“In the near future, the shores of Europe will be threatened by the possible landing of enemy forces”.
Adolf Hitler wrote this in a directive to his closest subordinates on March 23, 1942.
A year earlier, the commander had led a major invasion of the Soviet Union, and now the Nazi leader feared that the attack would drag on and require so many troops that the commander would be in trouble defending the part of Western Europe that the Nazis had occupied.
However, Hitler especially feared that the British and Americans would land on the Atlantic coast, which would have the consequences that he would have to fight on two fronts, with the difficulties that followed.
Hitler’s solution lay in the Atlantic Wall – a gigantic fortification that stretched for a total of 3,500 km along the west coast of Spain and as far as northern Norway.
Atlantic Wall:
The rampart itself was not a single coherent defensive line, but consisted of 15,000 structures, trenches, ramparts, minefields and barricades along the coastline.
The structures had mainly been built in the places that Hitler thought were most likely to be attacked by the Allies, including ports, military structures and important factories.
Despite Hitler’s grandiose plans, the Atlantic Wall played an extremely small role in the outcome of World War II.
The defense line was far too worn and weak to make a difference, and when the Allies invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, they burst through the wall in just a few hours.
“One only had to look at the wall in Normandy to realize what kind of garbage it really was”, said the German commander-in-chief Gerd von Rundstedt after the war.
The execution
In June 1941, Hitler had various defensive structures prepared on the Channel Islands, which were intended to ensure that they would not be attacked from England. A year later, Hitler decided that he needed to defend himself better against the Allies and ordered the Atlantic Wall to be built.
The work on the fortification was supervised by the engineering unit “Organisation Todt”, which was notorious for using slave labour. Of them approx. Of the 250,000 men who built the wall, the vast majority were prisoners of extermination camps or residents of occupied countries who were forced to work.
