Grenadier Heinrich Severloh: The German Soldier Who Fired 12,000 Rounds at Omaha Beach

The American soldiers who landed at the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944 were walking into a field of fire that, at its most lethal point, originated from a single German soldier. His name was Heinrich Severloh. He was nineteen years old.

Severloh was assigned to Widerstandsnest 62 — WN62 — one of the concrete defensive strongpoints that studded the bluffs above Omaha Beach. His position gave him a direct line of sight across approximately 400 meters of exposed sand that American soldiers would have to cross to reach the first cover of the seawall. He was equipped with an MG42 machine gun capable of firing 1,200 rounds per minute, and his own standard-issue Karabiner 98k bolt-action rifle.

The Morning of June 6

The first American landing craft reached the beach at approximately 6:30 a.m. From his position at WN62, Severloh opened fire with the MG42. When the barrel overheated — the MG42 required barrel changes after every few hundred rounds of sustained fire — he switched to his rifle and kept shooting. When the next barrel was ready, he switched back.

He would repeat this cycle for approximately nine hours.

German military historians who later interviewed Severloh and analyzed ammunition records from WN62 estimated that over the course of June 6, 1944, Severloh personally fired approximately 12,000 rounds from his K98 rifle and used 400 machine gun belts — the equivalent of somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 total rounds from the position's weapons systems. American after-action reports identified WN62 as the most dangerous single point on Omaha Beach.

The Weight That Never Lifted

What distinguishes Severloh's story from a simple military account is what happened to him afterward. For decades after the war, he spoke of June 6, 1944 to no one — not even his wife. He returned to his family farm in Lower Saxony, married, raised children, and by all outward appearances lived the quiet life of a German farmer.

But the memory of what he had done — the faces he had seen in his rifle sights, the waves of men who had come across the sand — stayed with him with an intimacy that never faded.

In the 1960s, Severloh began corresponding with American veterans who had landed at Easy Red. He attended reunions. He visited Normandy with American survivors of the beach he had defended. At these meetings, German accounts and French witnesses noted that he was frequently overcome with emotion. He sought not absolution, exactly — he understood he had been a soldier doing what soldiers did — but some form of human contact with the men who had been on the other side of his rifle sights.

In 2000, he published his memoir in German: "WN62: Erinnerungen an Omaha Beach" — "WN62: Memories of Omaha Beach." The book was never professionally translated into English, and so remains largely unknown to the American public whose fathers and grandfathers he had faced that morning.

A Different Kind of D-Day Story

Severloh's account complicates the tidy moral geometry that D-Day anniversary coverage typically presents. He was not a Nazi ideologue. He was a nineteen-year-old conscript from a farming family who was handed a rifle, pointed at a beach, and ordered to fire. He obeyed. The men coming toward him were, from his position, targets.

And yet: he spent the rest of his life haunted by what that meant. He died in 2006. His memoir, rare even in Germany, stands as one of the most personal first-person accounts of Omaha Beach ever written — from the side history usually does not ask to speak.

The veterans of Easy Red who knew him said he was a decent man. They said it with no irony.