The man at the centre of the Hitz disappearance was not a millionaire, a lawyer or a dictator. He was the night watchman at the West German embassy in Washington, and he was twenty-five years old. His name was Ulrich Bierschenk.
To the newspapers of November 1965 he was simply “a student,” the young man an heiress ran away with. The papers had it roughly right and entirely wrong. He was a student. He was also a husband, a father, and a survivor of a childhood most people in that embassy could not have imagined.
A childhood in the war
He was born in Warsaw in 1940, in a Poland absorbed into Nazi Germany. He was not a target of the campaign that murdered twelve million people, six million of them Jews, and his father fought on the German side. But he grew up among bodies in grey streets, in a community steeped in hatred. Family legend held that his father’s face was left permanently slack, ruined by a ricocheting bullet that caught him in the cheek.
His father barely spoke to him. The story in the family was that when Ulrich turned eighteen, his father calmly set his suitcase down on the street. The particulars hardly mattered. The message was plain, and Ulrich was glad to go.
A marriage as a passage
Postwar Germany was only marginally better than the war years for a young man with no prospects, but the country was changing. By 1947, according to research by Dewey Arthur Browder, 43 percent of German men under thirty had met an American. The rules that once forbade German-American marriage relaxed as the two nations turned to face a common Russian enemy. Between 1950 and 1960, 63,056 Germans emigrated to the United States to marry an American citizen.
Ulrich was one of them. He met Janet McCoy Sproat, a well-to-do American student at the University of Utah spending a summer abroad. They married, and on May 20, 1962, they arrived in the United States together. They settled in her home city of Logan, Utah, and their son Theo was born on June 18, 1963.
He enrolled at the University of Utah to study forestry and took whatever work he could find. By the summer of 1964 he was in Washington holding three jobs at once: security at the embassy, translating, waiting tables, and crop research for his degree. He sent home what he earned to a family growing up without him. He was, by every account, a blank slate who refused to discuss the past.
The rainy night
On a rainy September night in 1964, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany held a party. The building was barely a year old, sleek glass and sterile modern lines meant to bury the old order and beckon the future forward. Anna Maria Hitz was there because her mother, Anna Spring, worked on the premises as a cleaner and had been allowed, as a rare treat, to bring her daughter.
Anna Maria was sixteen. Ulrich was on duty. What passed between them that night has never been fully explained by anyone who was there. They were both runners, each with a history of leaving trouble half a world behind, and falling into each other may have given them a rare and temporary peace.
Fourteen months later she was gone, and the front page of The Washington Post was asking where a D.C. heiress to a ten million dollar fortune had gone. The opening chapter of the book is that night, and you can read it in full here.