Das Reich (26 page)

Yet the people of the western Dordogne were fortunate, had they but perceived it. The Germans had neither the forces nor the
time to pursue massive, systematic reprisals for the attempted uprising. The Dordogne suffered, and the
résistants
had suffered some 200 killed, but they escaped the terrible fate of Vercors a month later, where in a precisely comparable situation the victorious Germans meted out wholesale slaughter and destruction. If the attempt to liberate the region had been ill-judged, the isolation of its communications had critically hampered the Germans. The first of the Das Reich’s tank trains, bearing the heavy armour north from Périgueux towards Normandy, was unable to assemble, load and depart until the evening of 15 June, although, as has been shown, OKW had demanded its movement five days earlier.

It is now time to return to the night of 8 June, to rejoin the Der Führer Panzergrenadiers crawling wearily into Limoges after their long drive north from Montauban. The city sprawls grey and unlovely on the hills above the north bank of the Vienne. Limoges is more than twice the size of Brive, an industrial metropolis dedicated to porcelain, enamel and shoe-making. Renoir made his living here for a time, painting porcelain, but it is difficult to imagine that he enjoyed himself. In AD 250, St Martial came to convert the region to Christianity, but some ungrateful citizens of Limoges had him cast into captivity. Tradition relates that an ethereal light promptly overtook the prison, aweing his jailors and the local inhabitants, who freed Martial to stride to the temple and cast down the false idols.

No such heavenly deliverance was granted to the Limousin in June 1944. The German garrison considered itself in a state of siege. The Der Führer arrived with orders to sweep the region, clear the vital road links, and destroy
maquis
concentrations wherever they could be found. The town’s railway junctions had been badly affected by determined action by
cheminot
saboteurs after D-Day. On the afternoon of the eighth the Gestapo and local garrison troops moved on the main rail depot, seeking to arrest suspected
résistants
. They opened fire, killing one apprentice and wounding
another, shooting a wanted man who attempted to bolt. There had also been a string of
maquis
attacks on isolated German vehicles, whose occupants when captured had almost all been shot out of hand. At about 2 am on the ninth, the first vehicles of the Der Führer reached the nervous town, and Colonel Stadler and Major Weidinger drove to local headquarters for news. ‘The regiment is greeted with general relief,’ states Weidinger’s history. ‘All the Germans in the town hope that it will remain as long as possible. They have been cut off for two days from the outside world. Not a single vehicle had got through the circle of
maquisards
, either entering or leaving. There is talk of a converging
maquis
attack on the town . . .’ Stadler set up his headquarters in the Hôtel Central, and gave his battalion commanders their orders. The 1st battalion, under Dickmann – which was many hours late and had not yet arrived – would take up position on the western side, based on St Junien. The 1st battalion of the Deutschland would cover the south. The 3rd battalion under Major Kampfe would take the east. Kampfe’s initial task, at first light on 9 June, would be to push north-north-east, towards Argenton-sur-Creuse where the
maquis
were said to be in control, and north-west to Guéret, where there was word of heavy fighting and beleaguered German troops.

The AS and FTP had planned a joint attack on Argenton but, as so often, cooperation broke down. Eighty AS men from Châtillon-sur-Indre, who were intended to occupy and hold the approaches to the town, were diverted to another operation at Chauvigny. Fifty men of the FTP under Henri Lathière attacked alone. They seized two petrol trains in sidings at the station, blew the railway in several places, and moved the passengers of a blocked through train into the local school. They took prisoner twenty-three Germans from the local garrison, who surrendered promptly, and established defensive positions. They then sat down to see what happened next.

At 6.15 pm on the evening of 9 June, shooting was heard from the Limoges road. The 15th company of the Der Führer advanced
into the town, firing as they came. Henri Rognon, a twenty-year-old former Vichy soldier who had joined the Resistance only on 6 June, shot it out until the house in which he lay was blown down on him. Most of the FTP retreated hastily from the area. As usual, it was the population of Argenton who bore the price for their liberation. Three elderly inhabitants of homes on the Avenue Victor Hugo died where they sat. The Germans conducted a swift and ruthless house-clearing operation. One party burst into the homes of the Vilatte family, where a mother and her two daughters were at supper. The first burst killed Gisèle, thirteen, and a second disposed of her mother as she dragged her other daughter, Nicole, seventeen, wounded to the sofa. Nicole died in hospital two days later. The SS then gathered a hundred people found in the area, including the passengers from the stranded train. Six men were taken from the group and shot at once. Another group of ten, whose papers were not in order, was held aside. One of them was a sixteen-year-old
gendarme
’s son. His elder brother, who had been questioned and released, asked to stay with the younger boy. His request was granted and the two were shot together, along with the others. A total of fifty-four people died during and after the recapture of Argenton.

Meanwhile, further south the rest of the 3rd battalion under Major Kampfe was advancing from Limoges to Guéret, which had been in
maquis
hands since 6 June. On the road, they had a sudden encounter with two lorries moving southwards towards them.
Maquisards
in one vehicle opened fire at once, severely wounding the officer in the leading German half-track. They then abandoned the trucks, and fled through fierce German fire. When the SS reached the French vehicles they found that these contained German soldiers and officials, together with several French collaborators captured by the
maquis
in Guéret. Two of the Germans were now dead, several wounded, and a Frenchwoman had a severe stomach wound. Putting the casualties at the rear of the
convoy, the battalion moved on through the thick woods and steep hills of the Creuse. Just beyond Bourganeuf, they encountered another Resistance convoy. This time the Frenchmen surrendered, and twenty-nine were immediately shot.

There was a
Garde Mobile de Réserve
training school in Guéret, whose pupils defected
en masse
to the Resistance on 6 June. The former Prefect, who had been deposed by Vichy, was reinstalled. The town celebrated. Then, on the morning of the eighth, it was subjected to heavy German air attack. Wehrmacht units moved up from Montluçon with air support, and by the time Kampfe’s men arrived at 5.30 pm on the afternoon of the ninth, the Germans had already re-established control.

The SS moved the wounded Frenchwoman to the local hospital. Kampfe then ordered Muller, the battalion doctor, to put the rest of the wounded in a half-track and return to Limoges as rapidly as possible. He left two platoons of his support company in Guéret to bolster the German perimeter. Then the rest of the battalion, tired and not a little exasperated, swung themselves back into their vehicles, and turned once more towards Limoges.

At about 8 pm, Dr Muller’s half-track was clattering along the road when it was overtaken at speed by Major Kampfe’s open Talbot. The CO, in a hurry to return to headquarters after a frustrating day, waved carelessly and swept on. He was one of the stars of the division, a thirty-four-year-old former printer and Wehrmacht officer who had transferred to the SS in 1939. Tall, very strong, and a keen athlete, he had fought with distinction and won the Knight’s Cross in Russia.

At dusk on 9 June, as his car approached a road junction at the tiny hamlet of La Bussière, fifteen miles short of Limoges, he saw a lorry approaching and flashed his lights in greeting. With extraordinary lack of prudence, he halted and found himself surrounded by a ring of armed men, led by a miner from the nearby town of St Léonard, Sergeant Jean Canou, who was returning to an FTP
maquis
after blowing up a bridge at Brignac. The group had been travelling by side roads, and were cautiously
crossing the main D941 when they chanced upon Kampfe, whom they claimed later was accompanied by a driver (German accounts hold that he was alone). Canou was not highly esteemed by his fellow
maquisards
for his brainpower, but he knew a splendid catch when he found one. Kampfe was bundled into the lorry. They could do nothing with his Talbot, for the Frenchman at the wheel of the truck was the only one among them who could drive. They said later that Kampfe showed no sign of fear, but seemed arrogantly confident that he would soon be free, no doubt because he expected to meet his own men on the main road. Within a few minutes the incident was over. Canou and his men turned up a narrow dirt road towards their camp at Cheissoux. They testified after the war that they handed Helmut Kampfe to another
maquis
, and never saw him again. To this day there is no reliable evidence of the major’s fate. The only certainty is that some time after his disappearance he was killed by the
maquis
. It is a matter for speculation whether this took place immediately, or following the events of the next few days. SS records listed him: ‘Missing in southern France in action against terrorists.’

Colonel Stadler’s first knowledge of the disappearance of one of his battalion commanders – more than that, a close friend who had served as his adjutant in Russia – came with the arrival of a grim Dr Muller. He could report only that he had found Kampfe’s car, engine running and doors open, a Schmeisser without a magazine lying beneath it, but no signs of blood or violence. The battalion adjutant, Captain Weinrauch, was leading the men in a sweep of the woods around the long, straight avenue of fir trees in the middle of which Kampfe had been seized. The SS were bitterly angry. All night, frightened local peasants heard the roar of vehicles grinding down the tracks through the woods, occasionally firing flares to light the area. Two fanners from the hamlet of La Bussière, Pierre Mon Just and Pierre Malaguise, each in his forties and the fathers of five children, proved unable to provide any useful information and were shot in the ditch by the roadside. The Malaguise farmhouse was ransacked. The Germans sent
for help from the Limoges
milice
, who could provide specialized local knowledge to strengthen the search.

At regimental headquarters, frustration was compounded by their inability to communicate directly either with the 3rd battalion’s search parties, or with divisional HQ in Tulle. Stadler ordered Weidinger to leave at once in a Volkswagen field car with strong motor cycle escort, and report personally to Lammerding in Tulle. It was a nervous journey through the darkness. They travelled in a long, dispersed column, never faster than 30 mph for at any moment they expected to meet a terrorist roadblock. Shortly before 1 am, to their overwhelming relief they saw ahead the knife-rests and parked vehicles of the German outpost at the entrance to Tulle. They were waved through to the divisional headquarters, along the silent, heavily patrolled streets. In the lobby of the hotel where Stuckler had established his offices, among the orderlies and staff still sobered by the events of the day, Weidinger found Lammerding. He recollects only that Lammerding ordered the regiment to pursue the search for Kampfe with the utmost vigour. For the first time, Weidinger learned of the events in Tulle, and endorsed the staff view that reprisals had been entirely justified. Then he set off back to Limoges in the first light of dawn. At 6 am, he was with Stadler again.

The regimental commander’s night had not been dull. In the early hours of the morning, the
Sturmgeschützabteilung
’s ordnance officer, Lieutenant Gerlach, had arrived exhausted at Stadler’s headquarters dressed only in his underwear. On the morning of the ninth, Gerlach had driven with six men in three cars to reconnoitre billets for his unit in Nieul. Finding insufficient space, they moved on towards the next town. Gerlach had been specifically warned by Stadler about the terrorist menace, but raced ahead of the other cars, accompanied only by his driver. They soon found themselves alone. Becoming nervous, they turned the car and started back towards Limoges. A few minutes later, they were forced to halt in the middle of the road, and surrounded by
maquisards
. They were stripped, not gently. One
maquisard
strained his knowledge of German to shout repeatedly into their faces ‘SS! All kaputt!’, and made unmistakable slicing gestures at their throats. They were then forced back into their car and driven away. The little convoy stopped and started several times that afternoon as they moved Gerlach and his driver across the Limousin countryside. They were bound for some time, according to the German, but were later untied. Then the Frenchmen stopped at the edge of a wood, and gestured the Germans to move into the trees. Gerlach testified that they were both certain that they were about to be shot. The driver began to struggle. Seizing the moment while the Frenchmen’s attention was diverted, Gerlach ran headlong for the trees, pursued by a ragged fusillade. After some hours’ walking, he reached the Bellac–Limoges railway line, and stumbled down it until he reached the city, and at last his commanding officer. Stadler sent him to bed. Gerlach awoke to find another officer standing over his bed – Major Otto Dickmann, CO of the 1st battalion. Dickmann handed Gerlach the map. According to the ordnance officer’s subsequent evidence, the major demanded to be shown the exact route down which he had been taken by the
maquis
from the moment of his capture to that of his release.