The Nephilim were on the earth in those days...Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:1-4
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The sun rose. Mr. Severlo put his boots on, he buttoned his shirt and shot one of his closest friends.
Redirecting his gun, he hunted more humans. He gunned down another. And then another. And still more. One after the other he killed. For 9 hours he butchered, maimed, shot, destroyed, killed, and ended life on a biblical scale. So great his slaughter that day, it was as if the beach that day had been passed over by the angel of death.
The year was 1944. The date, June 6. The place, Normandy beach.
Heinrich Severlo waited at the shores of France as an invasion force grew on the ocean’s edge. Like a terrible tidal wave of retribution, the military might of the free world rose up in answer to Nazism. 5,000 ships, 11,000 aircraft and 156,000 allied soldiers fixed their wrath on a 50 mile stretch of sand in an amphibious landing the likes of which had not been seen since the founding of the world.
“The horizon was black with ships” recounted Franz Gockel, a German sniper, whose jowls wagged in the telling from more than his life’s fair share of pork.
“It was savagery” he continued, shaking his head in personal disgust, as he explained with what ease they slaughtered exposed men with raking machine gun fire while allied troops poured out of the Higgins boats.
They fell, cut down like winter wheat. Young men, boys. Soldier who came to fight men they’d never met, in a country they’d never seen. Like lambs given to wolves, they were layed on an altar of salt and sand and sacrificed. Hitlers knife, battle hardened veterans from the eastern front, fell upon them like a reapers scythe.
One of those butchers was Heinrich Severlo, a German soldier, a man whos very birth tolled the death of thousands. As the Americans spilled out of the sea and sprinted across soggy sand, Heinrich’s crosshairs fell upon them like the finger of God. First one, then twenty more, then fifty, even one hundred, then two hundred, then three, then five hundred, then seven, then one thousand, and still more. Two thousand men, and more, dead, all at the hands of one. Lifeless they lay in cool sand, or twisting and rolling in morning waves being washed pale of blood.
On the beach that chilly day, with three holes in his trembling flesh, “private” Silva, lay. Heaven ward, weeping blood and tears like Christ upon the cross, could he ever have guessed that mere meters away, through barbed wire, dirt and smoke, one of his future best friends was slaughtering his own countrymen like Ares, the god of war?
It would be decades before they ever met.
Heinrichs machine gun nest was eventually overrun. He fled in the final fleeting moments at the orders of his superior, a man who died with a bullet to the head within minutes of issuing the order to retreat.
The young lance corporal found sanctuary from the battlefield in the neighboring village of Colleville-sur-mer. The souls of thousands of dead clung to him like beads of sweat. Heinrich knew that to tell others of his prowess would be to invite death. The Americans had already named this faceless menace “The Beast of Omaha”, and had a price on his head, and whispered tales amongst Germans would ascend to an anthem, and identification of who he was.
He said nothing.
He told no one.
The war ended.
Heinrichs conscience gnawed him however like cancer feeds on tender flesh. For years, he revisited the battlefield both in beach and book. Nightly in dreams he saw the face of one soldier he shot through the head. The helmet flies, the chin drops, the body slumps and lifeless it lies in the sand. Over and over again, that image would not let him rest.
Like an unappeased spirit this American soldier haunted him.
Heinrich sought sanctuary from these memories in a forgiveness that could not be found. He wandered unpardoned, misunderstood, unknown, the monster in the mirror.
He passed through this troubled life alone..
until...
....like a well placed paper bullet from an unseen sniper, Heinrich was struck by something he read. In the “The Longest Day” , a book which recounted the D-Day landings, Heinrich read of a man named David Silva who survived his wounds that dreadful day. Could this be the human vessel that carried the elusive forgiveness that officer Severloh had always sought but never found?
Heinrich returned fire. The letter he sent out across the ocean failed to find its mark however. Repeatedly he tried to find this “David Silva”, this critical link to his own past, but was unable. Where was the one man that Heinrich really needed to see?
As on the beach, so too in life. David Silva was in fact not far away at all. Mere hours away from Heinrich, Mr. Silva was living in Germany as a military chaplain after the war.
The men met, and 19 years in the gnawing void of silence was filled with tales and tears, with confessions and embraces.
For Lance Corporal Hans Severloh, in 1963 the war finally ended.
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German artillery battery on Normandy Beach
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A pillar remembering the fallen on Normandy Beach
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American, Mike Wallien, inspects a German machine gun pill box on Normandy Beach. Battery WN-62. The location of Hein Severlo's machine gun overlooking "Omaha" beach sector. The view he would have had looking down on the beach explains his kills and full view of fire.
