Heinrich Severloh was born into a farming family in northern Germany. At the age of 19, he was drafted into the army in July 1942 during world war 2.On the morning of D-Day June 6, 1944, Severloh would wake up to the site of thousands of Allied ships off the coast of Normandy. Severloh and his comrades were positioned at a place called Widerstandsnest 62 or WN 62. This was a resistance location that had a number of larger caliber weapons as well as machine guns. It was situated a couple of hundred meters back from a beach which the Allies would give the code name Omaha Beach. It was also much higher than the beach and allowed for a perfect field of view over any troops landing there.
Heinrich Severloh took 40 years to begin to process what happened to him on Omaha Beach. He had taken up a concealed position on the eastern side of the beach along with 30 other German soldiers, and he recalls watching the horizon turn black with dozens of ships and landing craft racing for the shore. His commanding officer, Lt. Bernhard Frerking, had told him not to open fire until the enemy reached knee-deep level, where he could get a full view.
“What came to mind was, ‘Dear God, why have you abandoned me?’ ” he recalled. “I wasn’t afraid. My only thought was, ‘How can I get away from here?'”
But rather than run, Severloh slipped the first belt of ammunition into his MG-42 machine gun and opened fire. He could see men spinning, bleeding and crashing into the surf, while others ripped off their heavy packs, threw away their carbines and raced for the shore. But there was little shelter there. Severloh said he would occasionally put down the machine gun and use his carbine to pick off individual men huddled on the beach. He is still haunted by a soldier who was loading his rifle when Severloh took aim at his chest. The bullet went high and hit the man in the forehead.
“The helmet fell and rolled over in the sand,” Severloh said. “Every time I close my eyes, I can see it.” Severloh said he was the last man firing from his position. By mid-afternoon, his right shoulder was swollen and his slender fingers were numb from constant firing. When a U.S. destroyer pinpointed his position and began to shell it, he fled to the nearby village of Colleville-Sur-Mer, where he was captured that evening.
In Severloh’s telling of D-Day, there are few heroes and several surprises. The German occupiers had warm relations with their French farm hosts before the invasion, he contends. Lt. Frerking, who died on D-Day, was an honorable man who spoke fluent French and once gave one of his men 10 days’ punishment for failing to help an elderly French woman with her shopping bags, Severloh said. The U.S. invaders slaughtered farm animals and soldiers, he said, yet that evening he and his ravenous U.S. captors shared a baguette.
Severloh said he first told his tale to an inquisitive correspondent for ABC News during the 40th anniversary of D-Day in 1984. But the real breakthrough came when an amateur war historian named Helmut Konrad von Keusgen tracked Severloh down. Von Keusgen, a former scuba diver and graphic artist, said he had heard from U.S. veterans about the machine gunner they called the “Beast of Omaha Beach” because he had mowed down hundreds of GIs that day. Severloh confessed he was that gunner. Von Keusgen ghost-wrote Severloh’s memoirs, published in 2000, and still visits him regularly.
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