German Morale Was Low on D-Day

Horst Fluegge was a young lieutenant in the German army in Normandy when the invasion by Allies from across the sea spelled doom for his country’s vision of Fortress Europa.  He knew that the end was just a matter of time.

       In his later account, “Morale was low on D-Day, Ex-German Officer Recalls,” Fluegge sums it up as “Men knew they had lost war.”   They had already been severely beaten on the Eastern Front, where Fluegge had fought long and hard.  The German army was a shadow of what it once was–now a fighting force that had run out of the materiel necessary to withstand the onslaught from the west:  “It’s difficult to remember what I thought and felt then.  I was tired, worn out from fours years in Russia and from trying to train our inexperienced replacements.  Normandy was a long way from Berlin where I had been studying philosophy at the university when the war began.”

      The Guardian has made possible then and now photographs of various scenes from D-day.  The picture of captured Germans shows men like Fluegge.  Mouse clicking on the photo takes us to exactly the same scene today.