Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor

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