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

by Holger Eckhertz

on June 6th 1944, the day known to the Allies as ‘D Day.’ The reason for my grandfather’s interest in the German perspective of D Day was simple: shortly before the Normandy landings, he had visited several locations on the Atlantic Wall and interviewed a number of the troops there with a view to writing a feature for ‘Die Wehrmacht’ magazine. He was fascinated by the enormous preparations being made to defend the Atlantic coast against an invasion launched from England, and by the morale of the troops on the Wall, who were in many cases inexperienced or unfit. Much later, on the tenth anniversary of D Day in 1954, when many Germans preferred to draw a veil over the events of the war, my grandfather made enormous efforts to track down some of the troops whose units he had visited. He encouraged these men to discuss with him their personal memories of the Atlantic Wall, their frame of mind at the time