Das Reich (15 page)

Stuckler, the division’s 1a or senior staff officer, was an effective administrator. A thin, sombre man of thirty-one, the son of a works manager who had been an air force NCO in World War I, he had yearned to be a pilot himself, but the family had lacked the money. Instead he had joined the Bavarian police, and three years later, in 1935, the new Wehrmacht. After five years as a gunner, he was put through the superb General Staff course and was serving as a Corps staff officer in January 1944 when he found himself transferred to 2nd SS Panzer.

His first problems now were the two Panzergrenadier brigades. Both were desperately short of transport and contained too many under-trained recruits. A drastic solution was decided upon. The Deutschland regiment would hand over its best battalion – the 1st – and all regimental transport to the Der Führer. The Der Führer would transfer its least effective battalion – the 2nd – to the Deutschland. The weaker Deutschland brigade would remain at
Montauban, together with the least equipped artillery battalion and a rag-tag of support units until their training and transport position improved. After a further exchange of signals with 58th Corps, the Deutschland under Major Wisliceny was ordered to form a 600-man battle group from its better-trained elements to operate in a local security role under the orders of Toulouse. This force achieved its own terrible notoriety in south-west France in the weeks that followed, but its operations in Gascony have no part in the story that follows.

At dawn on 8 June, the great columns of vehicles and armour began to roar into life in lagers for thirty miles around Montauban. Lurching forward with their great clatter and screeching of tracks, they started to swerve out on to the roads, tearing up the asphalt behind them as they moved north through the sharp early morning light. It was an immensely complex manoeuvre to organize some 15,000 men and over 1,400 vehicles in order of march. Wulf’s reconnaissance unit, the
Aufklärungsabteilung
, was a few minutes late. The headquarters groups of the Der Führer, led by the inevitable motor cyclists, impatiently rolled away up the Cahors road without waiting for them. Behind, throwing a long, pursuing dust cloud into the sky, came the trucks and half-tracks and field cars.

In the heavily armed armoured cars and gun-mounted half-tracks of the reconnaissance group, the men ate cherries and sausages purchased with the last of their ready money from the fat, blackhaired grocer’s wife in Beaumont-de-Lomagne where they had been billeted. Every vehicle had been ordered to maintain 100-metre spacing in case of air attack. Karl Kreutz, the artillery commander, sat beside his driver with a Sten gun between his knees, souvenir of an Allied container drop captured by his men. It was a tradition that, on anti-terrorist sweeps, they kept what they found. While any Allied officer would have willingly thrown away his Sten in exchange for the much superior
German Schmeisser, in the way of soldiers it pleased Kreutz to carry a captured weapon. Behind him and his elderly driver, Feldwebel Lehmann, sat their ‘looky-looky’, the man nominated in every vehicle in the division to search the sky for enemy aircraft. From the moment that they crossed the Loire, the ‘looky-lookies’ would have plenty to do.

Far behind the towed artillery and the assault gun battalion, divisional headquarters and the flak units, came the two tank battalions, which were to swing eastwards at Cahors, taking the D940 north to Tulle. On exercises, engineer squads followed the armoured columns, repairing the havoc that they had wrought with the road surfaces. Today there were no such refinements. The tank squadrons were not expecting action. Two forty-gallon petrol drums were lashed to each hull – an essential measure when fuel supplies were uncertain, but unthinkable if there was a risk of gunfire. Within a few hours, as the sun came up, the heat and dirt and stink within the tanks were becoming intolerable. They moved far more slowly than the lighter elements, and halted every two hours to rest and make running repairs. Within a few miles of leaving Montauban, the maintenance crews were under pressure: the pins connecting the tracks snapped with heartbreaking regularity. Corth, the
Schirrmeister
or maintenance king of Pohl’s company, raced up and down the column with his men, sweat pouring down their bodies as they laboured over the roasting steel. They were grateful that Corth had wangled MAN engines for their entire company’s Panthers. Other, less fortunate units, equipped with the notoriously unreliable Daimler-Benz engine, suffered ceaseless problems. Major Tyschen, with his bullet head and the appalling scar on his chin, moved from company to company in his Volkswagen, checking tanks and driving their commanders. Already it was apparent that for the tank crews the road march would be a nightmare.

The division rolled without incident down the long, straight road beside the railway from Montauban to Caussade, and began the winding climb into the hills. It was open country here,
unsuited to ambushes or sniping. The men relaxed and sang as they lay against the guns or clung to the supports of their trucks. They breasted the ridge and saw the road fall away to Cahors, down a long avenue of plane trees, past the great rail viaduct, and then across the river into the medieval town. A number of isolated civilians were already dead, killed by fire from one or other of the columns on pretexts that will never be known. It may have been enough that they were under orders that this was to be a
ratissage
– a clearance and demonstration of dominance of the countryside which would not be complete without a heavy blood price. The reconnaissance battalion, the Der Führer regiment, the towed artillery and divisional headquarters – followed by the support units of the division – pressed straight on northwards, towards Souillac and Brive. The heavy armour branched east, to Figeac and St Céré. An hour up the road, Major Dickmann and his 1st battalion of the DF turned west at Gourdon. They were to swing through the eastern Dordogne, taking up their final position on the flank of the division in the Limousin. Ten miles up the road, at the tiny hamlet of Groslejac, the Das Reich Division began to fight.

Local Resistance histories record formally an action by ‘3rd Section, Company Rémy, Ace of Hearts
maquis
’. One of the survivors saw the day more simply. At 7 am on the morning of 8 June, Marcel Vidal, a stonemason who was also mayor of Groslejac, received a visitor. It was a woodseller named Victor, who was also an enthusiastic
résistant
, one of Guedin’s men. Germans were expected to pass through the village, said Victor, on their way north to fight in Normandy, and the order was that everybody must do everything possible to delay or to stop them. Vidal and Victor left the house, and began hastily knocking on doors up and down the village. There was a sharp difference of opinion among the men. Was it really worth it? What reprisals would the Germans take? How many of them would come, and was Victor sure that they would only be in lorries? . . . But one by one they dug out their weapons and walked, still arguing heatedly, towards the
old bridge across the Dordogne that lay at the north end of the village. Marcel Malatrait, the butcher who was also a radical socialist like so many of the people of the Lot, took command. There were two men from one of Soleil’s
maquis
who had come down from nearby woods where they were camped. One of them took his post on a rock overlooking the road, to fire a warning shot as the signal that the Germans were approaching. Ironically enough, Vidal had been given a revolver by the Germans as a mark of his status as mayor. Like most of the others there that day, he also possessed a 1914 vintage French Army rifle and bayonet. Each man held two grenades, from Resistance supplies. Almost all of them had served their time in the French Army – Vidal in the Alpine Infantry. But before that day, not one of them had seen action. The
maquisards
brought with them a single Bren gun. Fifteen men in all, they crouched and lay around the short, narrow bridge, and began the long wait in the sunshine. A few more wore the brownish tunics affected by some AS men. Most were in everyday peasant blue with berets. None really possessed the slightest hint of what was about to happen to them.

At around 8.30 am, they heard the warning shot from the rock. Up the single village street, round the curve towards the bridge swept the leading armoured half-tracks of Major Dickmann’s battalion of Panzergrenadiers. The little cluster of Frenchmen began to fire. The German vehicles slammed to a halt. Helmeted, camouflage-smocked infantry spilled out, racing for the cover of houses and trees, working swiftly round to outflank the defenders clustered at the bridge. A devastating hail of automatic fire poured on to the French position, answering the single shot, bolt-action rifles. René Lacombe, thirty-one, was mending his car outside his house, absurdly seeking to ignore the intruders, when German fire killed him as he stood. The Hôtel Jardel, just short of the bridge, was hit by cannon fire and began to billow flames. A gaggle of civilians fled hopelessly through the front door and were shot down as they ran. Louis Cauquil, one of the men on the bridge, tried to bolt across it as the Germans advanced,
and was blown dead into the roadway. The remainder of the Frenchmen, without lingering to try conclusions with their hand grenades, scrambled hastily down the river bank and fled towards the woods. The gunfire ceased. The Germans remounted their vehicles, leaving the French dead where they lay. The convoy rolled on over the Dordogne, with slight loss. Groslejac lay in silence again. Only the flames rising from the hotel and the bodies beside the road showed that there had been a battle. This mad, absurdly courageous act of defiance had lasted perhaps twenty minutes, and cost the lives of five of the defenders and five non-combatants. Today, a plaque beside the bridge records their names above the inscription: ‘It was here, on 8 June 1944, that a German column suffered an appreciable delay due to the sacrifice of these patriots.’

North of the river, the column approached the hamlet of Carsac. As they crossed a little bridge, they met a truck bearing five astonished
résistants
. One fled, pursued by fire. The other four were shot down at point-blank range. Dickmann had now intended to turn right, and move along the river to rejoin the main road at Souillac. Here, on 6 June, Guedin’s men had attacked a German outpost just after an armoured train had arrived to resupply it. The French had lost three wounded, and the region was duly marked down on the German maps as a hotbed of Resistance.

On 8 June, at Carsac, the SS briefly took the wrong road, and moved through the village towards Sarlat, firing as they went. Thirteen people died in as many minutes, including a Jewish refugee doctor, the eighty-year-old blacksmith Pierre Trefail, and a man driving oxen in the fields. Several houses were set on fire. The Germans then turned their vehicles, and disappeared down that most beautiful riverside road towards the east.

At Rouffilac,
maquisards
enthusiastically assisted by local civilians had erected a huge barricade across the road. The French later claimed to have killed the motor cyclist leading the column and hit an armoured car with a bazooka rocket before the Germans
broke through, killing one
maquisard
and wounding two who were later taken to the hospital at Sarlat. Fifteen civilians also died. Little more than a mile further on, at Carlux, the Germans shot two women at the approach to the village. They then rejoined the main road at Souillac, rather later than they had intended, without further incident. The Occupying army had reminded the eastern Dordogne of the cost of rebellion.
⁵

It should be noted that all the active
résistants
mobilized in the Lot that day were either directed by the Corrèze
Armée Secrète
, or belonged to the FTP
maquis
. The Groupes Vény were simply unaware that the German forces were upon them until it was too late. George Hiller wrote:

The most pathetic tragedy of the day was at the little hamlet of Gabaudet, a few miles south of Gramat in the heart of the Lot. Among hundreds of local young men who were streaming into the countryside from their homes to join the
maquis
after D-Day, a large party gathered in a farm at Gabaudet – it is thought
en route
to join the FTP group led by Robert Noireau, ‘Colonel Georges’. That evening, Noireau heard of their coming, and drove to join them. He and his colleagues were half a mile away when they heard heavy automatic fire, and prudently halted. Later, when silence fell and they could see only the smoke from the burning hamlet, they went into Gabaudet. An unknown unit from the right flank column of Das Reich had chanced upon the gathering of would-be
résistants
– which included a number of
gendarmes
– while patrolling up a side road. Ten boys and men, together with one girl, were shot on the spot. Eighty others were seized and driven off for deportation to Germany. To their overwhelming relief and astonishment, they were later released on the road to Tulle. Noireau’s men subsequently executed a French
gendarme
who was said to have informed the Germans of the gathering at Gabaudet.

The Ace of Hearts
maquis
, under Guedin’s command, was deployed across the southern Corrèze and northern Lot. Most were somewhat better armed than the little band at Groslejac, but like them they lacked the vital discipline and confidence that can only come with long training and experience as a unit. Very few
résistants
understood fire discipline – wasting ammunition is a chronic vice of guerillas. It is worth quoting the report of Maurice Parisot, commander of the Armagnac battalion, the most effective Resistance lighting group operating with George Starr, after their first action: