Hürtgen forest and the end of World War II | DW Documentary

A quiet

forest

in the Eifel region of western Germany… a

forest

that harbors a dark past… with a legacy still visible in isolated places… from a time when it was nicknamed “hell.” green". In the final stages of World War II, it was the scene of bloody fighting between American and German forces. The path of the Western Allies' advance from Belgium towards Germany ran directly through the forest surrounding the village of Hü

rtgen

. For local people, the battle remains a key part of their history. I really came into contact with the history of the Hü

rtgen

Forest when, as a teenager, I rode around here on my bicycle.

Suddenly I came across ruins between the trees: huge concrete walls. When I asked my parents they told me that they were remains of bunkers from World War II. And once you know what to look for in this wartime landscape, you can also see bomb craters, trenches, and trenches. If you really take the time, you can find many of these World War II relics in the Hürtgen Forest. For about five months, the forest was the scene of successive and fierce battles between the American and German armies. Although the Americans had more troops and were better equipped, their attempt to drive the Germans out of the forest was a military disaster.

Progress was slow and costly as they became stuck in the treacherous terrain. It was a nightmare. I don't think there could be a worse hell. It was horrible. It was very cold and those damned projectiles hit the top of the tree and fell in thousands of fragments. They could kill anyone. I was there in combat for ten days, at the height of the battle. I was shaking practically for the entire ten days. I knew I could die, of course, and I was terrified. An estimated 25,000 American and German soldiers died in the forest. Surviving Hurtgen Forest was a miracle.

But here I am. I don't know how I survived. The forest was a death trap for American troops. They called it “Hürtgen Forest,” in honor of the small town that was at the center of the fighting. The Battle of Hürtgenwald was one of the longest and deadliest on German soil in the West. It left many scars, not only on the inhabitants and their descendants, but also on the landscape itself, on the forest and also on the local buildings. For the German troops, the war had already been lost a long time ago. Even the young soldiers (those who could reflect) did not believe in victory.

You just wanted to survive, to return home safely. Nazi war propaganda, however, presented a completely different picture: by then everyone knew that the Allies would win the war. Everything that happened in Hürtgenwald meant only a minimal delay of the inevitable. And indirectly it contributed to the continuation of murders in concentration and extermination camps, in prisons and other places, until the last second of the Third Reich. Since D-Day in June 1944, Western Allied troops had been advancing from Normandy through France and Belgium towards Germany... ...in the process of liberating Paris, Brussels and Antwerp from Nazi occupation. We were told or ordered to take the ground they were on and take it from them, and that's how we moved forward to win the war.

We are the ones who are going to win, not them. On September 11, 1944, the first American divisions arrived at the Belgian-German border near Aachen... ...more than 3 months earlier than expected. A day later, the American 3rd Armored Division crossed into Germany near the town of Roetgen. We simply went through the town and went to the other side. Then we got into real trouble when we first sighted the Siegfried Line. The Siegfried Line was the defensive wall built to secure Germany's western border. We saw steel doors along the way and Dragon's Teeth. And that was the first Dragon Tooth we saw.

Anti-tank obstacles known as “dragon teeth” accompanied a line of bunkers that stretched 600 kilometers from the Dutch border to Switzerland. For the Western Allied troops, a formidable obstacle. They had no precise idea of ​​what to expect on the Siegfried Line. So the closer they got to the actual territory of the Third Reich, the more insecure they became, because they thought they would still be facing heavily fortified and heavily manned defensive positions. The Allies had been fooled by Nazi propaganda in the years before the war. This went so far that American army films used excerpts from German propaganda films depicting the Siegfried Line as an insurmountable obstacle. to explain to his troops what they were facing.

Up to half a million men worked up to 20 hours a day to build 22,000 fortified positions on land. We knew the Germans had built the Siegfried Line and were hoping that would stop us, but it didn't. Because we crossed the Siegfried Line, we suffered many casualties, but we made it through. But we knew the Siegfried Line was a bad place to go. Psychologically, the Siegfried Line was effective on both sides, but its military value in actual combat was very limited. American troops managed to break through anti-tank barriers near Roetgen. But on the other hand they encountered stubborn resistance from the German troops, who were firmly entrenched in bunkers and forests.

James Cullen was wounded in the fighting near the village of Rott. Oh (expletive)! They hit me. They hit me. And it was a tremendous blow. And I looked down and saw blood coming out right where my heart was. And I said: God, am I going to die here in a lousy German camp? Because it looked deadly. A few weeks later, Cullen's parents at home received news that his son had been wounded in combat after being hit by shrapnel. He was away from active duty for two months. As American troops advanced much faster than expected, supply lines were stretched, which in particular meant fuel shortages for tanks.

The advance stopped just behind the German border. That gave German forces time to rebuild their defense lines. Until then, the Wehrmacht had only stationed isolated units in the northern Eifel. Meanwhile, preparations were underway for the “Volkssturm”: old men and children, the “home guard” for Germany's last defense. In a televised speech, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels called for the determination of his compatriots. As usual, Goebbels was lying, of course. He claimed that the enemy was not yet on German soil, although he was, and tried to mobilize his remaining forces. It must be said that the German population was very happy to accept it.

They were tired of the war and wanted it to end. But they were also terrified of what the allies would do to them if they came. The Americans wanted to advance further into Germany and finally see the end of the war. Their goal was to reach the Rhine and then the industrial region of the Ruhr. But in front of them stretched a dense forest almost 10 kilometers wide that blocked their path: the Hürtgenwald. In the local towns, the war had been very present for several months, especially due to the Allied air raids on cities such as Aachen.

Civilians sought refuge in bomb shelters. There were constant air raid warnings, and one day we came out of the bunker and six buildings had burned overnight. The cattle screamed, the pigs screamed, the people screamed. It was horrible. In September 1944, the villages were evacuated as the invading troops and the front line grew closer and closer. One morning our parents said: We have to go. Artillery shells were falling everywhere. We were the last ones left in Harscheidt. My parents said: This is too much, we are going to leave too. Instead of encircling the forest to the north, the American commanders decided to advance east right through the center, where they expected the German defenses to be weak.

But they completely misjudged the terrain, with disastrous consequences. A first advance in October 1944 ended after only 3 km. It's not that forests are foreign to Americans. It is always very problematic for an army to fight in forested terrain. Tanks can't just go through forests and big trees. First you have to open paths through them. The ground was also littered with landmines and the Americans came across a chain of bunkers in the forest. The Germans had entrenched themselves there. The Americans managed to destroy some of the bunkers... But after ten days, the losses on both sides were so great that the fighting stopped for a while.

Shortly thereafter, American forces further north made a decisive advance and took Aachen on October 21 after fierce fighting. It was the first German city to fall into Allied hands. But this was of little help to American soldiers in nearby Hürtgenwald. As the autumn rains began, the weather was getting worse from day to day. American troops were literally stuck. Plans for a second breakthrough had to be repeatedly delayed. As one soldier later said: Anyone who says he knows where he was in the forest is lying... On November 2, the Americans attacked the village of Vossenack, from there they took the villages of Kommerscheidt and Schmidt through the Kall Valley. .

But once again they underestimated the difficult terrain. Some of the hills they had to cross were 150 m high. When you reach the top of a hill, you immediately experience the phenomenon of contemplating the landscape, from one plateau to another. But you have no idea how deep and steep the valleys in between are. The American 28th Infantry Division reached the town of Schmidt relatively quickly. But then their supply lines were disrupted. If you look at Vossenack and Schmidt, with the valley in the middle, the only link between them is a trail that winds down into the valley and then back up on the other side.

The Americans thought that this road would be fairly easy to drive and walk, and that they would be able to move troops, vehicles, heavy weapons, and other necessary supplies along it. All. But that was nonsense. The remains of the tank tracks are a stark reminder that the battle for Vossenack and Schmidt ended in disaster for the Americans. The invaders retreated in panic, only to be cut off by German units in the valley. Tanks fell down the slopes and many soldiers collapsed from exhaustion. The battle in Kall Valley, later named Death Valley by the Americans, claimed countless lives on both sides.

A few days after the defeat, General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived at Hürtgenwald to meet his troops on the ground and assess the situation. Neither the Supreme Allied Commander nor his officers expected so many casualties. The atmosphere was dejected. The fall of 1944 was unusually wet and cold, the terrain becoming more impassable by the day. American hopes for a quick victory were fading. They had already spent two months in Hürtgenwald, the forest they hoped to cross in just a few days. In mid-November 1944, the Americans launched a third offensive. This time they tried to advance by going further north, passing through the villages of Kleinhau and Großhau, and then east.

A 22-year-old Italian-American from Pennsylvania arrived in Hürtgenwald. In his youth he hoped to become a photographer. We were there, he would say a month. A month in war is a long time. The German artillery was there... but it never stopped. They really bombed us. The days followed the same pattern. It began with heavy artillery fire from the Americans... Then tanks, Sherman tanks, were deployed and advanced on a wide front. And then, of course, you could hear the shells and machine guns. That was the moment you realized there were other people nearby who were shooting at you.

Paul Verbeek was sent to Hürtgenwald with other young recruits in mid-December to lay anti-tank mines. American forces were constantly reinforced with more men, more vehicles and equipment. But they were not prepared for the extreme weather conditions in the Eifel. Every time they got stuck in the forest, they dug. But the trenches offered little protection against German artillery and the cold onset of winter. At some point it would rain or the snow would melt and the fox's den was always full of water. I was lucky to have this camera with me. And if you look at my photographs: I have hundreds and hundreds of photographs of officers.

I didn't take them because I liked it, I took them to make them happy, to give me the freedom to take more pictures, you know. I fooled them all, used them like little children. Both the Germans and the Americans spent most nights in their forest trenches, poorly protected from the cold and damp with makeshift canvas shelters. I transformed the nature around me into a dark room. I would ask three of my best friends to let me use the metal part of the helmet and those became the trays in my darkroom at night. I mixed mychemicals, most of the soldiers were all asleep, I was working because the dark room was just the night, the earth was the dark room, you see.

Tony Vaccaro took hundreds of photographs in Hürtgenwald, although he waited more than 50 years before publishing a selection of them. All he wanted to do was take pictures, pictures, pictures. And that's why I'm here today, otherwise they would have killed me a long time ago. Some of the fiercest fighting took place in a valley west of Kleinhau, in the heart of the forest. In mid-November, author Ernest Hemingway witnessed the bloody battles that took place there. In his novel “Across the River and Among the Trees,” based on his experiences, he wrote: “It was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive, even if all he did was be there.” ”.

In December, Tony Vaccaro also photographed his colleagues preparing for the Christmas season. Gift packages of canned food arrived from home for long-dead soldiers. They began to give this food from those soldiers to the local population, to the Germans. On December 16, 1944, a hundred miles further south, in the Ardennes, the Germans launched a final surprise offensive. Once again, the Allies found themselves hard pressed in this also densely forested region and had to bring in reinforcements at short notice to stop the German advance, many of them from Hürtgenwald. Even during the Battle of the Bulge there was fighting here, but both the The Wehrmacht and the Allies were so busy with the offensive further south that there was a period of two or three weeks without any major fighting.

Then the war returned to Hürtgenwald. Over the course of January 1945, the Americans managed to advance against the weakening of German resistance. The defeat in the Ardennes counteroffensive had cost the defenders their last reserves. I especially remember the first time I saw the Americans as prisoners of war and was amazed at how well fed they were. And they were clean and tidy, including their uniforms, while we were a dirty, lice-infested rabble. Once the Americans reached the Rur (not to be confused with the more famous and similar-sounding valley further north), their path to the Rhine and Cologne was finally clear.

The Germans attempted to blow up the dams to flood the valley and slow the American advance. But the end of the war seemed to be approaching quickly. In February 1945, American troops liberated Soviet prisoners of war and forced laborers at the Arnoldsweiler concentration camp near Düren. Many were also held in inhumane conditions in a second camp near Hürtgenwald. More than 2,000 inmates were later buried at the Simmerath Soviet war cemetery. Most of them had died of hunger and mistreatment. Most of the towns and villages of Hürtgenwald were barely recognizable after the fighting. The Allied troops pressed on and within a few weeks conquered the Rhineland and the industrial Ruhr Valley as they advanced towards Berlin.

The evacuated residents now hoped to return to their villages. When the Americans passed by, one of them asked us where we were from. We said we were from Schmidt. He said that he had fought there and that we should not return there because the whole place was in ruins and the town had been mined. But we said, "We're going home." The fighting in the Hürtgen Forest had ended, but the war had left a trail of destruction: a devastated landscape whose scars are still clearly visible today. First, American soldiers were also forced to remove mines that were buried everywhere. help them, but they were only able to remove a small amount of the deadly devices.

Again and again we heard a loud bang and another person flew through the air. Many people had lost their lives. A hand grenade. She thought she had perfume inside her. The hand grenades had rings on them and when you pulled them out, you had to throw them quickly. The girl's hand flew away. What worried the inhabitants of the Eifel most was that they had to rebuild their lives on a former battlefield. Children died because they played with ammunition. It was dangerous to plow and cultivate the fields. It took decades to clean up the worst affected areas. forest of artillery, rubble and dead that had been left there.

It would take decades for the forest to recover. At the same time, nearby cities were destroyed by air raids. In September 1945, August Scholl returned home from the war. After being demobilized, another boy and I arrived in Düren at the beginning of September on a freight train from Bonn. We looked at each other and I said, "Martin, is this really Düren?" "Sure," he said, "there's the sign!" It was a little crooked, but it said "Düren." And then we looked towards the old town, it was a big pile of rubble. Not a single building could be seen standing, and what was really depressing was this eerie silence.

He continued on foot to his hometown of Großhau. It had been almost completely destroyed during the fighting. Locals resorted to scavenging through the wrecked American tanks. The Americans had left a lot of canned food. Canned corned beef was one of the main meats. There were also soups and other types of meat, but these cans of corned beef were large enough to make a huge pot of soup for a large family. So they temporarily helped us get more or less enough food. In the first summer after the war, much of the forest that had survived the fighting suddenly caught fire.

During the fighting, the Americans had used phosphorus in their ammunition, which ignited very easily in the heat. Locals repeatedly found bodies of dead soldiers in the forest. I buried some myself. And I don't need to explain what half-rotten dead people are like. You have to breathe deeply (mentally too) when you do something like that. The area's first war cemetery was built in Vossenack several years after the war. Many of the dead were recovered by former German army captain Julius Erasmus, who dedicated the rest of his life searching for fallen soldiers in the forest. The Vossenack War Cemetery became the final resting place for some 2,300 dead soldiers and a meeting place for veterans and families of fallen Germans.

In 1952 another war cemetery was established a few kilometers away, in neighboring Hürtgen. Almost 3,000 soldiers are buried there, many of them in unmarked graves. Since the Americans did not want soldiers buried in Germany, the former enemy, many were buried in the Netherlands, Luxembourg or Belgium, in the Henri-Chapelle military cemetery, for example. It was not until four decades after the battle that the first groups of American veterans returned to Hürtgenwald, to the place where they had fought as young men. You can understand why it became the murky Hürtgen Forest, as they call it. The whole battle itself, as the man said this morning, was useless, it was nonsense, but the fact is that it was done to satisfy the whims of a few senior officers who thought it needed to be done.

Well, I didn't enjoy it at the time. I don't mind being here now because none of you are in uniform. So it's fine as far as that goes. But it was quite difficult. Memorial events sometimes brought together American and German veterans: former enemies. The battle also left its legacy in the forest itself. In subsequent years, bomb disposal experts have frequently been called in to remove bombs, hand grenades and other munitions. The dangers here will continue to affect future generations of people in the region. Even now, 75 years after the battle, the war is still present on the floor of Hurtgen Forest.

This is an area that has clearly not been searched, like so many areas of the Hürtgenwald. Here you can still discover a pomegranate by scratching the top layer of soil. Sometimes these things don't look like ammunition at all. For example, there is a German grenade that looks like a cigar and is about the same size. But if it rings, you're gone. In the first decades after the war, hundreds of tons of ammunition were found in the forest each year. These images from 1984 show the result of a search that lasted two weeks. You have to imagine that here, at noon on a single day, in a single attack, the Americans fired about 12,000 grenades. 12,000, not 1,200.

Given the typical assumption that 15% of these are fakes, then we have to assume that there are about 1,500 fakes in an area of ​​3.5 to 4 hectares. For several years now, researchers have been studying Hürtgenwald using the latest scientific methods. They have been able to reconstruct the course of the battle in places where it was not possible before. When you walk through the forest here, you find signs of battle at every turn. However, in all open spaces the former battlefield has been completely cleared. In other words, we always see half of the battlefield. And we can see that here.

We are standing on what appears to be a completely level green field, with nothing to indicate that we are on an ancient battlefield. But in fact, we are in the middle of a highly fortified section of the German second line of defense. Many local people have kept the memory of the battle alive. In addition to the dead Germans, thousands of Americans who had been sent to Europe to end Nazi terror perished here. Although this is not clear everywhere. Take as an example the memorial stones of American or German soldiers. The way they are treated equally is actually quite questionable.

It should be clear that the Americans were fighting for something very different than the German soldiers. But you will find them scattered across the landscape without any comment. The forest is still frequented by people searching for relics from the battle. Even today the area is a popular place with war enthusiasts. But many locals are upset by these groups of individuals in American uniforms, who repeatedly reenact battle scenes. It's like repeating the war. Some people even dig new trenches here. So that they do not leave this memorial landscape as it was. Of course, they don't shoot each other with live ammunition, but people still find it fascinating.

I have a critical view, because there were many fatalities here. Whether it's funny or not is beside the point. Today, in various places there are signs for walkers and hikers telling the story of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. They also remind us of their importance to the advance of the Western Allies through Germany. But Hürtgenwald will probably never be a normal forest again. Certainly not now, some 75 years after the battle. I returned to Hurtgen Forest about ten years ago. I cried like a baby because I suddenly remembered my best friends who were killed in the Hurtgen forest.

It was ugly, very ugly for humanity to have wars. The problem that humanity causes is that it believes itself to be Italian, German, Spanish. We are all humans in this beautiful paradise that is our earth. Beautiful!