We heard the incessant booming of field guns planes soared continuously overhead at night searchlights stabbed through the darkness. Now you’re the man of the family.” But nine days before Christmas, Field Marshal Von Rundstedt had launched the last, desperate German offensive of the war, and now, as I went to the door, the Battle of the Bulge was raging all around us.
“You’ll be safe in the woods,” he had told me. He had been ordered into the civil-defense fire guard in the border town of Monschau, four miles away. Father had stayed at the cottage on hunting weekends before the war when Allied bombers partly destroyed our hometown of Aachen, he sent us to live there. I was 12 then, and we were living in a small cottage in the Huertgen Forest, near the German-Belgian border. When we heard the knock on our door that Christmas Eve in 1944, neither Mother nor I had the slightest inkling of the quiet miracle that lay in store for us. It was Christmas Eve, and the last desperate German offensive of WWII raged around our tiny cabin. It is reposted here, in its entirety, for educational purposes: In 1973, Fritz Vincken told the story of what young Fritz witnessed as a child, in his home on the German-Belgian border that miraculous Christmas Eve. Most people have heard the story of the front-line, Christmas-time, truce in France during World War One, partially due to its retelling in the 2005 movie, Joyeux Noël, but not many have heard of the small Christmas Eve truce forced upon a handful of American and German Soldiers by a godly German woman during the Battle of the Bulge in World War Two.
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