Alsace bridgehead

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The Alsace bridgehead (French Poche de Colmar , English Colmar Pocket ) was an area on the left side of the Upper Rhine held by the German 19th Army under the command of General Siegfried Rasp at the end of 1944 against the advancing Allied units . The front protrusion ran in a wide arc from Mulhouse in the south over the Vosges to Rheinau in the north, in the west the front line ran across the Vosges. At the beginning of 1945, the region was the scene of the German company Sonnenwende and the Allied counter-offensive that led to the breakup of the bridgehead in early February.

US Army site map

M10 Wolverine of the French, shot down on January 26, 1945 between Illhaeusern and Elsenheim

At the end of November 1944, the French 1st Army under Jean de Lattre de Tassigny had advanced from the south along the Swiss border via Belfort to the Upper Rhine. In the north of the Vosges, the 7th US Army under Jacob L. Devers achieved a breakthrough near Zabern , and on November 23, 1944, Strasbourg and thus the Rhine were reached. The German troops were thus trapped with the Rhine at their rear, but the Allied supply lines had also become very long, especially in view of the unusually harsh winter weather.

On December 12th, the commander of the Upper Rhine Army Group, Heinrich Himmler , launched an encircling attack (code name "Habicht") in Upper Alsace between Kaisersberg and Rappoltsweiler Combat report of December 14, 1944, Freiburg Military Archives, Barch RH 20-19 / 145). For this purpose, “considerable forces in officer candidates, reserve officer candidates, non-commissioned officers courses and other parts of the reserve army, the army and the Waffen SS” had been brought in. “Although there was no proper preparation due to the short lead time, the attack was started with these barely or not at all battle-tested and mixed-up formations. The relatively considerable initial successes on the first day consequently had to be bought with such high losses that the attack was stopped on the second day ”.

On January 8, 1945, parts of the 19th Army ( 198th Infantry Division , 269th Infantry Division and the 106 Panzer Brigade ) attacked Strasbourg from the bridgehead ("Operation Solar Wind"). The French units standing between Ill and Rhine were initially thrown back, but the German advance came to a standstill on January 12 about 15 kilometers from Strasbourg.

As of January 20, the Allies in turn launched an attack on the bridgehead. On February 5, their attacking leaders met at Rouffach , so that part of the German units was locked in a cauldron with the center of Gebweiler and was wiped out a little later. The other German units evaded over the bridge from Neuenburg-Eichwald to Neuenburg am Rhein . When this bridge was blown up on the morning of February 9, the battle for the bridgehead ended.

In the Upper Rhine Plain, only houses offered cover and protection from winter, so civilians - such as the young Tomi Ungerer - suffered particularly from the fighting. Over 20,000 soldiers died on both sides.

Others

• Sigolsheim (eleven kilometers northwest of Colmar) was badly affected by the fighting over the Alsace bridgehead. A national military cemetery on Blutberg (“Nécropole nationale de Sigolsheim”) commemorates this time.

• 173 German war dead from the Second World War are buried in the military cemetery near Breitenbach-Haut-Rhin , 24 km west of Colmar .

At Bergheim north of Ribeauvillé (German: Rapolltsweiler ) there is a German military cemetery where the majority of the dead from the “Habicht” company are lying.

literature

• André Hugel, Wolfgang Krebs, Eberhard Neher: We were enemies: Alsatians, Germans, Americans remember the battles for the "Poche de Colmar" in December 1944 , Centaurus Verlag, Herbolzheim 2006, ISBN 3-8255-0618-5 .
• Robert Ross Smith and Jeffrey J. Clarke: Riviera To The Rhine. The official US Army History of the Seventh US Army. Diane Pub Co. 1993, ISBN 978-0-7567-6486-9 .
• Steven Zaloga : Operation North Wind 1945 - Hitler's last offensive in the West . Osprey Publishing, 2010, ISBN 978-1-84603-683-5 . google books .
• Charles Whiting: The Other Battle of the Bulge: Operation Northwind . History Press Spellmount, 2001, ISBN 978-1-86227-399-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ The German Reich and the Second World War (DVA Munich 2008, Volume 10/1, p. 412/13)
2. ^ Zaloga: Operation North Wind 1945. p. 86
3. ^ French Wikipedia , The War Graves Photographic Project : Search result ( Memento of the original from March 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
4. ↑ www.volksbund.de