Decorated by Hitler
After the battle, Lieutenant Witzig was promoted to captain and Hitler personally decorated the troops of the assault force. The Germans used the castle as a workshop and barracks. From the six existing generators in the fortress of Eben Emael, five were transported to the Atlantic Wall and the other still works.
Fortress held by the Allies
The Germans had not repaired the damaged guns, a fact that was ignored by the Americans when the fortress was recovered by the 30th Infantry Division in September 1944.
At seven-thirty in the afternoon of September 10, 1944, the Third Allied Battalion arrived at the abandoned fortress. At midnight it was in U.S. hands. But they learned that six German officers and 300 soldiers had abandoned the fort.
Finally, Eben Emael played his last role in the war of Mosella river canals. It was essential to capture the dams intact, as if the Germans managed to blow them, the resulting flood would have weakened the Allied right flank.
At five and a quarter in the afternoon of September 11, a team came to the canal through a tunnel of the fortress, having captured the dams without damaging them.
Since there was no struggle to take the fortress in 1944, today it can be seen as it was in 1940. Currently there are cultivated fields where years before German troops put their explosives to conquer the mythical Belgian fortress of Eben Emael.
