Heinrich Severloh

Heinrich Severloh (born June 23, 1923 in Metzingen (today the municipality of Eldingen ), † January 14, 2006 in Lachendorf ) was a soldier in the German 352nd Infantry Division during the Second World War , which was stationed in Normandy in 1944.

He became known as a machine gunner of Resistance Nest 62 , as he killed or wounded many American soldiers on June 6, 1944 when they landed as part of Operation Overlord . In the English-language media Severloh was and is therefore referred to as the "Beast of Omaha Beach" ( Beast of Omaha Beach ).

Life

Service in the armed forces

Heinrich Severloh, the son of a farmer from the Lüneburg Heath , was drafted into the Wehrmacht on July 23, 1942 and assigned to the 19 Light Artillery Substitute Department in Hanover-Bothfeld. On August 9, 1942, he was transferred to France and joined the 3rd Battery of the 321 Artillery Regiment of the 321st Infantry Division , where he was trained as a rider, among other things. In December 1942 he was transferred to the Eastern Front, where he was used as a horse-drawn sleigh driver for the rear of his division. Due to critical remarks, Severloh was sentenced to exercise in March 1943, which caused permanent damage to his health. A long hospital stay followed, which lasted until June 1943. In October 1943 Severloh was posted to Braunschweig for a non-commissioned officer course. Since his home unit, the 321st Infantry Division, had been relocated to France for the purpose of reorganization, he had to break off his non-commissioned officer course and return to his unit. In December Severloh rejoined his unit, which had since been renamed the 352nd Infantry Division and stationed in Normandy. On December 25th he was assigned to the newly established 1st battery. His new superior was Lieutenant Bernhard Frerking, whose officer boy Severloh became a little later. On February 14th, Severloh's battery took up position in the small town of Houtteville eight kilometers northwest of Bayeux .

June 6, 1944

Location of resistance nest 62 (WN 62)

Severloh's last active position was a simple foxhole on the beach section “Omaha Beach” in the American landing zone “Easy Red”. His superiors ordered him to use all means to repel the landing Americans. This foxhole was part of a medium-sized base called " Resistance Nest 62 ". In the absence of a continuous line of defense, so-called nests of resistance were set up on the Atlantic coast and numbered accordingly. There was a radio and telephone connection, often visual contact between the individual bases. So it was possible to give each other fire protection.

View from Heinrich Severloh's position on Omaha Beach, taken in June 2008

While Lieutenant Frerking was directing the artillery fire of his battery from his concrete bunker, Severloh took over the MG42 . He shot the attacking American soldiers with a machine gun and two K98 carbines . By around 3 p.m. he had fired around 12,000 rounds with the MG and 400 rounds with the two carbines. The exact number of American soldiers who died or were wounded as a result of Severloh's operation can no longer be determined. Severloh's own figures of around 2,000 are now estimated by German and American military experts as too high.

The American troops ultimately found a thinly occupied gap between WN 62 and WN 64 directly below today's American military cemetery and were thus able to attack and eliminate WN 62 from behind.

Captivity and Homecoming

Severloh was wounded after the fight at Omaha Beach. He withdrew with another soldier to the nearby village of Colleville-sur-Mer , where the resistance nest 63 was, but which only contained an unarmed bunker in which the command posts of higher-level units were housed. He was captured by American troops on June 7, 1944 with four American prisoners, whom he was supposed to bring from this shelter to a collection point, as well as several other German soldiers. Both the American prisoners and the soldiers from whom Severloh was captured were members of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st US Infantry Division . Many of the dead on the beach came from this unit, so Severloh preferred not to tell anyone about his role the day before.

Heinrich Severloh was shipped to the USA as a prisoner of war in June 1944 . The first stop was Boston , after which it was relocated again and again until March 1946 and used to harvest potatoes and cotton. At the end of March 1946 he returned to Europe ( Antwerp ) by ship as part of a prisoner-of-war transport . In May he was shipped to England, where he once had to spend 28 days in prison for unauthorized possession of food. A request from his father to the British military authorities brought him back his freedom in 1947, as his father urgently needed him for the farm work on his parents' farm. On May 22, 1947 he was back at the gates of his parents' house in Metzingen.

After the war

Immediately after the war, Severloh tried to suppress what he had experienced. He only confided in his wife Lisa.

His story first came to light in 1960 when he reached out to controversial publicist Paul Carell . Carell used Severloh's statements for his book You are Coming! The invasion of the Americans and British in Normandy in 1944. In the following years he visited the theater of war in Normandy again and again.

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Normandy landing, the American television station ABC broadcast an hour-long report on him on June 6, 1984 . In the course of creating this article, Heinrich Severloh gave a four-hour interview.

Severloh described his experiences in the book WN62 , published in 2000 , in which the writer Helmut Konrad von Keusgen acted as a ghostwriter.

Severloh died in 2006 in a retirement home in Lachendorf near Celle .

Trivia

One of the survivors of Severloh's machine gun fire was the then 19-year-old American soldier David Silva, who was seriously wounded. Years after the war was Severloh Silva's name in the book The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan about the invasion. Severloh later found out that Silva, who was stationed as a military chaplain in Karlsruhe during the 1960s , was in Germany. The enemies of that time became very close friends, and at the remembrance meeting of the victorious allied powers in Normandy in 2005, Severloh and Silva met again for the last time.

The lieutenant's artillery observation bunker and the entire resistance nest 62 still exist today on the beach below the village of Colleville in Normandy and can be viewed freely. The foxhole can only be guessed at.

On June 5, 2004, VOX showed the two-hour Spiegel TV documentary in co-production with CBC Radio Canada : Mortal Enemies of Omaha Beach - the story of an unusual friendship between the filmmaker Alexander Czogalla.

literature

• Hein Severloh: WN 62 - Memories of Omaha Beach Normandy, June 6, 1944 . Hek Creativ Verlag, Garbsen 2000, ISBN 3-932922-11-5 .
  • French transl .: WN 62: mémoires à Omaha Beach, Normandie, 6 June 1944 . Heimdal, Bayeux 2004, ISBN 2-84048-195-2 .
  • Engl. Trans .: WN 62: a German soldier's memories of the defense of Omaha Beach, Normandy, June 6, 1944 . HEK-Creativ-Verlag, Garbsen 2011, ISBN 978-3-932922-23-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hein Severloh: WN 62 - Memories of Omaha Beach Normandy, June 6, 1944, pages 21 to 49, HEK Creativ Verlag Garbsen
2. ^ Glenn Frankel: War and Emerging Remembrance. In: media.washingtonpost.com. July 24, 2004, accessed September 16, 2015 . 
3. ^ ^{A b c} Hein Severloh: WN 62 - Memories of Omaha Beach Normandy, June 6, 1944, pages 76 to 84, HEK Creativ Verlag Garbsen
4. ^ Hein Severloh: WN 62 - Memories of Omaha Beach Normandy, June 6, 1944, pages 91 to 94, HEK Creativ Verlag Garbsen
5. ^ Hein Severloh: WN 62 - Memories of Omaha Beach Normandy, June 6, 1944 pages 101 to 110, HEK Creativ Verlag Garbsen
6. ^ Hein Severloh: WN 62 - Memories of Omaha Beach Normandy, June 6, 1944, pages 140 to 142, HEK Creativ Verlag Garbsen

Web links

• Documentation, Heinrich Severloh: The mortal enemies of Omaha Beach
• Glenn Frankel: War and Emerging Remembrance , The Washington Post, July 24, 2004.