Promoted to Major General (Generalmajor) in December 1943, and Lieutenant General (Generalleutnant) in May 1944, he held various commands before being appointed Commander of the 91st Infantry Division in April 1944. Falley was the first German general to fall in action during the Normandy landings. On D-Day, Falley was returning from Rennes, where a war game had been organized by the German High Command, to his Division headquarters, in Picauville, Falley was killed in an ambush by a paratrooper of the US 82nd Airborne Division, near Sainte-Mère-Église, Normandy.Wilhelm Falley - Wikipedia
Visited the cemetery a long time ago....it was a former US temporary cemetery. The killing of Falley came about by mere chance.He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught in a well prepared action to intercept enemy road movements which he and his driver decided to make a fight of it.His body was recovered by the Germans and buried in the grounds of his HQ, Chateau Bernaville. Lt Malcolm Brannen of the 82nd Airborne Division who shot Falley the may well have not been aware of who he had shot. Falley would be transferred to Orglandes by the French Graves Service which used Orglandes as the final resting place of German dead from battlefield and small graveyards after US casualties had been transferred to St Laurent sur Mere.The German VDK began building and gardening work on the site from 1958,this being after a Franco/West German agreement and the cemetery was inaugurated in September 1961. Interesting to see that Falley was born at Metz in Lorraine... a number of the Third Reich senior individuals were born in Alsace Lorraine whose families had settled there as German administrators and through the Germanising process after its seizure following the capitulation of France in the war with Prussia in 1870.