Case Title: Desperate
Defense of Postal Sub Office
Subject: Lone German
soldier defending insignificant
Post Office on Lijmbeek Straat
Date: September 18th, 1944
Location: Eindhoven,
Holland
Introduction:
During a 2004 interview about a
different subject, eye-witness
mr. Jan van den Wittenboer of Eindhoven, told us
the story of a German soldier
who made a desperate attempt to
defend the postoffice on
Lijmbeek Straat on 18 September
1944, the day Eindhoven was
liberated by the 101st Airborne
Division.
On the 4th of September 2009, we
talked to Jan van den Wittenboer
again.
He told us:
"My grandparents lived across
the street from the Post Office
on Lijmbeek Straat in the 1940's
and also after the war.
On the 18th of September, the
day Eindhoven was liberated, a
German soldier from the garrison
of Eindhoven, named Kochel, took
his defensive position in the
post office. Upon approach of
the first American
paratroopers, Kochel fired his
K98 rifle. The bullet hit the
gable of my grandparents' house.
The hole could be seen in the
years after the war. The house
has been demolished later and
there are modern houses there
today.
The Americans didn't take any
risks and bended the steel bars
in front of one of he window of
the post office and fired their
weapons into the building.
They didn't find Kochel
inside the post office but a
while later he was captured in a
shed behind the vegetable shop
on the other side of the street.
After the war I found out
that there was a tunnel under
the street from the post office
to the vegetable shop.
As a young boy I played in it
and because it had a steel and
the tunnel was made of concrete,
I had thought it was a bunker.
There is a photograph of
American soldiers taking German
soldiers prisoner on Lijmbeek
Straat, and I believe Kochel is
one the Germans facing the wall
of a house in that street."
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