Heinrich Severloh
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Heinrich Severloh (23 June 1923 – 14 January 2006) was a soldier in the German 352nd Infantry Division, which was stationed in Normandy in 1944. He rose to notoriety as a machine gunner in an emplacement known as “Widerstandsnest 62”, whose position allegedly allowed him to kill or injure 2000-2500 American soldiers while they were landing on Omaha Beach as part of Operation Overlord, according to his own claims. He has been referred to as the “Beast of Omaha Beach” in the media of English speaking countries. His claims that he caused so many casualties are controversial amongst historians.
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[edit] Birth
Severloh was born in Metzingen (now Eldingen), the son of a farmer from the Lüneburg Heath region near Metzingen and close to Celle. Until his conscription, he had never had any intentions to join the war.
[edit] Service in the Wehrmacht
Severloh was conscripted on the 23rd of July,1942, at the age of 19. He was allocated to the 19th Light Artillery Replacement Division in Hannover-Bothfeld. On the 9th of August, he was transferred to France and joined the 3rd Battery of the 321st Artillery Regiment, where he was trained inter alia as a dispatch rider. In December 1942, he was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was employed in the rear of his division as the driver of a sleigh. As punishment for critical remarks, Severloh was required to carry out disciplinary exercises, which left him with permanent health problems. The immediate consequence was a lengthy stay in a military hospital, which lasted until June 1943, and which was followed by several weeks leave (partly because of the need for manpower during the harvest). In October 1943, Severloh was sent to junior officer training in Braunschweig, but after his unit, which had suffered heavy casualties, was transferred back to France, he was obliged to break off his training to rejoin it. In December, Severloh reached his unit again, which had in the meantime been reclassified as the 352nd Infantry Division and was stationed in Normandy. Severloh’s service in the Wehrmacht ended on the 7th of June 1944, when he was taken prisoner by the American forces.
[edit] Widerstandsnest 62
The site of Severloh’s last active mission was a simple foxhole in the section of the Omaha Beach known as “Easy Red” by the Americans, close to the present site of the U.S. War Cemetery near Colleville. Severloh’s superiors had ordered him to use all means to drive back the landing American soldiers. His foxhole was part of a medium-sized emplacement known as “Widerstandsnest 62” (English: resistance nest 62), which was to become a turning point both in Severloh’s life and in that of his opponents in the space of several hours. In the absence of a well-developed defensive line, such “resistance nests” had been established along the Atlantic coast and allocated numbers for identification. There were radio and telephone connections between the various emplacements, and many were also within eyesight of one another. This meant that a coordination of firing lines was possible.
Severloh was assigned to lieutenant Frerking. While Frerking coordinated the artillery fire of his battery from a bunker, the young Severloh manned a MG42. He fired on the waves of approaching American G.I.s with the machine gun and two Karabiner 98k rifles, using ammunition provided in a more or less permanent flow by comrades. By 3 p.m., Severloh had fired off approximately 12,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition and 400 rounds with the two rifles. According to experts, this resulted in an estimated 2000-2500 American deaths and injuries, before the G.I.s finally found a thinly manned gap between resistance nests 62 and 64 (directly below the site of the U.S. War Cemetery) and were thus able to attack Widerstandsnest 62 from behind and take it out (resistance nest 63 was a command centre in Colleville and not an emplacement).
Lieutenant Frerking’s artillery observation bunker and Widerstandsnest 62 still exist and can be visited at the beach below the village of Colleville in Normandy. The foxhole can only be vaguely discerned.
[edit] G.I. David Silva
One of the few survivors of Severloh’s MG salvoes was the 19-year-old G.I. David Silva, who was heavily injured by the incident. Severloh found David Silva’s name in a book about the invasion years after the war. Wanting to find this man that he had once shot at, Severloh wrote him a letter. Several months later, Severloh discovered that Silva was once more active in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was there that they met for the second time. The erstwhile enemies became good friends and at the 2005 reunion of the Allied Forces in Normandy, Severloh and Silva met again. According to eyewitnesses, the two seemed to be “the best of friends”.
[edit] Captivity
Severloh was injured at Omaha Beach. He withdrew with one comrade to the nearby village of Colleville. He was taken captive by American soldiers whilst escorting American prisoners from a dugout to a prisoner collection point.
Severloh was released from captivity quite quickly, in 1947. He had first been sent as a prisoner of war to Boston in the USA, where he was held until May 1946. In December of the same year, he arrived in Bedfordshire in England, where he helped with the construction of roads. Severloh regained his freedom as the result of a request made by his father to the British military authorities, as Severloh was needed to work in the fields of his parents’ grange.
[edit] Psychological traumas
Heinrich Severloh told nobody apart from his wife about what he had experienced for many decades. He claims not to have realized what he was actually doing during the landings at Omaha Beach. Yet from time to time, he had been forced to resort to the two rifles he had because his machine gun had overheated. In so doing, he moved from the unconscious slaughter of nameless and faceless waves of soldiers to the targeted killing of a man. Severloh saw a man he had hit stop rigidly, saw his helmet fall to the beach, and saw how he folded over, bleeding heavily. In this moment, Severloh understood for the first time what he had been doing for hours with his MG42. Nonetheless, only when he was injured did the young soldier withdraw further inland to Widerstandsnest 63. He was captured on the 7th of June 1944 by the Americans.
Severloh buried his experiences in his mind, until one day a reporter directly asked him about them, having discovered that Severloh was thought to be the (in)famous “Beast of Omaha”. Severloh, who was by this time an old man, was relieved to be able to break his silence, and recounted what he had done on the day of the invasion. He also wrote a book about his experiences.
Most American war veterans who took part in the landing in Normandy have forgiven Severloh, or recognize that his actions were robot-like, according to his belief: “If I don’t shoot them, then one of them will shoot me”. In contrast, criticism and even open animosity towards Severloh is to be found amongst the descendants of these war veterans and amongst those of the fallen soldiers.
[edit] Beast of Omaha Beach
For decades, this title was given to the unknown German soldier who had so horribly impeded the G.I.s during the landing at “Easy Red”. Thousands of soldiers fell victim to the misplaced belief that this section of the beach and all of the Wehrmacht’s emplacements had already been cleared before the invasion.
As none of the Allied landing forces knew who had operated the MG42 for so many hours, it was impossible to punish anyone for this. The “Beast of Omaha Beach” was more or less still unknown until the last memorial reunion commemorating the landing of the Allies in Normandy.
When Severloh was taken captive, he knew that he could tell nobody, not even his comrades, how many men he had probably killed during the landing. He knew that he could be murdered if the Americans ever found out what he had done.
[edit] Further factors
According to Severloh, there were only two or three active emplacements with machine guns in his section of the beach at the time of the landing. The 19-year-old Franz Gockel positioned next to Severloh was in any case also armed with a machine gun. Whether and to what extent Severloh’s claims that just 30 soldiers defended the beach or that just two or three men were necessary to keep an entire armada of enemy soldiers at bay is unclear. There can however be no doubt that the emplacements were so tactically well placed that they could cover the beach with overlapping target areas. The few cannons available provided considerable support for the machine guns from their armoured positions, which had been built so as to be able to target the entirety of Omaha Beach. These were protected by concrete walls several metres thick from direct attack by enemy ship-borne artillery. This meant that they could not fire directly out to sea, but they were able to fire along the entire beach. These positions were almost all knocked out by invading tanks. Widerstandsnest 62 had in addition to its machine guns two Czech-made 7.62 cm field cannons; the neighbouring resistance nest had an 88 mm flak gun. Additional losses were caused to the U.S. troops by artillery fire from further inland. Meanwhile, many landing boats hit mines, exploded, sank, or burned.
The American G.I.s had from the outset bad tactical positions during the storming of the beach. Between the edge of the water and the dunes, there was a very wide, treacherous strip of sand to cover, which was completely flat and without cover. The preceding bombing of the German defensive positions had not produced concrete results. Severloh’s line of fire almost entirely included the sections of beach known as Easy Red and Fox Green. Furthermore, the Americans took several hours to pinpoint Severloh’s position. Only when the lack of standard combat ammunition led to the use of tracer ammunition instead were U.S. war ships able to locate Severloh’s foxhole and attack it with heavy artillery.
Moreover, Heinrich Severloh with his MG42 was forced back into his bunker at least twice as the result of precise grenade attacks and yet he returned to the position he had been ordered to hold each time and continued to fire. This was more the result of Severloh’s obedience than of a blind desire to fight. The bunker, which can still be visited today, is only a couple of square metres in size. It had been built as an observation post for an artillery spotter (on 6. June 1944, this was Lieutenant Frerking). Some sources therefore claim that Severloh only stood in a foxhole beside it.
It is also notable that Severloh continued to fire using a rifle while he had to wait for both barrels of his MG42 to cool off (he only had access to one replacement barrel). Even with this quite slow weapon (it takes quite a long time to load in comparison to semi-automatic weapons), he was able to fire more than 400 times, until his rifle failed and had to be replaced. According to Severloh, even “kicking the loading lever” didn’t help any more, as the weapon had been distorted by heat.
Severloh’s loader was an unknown soldier who had arrived as with reinforcements from further inland. Severloh’s direct superior was Lieutenant Frerking. When Frerking noticed that Widerstandsnest 62 had been bypassed and was being attacked from the side, he ordered a retreat. Frerking himself was hit in the head and killed by one of the invading soldiers a matter of seconds after Severloh had left the emplacement and was fleeing towards Colleville. Frerking was buried at the German War Cemetery in La Cambe.
[edit] His final years
In his final years, Severloh lived more happily and more at ease than ever before. The “personal redemption” from his horrible memories that he achieved when he broke his silence had helped him move on from his experiences. Meeting David Silva had also helped to encourage a process of healing and forgiving. Severloh died in Lachendorf near his hometown of Metzingen.
[edit] Trivia
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David Silva later became a military chaplain and was stationed in Karlsruhe in the 1960s. During the first meeting between Heinrich Severloh and David Silva, Severloh asked him how he had come to this position. Silva answered: “In the moment when I had to get out of that landing boat and run up into the fire of your machine gun, I cried out to God to help me to get out of this hell alive. I pledged to become a chaplain and as such to help other soldiers...”
According to his own account, Ernest Hemingway must also have come close to Widerstandsnest 62 as part of the seventh assault wave. As this assault took place at 11 a.m., we must assume that Severloh also fired at Hemingway.
[edit] Sources
Heinrich Severloh: WN 62 - Erinnerungen an Omaha Beach Normandie, 6. Juni 1944, Hek Creativ Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3932922115
