Panzergrenadiers of the 116 Panzer Division

"As the vice snapped shut around the Sixth Army in Stalingrad and we fell back from Astrakhan, the furthest east that any unit of the Wehrmacht had penetrated, where we had glimpsed the vastness of Russia that still lay ahead of us, the Caspian Sea was in reach but still so far away, we knew then that we could no longer win this war. During that retreat across those frozen steppes where we lost so many good comrades and where we avoided encirclement and death or an uncertain fate in the Siberian gulags, this knowledge hung heavy in our hearts!

In ’43 the Soviets were no longer the badly disorganised troops that we had first fought back in ’41, the hard lessons that we had taught them back then and in ’42 had been learnt and following the failure of the Kursk offensive we felt their full wrath in our fighting retreats from the Mius and Dneiper rivers. Our losses continued to mount and the Soviets seemed to have an endless supply of men and equipment!

Finally with our numbers severely depleted we were withdrawn from Russia for rest and refitting. Back in Germany we were reformed as the 116th Panzer Division and sent to France. There we prepared the new boys for the Anglo-American invasion that we knew was coming. These new recruits could only imagine the hell we had been through, they couldn’t understand why we the survivors of the old Division stuck together. We didn’t fight for ‘Gröfaz’ and the Party; we fought for the only thing that now mattered to us – each other!

The big question was would we have enough time to get these boys ready for the coming storm? Unteroffizier van Toynton, myself and the other veterans of the old Division knew we had a big task on our hands but we were determined to succeed in the hard days ahead......... " Obergefreiter Wolfgang Kammler, Spring 1944

'Zäh wie Leder Hart wie Kruppstahl und Flink wie ein Windhund'