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Hitler’s Secret Attack on the World’s Largest Fort

By C. G. Sweeting
8/7/2012 • Gear, MHQ


JUST BEFORE DAWN, more than 80 elite German paratroopers gathered in an airfield hangar to listen to final instructions from their commander. Their mission? A bold attack on the world’s strongest fortress and an enemy that outnumbered them nearly 10 to 1.

‘Airplanes are overhead,’ one Belgian soldier reported. ‘Their engines have stopped! They stand motionless in the air’

It was May 10, 1940, and all across Germany thousands of troops were preparing to invade Belgium and the Netherlands, the first strike of Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg into the west. Yet the campaign’s success hinged in large part on this small unit. At 3 a.m., the hangar’s lights were extinguished, its doors rolled open, and the troops marched onto the tarmac. Loudspeakers filled the air with the stirring tones of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” and the men climbed into gliders. Eleven planes stood ready, packed with guns, ammunition, grenades, and five tons of a new, powerful explosive. The glider had never been used in combat; indeed, the Germans had cloaked their new weapon in great secrecy. Now they were about to unleash it with devastating effect.


Tactically, one of Hitler’s biggest obstacles was Fort Eben Emael. Looming over Belgium’s border with the Netherlands, Eben Emael sat astride the planned invasion route. Its guns protected the city of Maastricht to the north, the roads leading west from Maastricht, and, most important, three bridges over the Albert Canal. Hitler’s tanks and armies would have to cross those bridges to strike the heart of Belgium.


According to glider historian Robert Mrazek, the Germans had concluded that a conventional assault on Eben Emael would cost thousands of lives and take months—too long for a blitzkrieg. Hitler is said to have come up with the idea of landing a commando force of paratroopers on the fort’s earthen roof to take out the enemy guns and trap the Belgian soldiers inside, ensuring a safe crossing of the Albert Canal for the Wehrmacht tanks and troops. General Kurt Student, commander of Germany’s airborne forces, decided to use gliders, which could approach the fort silently. At Hitler’s urging, Student devised a four-pronged surprise attack that would simultaneously target the three vital bridges and Eben Emael.


Preparations began under tight security. The men did not wear air force insignia. No leave was granted, and calls and mail were screened. “Once we ran into some girls we knew and the whole unit had to be transferred,” recalled Sergeant Major Helmut Wenzel, Granite’s senior enlisted officer. Any man who leaked word would be executed.



Rehearsals for the raid were meticulous. The men studied aerial photos of the fort as well as a large sand-table model. A German contractor who helped build the fort provided blueprints that were used to construct a scale mockup, complete with large guns and fields of fire. Witzig’s men ran through their assignments there, and at the lieutenant’s urging, they were quietly taken to the Sudetenland to practice on former Czech fortifications.





EBEN EMAEL WASN’T TOTALLY UNPREPARED for the attack. Engine noise from the Ju-52s had roused Dutch antiaircraft guns around Maastricht, and their blasts were heard at the fort. But the Belgians were startled by these strange, silent apparitions emerging from the darkness. “Airplanes are overhead,” one reported. “Their engines have stopped! They stand motionless in the air.


Within minutes, eight other gliders swooped in and landed; two were missing, including Lieutenant Witzig’s plane. Sergeant Wenzel took command, but the squads needed little direction. Each had been assigned casements or cupolas to neutralize. The first target for the squad led by Sergeant Hans Niedermeier was the fort’s observation cupola, from which spotters would direct artillery fire. Niedermeier ran to it carrying the top section of a 110-pound hollow charge; another man followed carrying the bottom part.


Niedermeier’s squad next attacked a 75mm gun in a casemate, this time placing a 27.5-pound hollow charge under the gun’s barrel. The explosion blew the Belgian gunners from their seats and against the wall, killing two. The Germans entered through the breach, ran through the smoke to the casement’s stairwell leading inside the fort, then sent long bursts of submachine gun fire down into the interior.


Within 15 minutes, Sergeant Wenzel later recalled, the Germans had disabled all of the guns that threatened the canals and the roads leading from Maastricht. At 5:40, he radioed Koch: “Object reached; everything in order.

THE GARRISON ITSELF, meanwhile, was in chaos. When the attack began, only about 750 soldiers were in the fort; most of the others were on leave or quartered in nearby villages. The besieged soldiers tumbled into the fort from the roof and told of planes with no engines appearing silently out of the night sky. “What is going on above us?” wrote a Belgian chaplain in his diary. Adding to the confusion, the Germans had dropped explosive charges and smoke bombs down ventilation shafts into the fort’s interior.


At about 6:30, two hours after the assault began, another glider swept in and landed on the fort. Out leaped Lieutenant Witzig. According to the Granite leader’s postwar account, the tow rope on his plane had broken shortly after takeoff. After landing in an open field, Witzig seized a car, drove to a village, and contacted base. A Ju-52 soon arrived, hooked up Witzig’s glider, and towed it into the air to complete the mission.

Together, Witzig and Wenzel determined that the squad had achieved most of the mission’s objectives. Now, they had to keep the Belgian defenders bottled up until German ground forces arrived. The paratroopers fought alone through the morning and into the afternoon and night, sheltering in the destroyed casements and cupolas as the Belgian artillery continued to lob shells on the roof. To block the Belgians’ exits, they exploded the 110-pound hollow charges at stairways leading into the fort. Sparks flew as bullets and grenade fragments ricocheted off the fort’s interior walls, and men fought hand to hand in the dark, smoky tunnels.

The Belgians launched counterattacks, only to be beaten back. Between midnight and 2 a.m. the next day, May 11, advance elements of the German army reached the fort. But it wasn’t until 8:30 a.m.—28 hours after the assault began—that the 51st Engineer Battalion arrived and relieved Witzig’s unit. The fight for Eben Emael was all but over. Around noon the Belgian commander Jottrand opened surrender talks with the Germans. Not willing to wait for the result, his troops began filing out of the fort under a white flag to lay down their weapons.


Several days after the assault, Hitler met Koch’s officers and presented each with the Ritterkreuz, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, then Germany’s highest award for valor. Each enlisted man received the Iron Cross 2nd Class; some men and NCOs, including Sergeant Wenzel, were awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class. While Hitler’s passion for paratroopers would cool a year later with the costly airborne attack on Crete [see “Dead on Arrival,” Winter 2010], he was buoyed by this success.

The Allies, meanwhile, were shocked by the fall of the mighty Eben Emael. They were also mystified. Publicly, the Germans said nothing of the gliders or the hollow charges, announcing only that they had deployed a “new method of attack.” Rumors swirled suggesting Hitler had developed a paralyzing nerve gas.

Life magazine gave readers a fanciful account by a Dutch officer that claimed German endive farmers married to Belgian women had planted explosives, having built tunnels beneath the fort under the guise of fertilizing their crops. “At the push of a plunger,” the soldier wrote, “the ‘fertilizer’ was detonated and whole sections of the fort were flung skyward.”

Few would know the truth until years after the war.

C. G. Sweeting is the author of several books, including Hitler’s Personal Pilot: The Life and Times of Hans Bauer.

SIDEBAR 1940: Blueprint for the Osama bin Laden Mission?

ADMIRAL WILLIAM MCRAVEN is America’s top special op- erations officer, the mastermind of last year’s assault on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. And he’s drawn more than a few lessons from the Germans’ work at Fort Eben Emael.


McRaven singles out the German attack on Eben Emael as “one of the most decisive victories in the history of spe- cial operations.” The attack plan, he adds, “was brilliant both in its strategic vision and in its tactical simplicity.” He was enamored enough of the operation that he even tracked down and interviewed Rudolf Witzig and Helmut Wenzel, two key leaders of the raid.


But as one commentator put it shortly after the raid, the book’s “Cliff ’s Notes were on display in Abbottabad.”

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