Every summer he and his wife Hedwig rent a cottage in the Normandy village of Colleville-sur-Mer barely a quarter of

General — October 1, 2010 at 16:09

Every summer, he and his wife Hedwig rent a cottage in the Normandy village of Colleville-sur-Mer, barely a quarter of a mile from the former killing fields on Omaha Beach.Tomorrow, Franz Gockel will be among the handful of German veterans who will meet Chancellor Schr? and President Jacques Chirac at D-Day celebrations in Caen castle “I am glad Schr? is attending,” he said. Eventually, he found David Silva, a GI wounded three times on Omaha Beach. When the men met in Germany in the 1960s they hugged each other for five minutes. “He never asked me to forgive him, but I have done so all the same,” Mr Silva says today. He was taken prisoner by the Americans and sent to the United States five days later. He spent three years as a prisoner-of-war.By 1959, his story had become well known in the United States The Americans called him the Beast of Omaha Beach. Mr Severloh was too ashamed to tell his four children about his experiences, yet he was desperate to meet Americans who had survived.

I feel sick when I think about it.”For Hein Severloh, the war began and ended that day. His bunker was knocked out by a grenade which killed his commanding officer. The round smashed into the GI’s forehead and sent his helmet spinning The soldier slumped dead on the sand Mr Severloh still remembers the man’s contorted expression. “It was only then I realised I had been killing people all the time,” he said, “I still dream of that soldier now. On D-Day, he was two months old.But that day is all too real for Hein Severloh. He is plagued by a recurring nightmare, not from when he was mowing down Americans 600 yards away on Omaha Beach “At that distance, the enemy look like ants,” he said. It happened when he reached for his rifle during a lull in the fighting.A young GI who had survived the onslaught in the sea was running up the beach Mr Severloh took aim and fired.

Opinion polls show more than 70 per cent of Germans are glad he is going. The German Chancellor said the decision to invite him to the D-Day celebrations “shows that the postwar period is over and done for good”. I thought I am fighting for my life; it’s them or me, that’s what I thought.”This weekend, Chancellor Gerhard Schr? will become the first post-war German leader to attend D-Day anniversary celebrations. He is now a frail and bespectacled pensioner of 81, who lives in a timbered farmhouse in the village of Metzingen near Hamburg. He speaks with a lisp, the result of a stroke he suffered years ago.Last week, he nervously slapped his thigh in an attempt to fight back his tears as his mind went back to that day of slaughter.

He wept as he said: “What should I have done? I thought I would never get out of there alive. He fired his machine gun at advancing GIs, almost without a break, for nine hours. The heat from the gun barrels he had to keep changing set the grass on fire around his bunker as American bodies bobbed and floated towards him on a flood tide stained pink with their blood.Today his victims lie buried in the vast American cemetery above Omaha Beach that President George Bush will visit this weekend. They account for nearly a quarter of the 9,368 white stone crosses and Stars of David that cover the graveyard.Hein Severloh was a raw 20-year-old Wehrmacht private on D-Day, and the invasion was his first real taste of action. Hein Severloh was responsible for at least half of those deaths. Yet Hein Severloh is nicknamed the Beast of Omaha Beach for the carnage he inflicted on D-Day. He is reputed to be the German soldier who killed and wounded the most enemy troops in a single day during the whole of the Second World War.
Four thousand, one hundred and eighty-four Americans were shot in front of his bunker WN 62, above Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944.