Heinrich Severloh

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 has been referred to as the “Beast of Omaha Beach” by the media of English speaking countries. He rose to notoriety as a gunner in a machine gun emplacement known as WN 62 “Widerstandsnest 62”, whose position enabled him to inflict 1500-2000 casualties while American soldiers were landing on Omaha Beach as part of Operation Overlord.

Birth

Severloh was born into a farming family in Metzingen (now Eldingen) in the Lüneburg Heath of north Germany, close to the small city of Celle.

Service in the Wehrmacht

At the time of his conscription, Severloh had never had any intention of joining the war. He was conscripted into the Wehrmacht on July 23, 1942, at the age of 19. He was assigned to the 19th Light Artillery Replacement Division in Hanover-Bothfeld. On August 9, he was transferred to France and joined the 3rd Battery of the 321st Artillery Regiment, where he was trained as a dispatch rider, among other things. In December 1942, he was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was assigned to the rear of his division as a sleigh driver. In punishment for dissenting remarks, Severloh was forced to perform physical exertions which left him with permanent health problems. The immediate consequence was a six month convalescence in a military hospital, which lasted until June 1943. Upon discharge from the hospital, he was given 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 did rejoin his unit, which in the meantime had been reclassified as the 352nd Infantry Division and was stationed in Normandy. Severloh’s service in the Wehrmacht ended on June 7, 1944, when he was taken prisoner by the American forces.

Widerstandsnest 62

The site of Severloh’s last active mission was a simple foxhole in the section of Omaha Beach known to the Americans as “Easy Red”, close to the present site of the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial near Colleville-sur-Mer. 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). 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. The soldiers manning the emplacements in a firing line could therefore coordinate with one another.

Severloh was assigned to a Lieutenant Frerking. While Frerking coordinated the artillery fire of his battery from a bunker, the young Severloh manned an MG42. He fired on the waves of approaching American GIs with the machine gun and two Karabiner 98k rifles, while comrades kept up a continuous flow of ammunition to him. By 3 p.m., Severloh had fired approximately 12,000 rounds with the machine gun and 400 rounds with the two rifles. Some have asserted that this resulted in an estimated 2000-2500 American deaths and injuries, however this is likely a gross overestimation, since total American casualties on Omaha Beach were approximately 3000. GIs 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 Colleville. The foxhole can only be vaguely discerned.

GI David Silva

One of the few survivors of Severloh’s MG salvos was the 19-year-old GI David Silva, who was, however, gravely wounded. In the 1960s, Severloh found David Silva’s name in a book about the invasion. Wishing 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 as a military chaplain and was stationed in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was there that they met for the second time. Severloh asked him how he had come to be a chaplain. Silva's answer was: “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.” After living through the war, he was ordained a priest. The erstwhile enemies became good friends and at the 2005 reunion of Allied Forces in Normandy, Severloh and Silva met once more. According to eyewitnesses, the two seemed to be “the best of friends”. Between the time they first met after the war, until Severloh's death, the two wrote to each other often. Silva is now living in Cleveland, Ohio as a priest and has visited Severloh's gravesite more than once.

Captivity

Severloh was injured at Omaha Beach. He retreated with one wehrmacht soldier to the nearby village of Colleville. He was taken captive by American soldiers while escorting American prisoners from a dugout to a prisoner collection point.

Severloh was released from captivity in 1947. He had first been sent as a prisoner of war to Boston, USA, where he was held until May 1946. That December, 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’ farm.

Psychological traumas

For many decades, Heinrich Severloh told nobody but his wife about what he had experienced in the war. He has claimed that he was initially unaware of what he was actually bringing about during the landings at Omaha Beach. From time to time, when his machine gun would overheat, he had been forced to resort to his two rifles. In so doing, he moved from the detached slaughter of nameless and faceless waves of soldiers to the targeted killing of a man. Severloh saw how one man he had hit stiffened, the helmet fell to the beach, and the man doubled over, bleeding heavily. In this moment, Severloh now understood the results of what he had been doing for hours with his MG42. Nonetheless, only when he was injured did the young soldier retreat inland to Widerstandsnest 63.

Severloh kept his battle memories buried until one day a reporter who had discovered that Severloh was thought to be the (in)famous “Beast of Omaha”, confronted him. It was a relief to Severloh, by this time an old man, to be able to break his silence, and he recounted what he had done on the day of the invasion. He went on to write a book about it.

Most American war veterans who took part in the landing in Normandy have forgiven Severloh, or recognize that his actions were robot-like, consistent with 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 the American soldiers, both those who perished and those who survived. Others feel that Severloh was a soldier doing exactly what a soldier is expected to do in wartime, and would have been remembered as a war hero if he had been on the victor's side.

Beast of Omaha Beach

For decades, this epithet was hurled at the unknown German soldier who had impeded the invading GIs at “Easy Red” with such terrible effectiveness. These thousands of slaughtered soldiers had fallen victim to the misplaced assumption that this section of the beach and all of the Wehrmacht’s emplacements had already been cleared away before the invasion. The “Beast of Omaha Beach” would remain more or less unknown until the last memorial reunion commemorating the landing of the Allies in Normandy.

When Severloh was taken captive, he thought that he could tell nobody, not even his comrades, how many men he had probably killed during the landing. He thought that he might be murdered if the Americans ever found out what he had done.

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. He and the 19-year-old Franz Gockel positioned next to him were armed with machine guns. Severloh claimed that there were just 30 soldiers defending the beach and that only two or three men were necessary to keep an entire armada of enemy soldiers at bay. Whether these claims are correct is unknown.

The American GIs had bad tactical positions from the outset 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 cross, which was completely flat and without cover. The advance bombing of the German defensive positions had not produced concrete results. Severloh’s lines of fire almost entirely covered the sections of beach known as Easy Red and Fox Green.

The bunker 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).

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 slow weapon (slow to load in comparison to semi-automatic weapons), he was able to fire the rifle more than 400 times before it failed. According to Severloh, even “kicking the loading lever” didn’t help any more, as the weapon had been warped by heat.

Severloh’s loader was an unknown soldier who had arrived from inland with reinforcements. 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.

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.

Sources

Severloh, Heinrich (2004). WN 62 - Erinnerungen an Omaha Beach Normandie, 6. Juni 1944. Hek Creativ Verlag. ISBN 9783932922114. OCLC 56831668.

External links

• Hein Serverloh - the Beast of Omaha - with photos of Serverloh
• Brief military biography