ABSTRACT
Düsseldorf, April 1945: Immediately after the Allied occupation of the right-bank quarter of Düsseldorf on 17 April 1945, Erna L., an 18-year-old trained postal worker, calls on the Secret Service of the American Occupying Authority. Its office is in Room 165 of the Düsseldorf police headquarters. Only two months earlier, this young woman had still been an inmate at the Freimersdorf ‘Youth House’ of Brauweiler provincial detention centre, to which she had been committed in 1943 as an Edelweißpirat (edelweiss pirate).1 During her visit she draws attention to the fate of her friends who are still in detention.
