers, as the German defenders were using these underground networks to infiltrate the enemy’s rear.

  Reports began to flood back to the Allied command that boys and girls as young as eight were participating in the defence of Aachen. Many of the American soldiers were unsure of how to deal with these youngsters, even though they posed the same deadly threat as the adults.

  Willi Anderson, who had served as a young private with the American 26th Infantry Regiment recalls:

  It was a shock to see kids shooting at you. The saddest thing of all is that you were faced with no choice but to return fire and kill them. We encountered a number of young females during the operations to secure central Aachen. They had succeeded in taking down a few of our guys. Things like that did not go down too well with the guys, and they would aim and shoot to kill. One incident sticks in my mind today, and that was when we were advancing up a side street. A shot rang out and one of our guys was killed. For some minutes, there was panic as we tried to find out where the sniper was.

  In the meantime, this guy had died slowly, drowning on his own blood as blood filled his lungs; there was nothing we could do to save him. A second shot was fired at us, and as we had rolled out of the way behind some rubble, one of our platoon had observed and made out a faint puff of smoke from the cellar area of a ruin some 250-300 yards in front of us as the shot was fired. This was masonry dust thrown up by the muzzle blast of the sniper’s weapon. Any self-respecting sniper would have taken such a thing into account, but not this one. As usual we had to think quickly and get the sniper neutralized so as we could move on up the street. You have to bear in mind that the enemy is all around and you cannot hang around in any one place for too long and allow your enemy to converge his fire onto you.

  We took the only course of action that we could under the circumstances and fired a bazooka at the small entrance of the cellar. The round went straight in there and burst with a loud ‘puff’. We then ran like hell firing as we went into the hole of this cellar. We waited for a few minutes for the smoke to clear inside and shouted ‘Achtung, Grenate!’ [Watch out, grenade!]. If anyone was in there alive, then the idea was to flush them out by threatening to throw a grenade in. Nothing happened so one of our guys pulled out his pistol and crawled inside to have a look. He came out in a state of shock and said, ‘Jesus fucking Christ, there’s a dead kid in there, a girl.’ We didn’t believe him at first and asked if there were any other bodies in there, and he lit himself a smoke, spat and then said again, ‘Only a fucking kid, a girl that’s all. Why don’t you take a fucking look?’

  We all had a look and came out of there silent, in disbelief almost. We had all seen some pretty bad things, but this was something we just hadn’t expected and it made us all feel physically sick. We had guessed her age to be around thirteen maybe. A commercial non-military type big-bore hunting rifle, fitted with a small and relatively inaccurate telescope, lay close by her body, along with several expended cartridge cases. That kid’s death had a very demoralizing effect upon us, as some of us had kid sisters back in the States, they could easily have been our sisters, that is how we looked at them. We all felt like we had committed murder, even though we had no choice but to kill her, it just felt bad. She had no ID on her so we never knew who she was.

  Before we moved off, we stuck a rather crude wooden cross, formed from two sections of floor boarding, and placed it against the outside wall of the cellar hole – we hadn’t time to act as a burial party for anyone, not even this kid.

  As numerical superiority lay with the Germans, the fight for Aachen called for the intelligent use of the various weapons systems available to the US forces, as they fought their way inside the city. Particularly stubborn pockets of resistance were dealt with by the utilization of such powerful and highly efficient weapons as the 155mm Howitzer M1. These big guns with, their 100lb high-explosive shells, made short work of the
makeshift pillboxes and concrete reinforced defensive positions around the city. As the Americans pushed farther into the centre of the city, the fighting intensified greatly, and there were still reports of German forces popping up in the rear of the American attack.

  In one such incident, the Germans, using their advanced tanks, managed to push the Americans back several blocks, before the attack was countered, causing the German attack to stall. This then allowed the American forces to regain the initiative. The bloodiest fighting was now starting to take place amongst the ruined buildings, as the Americans were forced into close-quarter fighting with the Germans as they attempted to clear each building in every street of Aachen.

  Willi Anderson explains further:

  The fighting amongst the buildings near to the centre of the city was particularly intense. There were many diehards who were determined to try and push us back. We had to clear each room of every damned building in every street, and you cannot even begin to describe or even imagine the state of pure bedlam going on all around. There is the continual clatter of machine guns, the pop of grenades going off, the whoosh of incoming artillery, both enemy and friendly, and the ricocheting screams of bullets and shrapnel and screams from people.

  Our strategy was brutally simple, and we threw a grenade into each room and burst in firing our guns as we went, and if any Germans were in there who were still alive, we killed them with our bayonets – that was the way any enemy lying in wait was eliminated. One of our guys ran up the stairs of one building and was shot and then bayoneted somewhere near to the top, and just before the enemy made their escape, they tossed a stick grenade down to us. Fortunately for us, the grenade failed to explode. Often we would use a flamethrower to get the enemy out of buildings, and sometimes they would come out, while other times we had to cook them. On one occasion we flamed out one building and several German soldiers came out shouting in German, enveloped in flames. As they fell down we shot and bayoneted them.