Media - Hitlers Children: Spitting Fire Eyewitness Accounts: 12th SS Panzer Hitler Youth in Normandy 1944

Editors background: The 12 th SS Panzer, already based in Normandy south of Caen, was brought into the line shortly after the D Day landings, with the intention of throwing the fish back into the sea. This immediately brought them into contact with Canadian and British armor moving inland from the coastal footholds. Initial success in the German counterattack was suppressed, in a series of bitter engagements, by Allied ground and air power.

The speaker in this testimony was the gunner in a Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyer, then aged sixteen.

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Interview Transcript

We of the SS HJ panzer troops were stationed in the Normandy area for some months before the invasion of 6 th June. Our training left us in no doubt that, if and when an attack on France came from the Anglo-Americans, we would be fighting to defend a free and unified Europe against corrupt international Jewish finance, against Bolshevism and the forces of the anti-European British Empire.

Certainly, this was a very beautiful part of Europe for us to defend. We became acquainted with the local French people, and, indeed, friendships were made between our boys and numerous young French women, who lived up to their reputation in every way. I am confident that when the Allies finally took over the area, the girls affections were transferred accordingly, in the historic French tradition which we all heard about from the 1914 war.

The landscape itself was very picturesque; there was also plentiful milk, fruit and bread. When we had some hours of freedom from our tasks, we caught trout with our hands in the river pools and cooked them on our panzer engines, which was a great delicacy. This was the landscape that we then had to fight over.

I was in a platoon of five Jagdpanzer IV, each crewed by us SS HJ boys, with an elder, experienced Waffen SS Scharfuhrer ( Senior non-commissioned officer ) as vehicle commander. Each panzer had a gunner, loader, driver and the commander. I guess the average age of us boys was sixteen; I myself had my sixteenth birthday in March of that year 1944. Our Scharfuhrer was twenty-three, and he was very capable, having been in Russia. We had no doubt that we were the elite of German youth, having been selected, by expert hand as we said, for the 12 th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend.

I was very pleased to be the gunner in a Jagdpanzer IV. This was a Stug-type vehicle on a Panzer IV chassis, with a superb 75mm gun roughly equivalent to the Panther gun, capable of very high rates of fire. Above all, the Jagdpanzer was very low in profile; in fact, its roof was barely higher than a soldiers head when he stood beside it, so the vehicle could be concealed from ground observation very effectively.

Our equipment generally was of the highest quality; our uniforms were camouflage pattern, which we found the Allies did not have, and we felt that our vehicles outclassed the Allies in every respect. We were numerically fewer, but this did not deject us. The only things we envied of the Allies were their Jeep car, which we heard about from men who had been in North Africa, and certain of their aircraft such as the Mustang. The Luftwaffe was largely absent from the skies, of course, even before the invasion, and this meant the Allied Jabo planes could travel freely and attack us, hindered only by localised flak.

Shortly after the June landings, we moved to a line Norrey-Buron, which brought us into contact with Canadian tanks and half-tracks which were seeking to expand their pocket in that zone. My particular unit advanced to an area of wooded countryside, where the woods gave way to a rolling plain which contained low dunes, some streams and boulders. On the far side of this plain, which was about 1.2 kilometres distant, we were told that Canadian armor was assembling in numbers from the beach-head.

On the edge of the trees, our Jagdpanzers spread out with a 200 metre gap between them; we had three vehicles in the advanced position, including mine, and two being behind us in reserve and to monitor our flanks. We did not have time to assemble foliage around us, but we were in the shadows of the trees there.

The interior of the Jagdpanzer IV was very cramped, with its low ceiling, and most space was taken up by the long 75mm ammunition shells. As the gunner, I had a small circular seat where I could lean forward and put my eye to the gun sight monocle. The sight itself was a white triangle inside the optic; I had discovered that the gun in our vehicle shot slightly to the left, for reasons we did not understand, at ranges over 1,000 metres, and I made a calculation for this in my aiming. I controlled the gun by hand with a limited lateral traverse, the other movements being made by the caterpillar tracks.

Through my gun sight, I had my first view of the enemy, consisting of two green-painted Churchill class tanks, without camouflage or any attempt at disguise with netting and so on, moving rapidly out of a hill area, going from left to right across the plain ahead. Their vulnerable hull flanks were presented to us very clearly. I confess that my throat was dry and my heart beat fiercely, as Im sure did my comrades likewise. I traversed the gun slightly to place my sighting triangle on the leading tank of this pair, making my allowance for the targets movement and the oddity of our gun. However, my commander told me to pause.