Das Reich (25 page)
Lammerding’s report provoked a flurry of signals between the German command headquarters of France. Army Group G sent an urgent request to OKW for reinforcements to replace 2nd SS Pz on its withdrawal from Corrèze and Dordogne. They reported that, as an emergency measure, they were assembling a battle group from 11 Pz Div composed of two infantry battalions, one artillery battery and an anti-tank company: ‘The commander of the battle group will make personal contact with the staff of 2nd SS Pz in Tulle. His mission – restoration of peace and order and its maintenance by the strongest measures in the departments of Corrèze and Dordogne . . .’ A further signal to OKW, also dispatched on 10 June, indicated that ‘in view of the transport situation, entrainment of tracks 2 SS Pz Div Das Reich at earliest 12.6.44 at 00:00 Périgueux’. This was a reflection of the desperate flatcar shortage and the rail cuts. Yet before the tanks could even reach Périgueux, the spare parts were essential. On 11 June, Army Group G was signalling again to OKW: ‘High transport losses of 2nd SS Pz Div – immediate supply of following parts to Tulle essential . . .’ There followed a list that included twelve complete tank engines, two assault gun engines, and a vast array of wheels, tracks, sprockets and oxyacetylene equipment: ‘Arrival of parts essential to avoid delays in transport of division’s tanks . . .’ In short, the Das Reich Division was moving nowhere in a hurry.
Lammerding and his staff spent the day of 10 June at their headquarters in a villa on the Clermont-Ferrand road out of Tulle, grappling with their huge administrative problems, above all the recovery of the disabled armour on the road from Figeac.
The reconnaissance battalion, which now possessed unchallenged control of Tulle, organized several fruitless sweeps in search of terrorists north and south of the town, which achieved no more than the burning of a few farms and the execution of a handful of peasants who were slow to remove themselves from the Germans’ path. The companies remaining in Tulle set about comprehensively looting the town’s shops and houses while conducting further arms searches. Private Schneid and his section suffered the embarrassment of being billeted in the home of one of the previous day’s widows: ‘Our hostess, still ignorant of her husband’s death, asked us for news of him. We were cowards enough to pretend that he was not among the condemned, although he had been hanged at the corner of the next street . . .’ It was an interesting day. Ransacking one house, Schneid found an aged, mothballed blue
poilu
’s uniform in a tin trunk. An elderly woman appeared at the door. He suggested that she should dispose of her husband’s old souvenirs lest another less charitable searcher take it for a
maquis
uniform. The ‘Hascha’ appeared in high spirits, driving a splendid grey car that he had liberated. Another trooper carried off a motor cycle and sidecar. One man found a gramophone with a pile of Tino Rossi records: ‘Ah, Tino Rossi, if you only knew how often you enabled some young Waffen SS men to forget the war. Everybody adored your voice and hummed your songs. Later there was a rumour that after the surrender of Paris the partisans had killed you, you and Maurice Chevalier. Even the Germans were horrified . . .’ Above all, the troopers seized food, and revelled in breakfast with coffee: ‘The last of that Tullois salami lasted us as far as St Lô . . . We drank the last of the coffee in front of Mons.’
At 2.10 am on the tenth, the Das Reich issued the following tactical report to 58th Panzer Corps:
1. Area Souillac–Figeac–Clermont-Ferrand–Limoges in the hands of gangs, stubborn and well-armed.
Souillac–Limoges and Figeac–Tulle roads cleared.
2. Bulk of division in area Brive–Tulle–Limoges. Target for 10.6.44 Clermont-Ferrand.
Enemy losses: 500 dead, 1,500 prisoners
Own losses: 17 killed, 30 wounded
Heavy transport losses.
The figures for enemy losses included not only civilians shot on the road, but the ninety-nine civilians hanged in Tulle. The figure for prisoners included many Tullois men who had now been released. The decision to push east to Clermont-Ferrand was, as has been shown, almost immediately reversed. The Germans were now much more concerned about the situation westwards. The garrisons of Bergerac, Périgueux and Bordeaux were struggling to deal with the uprising inaugurated by Loupias and Philippe de Gunzbourg. They had already launched one modest attempt to relieve Bergerac from the west, which had been repulsed by the
résistants
. Now they were moving up heavier metal. Much closer to the Das Reich, on the road to Périgueux which the armoured columns must travel to reach their railhead, there was a report of a strong FTP presence blocking the highway at Terrasson, a small town on the Vézèré sixteen miles west of Brive. Army Group G reported to OKW that it was essential to move to clear this gang from Terrasson at first light on 11 June. Elements of the Das Reich would do the job.
Terrasson is a pretty little town of some 3,000 people with a twelfth-century bridge, a fifteenth-century church and a prosperous peacetime trade in truffles and walnuts. Since early 1944, the FTP
maquisards
in the hills to the south-west had found it a convenient target for demonstrations and limited raids without risking an encounter with major German formations, which normally
arrived only after their departure, in time to conduct reprisals against the townspeople. By June 1944, these hapless scapegoats were at their wits’ end. The mayor, Georges Labarthe, proprietor of a small sweet shop, recorded the events in an unhappy letter to his mother in Paris on 4 June:
Towards 11 pm on Wednesday evening we were woken by explosions and shooting. The town was in the hands of about a hundred men of the
maquis
, out on a punitive expedition. All the roads, all the paths were guarded, electricity cut, railways blown up. From behind our shutters, we saw men festooned with weapons moving in all directions, deploying to whistle blasts. The family in the house opposite our own were beaten and compelled to hand over their goods. It was the same at the shoe merchant’s and a bicycle shop. Meanwhile they had blown open the door of the
gendarmerie
and disarmed our eighteen
gendarmes
, whose rifles and revolvers they took away. They relieved the Post Office of 150,000 francs. They went to the house of the local Pétainist Legion chief. They blew open the door and shot him. He had been threatened and accused of informing a long time before, on many people’s testimony. From there they went to a glassmaker whom they shot with his wife. She was accused of informing to the Gestapo. The whole business lasted until four in the morning. At a whistle blast everybody got back in the lorries and went away. I leave you to imagine the terror of the inhabitants. Having received the blows of one side, here one was getting them from the other . . . I could have wished that there was no funeral [of the Legion chief], or at least that it was only a family affair, as was arranged for the
mairie
secretary. That was the accepted practice for victims of ‘happenings’ as one now calls them (we have had fifteen). But the Prefect, consulted by telephone, wanted normal obsequies.Ah! For the flexibility of a Talleyrand who survived the whole revolutionary process after occupying every position in sight!
But the troubles of the Mayor of Terrasson were to extend beyond agonizing about whether it was safe to attend a Vichy funeral. While the FTP’s battle for Tulle was at its height, Hercules, the FTP commander below Terrasson, returned to the town at the head of his men and began setting roadblocks and putting the approaches in a state of defence. When a few local townspeople sought to remonstrate with them, Hercules shouted contemptuously: Terrasson has 3,000 inhabitants and France 40 million! What can these here matter?’ The Fourth Republic was proclaimed in the central square. Local civilians were summoned to fell trees. The FTP took away a group of ‘suspects’, who were not seen again.
Mercifully for Terrasson, the German operation to clear the road on 11 June was not protracted. When the
maquisards
found themselves confronted by armour, and under shellfire from the SS vehicles, they retreated to their trucks, and to the hills, leaving a score of burning buildings, screaming women and children, and tumbled masonry beside the
mairie
where it had been struck by a 75 mm shell. The Germans burnt a house adorned with a red flag by the
maquis
, and discovered only afterwards that it was the property of Denoix, the departmental
milice
chief. The entire population was then assembled in the main square, covered by smocked and helmeted troopers. They knew what had happened in Tulle, and they were certain that they were to share its fate.
The unit doctor, who to the mayor’s relief spoke fluent French, pointed to the body of a
maquisard
which the SS had tossed down before them: ‘Does anyone recognize this man?’ No one admitted to doing so. The tension increased. They watched the doctor talking to the German commander and a group of officers. Suddenly the commander laughed. The doctor turned to the mayor: ‘The CO is in a good mood today, because it’s his wedding anniversary,’ he explained. Their only
maquisard
prisoner was publicly hanged, but Terrasson was spared. All that night and through the next day, as German columns rumbled through the town on the road towards Périgueux, the local firemen struggled to put out the last of the fires. To the town’s utter horror, towards
evening a group of
maquisards
reappeared, demanded to know what had happened, and to recover the body of their dead man. They were urged, implored and finally persuaded to leave. In an account composed on 13 June the mayor wrote:
I profit from an armoured train which is going to Périgueux to dispatch this letter. We have seen some horrors. We are all safe, but the cost is terrible: four killed, three wounded, the
mairie
burnt, eight houses destroyed by flames or tank gunfire, the population terrorized. We have lived through two hours of terror with the whole population gathered in the square covered by machine guns, a man hanged from the next-door balcony. God willed that I maintained a superhuman calm . . .
In a vivid afterthought, written on 9 July, Labarthe added:
The cycle is simple, and repeated every time: the
maquis
conduct an operation, the Germans arrive, the
maquis
disappears once more into the woods with slight losses, the civil population pay the tariff, the Germans go away and the
maquis
reappear. Where there are casualties among the Germans, the retribution is terrible. I must confess that in the circumstances it is hard to be the representative and the defender of the people!
The day that the Das Reich cleared Terrasson, 11 June, another FTP
maquis
attacked an armoured train at Mussidan station, south-west of Périgueux. They were beaten off with the loss of nine killed and eight wounded. In reprisal local German forces shot fifty-two hostages, including the mayor. Army Group G was now asserting itself to restore control of the main roads and towns throughout the Dordogne. On 12 June, as the first armoured elements of the Das Reich reached Périgueux, a German column smashed eastwards through the
maquis
cordon around Bergerac, killing twenty
résistants
and burning much of the village of Mouleydier. To the increasing despair of Bergeret and de Gunzbourg, it was becoming apparent that there would be no Allied parachute
landings to support them. Martial, De Gaulle’s departmental representative, was furious about the suicidal concentration of
résistants
facing inevitable destruction. In London, General Koenig was sufficiently alarmed by the great concentrations of
résistants
reported to be gathering that on the tenth he broadcast a somewhat clumsy request to restrain their activities: ‘Break contact everywhere to enable a phase of reorganization. Avoid large concentrations: form small, isolated groups.’ De Gunzbourg wrote:
At the end of four or five days I admitted to myself that we would receive no Allied support, and the situation threatened to become tragic. I had to send back the men in their trucks to their various departure points, and I was constantly woken in the night by panic-stricken people.
He was doubly depressed when a
résistant
from the Gers told him that his beloved
patron
, Starr,
. . . was displeased with me, and that I had not understood the orders given to me. Useless to say that I had suffered morally through a scarcely describable period when I believed that the country was going to liberate itself within a day or so, that the Allies had not kept their promises, that the various political factions were beginning to surface, and to dispute my action, that their leaders were seeking their own advancement through the Resistance . . .
Thousands of men and women took to the
maquis
rather than risk remaining in their homes and face German reprisals. The great concentration of
résistants
melted away into the countryside, and the German columns smashed the roadblocks and shot down anyone foolish enough to remain visible in their path. ‘The British had once again become
perfide Albion
,’ said de Gunzbourg sadly. ‘My own prestige and command of the region never recovered from their failure to arrive to support us.’
