D DAY Through German Eyes - The Hidden Story of June 6th 1944

by Holger Eckhertz

These shells made a noise similar to a gas blowtorch being run at full strength,

The shockwaves punched all the air out of our lungs, and made our eyes bleed.

One man, near me, could not take the stress, and he tried to run by ducking outside of the trench zone which was covered overhead by the steel screens. I saw him try to run. He was caught by an absolute storm of shrapnel, and his torso was ripped across and broken open. Absolutely ripped open, from front to back.

I remembered that my father had told me many times that he did this as a machine gunner at the Battle of the Somme in the first war; he and his comrades hid deep in their dugouts with their guns and then emerged to fix their guns in place again before the British attacked. Now here

After the initial burst of energy and determination that I felt when the attack started, I began to feel pity for these troops, because they kept arriving in landing craft.

We fired at them in the same way, causing the same deaths and injuries. My loader was moved by this, and he shook his head, saying that the Americans should not sacrifice their men in this way.

You mentioned a short time ago your father being at the Battle of the Somme in the First War. At the Somme, it is said that some German machine gunners shouted at the advancing British to save themselves and retreat.

We did not want to risk the gun breaking down, so we rested it to let it cool. We took up our rifles and used them, aiming at the Americans coming out of the water. This meant exposing our heads and arms above the parapet, and it was only at this point that I noticed we received the first shots aimed at us by the American soldiers themselves.

So the moment when I thought that we might win was very brief.

My loader was hit in the back of the neck, and he had to withdraw from the gun slit. He had a large piece of flesh hanging loose from his neck, and it was bleeding very profusely.

Also, I knew that we had surely enraged the attackers by killing so many of their comrades. The beach was literally piled up with corpses that we had shot. So what chance was there of the Americans showing us any mercy now?

A scene from “Saving Private Ryan” comes to mind.

My belief, as a foot soldier, is that we were close to throwing the attackers off the beach at that one brief moment, at least in my sector. It was the renewed heavy bombardment and the arrival of tanks which prevented that happening, I think.

Nevertheless, considering their capability, I am surprised that their aircraft did not attack us more fully overnight on the evening of the 5th June or at first light on the 6th, when the bombs from their heavy bombers fell wide. I think that would have disrupted our defences and still prevented us from reacting in time by bringing up reserves and so on.

On a wider scale, now that we have time to look back and reflect on it, it seems to me that the whole situation in Normandy was really the fault of our regime in the Reich for involving the Americans in the European war at all.

Well there ya go.

Adolf Hitler took everyone by surprise when he went on the radio and declared war on the USA! Why he did such an insane thing, I cannot begin to understand, even today. But that act made the Normandy invasion inevitable, because the English and Canadians could never have invaded alone, and we in the Reich could have focussed our efforts purely on the war against Russia.

And although I was tall, I had a chronic lung condition which technically classed me as unfit for active service. Nevertheless, I was sent to France to man the Atlantic Wall.

Asthma? Bronchitis? COPD?

Our life, by the standards of what most German soldiers experienced, was frankly very soft. Our military rations were basic, but these were amply supplemented by produce from local farmers and retailers, who had no compunction about trading food with us in exchange for cigarettes, gasoline and even leather for boot-soles, none of which were available to civilians.

When I read today about the French Resistance, I am impressed at their tenacity, but if the readers of such books could see the trading that went on between us and the local French, they might form a different view of life in France at that time. Well, but this is perhaps a case of history being written by victors.

It is overlooked, perhaps forgotten, by almost everyone today that we were there to defend Europe against the multiple threats represented by the Allies.

We saw the British as an outdated Imperial force, organised by freemasons, who sought to turn the clock back one hundred years to the days when their word was the law around the world. Why should they be entitled to install their freemason puppet, De Gaulle, in France, to rule as a proxy? The Vichy government had three consistent points in its propaganda regarding the threats to the French people: these were De Gaulle, freemasonry and communism.

As for the American state, we perceived that as controlled by the forces of international finance and banking, who wished to abolish national governments and have the world run by banks and corporations.

Ha! In reality, America was presided by FDR, who exponentially expanded the power of national government largesse and undermined free market capitalism.

And there was the definite sentiment that both these countries, England and the USA, were being manipulated, controlled, by the Bolsheviks in Moscow.

Well, FDR certainly was a Bolshevik sympathiser (he practically had a mancrush on Stalin).

Of course, I have since changed my opinions in this regard, as I have learned more about the Third Reich, as we all have.

Did you have any personal animosity towards the Anglo-Americans? My brother and cousin had both been killed in the East, at Kharkov, so my animosity lay more in that direction.

As for the English, my father had been in France in 1917 to 1918, and he confided to me that the English were surprisingly similar to us Germans in personal character, but that as a fighting force they were inconsistent, with many brave men but also a big element of shirkers and black market operators.

Some of us said there may be another small scale attack similar to the fiasco at Dieppe,

The scale of the June 6th landings when they actually happened was beyond what we had imagined possible.

There was also the danger of small-scale ‘commando’ type raids along the coast, which we did expect at any time. We knew the British especially were very unprincipled in these raiding parties, for example the St Nazaire atrocity in which they massacred a large number of unarmed German officers and French civilians. Incidentally, this is one point in which I have not changed my thinking since the war. The St Nazaire raid was a deliberate massacre by the British.

Hmmm, interesting...per Wikipedia, “The operation has been called ‘the greatest raid of all’ in British military circles,” with nothing about alleged Brit atrocities.

‘Angriff! Angriff!’ (‘Raid! Raid!’)

I remember, if I may be honest, that I began to tremble, and I broke out in a sweat. I know I am not the only soldier in history to experience such a reaction when faced with the enemy, and so I feel no shame in describing this to you. The MG gunner, who was a middle-aged man, looked at me and laughed in a bitter fashion, and he said, ‘Are we sorry we started this war now?’

Frankly, I began to lose track of time, and my only thought was that I wanted this shelling to be finished. I assure you that I was not afraid to fight, but to be subjected to these colossal, ceaseless explosions was not the same as fighting.

I saw several pieces hit the officer, and pierce him in the face, going through one eye and also breaking his teeth.

The other two Churchills were also hit; one was knocked over on its side when it ran over the edge of a sand dune. The other was hit repeatedly on the turret, but it progressed to the sea wall and it fired its gun repeatedly at the concrete.

How the hell did it manage to survive multiple hits from an 88mm?!?!

I still felt numb, but at the same time, let us remind ourselves, we the Germans were not attacking England!

Um, yeah, your country had already attacked England four years earlier.

This Churchill simply stormed up the roadway, bulldozing aside the Sherman, went through the burning fuel and drove straight up to us without slowing. It was trailing burning gasoline, and although our 88mm hit it on the turret front, the round deflected off and went into a nearby house, ripping a hole in the wall.

Wow, I guess the Churchill tanks had tougher armour than the Sherman.

The Englishman then fired in through the slit with a sub machine gun, the type they called the Sten gun. This produced a huge amount of fire, and the soldier must have used a whole magazine, because my gunner was hit in a devastating way in the chest and head. I was crouching down on the platform, and looking up, I saw the Sten gun punch holes in his chest, and the bullets emerge from his back.

One of the soldiers said, ‘The bunker is finished, we should surrender.’ He threw away his rifle and raised his hands, but he was immediately shot in the head, and his skull fragmented even while his arms were stretched out.

That one scene from “Saving Private Ryan” again comes to mind.

I saw one of the Englishmen stab a German through the stomach with his bayonet, and throw him aside like a sack, then move onto the next German, whom he stabbed in the neck. The soldier with me clubbed this man over the head with his rifle butt, then stepped back and shot him in the chest. The Englishman slashed at this soldier even as he slumped down, blinding him in one eye with his bayonet.

As Gen. Patton might’ve said of that Tommy, “By God, there was a real man!”

An English soldier came up the slope with a Thompson gun, and shot down many Germans before he was hit by MP40.

I was sprayed with blood from the wounded Panzergrenadier, and this added to my unease. Another soldier was hit by shrapnel in the head, and his skull was completely opened above one ear, with his brain matter visible.

The 42 was such a powerful gun, and the range was so short, that these men were blown to pieces, almost as if by shrapnel. Pieces of their bones and flesh came streaming out behind them, and their uniforms caught fire from the heat of the bullets.

I saw one of the other English with a Thompson gun shot up the MG42 machine gun team, and he fired like a madman into all of us, knocking many of us down.

Vive Le Tommy Gun!!

Some of our men seemed to believe this. ‘Dieppe’ was said repeatedly among us. ‘This is just another Dieppe, they will be gone tomorrow,’ and such comments.

One of the men there had been to Dieppe in 1942 after that raid, and he told us that the Allies had dropped thousands of leaflets by air during that attack, which said ‘This action is a coup de main, not an invasion. Civilians must not risk themselves,’ or some such thing. Very sporting of the English! But on June 6th, no such leaflets had been seen, which further suggested that this was a permanent incursion into France.

At many times afterwards, I noticed this trait in the English: they changed rapidly from being friendly or so-called ‘gentlemen’ to being very ruthless, even brutal, and they could turn these different sides of their character on and off very quickly.

In the afternoon, the English, I recall, insisted for some reason on sending a German-speaking English army priest in among us to listen to any spiritual concerns we had; this was met with derision. I still recall the face of the army priest, who was very angry at his reception.

That calls for some serious Penance right there!

There were still many bodies, which were lined in large groups on the sand and partly covered with tarpaulins; despite our lack of religion, many of our men crossed themselves as we passed these.

Requiescat In Pace.

It may sound bizarre today, but this impressed us greatly, showing that the Allies had no need of horses anymore, as they had such huge oil resources and production capacity. Because, of course, the German armies used horses for transport on quite a large scale right up until the end of the war,

Every German unit had its stables and veterinarian officer,

Incidentally, I hope that one day the story of the POW camps in England is written; I think that there were half a million Germans and Italians in those camps, and the English, of course, never discuss them. The things that went on in those camps were completely insane.