| Original caption: “A seventy-five millimeter German howitzer turret on Omaha Beach, France.” A Betonpanzer (“Concrete Panzer”) consisting of a VK 30.01 (H) tank turret mounting a Kampfwagenkanone 37 L/24 cannon installed on an H246-type bunker, part of Widerstandsnest (“Resistance Nest”) 68 (WN68) near Les Moulins ouest, covering the Saint Laurent draw off Easy Green Sector, Omaha Beach in Normandy. A Nazi German prototype heavy tank developed by Henschel und Sohn, the VK 30.01 (H) tank was rejected for production, likely because it was already an outdated design. The Heer (“Nazi German Army”) favored the development of the VK 45.01 (H), a heavier, more advanced project that, in turn, became the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger I prototype. The remaining turretless hulls were stored in Henschel’s factory in Haustenbek and used as recovery, training, and test vehicles. 6 of the proposed VK 30.01 (H) turrets were used in permanent fortifications, 4 ending up on the Atlantic Wall and 2 on the Westwall. WN68 consisted of defenses in depth. Besides this turret, this Resistance Next had 52 millimeter (2-inch) guns – a Kampfwagenkanone L/60 and L/40 – and a captured French APX anti-tank gun, designated 4.7-centimeter Panzerabwehrkanone 181(f). In addition, several machine guns of various calibers and manufacture – a Doppel (“Double”) emplacement bunker with MG 42s, an FT tank turret with Reibel Mitrailleuse modèle 1931 7.5 millimeter (.309 caliber) machine gun, Nazi German Heer designation MG 331(f). Gefreiter Gustav Winter (???? – ????), a Panzer III crewman, suffered frostbite during the invasion of the Soviet Union but survived and was transferred to the Infanterie-Regiment 726, 716. Infanterie-Division (“726th Infantry Regiment, 716th Static Infantry Division”) to crew the static, manually operated Betonpanzer turrets of WN68. Paired with a 17-year-old Czech-born ethnic German soldier, Winter stated, “In the East, they would have been considered quite weak, especially against an enemy expected to use panzers. But there on the French coast, it seemed to me that it was pretty unlikely that the Allies could land with large numbers of panzers. We knew they had landing craft that could bring a Panzer ashore, because they had used this tactic in Italy. But France was not Italy. They would need thousands upon thousands of panzers to invade France, and how could these possibly be carried across the water from England to all arrive at once? We had no idea of the organization that the Allies were capable of.” “The concrete panzer was pretty comfortable, because it was all stripped out inside and there was plenty of room. The turret had a fifty millimeter gun, and in addition to the telescopic gunsight, it was fitted with periscope binoculars that could focus on the sea immediately beyond the dunes. On this night, there was moonlight, but all I could make out was clouds over the horizon of the sea.” “On that night of June 5, 1944, there was aircraft noise and heavy bombing inland, but being in the [concrete] panzer, we couldn’t see what was happening out there. All our watching and waiting went on for hours, until sometime around 0500 Hours, when everything changed.” “First, our officer came to us on horseback (he had been a cavalry commander in World War I, and he prided himself on his Austrian horse). He told us there was suspicious activity to the East involving gliders and similar things, and to be completely vigilant. Therefore, we checked over the gun, and I went out to see if anything was happening around us.” “There were flares in the sky, I don’t know where from, and they lit up the underside of the clouds, and I could see many planes moving through the clouds, which worried me. Our only Flak was a single twenty millimeter gun behind us, near the fortress houses, and this remained silent. I now had a horrible feeling, and I felt very exposed out there, even with our concrete shell. I suppose that all the other crews in the bunkers around me were thinking the same thing – ‘What the devil is happening?’” “First light came at about five fifteen or five thirty, I think, and I noticed that the sea was still empty as far as I could make out into the distance. All I saw was a series of flashes on the horizon, which I thought might be more flares. Then there was a horrific noise in the air, which was a long, crashing sound, and we began to be hit by huge explosions. These explosions were mighty…they made the whole concrete box around the panzer move and rattle.” “I figured out that these were naval shells coming from out on the sea, something which had never happened before in my experience. I could actually see the flames of the warship guns firing; that was what the flashes were out on the sea. After several of these explosions, which landed randomly around us, the air was full of sand, smoke, and dust, and it was hard to see anything through the periscopes at all.” “The intensity of that bombardment was more than anything I had known on the Eastern Front. When one of these naval shells exploded near us, the shock wave came through the ground and travelled through the panzer, which felt like a punch in the stomach. These blows came again and again, every time a kick in the belly, and made my ears ring horribly.” “The Czechoslovakian lad who was my loader got down on the floor of the panzer and began sobbing…he was only seventeen, and had not been in action before. What a way to start!” “After that, I think we were bombed by aircraft, but I’m not sure. I couldn’t hear properly, but I felt a lot more explosions, which seemed to be some distance away. A few of these bombs came close, and bits of shrapnel came crashing off the turret, and a lot of smoke was coming in through the air vents. I braced myself and closed my eyes; that was all I could do. When the bombing finally paused, the explosions seemed to fall behind us, in the inland zone. I opened the turret’s side hatch slightly and looked out. What a sight that was.” “One of the small concrete bunkers was destroyed, and the concrete was in pieces all over the dunes. There were huge craters in the sand everywhere around us, and in places, the sand was on fire from the explosion. The PAK gun near us was in one piece, and the crew there signaled to me with a green signal flag that we used (we had no phone or radio, of course, and I was deafened anyway; I could hear nothing at all.).” “Out on the sea…well, the horizon was like a solid wall of ships. As if someone had put a steel curtain across the horizon, that’s how many there were. The warships that were firing on us were lighting up the whole array of ships with the flash of their guns. I looked up out of the hatch and saw that overhead there were vast numbers of planes, which I couldn’t hear because my ears were deafened. Still, I could feel the vibrations of their engines in the air… probably nobody can understand that sensation unless they have been under an air fleet like that, not with modern jet engines, but with the propellers from those days. The air itself was vibrating around us. “By now the light was quite clear, and with the light came the Allied aircraft. A large number of planes appeared over the fleet of ships; I couldn’t be sure, but I would say around a hundred, at different altitudes and speeds. I saw several of these approach our area at very high speed, almost as if they were diving on us…I sealed the hatches again, and soon I heard the impact of cannon shells on the turret. These aircraft cannons were mighty, and they partly split open the armor plate around the cupola. If they had come round again, they might have eradicated my turret, but I heard them go off to the south.” “Through my periscopes, it was difficult now to see anything because of smoke outside; whether this was a smokescreen the Allies had put down with their shells, I don’t know. I managed to get my young loader off the floor of the panzer, and we got ourselves into some fighting shape, ready for whatever was to be thrown at us.” “I was determined to hold the resistance point. I saw explosions at the edge of the dunes, where the low cliff was located. These were big flashes that threw sand a great distance into the air. The noise throughout this time was unbearable, with the huge impacts recurring again and again. I primed the turret gun and tried to see through the gun sight, but all I could see were some of our own troops, or maybe the Eastern troops, running back from the cliff. These men were caught by a shell blast and thrown in pieces across the sand, which was a horrible sight. I dreaded the thought of dying like that.” “Then I saw an explosion on the edge of the dunes. This explosion ran left to right in a line, and I suppose it was an explosive cord used to clear the barbed wire there, or something similar. A few seconds later, there was a cloud of sand, and an American panzer came up over the top of it, onto the dunes.” “This was a great shock to me, as I didn’t think the attackers could come off the beach, but I fired on that panzer immediately. It was a Sherman class panzer, which was very high in profile, and made an easy target – especially with the big, white star they had painted on the front. I aimed straight at the star, but my shell bounced off the armor and went off over the beach behind. This Sherman fired on me very quickly, and I imagine that the crew had studied plans or photographs of our positions, because they seemed to know their way around the plateau.” “They shot me in the front of my gun mantle, which dislocated my gunsight and dazed me with the impact. When I managed to look out through the cupola, I saw that the Sherman was firing at the PAK gun behind the metal shield near me as well. Other Shermans were coming up this path onto the dunes; one of them hit a mine, I think, and started to burn up in flames very brightly.” “I tried to fire again, but with our damage, there was no way to aim our gun. We were hit again, and this round came into the turret itself. It was a nightmarish moment because Sherman’s warhead came through the turret front plate and hit my loader fully in the chest where he stood. It shattered his whole chest at once, and passed straight through him, and ricocheted around on the floor of the hull without hitting me. The bulk of his body had slowed the shell down, just enough to stop it bouncing off the walls and hitting me, I think. So this poor boy, who barely needed to shave his chin, saved my life in that way. He died instantly, standing next to me. That was the end of the concrete panzer as far as I was concerned.” “I tried to get out of the panzer, without really knowing what I was trying to do out there. I slid out of the turret side hatch and got behind the turret, sheltering there. The situation on the dunes was appalling. There were bits of bodies on the ground, and huge craters, and dust and smoke everywhere. That Sherman, which was on fire, was burning like one of those flame torches that metal welders use, you know, the ones I mean? Like an oxyacetylene flame. It was burning like that, sending up a very tall, blue flame, going up many meters into the air.” “To my side, I could see our PAK gun in its metal shield, a few hundred meters from me, and it was still firing. That was the gun commanded by the man who hated the Americans. That gun kept firing, firing, even though rounds from the Shermans were hitting it.” “The Shermans were coming onto the dunes in numbers now, I think there were three or four…they fired very rapidly, with their gun barrels depressed down to aim at that PAK. In a minute, that PAK stopped firing, but the men in there kept firing with a machine gun. I could only crouch and peer out from behind my turret.” “In a few minutes, American infantry began coming up onto the dunes, and the Shermans were shooting away at that machine gun behind the PAK shield. One of the American foot soldiers had a flamethrower, and he got close enough to use it on the PAK. The flames were enormous, shooting out at an incredible rate, like a fire hose filled with burning liquid. The whole PAK position was covered in these flames; the burning stuff was dripping off it and making a pool of fire on the sand.” “At that moment, something awful took place…it was almost like a sign from God that we were doing wrong. A strange, circular wind blew up on the dunes, some small tornado, and it whirled around and fanned the fires from the burning Sherman and the burning PAK …there was chaos all around me in this whirlwind. Ammunition was exploding, men were screaming, both German and American, and in Russian too. All the time, the planes were racing over us through the smoke, firing their cannons inland. It was absolute hell on that sand. Absolute hell. “I wish I could say that I was a hero, but I was drained and finished by all of this. I remained crouching behind the concrete panzer turret, and when those American soldiers began running past me towards the inland area, I didn’t do anything to attract attention. It was only when the first dozen troops had charged right past me that a soldier noticed me there. He hit me in the face with his rifle stock…those American rifles were much heavier than ours. He had a bayonet fixed on it, and he was going to stab me with it, I think, but an explosion close by diverted his attention.” “Other Americans ran up and threw grenades into the concrete panzer. The poor panzer, with the boy’s body inside, exploded with all the ammunition. I remember these soldiers were dripping wet from the sea, and steam was rising from their limbs. One of them pointed back to the beach and sent me off running down there with a kick to my backside. I ran to the beach, and other Americans halted me and put me in handcuffs under the edge of the dunes. There were a few other German men there in manacles, and several wounded and unconscious. I noticed that the Americans had separated the Russians who had surrendered from the Germans. The Russians were being taken away separately, that was clear.” “On the beach itself, I was shocked to see the remains of that battle. It was a sight that would make the bravest man very mournful. There were bodies all along the sand, some still in the water, and many just piled up on the sand. These were all American dead, as far as I could see along the sand. All the way along the beach, one after the other, into the distance. Closer to us, there were German corpses, men who had fallen out of their posts on the sea wall, and they were very burned. We German prisoners were all mute, just looking at this.” “As the minutes went by, I began to think more about what was happening at the beach, and I was amazed at the number of ships and vehicles the Americans had available. There were landing barges lined up on the sand for hundreds of meters, and vast numbers of jeeps and armored cars moving around. They had machines there that I didn’t even know the name for…trucks that drove on the water and then came up onto the land, and flat rafts that carried stores and jeeps. Metal ramps lay around, which they may have used to get up onto the dunes, and armored bulldozers with enormous blades were digging out a larger exit lane from the beach.” “I was taken on a ship that same night to somewhere on the coast of England. By the way, there were no Russian prisoners on that ship, not one. We got off the boat at about eight in the morning, and we had to walk from the docks to a rail station in the town. There were lots of English civilians about, all older men and women, and they all stopped and stared at us going past in our ragged German uniforms. That was a strange moment when we came face to face with the English women. I must say that none of them shouted at us or cursed us – not that I could hear, anyway. Maybe I didn’t understand what they said. I didn’t see any of them spit at us or throw stones, anyway. But I remember that the eyes of these women were very bright; they were very proud to see us trudging away in our defeat. We were a pitiful sight in our rags and bandages. I suppose that a scene like that has been repeated many times in human history and captured prisoners trudging past the womenfolk.” Photograph by Private 1st Class Louis Weintraub (1922 – September 13, 1991) of the 162nd Signal Photographic Company. | |
| Image Filename | wwii2147.jpg |
| Image Size | 565.67 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 3413 x 2480 |
| Photographer | Louis Weintraub |
| Photographer Title | United States Army Signal Corps |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | June 15, 1944 |
| Location | Les Moulins ouest |
| City | Omaha Beach |
| State or Province | Normandy |
| Country | France |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | 111-SC-275425 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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