Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor Page A

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