| Original caption: “American soldiers look down on the Siegfried Line. Two American soldiers look down on a long row of ‘dragon’s teeth’ concrete devices to halt invading tanks at the Siegfried Line. American troops move through a break in the vaunted defense line and pass into Germany.” The Siegfried Line, known in German as the Westwall, was a German defensive line built during the late 1930s. Started in 1936, opposite the French Maginot Line, it stretched more than 630 kilometers (390 miles) from Kleve on the border with the Netherlands, along the western border of Nazi Germany, to the town of Weil am Rhein on the border with Switzerland. The line featured more than 18,000 bunkers, tunnels, and tank traps. From September 1944 to March 1945, the Siegfried Line was subjected to a large-scale Allied offensive. The Siegfried Line, thrown up opposite the borders of France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and part of Holland, by nearly half a 1,000,000 men under Fritz Todt, the Nazi German autobahn-builder, in only 15 months after Führer und Reichskanzler (“Leader and Reichchancellor”) Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 – April 30, 1945) gave the go-ahead order in 1938. The Todt Organization cunningly sited 14,000 steel-reinforced concrete bunkers behind a line of pyramid-shaped “dragon’s teeth” antitank obstacles, which, in turn, were fronted by barbed wire and minefields. The fortifications, probably the last of their kind, consumed 8,000,000 tons of cement, 20,000,000 tons of sand and gravel, 2,000,000 tons of steel, 1,000,000 cubic meters (350,000 cubic feet) of wood, and over 3 1/2 1,000,000,000 reichsmarks. Nazi propaganda proclaimed the Siegfried Line a monument to the Führer’s military genius that would deny enemy armour entry to the 3rd Reich. Attacking tanks would be “hung up” on the obstacles and destroyed by crossfire from guns in the bunkers. However, it did not work out that way when the Shermans of Lieutenant General Courtney C. Hodges’ 1st Army eventually came up against the Line between Aachen and Rötgen in September 1944. The Line was thinly manned, and most of its big guns had been rushed to Normandy in a vain bid to fight off the Allied invasion. Reeling back from France after the Anglo-American breakout, beaten and exhausted German troops were in no condition to put up more than a token defence. United States Army engineers blunted the “dragon’s teeth” simply by building ramps of earth and wood over them, and the Sherman tanks rolled into Germany. Imgenbroich farmer Max Klein (1938-2013) had a relatively prosperous dairy farm with a herd of 46 cows on a 100-acre (40-hectare) property when he was interviewed in 1979. “We want to forget the past. We want those damn bits of concrete to disappear.” His wife, Maria Becker Klein (1939 – 2012), added, “Would you like to live with this ugliness all your life?” Max Klein, a child in 1944, recalled that “The Americans were afraid of the Westwall. They stopped their advance on high ground in Belgium, only two kilometers (one mile) away, and sat back and shelled it for weeks before they came forward. The village was just about smashed to the ground.” The Klein family took refuge in their cellar until German military police forced them and the other villagers to evacuate the area at the point of a gun. “They threatened to shoot us, so we moved. Then they laid mines all over the place.” The fighting overtook the Kleins on the Rhine, but they all survived to trek back to their devastated farm. War Correspondent Richard Tregaskis (November 28, 1916 – August 15, 1973), still recovering from wounds received at Monte Cassino, reported on the breaking of the Siegfried Line in a nationally syndicated article on September 17, 1944: “Inside Germany, East of Aachen, September 16 – American Sherman tanks and half-tracks are pushing through the Siegfried Line on Saturday. I can see them moving through rows of green ‘dragon’s teeth,’ and past massive pillboxes supposed to provide defensive fire.” “Today I was able to pass through both belts of ‘dragon’s teeth’ and the forts that composed the Siegfried Line. These two belts are approximately seven miles apart and would form a formidable barrier to Germany, but fortunately, they are only lightly manned.” “Nazi Positions Plastered” “German artillery has been firing at us from the east and also from Aachen, which we flanked. But American tanks and self-propelled guns arrayed through the fields behind this break in the line are plastering the German positions. For every German shell we are giving them eighty or ninety.” “I have just talked with some of the brave infantrymen who, working with the tanks, cleaned up the last Nazi resistance in this all-important breakthrough on Friday. At least two other breaks were made in the double line, so American forces poured through into the Rhineland. As far as is known, there are no further fortifications in this area.” “German Gun Silenced” “I talked with the men who made the breakthrough in a barn while German shells screamed overhead in groups of two and three. While we were talking, one of the German guns hit an American half-track, which trailed a wedge of black smoke into the sky. However, our guns blasted forty or fifty shots in the direction of that German gun, and it wasn’t heard firing again. Probably the first two men to hit the ‘dragon’s teeth’ in this second belt of the Siegfried defenses were Private First Class Alvin O. Kenyon (May 25, 1922 – December 3, 1991), of Seattle, and Private Ignatio Soto (October 23, 1920 – June 7, 1996), of Torrington, Wyoming. They were scouts of a company thrown in to investigate a supposed gap in the ‘dragon’s teeth.’ Kenyon said, “Well, the tanks didn’t want to push on into the road through there until they found out whether they were mined. There was a roadblock — wagons and other junk — piled up, so my platoon went up.” “Made Up Their Minds” “‘We crawled up and then the Nazi Germans opened up with machine-gun and rifle fire. After we got through, I fired on two Germans who were in foxholes. One didn’t want to get out. The other got up and told his buddy to stand up and surrender. We took a couple of shots — and he put his hands up.’” “‘Generally,’ said Sergeant Frank F. Kitts (1921 – November 17, 1944) of Newburgh, Pennsylvania, Germans didn’t fight hard, especially after a platoon could verify the fact that the soft spot in the line was unmined and the tanks passed through.” “The few men in the ten or twelve huge pillboxes behind the ‘dragons’ teeth’ usually wanted to surrender. The experience of Kitts was typical.” “Woman Found In Pillbox” “‘Once we got through the ‘dragons’ teeth’ where we were pinned down for a while by machinegun and rifle fire,’ he said. ‘I crawled up on the first pillbox. When I got close enough, he let a potato masher (German hand grenade) come at me. I saw it lying on the ground – I swear it’s true – and shot it and exploded it with my rifle.’” “Then they closed the slit in the pillbox, but I found another slit on the other side, which was open. I dropped in a hand grenade. A tank came moving up at that time, so the Jerries gave up — six of them and a woman.” “Others of the group, including officers, vouched for the fact that a woman was captured in the group.” “The company commander, young Frank J. Kolb Junior (April 25, 1923 – May 12, 2000) of Paducah, Kentucky, added, ‘Pretty good looking, too.’” “Nazis Just Didn’t Have It” “Kolb, who had been a pharmacy student at Purdue University, summed up the action. “The strange thing is that we didn’t have anything except small arms fire, although later waves ran into German counterattacks. When we hit the ‘dragons’ teeth,’ we were pinned down. Then we brought up tank destroyers and medium tanks. We used the tanks for direct fire on the pillboxes behind the ‘dragon’s teeth.’ “Then we went on, throwing grenades and using bazookas in helping persuade the Nazis to give up.” “Lieutenant John J. ‘Jack’ Lennon (October 16, 1918 – October 12, 2010) of Binghamton, New Yorker, and Lieutenant San Davey led the assault against the line. Lennon said some of the pillboxes were built for anti-tank guns or artillery, but didn’t have them there.” “‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘that’s been the state of all the German defenses here.’” Georg Werner (September 24, 1911 – January 15, 2002), whose Sprengunternehmen (“blasting company”) firm at Stolberg, near Aachen, demolished the Siegfried Line for 60 years after World War II, until 2005. By 1980, demolition had removed about 5,700 bunkers and 40 miles of the “dragon’s teeth,” at a cost to Bonn and State governments totaling 24,000,000 United Kingdom pounds. Werner commented, “It’s tough work. Some of the bunker foundations go three meters (ten feet) deep,” Werner, who styled himself “King of the West Wall,” believed he had earned the title after spending nearly half his life on the demolition of it. “Let the young see how Herr Hitler buried millions of marks in the soil for nothing.” | |
| Image Filename | wwii0980.jpg |
| Image Size | 1,002.70 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2920 x 2364 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | United States Army Signal Corps |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | September 15, 1944 |
| Location | |
| City | Hurtgen |
| State or Province | North Rhine-Westphalia |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NRE-338-FTL(EF)-703(2) |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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