Heinrich Severloh has long been one of the most controversial figures of D-Day. The German soldier, remembered as the "Butcher of Omaha Beach," claimed he personally killed or wounded thousands of American troops on June 6, 1944. Modern research, detailed mapping, and a careful reading of his own memoir tell a far more complicated story.
Severloh was born in 1923 into a North German farming family. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht in July 1941 at age 18, he was assigned to an artillery unit. He later served on the Eastern Front in non-combat roles, where frostbite and illness took their toll. By November 1943, the 20-year-old had been posted to a quiet outpost in the French countryside as orderly to an artillery officer.
That officer was 31-year-old Oberleutnant Bernhard Frerking. Frerking commanded men of the 1st Battery, Artillery Regiment 352, whose job was to act as the eyes and ears of the guns at Houtteville. Four 10.5 cm guns there could deliver fire directly onto Omaha Beach. Frerking adjusted their fall of shot from an observation bunker, sending messages back through a nearby communications bunker.
Their post was Widerstandsnest 62, or WN62, a strongpoint on the high ground above the E-3 draw leading inland toward the village of Colleville. The position had grown since 1942 from a shallow trench line into a formidable complex. It eventually held seven machine gun positions, two 5 cm mortars, an artillery observation post, an ammunition store, a troop shelter, two 75 mm Belgian guns in concrete casemates, and a PaK 40 anti-tank gun guarding the road up the draw.
Minefields, anti-tank ditches, and barbed wire protected the approaches. Open and covered trenches linked the whole complex, which was still under construction on D-Day. Timber, construction huts, building materials, and even a light rail line from the beach littered the site.
Roughly 40 men manned WN62 and its associated works that morning. Most were 27 soldiers of 3rd Company, Grenadier Regiment 726, 716th Infantry Division, led by Oberfeldwebel Ludwig Piske. Four anti-tank gunners crewed the PaK 40. Nine more men from Frerking's battery completed the garrison.
Among the defenders was a French volunteer manning a Polish WZ30 machine gun from a wooden pillbox. Severloh, meanwhile, served as Frerking's orderly. His presence at WN62 is not in doubt. His unit and his officer appear in numerous contemporary records, and his description of his own position can be corroborated.
The communications bunker he mentioned, about 20 meters away, is known. Frerking's bunker is known. Severloh's claim that he fired from a trench about 7 meters to the right of Frerking points to a U-shaped spot, the kind of position seen in wartime images of German machine gun emplacements.
Opposing them were the men of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, and the untested 29th Infantry Division. Omaha Beach was assigned to the Americans, with the 29th on the right and the 1st Division landing in the Fox and Easy sectors on the left. The leading wave closest to WN62 came from the 16th Infantry Regiment, specifically E and F Companies of the 2nd Battalion.
The plan called for the 16th Regimental Combat Team to land between WN62 and WN64, a fairly lightly defended stretch. Strong currents, heavy smoke, dust, and confusion pushed most of the leading wave directly into the teeth of WN62 instead. Landing from 6:30 a.m., the waterlogged and seasick men faced a journey of more than 400 meters under heavy fire to reach a small shingle bank at the foot of the bluffs.
Severloh's 2000 memoir, ghostwritten by German amateur historian Helmut Konrad von Keusgen, describes the first moments. He recalled a large landing ship approaching directly in front of his sector, about 600 meters from WN62, with gang planks lowered on either side. Soldiers descended calmly in orderly columns and jumped into chest- to shoulder-high water.
He wrote that the bay was almost completely quiet and not a single shot was fired. The defenders had strict orders to wait until the Americans were only about 400 meters from the upper beach in knee-deep water. Severloh ran to the communications bunker and called out that the landing had started.
That description does not match the historical record. The ship he describes, with gang planks on both sides, is not a Higgins boat but almost certainly a Landing Craft Infantry. No LCI came in with the leading wave. The first, LCI 491, came ashore in the Easy Red sector at about 8:00 a.m., roughly H plus 90 minutes.
By then the tide had risen, so the distance to cross was far shorter than the 600 meters Severloh mentioned. His claim that the bay was empty except for that one vessel also cannot be true. He could not have mistaken a single LCI for more than a dozen smaller landing craft.
Severloh went on to describe more soldiers disembarking, wading in two columns, each man holding the belt of the one in front with his left hand. He wrote that he moved the safety of his machine gun and began to fire, seeing water spouts where his rounds hit. Panic broke out, he recalled, and men lay in the shallow cold water or tried to take cover behind beach obstacles.
Again the account raises questions. The two lines of men from each gang plank did not happen in the first wave, which was made up mostly of Higgins boats. His estimate of the first troops landing about 600 meters away is probably about right, but at that range, details such as men holding each other's belts would have been impossible to make out.
Images taken from Frerking's bunker, about 7 meters from Severloh's position, show people on the beach. Using modern measuring tools, those clustered around a concrete block are 179 meters from his firing position, while others are 240 and 300 meters away. At those distances, real detail is already very hard to see. At twice that range, individuals are basically dots.
It is possible Severloh saw what he claimed in a later wave and simply misremembered the chronology. He then described a swarm of landing craft approaching, each carrying about 30 troops. He noticed a thin metal staff about 3 meters high with a red pennant, which he took to be an orientation mark for following craft.
That detail is troublesome. If a red pennant was on the beach, this cannot be the first wave. The existence of such a pennant is itself questionable. U.S. naval beach landing parties were due to mark the beaches, but they came ashore significantly later than planned, and whether they got any markers up at all is highly doubtful.
Severloh also said he counted six assault waves before noon. Officially there were not even six waves in total during the assault. Some craft did come in clusters, and in the confusion of the day they may well have looked like a new wave.
A photograph taken that day shows the area around WN62. By triangulating visible positions such as the two 75 mm casemates and prominent trench lines, the spot Severloh occupied can be identified. The image shows clusters of troops against the shingle, landing craft wallowing in the surf, and more vessels heading for shore. Smoke is also visible, which would have impeded his view throughout the day.
Severloh described a gravel mill on the beach, a large metal funnel resting on two concrete blocks. A sergeant pointed out an American almost reaching the upper beach, carrying what looked like fuel tanks for a flamethrower. Severloh took a loaded rifle from the sergeant, aimed, and shot the man, who tried to take cover behind the mill. A second shot knocked his helmet off, and the soldier dropped forward on his face.
That passage is telling. There was a gravel mill on the beach that day. An aerial image of the aftermath locates it next to a light rail line, perched on two concrete blocks with a conveyor belt running up to WN62. The distance between the mill and Severloh's machine gun position was 156 meters, an achievable rifle range.
One of those concrete blocks is today known as Ray's Rock, after medic Ray Lambert, who used it as a makeshift dressing station. On D-Day, however, the blocks stood about 15 meters from their current locations, having been moved by American dozers after the landing.
Severloh also wrote that an unnamed sergeant resupplied him with at least 8,000 rounds over several hours. Assuming he used an MG42, which fired the standard German 7.92 mm round at a very high rate, he could have burned through that amount. But 8,000 rounds is a massive quantity.
MG42 ammunition came in 250-round cans weighing 8.35 kilos, or much larger crates carrying almost 1,900 rounds. For one man to supply Severloh throughout the day, he would have had to deliver at least 32 cans or five huge crates, without considering the needs of the seven other machine gun positions at WN62. Unlikely, but not impossible.
Severloh later stated he fired a total of 12,400 rounds, and on another occasion 13,500, plus 400 rifle rounds. That is a staggering amount and would have been an extremely painful experience. Almost certainly he was not keeping an accurate count. No single position at WN62 was documented after the fight with 50 or more discarded ammunition cans lying around it.
Severloh also described switching to night-fighting ammunition in which every fifth bullet was a tracer. Aware that tracers helped the Americans identify his position, he began to shoot. Shortly afterward, a shell landed directly in front of him, knocking the machine gun from his hands. Within 10 minutes, it happened twice more. He later learned, he said, that the destroyer USS Frankford had targeted him from 3 kilometers away.
The firing logs of USS Frankford for June 6 still exist. They report that at 8:35 a.m. the ship proceeded to a position about 1,200 yards off Easy Red and remained in the area for seven hours, staying between 500 and 800 yards off the beach. In total, 343 rounds of 5-inch caliber were fired that day, and every target is listed. None were at WN62.
Severloh's narrative continues with troops seen moving around his flank at about 3:00 p.m. In fact, Americans had been climbing the bluffs at Spalding Draw much earlier, and by then his position was in real danger of attack from flank and rear. Moments later, he recalled, Frerking's observation position took a direct hit, which still shows signs of damage today.
When the two wounded officers staggered out, they told Severloh it was time to abandon the position. Severloh and the survivors of WN62 withdrew as the Americans who had endured hell on the beaches below finally claimed the strongpoint. The fight for the Colleville draw was over.
Severloh was wounded a short time later while trying to escape and was taken prisoner the following day. Frerking was killed and is buried today at the La Cambe German military cemetery.
The most problematic claim of all is Severloh's estimate of the casualties he inflicted. In one interview he said it was certainly more than 1,000, more likely more than 2,000 men. On more than one occasion the same figure was used to mean men killed rather than casualties, meaning killed, wounded, and missing combined. That simply cannot be correct.
Omaha Beach casualty figures are difficult to establish, but the most authoritative account, compiled from all available records for the two divisions leading the landings, gives total casualties as in excess of 2,800 men along the entire 5-mile, or 8-kilometer, length. That includes 842 officers and men killed and a further 715 missing, some later reported killed and others returned to their units.
Records for the 1st Infantry Division, which predominantly but not exclusively landed in the area around WN62, are more precise. They reported 1,346 casualties: 104 killed, 940 wounded, and 411 missing. That does not include other units that landed there, though the 1st Division made up the largest number in that area.
Even taking those numbers as accurate, Severloh cannot be assumed responsible for every one. At WN62 alone there were multiple machine gun positions, plus mines, riflemen, mortars, artillery, and machine guns from other strongpoints. It is impossible to say how many casualties Severloh, who was not a fully trained machine gunner, caused. Maybe dozens, maybe even hundreds, but very unlikely 1,000 or more.
Those who lost their lives were not statistics. Each was an individual who stormed ashore into a nightmare to play a part in the liberation of Europe that they would not live to see.
So was Heinrich Severloh an impostor or a liar with an agenda? The evidence suggests not. He undoubtedly made claims that were not true, but like many veterans he admitted his view of that day was far from complete. It was an extremely chaotic and traumatic environment.
The value of his memoir is limited, and it is fair to question why. Perhaps the attention his recollections brought him, and what he learned about the day after the war, affected which memories were real and which were not. Perhaps his ghostwritten memoir distorted fact from fiction and stretched the truth. Perhaps an elderly man was swept up in theories created in the age of the internet.
What is clear is that he was there and did take part. Severloh was genuinely remorseful about his role on D-Day and returned to Normandy many times in his later years, not to show off but to pay his respects to the fallen. What happened there never left him, and year after year, even at the age of 81, he made a pilgrimage back to the battlefield.