Aachen Winter - 1944

The Rhineland Campaign, 1944

Winter was coming, and life in Aachen was not going to be easy.

The most optimistic prediction First Army G-5 would venture was that the area might just be able to feed itself through the winter from local stocks and from what could be gathered in the countryside provided "no more people return."

SHAEF policy was to turn the problems of their existence over to the Germans themselves.

After moving into Aachen, FIG2 created a new functional subdivision, the Special Branch of Public Safety, to screen the political backgrounds of candidates for municipal offices.

The Special Branch was going to become a permanent and pervasive fixture in the occupation, as was also its chief weapon against nazism, the Fragebogen.

A deceptively simple-looking questionnaire, the Fragebogen required the respondent to list all his memberships in National Socialist and military organizations and to supply a variety of other information concerning his salary, associations, and employment back to the pre-Hitler period. With the information in the Fragebogen military government expected not only to be able to detect overt Nazis but also sympathizers, militarists, arid individuals who had benefited materially from the Nazi regime.

The Special Branch in Aachen opened with no public records with which to verify the information in the Fragebogen and only one agent-investigator from the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) ; consequently, the branch resorted-as most Special Branches did later-to hiring Germans to check on Germans.

On 30 October, F1G2 installed Franz Oppenhoff as Oberbuergermeister (chief mayor) of Aachen.

His was the most important appointment yet made in Germany and one that was certain to attract attention on both sides of the front. Military government was concerned over press and political reactions in the United States and England; Oppenhoff was concerned for the safety of his relatives in unoccupied Germany and for his own life.

Earlier in the month the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, had written that there would be no German administration under the occupation because any official who collaborated with the enemy could count on being dead within a month.

Oppenhoff was a native of Aachen and a prominent Catholic layman. He was an expert on Nazi law, had been legal representative for the Bishop of Aachen, and had defended some cases for Jewish firms. Knowing that the Gestapo was interested in him, he had taken refuge in Eupen, across the border in Belgium, in the first week of September, taking his wife and three daughters with him. When he returned to be sworn in as mayor in Aachen, he was alone.