Operation Sonnenwende in Alsace

At five in the morning on 7 January 1945 the German 198th Infantry Division, supported by tank destroyers and the remnants of a panzer brigade, attacked from the northern edge of the Colmar Pocket in Alsace. The attack, named “Sonnenwende” (solstice), drove north between the Ill and the Rhine towards Strasbourg. Facing it was the French 1st Free French Division, which had taken over the sector only a week earlier.

The popular account of the day – that the Germans, as part of a plan to retake Strasbourg, “broke out of the Colmar Pocket, a bridgehead on the Rhine, and headed east” – needs two corrections. The Colmar Pocket was indeed a German bridgehead, but on the left, western bank of the Rhine; to the east of it there was only the river, and beyond that Germany. Nor was the attack an escape from encirclement or a march eastwards: it was an advance northwards, towards Strasbourg. Sources differ on the date: French studies give 7 January, some German ones 8 January, when the attack gathered full momentum.

The Colmar Pocket

The pocket had formed at the end of November 1944. When the American Seventh Army and the French 2nd Armoured Division liberated Strasbourg, and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French First Army (PL) reached the Rhine near Mulhouse, Hitler forbade the German Nineteenth Army to withdraw across the river. A large enclave held out around Colmar – some 65 km from north to south and up to 50 km wide – resting on the Vosges to the west and the Rhine to the east, and supplied across the bridges at Breisach and Chalampé. It was under the command of Heinrich Himmler’s Army Group Upper Rhine.

The French, exhausted by the autumn fighting in the Vosges, were unable to eliminate it before winter. In December, when the Ardennes offensive forced the Americans to shift forces northwards, the First Army also had to take over from them the stretch of the Rhine south of Strasbourg.

The Sonnenwende plan

At the end of December the attack from the pocket was incorporated into the plan for Operation Nordwind, which opened on New Year’s Eve in northern Alsace. On 5 January, two days before Sonnenwende began, the Germans had crossed the Rhine at Gambsheim, north of Strasbourg. The blow from the south was to close the pincers.

Originally it was meant to be a subsidiary operation, a few attacks “at battalion level”. In the end General Hellmuth Thumm’s LXIV Army Corps was given the task of taking the triangle between the Ill and the Rhine, from Sélestat to Erstein, and establishing a bridgehead over the Ill. According to German plans cited by French historians, from there a march on Molsheim, west of Strasbourg, and the cutting-off of the city could be contemplated.

The main force was Generalmajor Otto Schiel’s 198th Infantry Division, badly depleted during the retreat from Provence after the Allied landings and made up with a medley of fortress battalions, sailors and guard units. Armoured support came from Colonel Franz Bäke’s 106th Panzer Brigade Feldherrnhalle, which according to German returns had only a few serviceable tanks at the time of the attack; from Major Karl-Heinz Noak’s battle group, with some twenty Jagdpanther tank destroyers and twenty-odd Nashorns; and from an assault gun brigade. The 269th Infantry Division stood in reserve.

On the French side the sector was held by Brigadier General Pierre Garbay’s 4th Brigade of the 1st Free French Division (formally already renamed the 1st Motorised Infantry Division): the 21st and 24th Marching Battalions and the Marine Infantry and Pacific Battalion. The division, a veteran of Bir Hakeim, El Alamein and Italy, had arrived from the Atlantic coast and was under strength. In the autumn of 1944, as part of the so-called “whitening” of the First Army, some 6,000 experienced soldiers from West Africa had – according to French studies – been sent away from it and replaced by untrained volunteers from the French Forces of the Interior. Colonel André Malraux’s volunteer Alsace-Lorraine Brigade operated in the area in support.

The first days: Krafft, Herbsheim, Rossfeld

On the first day the Germans achieved surprise. Grenadiers took Neunkirch, and Noak’s group crossed the little river Zembs and before noon appeared in front of Osthouse and south of Erstein. At around 1 p.m. the Germans captured the bridge over the Rhône–Rhine Canal south of Krafft, but their further advance on the village was stopped by the fire of French anti-tank guns, and sappers blew the bridge over the Ill relief channel. The French outposts at Herbsheim and Rossfeld beat off several attacks, by day and by night, with the support of the light tanks of the 1st Marine Fusilier Regiment. In the evening Himmler ordered the attack on Benfeld to be reinforced and then turned north-west, towards Molsheim.

On 8 and 9 January the attack slowed. The French counter-attacked in an effort to keep contact with their units pushed forward to the Rhine, while the German command, dissatisfied with the progress, relieved Noak and handed command to Bäke. Herbsheim and Rossfeld came under constant fire, and on 9 January the Germans cut off their garrisons, made up mainly of the exhausted Marine Infantry and Pacific Battalion.

Obenheim

The heaviest blow fell on Major (commandant) Pierre Coffinier’s 24th Marching Battalion, which was defending the village of Obenheim between the Rhône–Rhine Canal and the Rhine. On 9 January the Germans took neighbouring Gerstheim, from which a detachment of about a hundred men of the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade had withdrawn, and the battalion was cut off. According to French studies, the command – right up to de Lattre’s level – delayed the order to retreat while it considered holding the village as a strongpoint; only an evening armoured sortie by the marine fusiliers brought the defenders ammunition and food and took away the wounded.

On 10 January, after a day-long artillery bombardment, the Germans attacked Obenheim from four sides with tank destroyers, panzergrenadiers and an SS battalion. Supply drops by Marauder bombers largely fell outside the village. In the evening the Germans broke in, and at around 9.30 p.m., after destroying their papers and equipment, the defenders ceased fire. According to figures cited in French studies, 569 men, including 17 officers, were taken prisoner; about 20 had been killed and 80 wounded. Only a handful managed to slip away. Some sources date the fall of Obenheim to 11 January. The battalion ceased to exist; a street in Strasbourg commemorates its defence today.

That same day a French armoured detachment with paratroopers fought its way through to Herbsheim and Rossfeld, and soldiers of the division’s 1st Brigade – the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion – relieved the garrisons there. Holding the two villages proved impossible, however: Himmler demanded that the commander of the Nineteenth Army, General Siegfried Rasp, direct the battle personally, most of the 269th Infantry Division was committed, and on the night of 11–12 January the legionnaires and the men of the 11th Marching Battalion withdrew behind the Ill. On 12 January the Germans took both villages.

Halted on the Ill

Despite these losses the front did not collapse. The 1st Free French Division, reinforced by remnants of the 5th Armoured Division, paratroopers and aircraft, held the line of the Ill at Benfeld, Erstein and Krafft. On 11 January German tanks came within a few hundred metres of Benfeld but were stopped when the bridge over the Ill was blown. By 12 January the French had withdrawn all their units from the triangle between the Ill and the Rhine and dug in behind the river. The furthest-advanced German positions near Erstein were some 20 km from Strasbourg.

On 13 January the Nineteenth Army was ordered to give up the 269th Infantry Division, which was being rushed to the Eastern Front, where a great Soviet offensive from the Vistula had begun the day before. With it went any hope of a further advance. Over the following days the 198th Division was stripped of almost all its armoured support, and a last attempt – an attack on the footbridge at Huttenheim on 14 January – broke down. By around 16 January Sonnenwende had petered out.

For the French, what mattered more than a few lost villages was that Strasbourg had survived. At the beginning of January General Dwight Eisenhower, thinking above all of the Ardennes, had been prepared to withdraw from the city, and General Charles de Gaulle had ordered it to be defended even against the wishes of his ally. The defence of the southern approaches fell precisely to the 1st Free French Division. Had a breakthrough on the Ill coincided with an attack from the Gambsheim bridgehead, the city’s position would have become critical.

Losses

According to figures cited in French studies, the 1st Free French Division lost 99 killed, 389 wounded and 906 missing between 3 and 17 January, most of them from the 24th Marching Battalion; the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade and the armoured units also lost several dozen men. German losses for 7–12 January are estimated at 115 killed, 391 wounded and 155 missing. The French lost a dozen or more tanks and tank destroyers; the Germans had nine vehicles destroyed and several dozen damaged. Frost of down to –20°C, snow and fog restricted Allied air operations, which favoured the attackers.

Place in the war

Sonnenwende was a small but telling episode of the winter of 1944–1945. As part of Operation Nordwind it failed: it posed no serious threat to Strasbourg, did not destroy the French First Army and did not create a bridgehead beyond the Ill. As a local operation it brought the Germans limited success – the capture of the Ill–Rhine triangle and the destruction of a French battalion – bought at the price of a front lengthened by a dozen or so kilometres and a weakening of forces that would soon prove to be needed. It also showed how heavily the Colmar Pocket, left in place in the autumn, weighed on the situation in the whole of Alsace.

The lessons were drawn quickly. After the end of Nordwind the 6th Army Group was given the task of eliminating the pocket. On 20 January the French I Corps opened the offensive from the south, and on 22–23 January II Corps attacked from the north, including the 1st Division, whose battalions advanced east of the Ill across the ground lost during Sonnenwende. When progress proved slow, the Americans placed their XXI Corps under de Lattre. Colmar was liberated on 2 February, and on 9 February the last German units withdrew across the Rhine at Chalampé. Central and southern Alsace was free; the strip in the north, between the Moder and the Lauter, was abandoned by the Germans only in March 1945.