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!