Free Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor Page B

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