Death factory. Bloody Forest. Hell's Forest - that's what the American soldiers called the Huertgen Forest, the forest of pain that still bears the horror of war in its name for American ears: an approximately forty-kilometer section of the front in the northern Eifel, south of Aachen. Fall / Winter 1944/45 saw the biggest defeat in US military history. Ironically, in this catastrophic theater of war, the only two members of the Wehrmacht made appearance, which were honored by the US Army after the war.
One of them was Lieutenant Friedrich Lengfeld, who was killed trying to recover a seriously injured American soldier from the "Wild Sow" minefield. The US veterans dedicated a commemorative plaque to him in the honorary cemetery of Düren. The other German hero from Hurtgenwald survived the war - but it took fifty years for him to finally be honored in the Capitol of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
His name was Günter Stüttgen, (1919-2003) born in Dusseldorf and since the late sixties chief of dermatology at the West Berlin Rudolf Virchow Clinic. Stüttgen was already retired at the time of the award, one of the world's leading dermatologists, especially in the field of pharmacology. So he was the first one who recognized the importance of cortisone.
All the more astonishing that half a century had passed before American military historians were able to identify in him the "German Doctor" from the Hürtgenwald, who, according to unanimous eyewitness accounts, had saved the lives of hundreds of injured Americans. Stüttgen himself had never told about it later. He was well aware that the US soldiers had come to put an end to the Nazi terror, said Stüttgen in 1996 in his acceptance speech in Harrisburg. In this sense, he felt only as a representative of the German army doctors during the war, "which would have done exactly the same in my place."
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Steffen Kopetzky
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Unusual as the modesty of this outstanding scientist and physician always turned to man, so remarkable was what the twenty-five-year-old ambulance captain had actually accomplished: nothing less than "the miracle of the Hürtgenwald."
Space of humanity
Heinz Munster, chief of the fourteenth company, which belonged to the 1056th Infantry Regiment, described the situation as follows:
"In the valley of the river Kall, near the so-called Mestrenger mill, a jungle fight, in which a normal frontal course was difficult to recognize, friend and foe were in the narrowest space and fought dogfirstly man against man.The losses on both sides were considerable Providing help to wounded people on the hard-to-reach ground had become virtually impossible for both sides, and cries for help in the area suggested that Dr. Stüttgen decided to have a firebreak three times through immediate negotiations with the enemy Serve wounded and rescue their dead. "
In the midst of one of the hardest battles of military history, this medical captain managed to open a space of humanity for three days to save lives. It was the only ray of hope in a military disaster that later many American historians wanted to see understood as harbingers of the Vietnam War. For in the Hürtgenwald, the US troops fought for the first time in a forest, even if it was not a tropical rainforest, but an icy, hundred-year-old German plantation forest that covered a bizarre rugged, snow-covered mountains, the North Eifel.
At the beginning of September 1944, the military situation had looked so good that not a few Americans hoped to have defeated the Axis powers by Christmas. In the Pacific, the Japanese Navy was destroyed, Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur prepared the landing in the Philippines. The Red Army crawled incessantly to the west, amid horrendous losses of its own. As expected, the landing in Normandy on 6 June had cost a high toll, but by mid-August Paris had been liberated without a fight - in the first instance with Ernest Hemingway, accredited as a war correspondent.
"Body counting" becomes a sport
In the middle of September, three months earlier than planned, one stood on the border of the old Reich, the Siegfried Line. But here allied troops suffered from replenishment problems - after all, every liter of fuel and every can of corned beef had to be transported by truck from the ports of Normandy to the front. Montgomery's "Operation Marketgarden" was designed to remedy this situation and provide supplies across the Dutch coast, but failed.
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Battle in Hürtgenwald: "In Hürtgen the dead are frozen"There was tension not only between the British and the Americans, but also between the American generals themselves, who were engaged in a race for territory and German soldiers who had been turned off. For the first time, body counting became the sport of the general , The first German city that was finally attacked was Aachen.
South of the old imperial city, the approximately 250,000-strong First US Army under General Hodges was given the task of gaining control of the river system of the Rur, a river that rises in the Belgian Ardennes and flows through the German cities of Monschau and Düren. In the plain behind it lay the Rhine, the last natural obstacle whose overcoming would open the way to the Ruhr - the industrial center of Germany, which the Americans wanted to reach at any cost before the Red Army.
To do this, they had to conquer the eighty square kilometer forest area, which they named after the village of Hürtgen "Huertgen Forest". The northern Eifel was hardly known to the generals, especially Dwight D. Eisenhower. So they also overlooked that the Rur and its tributaries were regulated by dams. By blowing up the dams, the Germans could flood the Rhine plain and cause considerable problems for the invaders.
While the advance of the Americans around Aachen was difficult, the Germans worked day and night to strengthen the defense line in the Hürtgenwald: "The spade must not get cold!" Was the motto.
Blood baptism of the future superpower
The radio stations of the Americans played the latest upbeat hit song, "We're Gonna Hang Our Washing on The Siegfried Line," as finally on Friday, October 6, a sunny autumn morning, attacking the Valley of the White Woe, and thus the first out of a total of four defensive battles in Hürtgenwald. With no knowledge of the area, with faulty maps and inexperienced young soldiers who had never fought in a forest before, the biggest disaster in US army history took its course: In less than five months, Americans lost 22,000 to 32,000 troops - around half as many as later in the entire Vietnam War.
Four US divisions were wiped out in the Hürtgenwald successively, including the 4th Division, where the writer Jerome D. Salinger served. Salinger was traumatized in the Hürtgenwald for the rest of his life, but so was Ernest Hemingway, who was still searching for the material for the great novel about World War II and dreaming of writing an American "War and Peace".
The writer was horrified to see what the Generals 'relentlessly continued slaughter in the wintry forest was for America: the baptism of blood of the coming superpower, which would compete with the Soviet Union at any cost, even mercilessly over their soldiers' lives to sacrifice.
Fifty years later, the 28th US Division, which has been nicknamed "Bloody Bucket" since the Battle of Hurtgenwald, commissioned the "Blood Bucket Division" to create the artist Robert Nisley, a painting of the miracle in the Hürtgenwald, to his benefactor, Günter Stüttgen was dedicated. Stüttgen also got a copy of "A Time for Healing", which he gave away.
As little as the former lifesaver had wanted to talk about his deeds in the war, he did not even want to have the image of a uniform in his apartment.