Wilhelm Richter (General)

Wilhelm Richter (* 1892 in Hirschberg , Province of Silesia , † 1971 ) was a German officer, most recently in the rank of lieutenant general , who was active during the First and Second World Wars .

Life

Wilhelm Richter was a son of the Lord Mayor of Hirschberg and Frankfurt an der Oder Georg Richter (1853-1925). In 1913, a year before the First World War , he joined the German Army at the age of 21 . He took part in battles of the First World War. After 1918 he remained in the army and continued his military career in the reduced and disarmed Reichswehr .

In 1937 Richter received an order for the 30th artillery regiment of the Wehrmacht . He took part in the attack on Poland in 1939 and in the western campaign in 1940 . In 1941 he fought on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union . In March 1943 he took command of the 716th Infantry Division in Normandy , whose task it was to protect the French coast against an Allied amphibious assault. Richter's sector lay west of Bayeux , where the 352nd Infantry Division was stationed from May 1944, and east of Caen .

When the invasion took place on June 6, 1944 , Richter's forces were essentially fighting Canadians and British who had landed over the invasion Juno Beach in France. By June 15, 1944, Richter's division had lost sixty percent of its soldiers.

The 716th ID was then withdrawn from the front, reorganized and replenished in terms of people and material. In September 1944, after the Battle of Normandy , Richter lost command of the 716th Infantry Division and instead took over a division of the Air Force in occupied Norway , where he survived the war without a fight. He died in 1971 at the age of 79.

Richter's headquarters and bunker have been a museum since 1991.

literature

• Jane Penrose: The D-Day Companion: Leading Historians explore history's greatest amphibious assault . Osprey Publishing, Oxford New York 2009, ISBN 184603454X , ISBN 978-1846034541 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marc Laurenceau: Biography of Wilhelm Richter on dday-overlord.com (French). February 19, 2016, accessed April 20, 2016.
2. ↑ Ken Ford: D-Day 1944 , Volume 3. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2002, ISBN 978-1-84603560-9 , p. 21 ( online )
3. ^ The Second World War. General Richter's Headquarters. ( Memento of the original from February 23, 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. Mémorial de Caen (English). Retrieved April 20, 2016.