The shot came from inside the house, and for a moment the night went still. Ilse H. stood outside, waiting to lead the team out of Aachen, when the report of the pistol told her the deed was done. Then came the shouting, the scramble, the desperate flight through the dark streets toward the edge of town.

She ran ahead of the others, her mind already fixed on the escape route, on getting every one of them back through the lines alive. She never saw the trip wire. Her foot caught it, and the buried landmine beneath the ground erupted. The blast tore into her knee and killed one of the assassins outright.

Ilse H. , the young woman who had risen to lead the League of German Girls in Monschau and had volunteered for the most dangerous mission the Werewolves had ever mounted, lay bleeding in the dirt as the war closed around her. She had been born in 1922 in Hamm, Germany, a girl who grew up as the Nazi Party tightened its grip on the country. At sixteen she joined the League of German Girls, the female branch of the Hitler Youth, and her commitment did not go unnoticed.

She rose through its ranks to become one of the leaders of the organization in the town of Monschau, a position that placed her firmly within the machinery of the regime as the war ground toward its catastrophic end. By 1945, Germany was collapsing on every front. The Americans had pushed deep into the west, and the Nazi leadership, desperate for any means to slow the advance, had created the Werewolves, a partisan force designed to operate behind enemy lines. These were men and women prepared to carry out sabotage, ambushes, and assassinations against the occupying forces and against any German who cooperated with them.

Ilse H. became part of that underground army. The city of Aachen had fallen to the Americans in October 1944, the first major German city to be captured. To administer it, the Americans appointed a German lawyer named Franz Oppenhoff as mayor.

Oppenhoff had been chosen precisely because he was willing to work with the occupiers, a fact that made him a traitor in the eyes of the Nazi regime. The appointment enraged the leadership in Berlin. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, ordered Oppenhoff eliminated, and the task fell to SS Lieutenant General Hans Kammler, who began planning an operation to assassinate the mayor. Hitler himself took a personal interest in the matter and insisted on the execution of the sentence.

Kammler devised a plan he called Operation Carnival. He assembled a team of six men, four SS soldiers and two members of the Hitler Youth, to infiltrate Aachen, find Oppenhoff, and kill him. Ilse H. was selected for the mission.

So were Herbert Wenzel, who had been chosen to do the actual shooting, and Josef Leitgeb, who was to accompany him. The team also included two men who knew Aachen well, Karl Morgan and Erich Morgenschweis, who would serve as guides, leading the group into the city and locating their target. Once they learned the mayor’s daily routine, they would hand the information to Wenzel and Leitgeb, who would carry out the assassination. A fifth man, Hans Heynen, was also part of the operation, and another SS man, Anton Heidemann, rounded out the group.

On 20 March 1945, the team was parachuted into the area near the village of Gemmenich, close to the Belgian and Dutch borders. The drop did not go unnoticed. A twenty-year-old Dutch border guard named Joseph Sef emerged to challenge them. The Werewolves shot him dead.

The killing raised the stakes, for the body would be found, and the alarm would spread. The team scattered into smaller groups to make their way toward Aachen. Ilse H. separated from the main party and moved alone.

She reached Aachen and made contact with a friend from her days in the League of German Girls, who told her where Oppenhoff was living and what his schedule looked like. The rest of the unit arrived in the city on 25 March. The pieces were in place. The mayor lived at a villa on Eupener Straße 251 with his wife Irmgard and their three children.

On the evening of 25 March, Oppenhoff was not at home. He had gone to a party. The assassination team approached the house and spoke to the housekeeper, claiming to be German pilots trying to find their way back to German lines. They asked her to send for the mayor.

The housekeeper complied and went to fetch him. Oppenhoff returned to the villa and found the men waiting for him. They repeated their story, that they were downed airmen looking for a way back. Oppenhoff listened, then tried to persuade them to surrender to the Americans instead, telling them the war was lost and nothing would be gained by continuing to fight.

The moment stretched. Wenzel had assured his comrades that he would do the shooting, that he would pull the trigger when the time came. Now, with the mayor standing before him, he hesitated. Leitgeb looked at him, then shouted, “Heil Hitler!

” and shot Franz Oppenhoff in the head at close range. The mayor slumped to the ground, dead. The killing done, the team fled the villa. Ilse H.

tried to lead them to safety. She knew the ground, had grown up in these hills, and took the point position on the escape route. In the darkness, she caught her foot on a trip wire. The landmine beneath her exploded.

The blast mangled her knee and killed Leitgeb, the man who had fired the fatal shot. She lay wounded as the rest of the team scattered and made their own way out of Aachen. Her injuries required a long stay in the hospital. The war ended weeks later, in May 1945, and Germany surrendered.

Ilse H. eventually recovered and returned home, her part in the assassination hidden for years. The survivors of Operation Carnival did not escape justice forever. After the war, the investigators tracked down the members of the team, one by one.

Karl Morgan, Erich Morgenschweis, Hans Heynen, and the others were arrested. In October 1949, they were brought before a court in Aachen for what became known as the Aachen Werewolf Trial. The proceedings examined the murder of Franz Oppenhoff in detail, the parachute drop, the killing of the Dutch border guard, the deception at the villa door. The court found Hans Heynen and Karl Morgan guilty of the killing of Oppenhoff and sentenced them to terms of one to four years in prison.

Another defendant was acquitted. Ilse H. herself was not charged. The men went to prison.

The woman who had led them through the dark streets of Aachen, and who had been torn apart by the landmine as she tried to bring them home, was never brought before the court. She settled in the Aachen area after the war and lived quietly for the rest of her life. She died in the year 2000, more than half a century after the shot that killed Franz Oppenhoff, the shot that she had helped to make possible, and the explosion that had nearly taken her leg and her life on the night the war caught up with her.