Michael Wittmann

Michael Wittmann was born on 22 April 1914 in Vogelthal, a village near Dietfurt in the Upper Palatinate in Bavaria, the son of a farmer. He grew up in a rural environment and worked on the farm after leaving school. In 1934, shortly after the Nazi seizure of power, he enlisted in the German Army.

In October 1936 he registered with the SS unit in Ingolstadt; in April 1937 he transferred to the SS-Verfügungstruppe, the armed branch of the SS from which the Waffen-SS later emerged. From April 1938 he trained with the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, originally Hitler's bodyguard, which grew into an armoured division during the war.

In spring 1941 his unit went to the Eastern Front for Operation Barbarossa. Wittmann commanded a StuG III assault gun and later a Panzer III. In 1943 he commanded a Tiger I and led a platoon of four Tigers in the Battle of Kursk; on the first day his crew were credited with eight tanks and seven anti-tank guns. In November 1943 he fought in counter-attacks around Zhytomyr.

In January 1944 he received the Knight's Cross and shortly afterwards the Oak Leaves, for a claimed total of 117 tanks. German kills, however, were recorded per unit and are difficult to attribute to one person. In April 1944 he became a company commander in SS Heavy Panzer Battalion 101, which was sent from Beauvais to the front after the Allied landings in Normandy.

On 13 June 1944 Wittmann attacked a British column of the 7th Armoured Division at Villers-Bocage with his Tiger. In less than fifteen minutes his battalion destroyed 13 or 14 tanks, two anti-tank guns and 13 to 15 other vehicles, most of them attributed to Wittmann, before his own tank was disabled. He was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer and received the Swords to the Knight's Cross on 22 June.

The Waffen-SS was the armed branch of the SS, the Nazi organisation responsible for terror, the concentration camps and the Holocaust. The Leibstandarte, in which Wittmann served until 1944, was involved in war crimes such as the murder of British prisoners of war at Wormhoudt in 1940; after Wittmann's death, a battle group of the same division carried out the Malmedy massacre in December 1944.

On the Eastern Front Germany waged a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, with millions of civilian victims. In 1943–1944 Nazi propaganda looked for heroes to obscure setbacks; corps commander Sepp Dietrich promoted Wittmann as a figurehead of the Waffen-SS. With its 88-millimetre gun and thick armour the Tiger I offered a great advantage in individual engagements, but it was expensive and mechanically vulnerable.

The attack at Villers-Bocage disrupted Operation Perch, the British attempt to outflank Caen. The British withdrew and long regarded the battle as a heavy defeat, partly because German propaganda circulated manipulated photographs and a radio talk by Wittmann. Later analyses found the result less clear-cut: the Germans also lost tanks, and the British advance continued elsewhere.

After the war Wittmann became a cult figure in books, magazines and games about 'tank aces'. Historian Stephen Hart speaks of an established 'Wittmann legend', and military historian Steven Zaloga called him 'the hero of all Nazi fanboys'. Franz Kurowski's book 'Panzer Aces' (1992) is regarded as hagiographic and ahistorical; such works contributed to a romanticised image of the Waffen-SS.

On 8 August 1944 Wittmann led seven Tigers in a counter-attack against Operation Totalize near Saint-Aignan-de-Cramesnil. The group came under fire from two sides from British and Canadian tanks; a shell penetrated his tank, the ammunition exploded and the whole crew was killed. German propaganda claimed he had been hit by fighter-bombers, but historians reject this; Joe Ekins of the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry is often named as the gunner.

The crew were buried in an unmarked grave. In 1983 the German War Graves Commission found the remains, and Wittmann and his crew were reburied together at the German military cemetery at La Cambe. Historian John Buckley argues that attributing the entire German success at Villers-Bocage to Wittmann uncritically repeats Nazi propaganda; his tactical choices, such as his solitary advance into the town, have also been criticised.