BDM-Hauptgruppenführerin (Captain) Ilse Hirsch
(image - Wikipedia creative commons)
(image - Wikipedia creative commons)
In Autumn 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered SS Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann to begin organising an elite troop of volunteers to operate secretly behind enemy lines.
with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler
(image source: Wikipedia, public domain)
Known as Operation Werwolf, regional party leaders of the NSDAP, or Gauleiters as they were called, were to find suitable recruits who would then be trained at secret locations in the Rhineland and Berlin.
By early 1945, several hundred recruits, mostly drawn from the Hitler Youth and Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), were being trained at Hülchrath Castle, the chief training centre in the West. Once trained, teams of these Werwolf Kommandos, commanded by older, battle-experienced hand-picked soldiers from the German Army and Waffen-SS, would operate behind enemy lines as guerrillas, creating deadly mishap amongst the occupying forces.
The Hitler Youth members were instructed in small-arms and demolitions skills, radio-communications, map-reading, and survival skills by instructors from Otto Skorzeny's Jagdverband, experts from the Army, and agents of the SD and Gestapo.
They were taught to sabotage vehicles and communications facilities, to poison wells and food supplies - large quantities of arsenic were issued to some squads.
After the D-Day invasion, Allied officials appointed Franz Oppenhoff as mayor of Aachen, the first German city to fall to the Allies. Hirsch was one of the team chosen to assassinate Oppenhoff. At the time of the assassination, March 25, 1945, 23 year old Ilse Hirsch was a Hauptgruppenführerin (Captain) in the BDM.
Further reading: Smithsonian.com
The Hitler Youth members were instructed in small-arms and demolitions skills, radio-communications, map-reading, and survival skills by instructors from Otto Skorzeny's Jagdverband, experts from the Army, and agents of the SD and Gestapo.
They were taught to sabotage vehicles and communications facilities, to poison wells and food supplies - large quantities of arsenic were issued to some squads.
Ilse Hirsch on the cover of a German propaganda magazine, 1940
Ilse Hirsch was one of the new Werwolf recruits. Born in the industrial town of Hamm in 1922, she joined the BDM at age sixteen and soon became one of its principle organizers in the town of Monschau.
After the D-Day invasion, Allied officials appointed Franz Oppenhoff as mayor of Aachen, the first German city to fall to the Allies. Hirsch was one of the team chosen to assassinate Oppenhoff. At the time of the assassination, March 25, 1945, 23 year old Ilse Hirsch was a Hauptgruppenführerin (Captain) in the BDM.
Dropped by parachute near the outskirts of the town, the five man and one woman team made their way into the city guided by Hirsch who knew the area well. Franz Oppenhoff, a forty-one year old lawyer, his wife Irmgard and their three children, lived at no 251, Eupener Strasse. When Oppenhoff agreed to allow the Americans to appoint him Bürgermeister, he had signed his own death warrant.
Regarded as a traitor by the Nazi resistance movement, Werwolf, he was a prime candidate for assassination. Guided by Hirsch to the house, the actual murder was carried out by the leader of the team, SS-Untersturmfuhrer (2nd Lieutenant) Wenzel and their radio operator, Sepp Leitgeb, who fired the fatal shot as Oppenhoff stood on the steps of his residence.
Ilse Hirsch took no part in the actual assassination but acted only as guide and lookout. Making their escape from the city, Hirsch caught her foot on a trip-wire attached to a buried mine which severely injured her knee and killed her companion, Sepp Leitgeb.
After spending a long time in hospital she eventually returned to her home in Euskirchen. After the war, the survivors of the assassination team, with the exception of SS Lt. Wenzel, were tracked down and arrested.
At the Aachen 'Werwolf Trial' in October, 1949, all were found guilty and sentenced to from one to four years in prison. Ilse and one other team member were set free.
In 1972, Ilse Hirsch was happily married, the mother of two teenage boys, and living only about twenty miles from the scene of the most momentous event in her life.
Further reading: Smithsonian.com
