Exorcising Hitler (9 page)

So, for the
Volkssturm
, with their civilian outfits and armbands, or home-made Ruritanian uniforms, the omens were doubtful. For the
Werwolf
recruits, they were ominous in the extreme.

Despite the brief false hope of the Ardennes offensive, there seems little doubt that by the end of 1944 most Germans were war-weary and disillusioned. Their once-proud army was in full retreat on every front, the Reich’s all but defenceless cities were being continually devastated by the Allied bomber fleets, and now enemy armies had set foot on German soil. Only the most fanatical or the most gullible Germans (groups which perhaps overlapped) still really believed in the ‘final victory’ that the Nazi leadership continued to promise.

The most bizarre aspect of the German people’s descent into hell was, nonetheless, that so many continued to fight and work for victory right up to the end. There were almost no strikes, no mutinies, no stirrings of popular revolution as there had been at the end of the First World War. This was partly because, unlike during the First War, no Germans starved – though many in the occupied countries did, so that Germans might eat – and partly because Hitler’s Germany, especially towards the end of the war, was a far more tightly run and ruthlessly policed country than the Kaiser’s had been. In 1944–5, executions were routine and even mildly defeatist talk incurred the severest of punishments.

The early experiences of Russian incursions into East Prussia reinforced this apocalyptic view of Germany’s fate, should she be defeated. Widespread, if not always precise, knowledge of the horrors that had been perpetrated in the occupied countries and in the concentration camps, within the Reich and abroad, also played a role in the German people’s apparent willingness to fight on at all costs. A conversation between two workers in Berlin was reported to the SD (SS intelligence) in the final weeks of the war. In this exchange, one said: ‘We have only ourselves to blame for this war because we treated the Jews so badly. We shouldn’t be surprised if they now do the same thing to us.’
⁵

In fact, along with recognition of the inevitability of defeat, it seems that the majority of the German people felt anger against both the Allies – especially for the relentless bombing of German cities – and their own Nazi masters, in the latter case mingled with disappointment.

Already, self-excusing themes were developing that would dominate the immediate post-war discussion of the German plight. The ‘idealistic’ people had trusted Hitler and the Nazis to create a powerful, prosperous Germany, had been prepared for any ‘sacrifices’ necessary, but had been ‘lied to’ and ‘betrayed’.

Even the above conversation between the two Berlin workers, while seemingly acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for its own misfortunes, also contained grains of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Semitism that the regime had fed the population for the past decade or more. The powerful Jews and their Allied friends were now returning, determined to punish the Germans. From now on, this attitude implied, everything would be the fault of these alien people, bent on revenge – the destruction of German towns and cities, the violence, the expulsions from the old German territories in the east, the post-war deprivation.

Meanwhile, in the first days of 1945, the Reich remained in a state of expectant hiatus. And, in absolute numbers, there were still enough fanatics to give the Nazi leadership the semblance of what it wanted.

Among these was Obergruppenführer Karl Gutenberger, the Higher SS and Police Leader West. On 20 September 1944, with the forced evacuation of Aachen all but complete, Gutenberger summoned the city’s Gestapo chief to his headquarters at Erkelenz. The thirty-nine-year-old Gutenberger was brutally clear in his orders. ‘Plunderers, deserters and assorted riff-raff’ found in Aachen were to be shot summarily and without trial.
⁶

So many innocent civilians and soldiers paid with their lives for failure to show sufficient enthusiasm for the pointless defence of Aachen, a pattern that was to be repeated in countless towns and cities throughout western Germany as the Allies advanced.

In accordance with the rules laid down by Himmler, it was Gutenberger who automatically became Inspector of the
Werwolf
movement in northern Rhineland and Westphalia (Defence District VI). Like his colleagues elsewhere, he set up a small staff headed by a
Werwolf
commissioner, the fanatical Standartenführer Karl Raddatz. Because of its closeness to the front, District VI was, of course, a more important and above all potentially active theatre for undercover guerrilla warfare.

As early as the first week of October, while the Americans prepared to lay siege to Aachen, the SS newspaper,
Das Schwarze Korps
, saw fit to issue bloodcurdling threats against any Germans who might accept administrative posts from the Allies:

In the occupied parts of German territory, there would be no ‘German’ civil administration, no ‘German’ authority, no ‘German’ legal judiciary, because such office holders and administrative organs would scarcely survive their first month. No official would be able to obey enemy orders without experiencing the certainty that he would soon sit cold and sightless behind his desk, no one would carry out the enemy’s will without finding himself on the yawning edge of a grave, and no judge would condemn a German in accordance with enemy wishes without ending up dangling prettily from his own window bars one night . . .
⁷

At the time, such collaboration remained a merely theoretical possibility. In the event, as transpired weeks later, there did turn out to be Germans prepared to accept such posts. And when this became clear, the big bosses in Berlin began to demand the punishment of Germans who ‘collaborated’ with the Allies in the still-limited occupied areas of the Reich.

It was in early November that the
Werwolf
supremo Prützmann visited Gutenberger. He came straight to the point. Himmler and Goebbels, Prützmann told the SS and Police Leader, were both furious that Oppenhoff, a collaborator, possibly a Jew (sic), had accepted the post of Lord Mayor of Aachen from the Americans. An example must be made. The traitor must be killed, and Gutenberger must organise this mission.
⁸
The Obergruppenführer was not enthusiastic. With more important problems on his plate, he simply ignored the instruction and hoped it would lapse. He was, in this case, to be disappointed.

Within a few weeks, a telex arrived from Reichsführer Himmler, demanding an update on progress with mission planning. Shortly after, an emissary from Prützmann appeared, bearing a formal warrant for the Lord Mayor’s execution. Following this, phone calls and cables arrived in increasingly insistent profusion. Gutenberger was forced to fall back on a plea of ‘personnel difficulties’ and to complain about how hard it was to infiltrate teams through the confusion of the front line.

Prützmann, aware of how much of his own status was riding on this matter, now decided to force the pace. At his personal behest, training began. In charge was Untersturmführer (Lieutenant) Wenzel, a mysterious character variously thought to have been co-opted from the notorious Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny’s commando group (which had famously rescued the deposed Italian dictator Mussolini from his mountain prison in September 1943) or to have been a former member of the Aachen Gestapo.

The rest of the would-be assassination squad was drawn from
Werwolf
volunteers undergoing training at Schloss Hülcrath on the outskirts of Düsseldorf. It included an Austrian-born SS-trained radio operator by the name of Leitgeb, an eager Hitler Youth leader from the Aachen area, Erich Morgenschweiss – at sixteen little more than a child soldier – and Ilse Hirsch, twenty-two, a League of German Girls organiser. Fräulein Hirsch came from just a little farther away, the border town of Monschau, in the Eiffel, which by November 1944 was already in American hands. Morgenschweiss and Hirsch would be responsible for reconnoitring the city and identifying and locating the American-appointed Lord Mayor. Wenzel and Leitgeb would carry out the actual murder. Two former border policemen-turned-Gestapo men, Hennemann and Heidorn, who knew the area around Aachen well and had already been back and forth between the lines several times, would act as guides.
⁹

In the new year, the pressure on Gutenberger increased. The Führer himself was said to have taken a personal interest. Moreover, the Luftwaffe had agreed to fly the team to a suitable point west of Aachen. They were given parachute training.

The codename for the operation was
Karneval
, which implied that it had originally been planned for the beginning of Lent in mid-February 1945. However, it was not until mid-March, a time when the German military position had suffered a serious deterioration and the front line had moved many kilometres to the east, that, after a small farewell party sponsored by Gutenberger, the team finally embarked on its 400-kilometre trip to an air base at Hildesheim, near Hanover. From here they would take off on their mission.

On the evening of 19 March 1945, Wenzel and his motley crew boarded a captured American B-17 (with German Luftwaffe markings). Their target was a drop zone in Dutch territory, apparently on the supposition that security would be less tight outside Germany.
¹⁰

In the second half of January, the Anglo-Americans had begun to push the Germans out of the areas they had occupied during the Ardennes battle. By mid-February, the Allied air offensive was achieving new levels of destruction. Central Berlin was devastated on 3 February. Historic Dresden was ravaged on 13–14 February, with upwards of 25,000 civilian dead. The Russians were once more advancing into eastern Germany. The prospect of German underground resistance within the rapidly increasing areas of occupation had now become a serious Allied concern.

One of the Allied planners’ chief worries was the extent to which German youth might have been fanaticised by the Nazi system. Any young German still under military age had known only the Hitler regime. Twelve years of brainwashing in the Nazi Party’s youth movements and the Reich’s increasingly politicised school system would, it was thought, have turned them into willing tools of last-ditch Nazi bosses such as Himmler and Goebbels.

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.