A tranquil 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 dubbed a “Green hell”.
In the closing stages of
the Second World War,
it was the scene of bloody fighting
between US and German forces.
The path to the western Allies’
advance from Belgium into Germany
led straight through the forest
around the village of Hürtgen.
For local people, the battle is
still a key part of their history.
I really came into contact with
the history of the Hürtgen forest
when I rode around here
on my bike as a teenager.
I’d suddenly come across ruins
among the trees — massive concrete walls.
When I asked my parents, they told
me they were the remains of bunkers
from the Second
World War.
And once you know what to
look for in this wartime landscape,
you can also see bomb
craters, trenches and foxholes.
If you really take the time, you can
find a lot of these World War Two relics
in the
Hürtgen forest.
For around five months the
forest was the scene of successive,
bitterly fought 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
bogged down in the treacherous terrain.
It was a nightmare. I don’t think
there can be a worse hell. It was awful.
It was freezing, and these damn
shells, they hit the top of the tree
and came down in
thousands of fragments.
They could
kill anybody.
I was in combat there for ten
days, at the height of the battle.
I was trembling for
practically 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.
To survive Hurtgen Forest was a miracle.
But here I am. I don't know how I survived.
The forest was a death
trap for the US troops.
They called it “Hürtgen Forest” after the small
village that was at the heart of the fighting.
The Battle in the Hürtgenwald was
one of the longest and deadliest battles
on German
soil in the West.
It left a lot of scars, not only on the
inhabitants and their descendants,
but also on the landscape itself, in
the forest and also on local buildings.
For the German troops, the
war was in effect already long lost.
Even the young soldiers — those who
could reflect - did not believe in victory.
You just wanted to survive,
to come home safe and sound.
Nazi war propaganda, however,
portrayed a completely different picture:
By then everyone knew
the Allies would win the war.
Everything that happened
in the Hürtgenwald
meant just a minimal
delay of the inevitable.
And it indirectly contributed to
the continuation of the murders
in the concentration and extermination
camps and in the prisons and other places,
until the very last
second of the Third Reich.
Since D-Day in June 1944,
the Western Allied troops
had been advancing from Normandy through
France and Belgium towards Germany ...
... in the process liberating Paris,
Brussels and Antwerp from Nazi occupation.
We were told
to, or ordered to,
take the ground that they were
on and take it away from them,
and that’s how we
advanced to win the war.
We’re the ones that
gonna win, not them.
On September
11, 1944,
the first US divisions reached the
Belgian-German border near Aachen ...
... more than 3 months
earlier than expected.
One day later, the 3rd US Armored Division
crossed into Germany near the town of Roetgen.
We just went through the
town, and went on the other side.
Then we got into the real trouble
with the first sight of the Siegfried Line.
The Siegfried Line was the defensive wall
built to secure Germany’s western border.
We saw steel gates on the
road and Dragon's Teeth.
And that was the first Dragon's
Teeth that we had seen.
Anti-tank obstacles known as “dragon's
teeth” accompanied a line of bunkers
stretching over 600 kilometers from
the Dutch border down to Switzerland.
For western Allied troops,
a formidable obstacle.
They had no precise idea what
to expect at 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 face
strongly fortified and heavily
manned defensive positions.
The Allies had been taken in by the
Nazi propaganda of the pre-war years.
This went so far that the
American military’s films,
used excerpts from
German propaganda films
showing the Siegfried Line
as an insurmountable obstacle.
to explain to its troops
what they were up against.
As many as half a million men
worked as much as 20 hours a day
to build 22,000 fortified
positions on land.
We knew that the Germans
had built the Siegfried Line
and that they were hoping that that
would stop us, but it didn't happen.
Because we broke
through the Siegfried Line,
we took a hell of a lot of
casualties, but we did it.
But we knew that the Siegfried
Line was a bad place to go to.
Psychologically, the Siegfried
Line was effective on both sides,
but its military value in the
actual fighting was very limited.
US troops succeeded in breaking through
the anti-tank barriers near Roetgen.
But on the other side they met with
stubborn resistance from German troops
who were firmly dug in - in
the bunkers and in the woods.
James Cullen was wounded in
the fighting near the village of Rott.
Oh (expletive)! I got hit. I got hit.
And, it was a tremendous blow.
And I looked down and I saw the blood
pouring out right where my heart was.
And I said: God, am I I gonna
die here on a lousy German field?
Because it
looked deadly.
A few weeks later, Cullen’s
parents back home received the news
that their son had been wounded
in action after being hit by shrapnel.
He was away from
active duty for two months.
With American troops progressing
much faster than expected,
supply lines were stretched, which in
particular meant fuel shortages for tanks.
The advance ground to a halt
just behind the German border.
That gave German forces time
to rebuild their lines of defense.
Until then, the Wehrmacht had only stationed
isolated units in the northern Eifel.
Meanwhile, preparations were underway
for the “Volkssturm” — old men and boys,
the “home guard” for
Germany’s last-ditch defense.
In a televised
address,
propaganda minister Josef Goebbels
called on his compatriots’ determination.
As usual Goebbels
was lying, of course.
He claimed that the enemy was not
yet on German soil, although they were,
and tried to mobilize
any remaining forces.
It has to be said that the German population
were all too happy to go along with that.
They were tired of war
and wanted it to be over.
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 war ended.
Their aim was to reach the Rhine
and then the Ruhr industrial region.
But ahead of them lay a dense forest,
almost 10km wide, which blocked their path:
The
Hürtgenwald.
In local villages, the war had been
all too present for several months,
especially due to the Allied
air raids on cities like Aachen.
The civilians sought
refuge in air-raid shelters.
There were constant air raid alerts,
and one day we came out of the bunker
and six buildings had
burned down in the night.
The cattle were screaming, the pigs
were screaming, the people were screaming.
It was
awful.
In September
1944,
the villages were evacuated as the invading
troops and the front line came ever closer.
One morning our parents
said: We have to leave.
The artillery shells
were landing all around.
We were the last
ones left in Harscheidt.
My parents said: This is too
much, we’re going to leavse too.
Instead of going around
the forest to the north,
the American commanders decided to
advance eastward right through the middle,
where they hoped German
defenses would be weak.
But they completely misjudged the
terrain — with disastrous consequences.
A first push in October
1944 ended after just 3km.
It's not as if forests
are alien to Americans.
It's always highly problematic for
an army to fight in wooded terrain.
Tanks can't just drive through
forests and over large trees.
First you have to cut
paths through them.
The ground was also
littered with land mines,
and the Americans ran into a
chain of bunkers in the forest.
This was where the Germans
had dug themselves in.
The Americans managed to
destroy some of the bunkers ...
But after ten days, the losses
on both sides were so great
that the fighting
died down for a while.
Shortly afterwards, American forces further
north achieved a decisive breakthrough,
taking Aachen on October
21st after fierce fighting.
It was the first German
city to fall into Allied hands.
But this was of little help to the American
soldiers in the nearby Hürtgenwald.
As the autumn rains began, the weather
was worsening from one day to the next.
The US troops were
literally bogged down.
Plans for a second advance
had to be repeatedly delayed.
As one GI
later said:
Anyone who says he knows
where he’d been 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 via the Kall valley.
But once again they
underestimated the difficult terrain.
Some of the hills they had
to cross were 150m high.
When you reach
the top of a hill,
you immediately experience the
phenomenon of looking over the landscape,
from one plateau
to another.
But you have no idea how deep
and steep the valleys in-between are.
The 28th US Infantry Division reached
the village of Schmidt relatively quickly.
But then its supply
lines were interrupted.
If you look at Vossenack and
Schmidt, with the valley in between,
the only link between them is a
footpath that winds down into the valley
and then up again
on the other side.
The Americans thought this path would
be easy enough to drive and walk along,
and that they’d be able to move
the necessary troops, vehicles,
heavy weapons and
other supplies along it.
Everything. But
that was nonsense.
The remains of 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 for
German units to cut them off in the valley.
Tanks crashed down the slopes and
many soldiers collapsed from exhaustion.
The battle in
the Kall Valley,
which the Americans subsequently
referred to as Death Valley,
claimed countless
lives on both sides.
A few days after the defeat, General Dwight
D. Eisenhower came to the Hürtgenwald
to meet his troops on the
ground and assess the situation.
Neither the Allied Supreme
Commander, nor his officers,
had expected so
many casualties.
The mood was
despondent.
Autumn 1944 remained unusually wet and cold,
the terrain became more impassable every day.
The Americans' hopes for
a quick victory were fading.
They had already spent two
months in the Hürtgenwald,
the forest they had 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 heading east.
A 22-year-old Italian-American from
Pennsylvania arrived in the Hürtgenwald.
In his youth he’d hoped
to become a photographer.
We were there, I would say a
month. A month in war is a long time.
The German artillery was in... it just
never stopped. They really bombed us.
The days followed the same pattern. It began
with heavy artillery fire from the Americans ...
Then tanks were deployed, Sherman
tanks, which advanced on a broad front.
And then of course you could
hear the shells and machine guns.
That was the actual
moment you realized
there were other people
nearby who were shooting at you.
Paul Verbeek was sent to the Hürtgenwald
with other young recruits in mid-December
to lay anti-tank
mines.
The US forces were constantly
getting reinforced with more men,
and more vehicles
and equipment.
But they were not prepared for the
extreme weather conditions in the Eifel.
Whenever they got stuck
in the forest, they dug in.
But foxholes offered little
protection against the German artillery
and the cold
onset of winter.
It would rain sometime,
or the snow would melt,
and the fox hole was
always filled with water.
I was fortunate to have this camera
with me. And if you look at my pictures:
I have hundreds and
hundreds of pictures of officers.
I didn't take those because I liked
it, I took them to make them happy,
so that they would give me freedom
to take more pictures, you know.
I tricked all of them, I
used them like little boys.
Both the Germans and the
Americans spent most of their nights
in their foxholes
in the woods,
poorly protected from the cold and
wet with makeshift tarpaulin 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
for my darkroom at night.
I would mix my chemicals,
most GIs were all asleep,
I was working because the
dark room was only the night,
the earth was the
dark room, you see.
Tony Vaccaro took hundreds
of photos in the Hürtgenwald,
although he waited over 50 years
before publishing a selection of them.
All I wanted to take was take
photographs, photographs, photographs.
And that's why I am here today, otherwise
I would have gotten killed 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
was witness to the bloody battles there.
In his novel “Across the River and into 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 comrades preparing for Christmas season.
Gift parcels with canned food from home
arrived for soldiers long since perished.
They began to give this food of those
GIs to the local people, 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 were hard-pressed
in this likewise heavily forested region,
and had to bring in reinforcements at
short notice to stem the German advance —
many from the
Hürtgenwald.
Even during the Battle of the
Bulge there was fighting here,
but both 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 combat.
Then the war returned
to Hürtgenwald.
In the course
of January 1945,
the Americans managed to advance in
the face of weakening German resistance.
The defeat in the Ardennes counter-offensive
had cost the defenders their last reserves.
I particularly remember the first time I
saw the Americans as prisoners of war,
I was amazed at how
well fed they were.
And they were clean and
tidy, including their uniforms,
while we were a
lice-ridden, dirty rabble.
Once the Americans reached the Rur —
not to be confused with the more famous,
similar-sounding
valley further north —
their way to the Rhine and
Cologne was finally clear.
The Germans tried to blow up the dams to
flood the valley and halt the US advance.
But by now the end of the war
seemed to be fast approaching.
In February 1945, US troops liberated
Soviet prisoners of war and forced laborers
in the Arnoldsweiler
concentration camp near Düren.
Many were also held in inhuman conditions
at a second camp near Hürtgenwald.
Over 2,000 inmates were later buried
at the Soviet war cemetery in Simmerath.
Most of them had died of
hunger and maltreatment.
Most of the towns and
villages in the Hürtgenwald
were barely recognizable
after the fighting.
The Allied troops pushed on, and within
a few weeks had conquered the Rhineland
and the industrial Ruhr Valley
as they advanced towards Berlin.
The evacuated residents now hoped
to be able to return to their villages.
When the Americans passed through,
one of them asked us where we were from.
We said we were
from Schmidt.
He said he had fought there,
and that we shouldn't go back there
because the whole place was in
ruins and the village had been mined.
But we said:
"We're going home.”
The fighting in the
Hürtgen Forest was over.
But the war had left
a trail of destruction:
a ravaged landscape whose
scars are still clearly visible today.
First, American soldiers cleared the
mines that were buried everywhere.
German prisoners of war
were also forced to help them.
But they could only remove only a
small number of the deadly devices.
Again and again we’d hear this huge bang,
and another person flew through the air.
So many people
lost their lives.
One little girl had been playing with a hand
grenade. She thought it had perfume inside.
The hand grenades had rings on
them, and when you pulled them,
you had to throw
them away quickly.
The girl’s hand
was blown off.
A very central aspect of the post-war
experiences of people living in the Eifel
was that they actually had to rebuild
their lives on a former battlefield.
Children died because
they played with munitions.
It was dangerous to plough
and cultivate the fields.
It took decades to clear the most severely
affected parts of the forest of ordnance,
debris and the dead
who had been left there.
It would take the forest
decades to recover.
At the same time, nearby towns
had been destroyed by air raids.
In September 1945, August
Scholl returned home from the war.
After being demobbed, me
and another guy arrived in Düren
on a freight train from Bonn
at the beginning of September.
We looked at each other and I
said: “Martin, is this actually Düren?”
“Sure,” he said,
“there’s the signpost!”
It was a bit lop-sided,
but it said “Düren”.
And then we looked across the
old town, it was one big pile of rubble.
You couldn't see a single
building still standing,
and the really depressing
thing was this eerie silence.
He continued to his home
village of Großhau on foot.
It had been almost completely
destroyed during the fighting.
The locals resorted to scavenging
amongst the wrecked American tanks.
The Americans had left
behind lots of canned food.
Canned corned beef was
one of the main meats.
There were also soups and other kinds
of meat, but these tins of corned beef
were big enough to make a
huge pot of soup for a large family.
So temporarily, they helped us
to get more or less enough to eat.
In the first summer
after the war,
large parts of the woods that had survived
the fighting would suddenly catch fire.
During the fighting, the Americans
had used phosphorus in their ammunition,
which ignited very
easily in the heat.
The locals repeatedly found the
bodies of dead soldiers in the forest.
Some I
buried myself.
And I don't need to explain what
half-rotten dead people look like.
You have to take a deep breath — mentally,
too — when you do something like that.
The first war cemetery in the area was built
in Vossenack several years after the war.
Many of the dead were recovered by
former Germany army captain Julius Erasmus,
who dedicated the rest of his life to
searching the forest for fallen soldiers.
The war cemetery in Vossenack became the last
resting place for around 2,300 dead soldiers,
and a meeting place for veterans
and relatives of the German fallen.
Another war cemetery was set up a few
km away in neighboring Hürtgen in 1952.
Nearly 3,000 soldiers are buried
there, many of them in unmarked graves.
Since the Americans didn't want soldiers
buried in Germany, the former enemy,
many were laid to rest in the
Netherlands, Luxembourg or Belgium —
at the military cemetery of
Henri-Chapelle, for example.
It was not until four
decades after the battle
that the first groups of American
veterans returned to the Hürtgenwald -
to the place where they
had fought as young men.
You can understand why it became the
murky - as they call it - Hürtgen Forest.
The whole battle itself, like the
man said this morning, it was futile,
it was foolish, but the fact remains
that it was done to satisfy the whims
of a few superior officers
that thought it had to be done.
Well, I didn't
enjoy it at the time.
I don't mind being here now because
none of you fellows are wearing uniforms.
So it's ok as far as that's
concerned. But it was pretty difficult.
The commemorative events sometimes brought
together American and German veterans:
former
enemies.
The battle also left its
legacy in the forest itself.
Over the
subsequent years,
bomb disposal experts have frequently
been called in to remove bombs,
hand grenades
and other ordnance.
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 in the
ground of the Hurtgen Forest.
This is an area that has
obviously not been searched,
like so many areas
in the Hürtgenwald.
Here you might still unearth a
grenade by scratching away the topsoil.
Sometimes these things
don't look like munitions at all.
For example, there’s a German grenade that
looks like a cigar, it’s about the same size.
But if it goes off,
you’re gone.
In the first decades
after the war,
hundreds of tons of ordnance
were found in the forest every year.
This footage from 1984 shows the
yield of a search lasting two weeks.
You have to imagine that here, by
noon in 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 duds,
then we have to assume there are about
1,500 duds in an area of 3.5-4 hectares.
For a number
of years now,
researchers have been studying the Hürtgenwald
using the latest scientific methods.
They’ve been able to
reconstruct the course of the battle
in places where this
wasn’t previously possible.
When you walk
through the woods here,
you encounter signs of
the battle at every turn.
In all the open spaces, however, 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 in what appears
to be a completely level green field,
with nothing to indicate that
we’re on a former battlefield.
But in fact, we’re in the middle
of a highly fortified section
of the Germans’
second line of defense.
Many local people have kept
the memory of the battle alive.
In addition to
the German dead,
thousands of Americans who had been sent
to Europe to end Nazi terror perished here.
Although this is by no
means clear everywhere.
Take the memorial stones for American
or German soldiers, for example.
The way they are treated on equal
terms is actually quite questionable.
It ought to be made clear that
the Americans were fighting for
something very different
than the German soldiers.
But you’ll find them dotted around
the landscape without any comment.
The forest is still frequented by people
foraging around for relics of the battle.
Even today the area is a popular
site among war enthusiasts.
But many locals are annoyed by these
groups of individuals in American uniforms,
repeatedly re-enacting
scenes from the battle.
It's kind of like replaying the war.
Some people even dig new trenches here.
So they don't leave this
commemorative landscape as it was.
Of course, they don't shoot at
each other with live ammunition,
but people still
find it fascinating.
I take a critical view, because
there were so many fatalities here.
Whether it's fun or
not is beside the point.
Today there are now signs for
walkers and hikers in various places,
telling the story of the
Battle of the Hürtgen Forest.
They also remind us of its
importance for the Western allies' advance
through Germany.
But the Hürtgenwald will probably
never be a normal forest again.
Certainly not now, some
75 years after the battle.
I went back to Hurtgen
Forest maybe ten years ago.
I cried like a baby because I
suddenly remembered my best friends
that got killed in
the Hurtgen Forest.
It was ugly, ugly for
mankind to have wars.
The trouble mankind makes is he thinks
he's Italian, he's German, he's Spanish.
We're all humans on this beautiful,
paradise that is our earth. Beautiful!
