Hitler's Paratrooper

The Life and Battles of Rudolf Witzig

Gilberto Villahermosa

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781473827622
• eBook ISBN: 9781473805538
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

"A valuable study . . . a must-read for everybody interested in the topic of German Fallschirmjäger in the Second World War" (Volker Griesser, author of The Lions of Carentan).
 
Rudolf Witzig entered the history books as the heroic captor of Belgium's supposedly impregnable fortress Eben Emael in May 1940—the first time that glider-borne troops were used in the war. To many people, he is also known as the commander of the battle group that fired the first shots of the Tunisian campaign.
 
Remarkably, next to nothing has been written about him as an individual. This biography, completed with the full support of Witzig's widow and son, is a comprehensive history of the man and also provides important new detail on the German parachute arm that he served.
 
In the course of his service, Witzig was awarded the coveted Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, even though he had not yet earned the Iron Crosses 2nd and 1st class. To resolve the problem, he was awarded all three on the spot.
 
Witzig was involved in Operation Mercury, the invasion of Crete, but was injured during the fighting. After his recovery, he was sent to Tunisia where he was credited with several successful defensive actions. He ended the war in captivity, surrendering to the Allies on May 8, 1945, the day after his name was placed on the Honour Roll of the Luftwaffe.
 
"A gripping biography, providing a tough, gritty and compelling study of a German soldier." — Firetrench
 
"A unique, well-written and impeccably researched account of the Third Reich's evolving fortunes as witnessed on numerous battlefronts by a highly decorated Fallschirmjäger officer." —Mark J. Reardon, author of Defending Fortress Europe
 

Chapter 1

A CHILD OF WAR

Rudolf Witzig was born on 14 August 1916 in Röhlinghausen Westphalia, Germany to Rudolf Friedrich Witzig and Amanda Henriette Adolfine Ziehn. He was the third of four children. His parents had been married four years earlier in Kiel, his mother’s home town. Rudolf Friedrich, who was from Magdeburg, had served briefly as a soldier in a German artillery regiment from October 1898 to August 1899, before sustaining an injury to his hand, which ended his military career. ‘His conduct in terms of morale and duty was good,’ recorded the younger Rudolf proudly in a family history many years later, when his own military career, spanning almost forty years, had ended.¹ The elder Rudolf then attended the Neustadt technological college near Mecklenburg, where he earned high marks. Afterwards he worked as a manager in the civil engineering field in Kiel and elsewhere. During the First World War he ran a machine factory in Röhlinghausen, which employed a large number of women and produced artillery shell fuses. After the war, he founded a large electrical company ‘Witzig and Winter’ in Gelsenkirchen, which dealt with large-scale manufacturing projects.

The younger Rudolf was born during extremely hard times. Germany was in its third year of the First World War, a war which had become ‘total’ for the home front. The food supply had become horrendous and civil war appeared in the offing. Ration cards were required to procure almost all foodstuffs, clothing, and even soap. Malnutrition was beginning to exert a terrible toll on the German population and mortality rates for women and children under the age of five rose by more than half as the national birthrate dropped by half.² Food shortages brought renewed and intensified labour unrest and increasing public protests, riots, and the plundering of grocery stores, mostly by women and youths. A wave of strikes by factory workers and coal miners, critical to sustaining the war effort, swept the country as food prices continued to soar, while incomes sank. ‘Sacrifice, privation, death, on a huge scale, left Germans of all political hues bitterly searching for the reason why’, writes historian Richard Evans, in the first volume of his monumental new account of Hitler’s Germany. Young Rudolf was fortunate indeed to have been born into an economically viable family with a strong father present, especially a loving one. In the midst of widespread hunger, illness, and death, the Witzig family’s existence appears to have been a comfortable middle-class one.

Rudolf Witzig (on the left) with a group of fellow soldiers from the 16th Engineer Battalion, III Motorized Corps, in Höxter in 1935.

It is clear, from the family history written by the younger Rudolf long after the Second World War, that his childhood was a happy one and his relationship with his father, a close one. ‘My father often went hiking with his children’, he remembered. ‘We learned to know our surroundings. He always had things to tell us, both funny and serious, and jokes and games were part of his nature. As soon as it was possible, my father took me along on excursions with my mother.’³ The Witzig home was often filled with friends and music. ‘My father loved company. Therefore, my parents often had guests in their house.’⁴ Thus Rudolf’s childhood memories were positive ones. ‘I associate the most beautiful childhood memories with our house’, he recalled.⁵ From his father, Rudolf learned a love of sailing, swimming, hiking, travelling, and even photography. ‘My father took a lot of photographs, which he developed in his darkroom in the attic. Prints were produced in the daylight and sunlight in special wood frames under glass sheets.’⁶ During a seaside holiday in 1924, the family watched a fire consume much of the town of Norddorf and young Rudolf witnessed his father rescuing his two sisters from drowning. Thus, by the time he was eight, Rudolf had learned the importance of family and friends, self-sufficiency, courage and camaraderie.

Witzig (on the left) with fellow soldiers from the 16th Engineer Battalion, III Motorized Corps, in Höxter in 1935.

Rudolf recalled the harshness of life in Germany after the war, remembering the billeting of the Reichswehr, the Weimar Republic’s army, in the area. He also recalled the expulsion of the Communist government council from Essen, and the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923. ‘There were captive balloons over the mines and metal factories’, he wrote. ‘Everywhere there were barbed-wire roadblocks and checkpoints at bridges and gates. Once, French guards shot a citizen dead. I can still see the endless funeral cortege, in top hats and umbrellas.’ The impressions these scenes left on the young boy were ‘unforgettable’ and ‘bad’.⁷

In 1923 the German economy reached a state of hyperinflation. By June the price of a single egg reached 300 marks and a pound of coffee cost 30,000 marks. By November the mark, which had been trading at 4.2 to the dollar in July 1914, was trading at 4.2 trillion to the dollar. The disastrous results of the runaway inflation left many children feeling frightened and dreading real or potential impoverishment, a feeling exacerbated by the high unemployment and wage cuts during the Great Depression, which rocked the country from 1929. Unemployment rocketed to 30 per cent and the catastrophic economic situation resulted ultimately in the fall of the Weimar Republic.

One of Witzig’s comrades from the 16th Engineer Battalion wearing the German First World War steel helmet.

Rudolf Friedrich Witzig died of heart disease when Rudolf was barely eleven years old and his siblings only four, twelve, and fifteen. The loss must have been particularly devastating for the young boy, who adored his father. ‘From that time, my mother carried the entire burden’, he remembered.⁸ The family moved to Kiel, Amanda’s home town. There they were surrounded by her four sisters and their husbands. ‘They were all pretty fond of us children,’ remembered Rudolf, ‘and the relationship among them – especially the sisters – was very close.’⁹ It is perhaps significant that Rudolf records that the husband of Amanda’s sister Ilse was an officer in the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy, for he does not mention any of his other uncles. Perhaps it is this uncle who provided the young and impressionable boy with the father figure and male role-model he needed after the loss of his father. And the fact that both his much-loved father and his uncle had been or were military men no doubt influenced Rudolf greatly in his choice of future career, for he was living at a time when German military men were being held up as national heroes. Indeed, Rudolf’s younger brother George would follow in his uncle’s footsteps and join the Kriegsmarine for U-boat duty.

Amanda rented a partially furnished house in Kiel and lived off the interest of devalued war bonds and a small rental income from Rudolf Friedrich’s business premises in Gelsenkirchen. ‘We lived very thriftily without suffering from it,’ Rudolf wrote later:

She raised her children in this way, while allowing us sufficient freedom. She worked hard. She grew vegetables in the garden and did all our laundry by hand, sewed all the children’s clothes herself and knitted and darned socks and took care of the rented rooms. And she did all of this without help from others.¹⁰

Still, she always seemed to have time for her children. ‘One of my best memories is of my mother singing [Hermann] Löwe ballads and playing them on piano’, he remembered. ‘Even today I know the melodies and words.’¹¹ Amanda Witzig never remarried.

Machine-gun training with the 16th Engineer Battalion in 1935.

Rudolfs peaceful childhood days, however, were quickly coming to an end. On 30 January 1933, shortly after he turned sixteen, German President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor. Two months later the Reichstag, the German Parliament, passed an Enabling Act, granting Hitler’s National Socialist Party dictatorial powers. Hitler and the Nazis had come to power despite the fact that the majority of Germans – 56 per cent – had not voted for them.¹² Still, between 13 February 1919 and 30 January 1933 the Weimar Government had gone through no fewer than twenty different cabinets.¹³ The German people were no doubt hoping for greater stability. Many sought strong leadership and a ruthless and even uncompromising willingness to strike down the enemies of the nation without compunction. They were not to be disappointed. The Nazi Party quickly assumed complete control over Germany’s national life and future. A dictatorship was created and opposition was brutally suppressed. An extensive armaments programme, expansion of the small armed forces permitted under the Treaty of Versailles, and large public construction programmes brought a measure of economic recovery and improved the country’s military posture. Germany soon regained a semblance of the position it had held as a European power before its defeat in 1918.¹⁴

An artistic schematic of Höxter, a town in eastern North Rhine Westphalia on the ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations and Maps
• Maps
• Introduction
• Prologue Glory or Death
• Chapter 1 A Child of War
• Chapter 2 Fallschirmjäger
• Chapter 3 Eben Emael
• Chapter 4 Crete
• Chapter 5 The Spearhead Shattered
• Chapter 6 North Africa: First Battles
• Chapter 7 North Africa: To the Last Man
• Chapter 8 From Partisans to the Red Army
• Chapter 9 Holland: ‘No Longer War’
• Chapter 10 Holland: Last Battles
• Chapter 11 The New German Army and Retirement
• Notes
• Bibliography