Das Reich (20 page)

Wulf could scarcely credit the picture he saw before him inside: fifty or more elderly reservists, blazing nervously at shadows from their windows; a handful of wounded on the floor; the men so shaken that they could not dispose of
maquis
sniper
firing from a position thirty yards away. Wulf curtly ordered his men to silence the enemy weapon, which ceased fire after a few moments. Then he turned to the cluster of delighted old men gathering around him, all talking at once. They were members of the 95th Security Regiment, and were commanded by Captain Reichmann, a fifty-five-year-old dentist from Baden-Württemberg. Wulf said:

Wulf reached his half-track to find Albert Stuckler arrived beside it at the head of the divisional headquarters column. They could plainly see
maquisards
moving on the hillsides above the town, and hear firing from the other end of Tulle. The first priority, clearly, was simply to sweep them from the streets.

The
maquisards
scattered through Tulle never organized a coherent defence against Wulf’s companies. Many were at the limit of exhaustion and had no more ammunition. At the sound of heavy firing, they began to trickle away into the hills. One party was counting the German dead at the Ecole Normale when someone shouted that enemy vehicles were approaching. They gave their only bazooka to a young Parisian watchmaker renowned as a marksman, and watched the German convoy crawl towards them.
A motor cycle and sidecar passed, then the watchmaker fired at the half-track behind. The rocket exploded against it, and the column stopped abruptly. The partisans began a hasty retreat from the town, leaving only a handful of bolder spirits who stayed long enough to fire off the last of their ammunition at the Das Reich.

Private Sadi Schneid, one of the young Alsatians who had been posted to the battalion anti-tank company at Bordeaux, crouched nervously with his fellow-recruits in their half-track as they moved into the streets of Tulle amid sporadic gunflashes. Their senior NCO, their almost worshipped Hauptscharführer – ‘Hascha’ – Kurz was the only man in the vehicle who knew his business perfectly. ‘We’ve got to make that machine gun shut up!’ he shouted, slamming the driver on the shoulder to make him halt. As the engine cut, for the first time they heard the gunfire. The men leaped down, unlimbered their towed Pak 75, and swung it towards the hillside from which a
maquisard
was using a Bren. The gunlayer, another raw recruit, was still peering intently through the eyepiece when, in a moment of black comedy, the gun fired and he was hurled bodily from his seat. On the asphalt road, the spades that stemmed the recoil could not grip. The ‘Hascha’ swore violently, the team pulled itself together and fired again. There was no sign of an explosion from the hill. The ‘Hascha’ cursed again: ‘That clumsy hippopotamus’ – this to the loader – ‘is feeding us solid anti-tank rounds instead of shrapnel!’ When the Pak crew fired again, the
maquisard
ceased fire.

Another of the company’s vehicles roared up to them, bearing two dejected prisoners with FTP arm brassards. An NCO stood up in the back and shouted a question to the ‘Hascha’ about what was to be done with them. Nobody knew. The half-track clattered away. Another followed with a shaken crew. A
maquisard
bullet had caught one of the young Alsatians in the eye, killing him instantly as he crouched covering their rear. The ‘Sani’ – the company medical orderly – confided to Schneid that he was feeling unhappy because he had killed a woman as they drove up
the street. He saw a curtain move, fired at the window, and saw a middle-aged Tulle housewife topple forward over the sill. Another half-track returned with a man dead and another wounded. A
maquisard
had lain poised above it to lob a gammon grenade into the interior as it passed.

But Wulf’s companies suffered very few casualties that night. There was no serious resistance to the reoccupation of Tulle. Within twenty minutes of the Das Reich beginning to deploy around the town, their dominance was complete. Dejected files of evicted
maquisards
were trudging away into the hills, bearing such wounded as they could carry off. ‘It was a Dante-esque spectacle,’ wrote one of them, Elie Dupuy. ‘Flares being fired from all directions, bursts of machine gun fire, cannon and mortar explosions overwhelming every other sound. Tired, beaten, our units and our men see all their efforts, their sacrifices and their hopes evaporate in a matter of minutes . . .’

The Germans, now unchallenged, deployed around the town for the night. Every wall in the centre was hacked and pock-marked by gunshots; windows stood shattered, shutters hanging torn and loose, glass strewn in the street. The townspeople remained closely hidden behind their doors, many already terrified by the prospect of German vengeance. Private Schneid slipped into a garage close to his platoon position, in search of some tools to repair a panel on the half-track damaged when the Pak gun recoiled into it. Suddenly he found himself overshadowed by an enormous, menacing figure – a ‘
Kettenhunde
’, a ‘chained dog’, one of the
Feldgendarmes
so called because of the chains of office around their necks. ‘And what are you doing here?’ demanded the man fiercely, and led Schneid, protesting, to his company commander to report a suspected looter. The officer sent the
Feldgendarme
on his way. It is an odd aside on the events of Tulle that such a matter at such a moment attracted the attention of German authority.

Hungry – for they had no more rations – and exhausted by the first encounter with live ammunition for many of them, the SS
lay by their weapons, dozing and standing guard through the brief summer night of 8 June.

Shortly after midnight, Wulf was called to divisional headquarters, temporarily established in a hotel at the foot of the town. Stuckler was furious. While the division had suffered only three killed and nine wounded in retaking the town, the body count among the German garrison showed that 139 men had been killed and forty wounded by the
maquis
. At first light, Wulf was to send one company to a point some twelve miles from Tulle which was reported to harbour the French headquarters and arms dump. The other two companies, less those men essential to control the perimeter, were to sweep the entire town, house by house. They were to seize any hidden weapons, and bring every male Frenchman in Tulle to the courtyard of the arms factory for an identity check. As a convenient starting point, any man without papers could be assumed to be a terrorist.

It was the beginning of the day that Tulle would never forget. From first light, files of SS troopers marched rapidly through the streets, hammering on doors, ordering out their terrified inhabitants, forming the first pitiful huddles of civilians to be herded towards the arms factory. The Prefect, Pierre Trouillé, had come close to summary execution himself when a case of grenades was found in his office, but he convinced the Germans that he had been an innocent spectator of the FTP takeover. Now, he asked Major Kowatsch, the divisional 1c or third-ranking staff officer, if there were to be any reprisals. He pointed out with perfect justice that the citizens of Tulle had been totally uninvolved in the events of the past two days. Kowatsch told both Trouillé and the German-speaking secretary-general, Maurice Roche, that no punitive action would be taken. This assurance was echoed at more junior levels. Private Schneid was summoned to interpret for one of his company officers who was commandeering a schoolteacher’s house for quarters. In answer to her frightened question, the officer said that reprisals had indeed been considered, but had now been decided against. Kowatsch told Trouillé that a decisive factor in
the decision to show mercy was the care with which German wounded had been treated in the town hospital.

Yet at 10 am, with some 3,000 Frenchmen of every age standing bewildered in the yard of the arms factory under the guns of the SS, a new order was given. There would, after all, be reprisals. Schneid and an SS detail were ordered to escort the town fire engine as its crew drove through Tulle reading a terrible proclamation at the street corners. Clinging to the back of ‘this antediluvian machine’ as it rang its bell to seize the attention of the citizens, they set off through the streets. The chief fireman – in tears according to Schneid – declaimed a brief German announcement which the soldier recalled as follows: ‘Because of the indescribable murder of forty German soldiers by communist
maquisards
, the German authorities have decided that three Frenchmen will pay for each German killed, as an example to all France.’ Within the hour, a formal proclamation copied by a local printer, hauled from his home, was being posted on the walls of Tulle:

It was now that the most dreadful drama of Tulle began, which to this day remains shrouded in controversy. The precise truth is beyond discovery. It is only possible to report the accounts given by the surviving participants.

Heinrich Wulf and his SS colleagues say that, early on the morning of 9 June, the senior divisional doctor who had been collecting the German dead from the battle arrived at headquarters to report that a single group of forty bodies had been discovered, horribly mutilated. Their faces had been stove in, and their testicles cut off and stuffed in their mouths. It was for this act, the Germans alleged, rather than for the Resistance attack, that reprisals were to be taken. Private Schneid claims to have heard the same story from his friend the ‘Sani’, the company medical orderly. He and his platoon went to the cemetery to bury their two men killed the previous night:

As soon as they had fired their ceremonial volley over the grave, he and the others were ordered to form a burial detail to carry away the corpses of the forty dead Germans:

One of the prime movers among the Germans for wholesale reprisals was Lieutenant Walter Schmald of the Tulle SD, the security police. Schmald had been in the Ecole Normale throughout its siege. He was a mechanic’s son from St Vith, in Belgian territory that had shuttled between German and Belgian possession since before World War I. A former chemistry student, he had served with the SS on the Russian front, transferred to the SD, and had been based in Tulle for five months. He and his colleague, Lieutenant Beck, knew that they had no hope of mercy from the FTP. When fire overtook the school and the garrison prepared to surrender, Beck put a pistol to his head and shot himself. Schmald found a hiding place in the kitchens, and far into the night of 8 June he lay suffocating amidst the smoke and ruins of the school, barely clinging to life. When he staggered from his refuge to meet the relief column, he was consumed with bitterness. He claimed that most of those who had surrendered were now among the mutilated bodies found by the SS. But for the persuasion of Maurice Roche, pleading urgently with the German divisional staff, if Schmald had had his way the Germans would have been preparing to hang several hundred Frenchmen.