Pegasus - Was Helmut Romer captured or killed?

Discussion in 'Germany' started by marcus69x, Nov 20, 2008.

  1. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    If Romer was killed he'd show up on here wouldn't he?
    Kurzprofil

    My German still isn't good enough for it, so maybe Kuno, Dave or Diane could search for him?
     
  2. dbf

    dbf Moderatrix MOD

    If Romer was killed he'd show up on here wouldn't he?
    Kurzprofil

    My German still isn't good enough for it, so maybe Kuno, Dave or Diane could search for him?

    Owen,
    Reporting in ..
    only one of that name - killed in Caucasas in Feb 44.
    d
    [Dave has pointed out before that records are incomplete ...]

    Just to be thorough - one Romer killed on 6/6/44 at Emondeville:

    Nachname:Romer Vorname:Ernst Dienstgrad:Pionier Geburtsdatum:24.05.1911 Geburtsort:Aasen Todes-/Vermisstendatum:06.06.1944 Todes-/Vermisstenort:Emondeville
     
  3. 52nd Airborne

    52nd Airborne Green Jacket Brat

    Ok!...........Just to throw the cat amongst the pigeons.

    There is much controversy regarding who was the first Allied soldier to die on D-day. There is no doubt that Lt Brotheridge was the first Officer killed on D-Day. However, it is claimed that L/Cpl F Greenhalgh (14 platoon, B company, 2OBLI) was the first Soldier to lose his life. He was thrown clear and knocked unconscious when the glider landed and subsquently drowned.
     
  4. Drew5233

    Drew5233 #FuturePilot 1940 Obsessive

    Owen,
    Reporting in ..
    only one of that name - killed in Caucasas in Feb 44.
    d
    [Dave has pointed out before that records are incomplete ...]

    Just to be thorough - one Romer killed on 6/6/44 at Emondeville:

    Nachname:Romer Vorname:Ernst Dienstgrad:Pionier Geburtsdatum:24.05.1911 Geburtsort:Aasen Todes-/Vermisstendatum:06.06.1944 Todes-/Vermisstenort:Emondeville

    I just googled mapped Emondeville and its not really near Normandy. Its just South West of Dieppe :unsure:
     
  5. Drew5233

    Drew5233 #FuturePilot 1940 Obsessive

    I was told by a Pegasus Bridge Ox & Bucks Veteran that the first casualty on d-day was Blue on Blue...

    Donnie

    You may have something there Donnie....I had a quick flick through my new ATB D-Day books that came today before the G/F came home and it mentioned that someone shot themself in the leg before exiting the Glider. I will check later but I think the name was LCPL Hull ??:confused:??

    Cheers
     
  6. COMMANDO

    COMMANDO Senior Member

    Check your sources:- Ambrose page 192...

    Romer send an account to John Howard from a Russian POW camp in late 1945 ( the war in Europe ended in May)... So Romer survived. He survived the war (if he also survived the POW camp I do not know)

    If he had been shot dead on the day on D-Day then no one had known Helmut... So how can a dead men write a story to Howard after the war...

    Conclusion..... ! He was not killed ! and not captured on D-Day!
     
  7. Donnie

    Donnie Remembering HHWH

    Hi Drew,

    Thanks for the reply.....i thought there was something in the old boys story.....

    Cheers, Donnie
     
  8. Verrieres

    Verrieres no longer a member

    Hi,
    Just to add to the confusion was`nt Den Brotheridge listed as the first British casualty killed by enemy action and not the first invasion casualty ,many men will have died in the initial Glider and Parachute landings as the Germans had flooded the fields as a precaution against such an event and many drowned.
    [​IMG]
    Den Brotheridge commanded No.25 Platoon, designated as No.1 Platoon for the coup de main raid on the Bridges. His glider carried Major John Howard and it was the first to land on LZ-X, next to Bénouville Bridge. The glider was brought to an abrupt halt upon landing and the force of it rendered all of the passengers momentarily unconscious. Fortunately for them, the German sentries, mere yards away, disregarded the sound of the crash as that of debris falling from a stricken bomber, and so the opportunity to attack the troops in the glider before they disembarked was lost. No.25 Platoon quickly recovered and very quickly Lieutenant Brotheridge led them across the bridge, rapidly dealing with any enemy they encountered. Brotheridge reached the opposite side of the bridge where he dropped a grenade into a machine-gun post. In the same instant he was himself shot through the neck. Mortally wounded, it was several hours before he died, but he was classed the first British soldier to die as a result of enemy action on D-Day. Source Pegasus Archive
    Regards
    Verrieres
     
  9. Verrieres

    Verrieres no longer a member

    [​IMG]
    Den Brotheridge`s grave he is buried in Ranville Churchyard and not the nearby Ranville Cemetery where so many of his comrades lie.
    Regards
    Verrieres
     
  10. Verrieres

    Verrieres no longer a member

    [​IMG]
    Helmut Romer
    Extract from the Daily Telegraph June 2004;-
    The first German soldier to witness the D-Day invasion was Private Helmut Romer, a thin-faced 18-year-old with floppy blond hair who barely knew how to fire a rifle. He certainly had no idea of the strategic significance of Pegasus Bridge, spanning the Caen canal at Benouville, where he was on duty on the night between June 5 and 6."As far as I was concerned, I was on a fairly boring bridge in the middle of rural France and was just very glad to be there and not on the Russian front," he said. At about 12.15am, his two-hour watch having come to an end, Romer was waiting impatiently to be relieved when he heard a noise that was to change his life.
    "One minute it was a duty like any other. The next there was this swishing noise, followed by a bang and we thought it was part of an Allied plane that had been shot down," said the now 78-year-old."But the sound kept getting nearer to us, accompanied by a huge shadow and we froze."The first glider, full of men from D Company Oxford and Bucks, led by Major John Howard, had crashed through the hazy sky and landed in a mound of barbed wire only 50 yards from Romer."Then some soldiers, their faces smeared all in black, started coming towards us and in the half-moonlight we saw they were British. In a split second, we realised what the story was."A petrified Romer fired a flare into the air from his Very pistol and screamed: "Alarm!""Within a few steps, they were on the edge of the bridge and started shooting around themselves wildly. [My friend] Sauer, I and our Polish comrade decided to leg it and we threw ourselves into an elderberry bush."From there, they watched as tracer bullets flew.
    Romer saw his sleep-drunk sergeant emerge from his pillbox on to the bridge. He just had time to ask: "What's wrong?" before he was shot dead. His fellow soldiers were gunned down in their similarly dozy state.From his hideout, the young Romer witnessed the sinking of a ship that tried to pass along the canal, a Mark IV tank being blown up by a Piat bomb by Sgt MC Thornton and the arrival of the commandos.The German soldiers drank canal water to keep themselves going. At around noon the next day, they saw troops accompanied by a piper - none other than Lord Lovat's Commando Brigade, Romer later discovered. Soon after, they gave themselves up."Thirty-six hours had passed and we were exhausted," Romer said. "We made the decision to hand ourselves over to the British, thinking 'Either they will shoot us or they'll take us prisoner'.
    "It was the afternoon of June 7. The Germans emerged slowly from the bushes with their hands in the air."Thank goodness for us they didn't kill us. I'll always be grateful to them for that," he said with a large smile. "But I think we must have looked so pathetic, they quickly realised we were not much of a threat."Romer, Sauer and the Pole were gathered up along with other German prisoners, their proud captors pausing to take a snapshot of them in front of a Sherman tank; a snapshot that would later become a history book illustration. A Jeep took them to the coast, where they waited thigh-deep in seawater for five or six hours for a landing craft.
    "We arrived at a small English port and, of course, we were utterly depressed and I had pneumonia," Romer recalled. "My abiding memory was of the Englishwomen in the doorways with babies on their hips who were silently drawing on cigarettes - I remember thinking how curious that was, how we weren't used to seeing German women smoking."They in turn were fascinated by us, though they were not unkind. The soldiers were pleasant as well, getting us to sing Lili Marlene during the journey."After being questioned at a greyhound track in London and fed biscuits and beans, the prisoners were taken by train to Glasgow and then by ship to Halifax in Canada, from where a steam train carried them across the prairies to Calgary."It was a wonderful journey, like being on holiday because by then I think we knew we were going to survive," he said.After two years in a PoW camp with 15,000 others, he spent time working on farms in England, returning to Germany in autumn 1947 "with sackfuls of cigarettes and coffee".
    It was not, Romer said, until John Ford's 1962 film of D-Day, The Longest Day, which he took his wife to see in Dusseldorf, that he realised the significance of the Pegasus Bridge drama.Romer is depicted as a skinny and bewildered young soldier throwing his flare into the sky before, as we know, he hightails it.For years he tended to block the whole experience from his mind, particularly after getting hate mail from those Germans who thought he had "acted cowardly" on the bridge and not like "a true German soldier who would have fought to the death"."It did affect me," Romer said. "When I met my future wife, Luise, at a dance class in the late 40s, I warned her, 'Do you really want to marry me? After all, I'm a coward.' " She told him: "Be grateful you were otherwise you wouldn't be alive today."The couple went on to have six sons with whom Romer still runs a family hotel in Hilden, near Dusseldorf, and a wholesale drinks company set up by his father.In the 1960s, he befriended John Howard and the two met in Normandy every year until the Englishman's death in 1999. They would pop into the famous Gondree Cafe before toasting each other with champagne on the bridge at 12.16am on June 6.Romer, the last of the Germans who were on Pegasus Bridge to have survived, plans to return again this year."Now I realise that the Pegasus Bridge adventure was a defining moment in my life. It was there that my second life began."

    Regards
    Verrieres
     
    marcus69x and Owen like this.
  11. marcus69x

    marcus69x I love WW2 meah!!!

    Verrieres, where did you get this information from?

    A lot of the things in your post match with what I've read elsewhere. Could he be the real Romer or another hoax out to tell tales?

    Good post mate.
     
  12. Verrieres

    Verrieres no longer a member

  13. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    Romer still runs a family hotel in Hilden, near Dusseldorf,


    I think it is this one...

    Hotel am Stadtpark | About us

    Owner:
    Römer Hotelverwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG

    Hotel am Stadtpark
    Klotzstraße 22
    D-40721 Hilden
     
  14. Smudger Jnr

    Smudger Jnr Our Man in Berlin

    Owen,
    Looks like you found the right man and Hotel, good detective work.

    Regards

    Tom
     
  15. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    Marcus, just a thought.
    If you that interested wny not write Helmut a letter?
     
  16. marcus69x

    marcus69x I love WW2 meah!!!

    Spot on lads.

    Marcus, just a thought.
    If you that interested wny not write Helmut a letter?

    :lol: Good idea mate but I'd have absolutely no idea what to write.

    "Hello, were you at Pegasus bridge...." :)

    I'll just be content with the fact that he's still alive and that second book I'm still reading is obviously not worth taking seriously as it states he died.

    Great stuff lads.

    cheers,
    marcus
     

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