Das Reich (28 page)

There is today no longer any prospect of discovering the definitive truth about Dickmann’s motive in moving against Oradour-sur-Glane. Some of those who knew are dead. Others, in the shadow of war crimes trials, have always had the strongest possible motives for lying. There are survivors of Dickmann’s company alive and living in Germany today who undoubtedly know some of the answers, but will never reveal them. Some of those with whom the author corresponded in researching this book know the whereabouts of men who were in the convoy that left St Junien that afternoon, but they have no intention of disclosing them.

Certain key points can, however, be brought into focus. First, it has sometimes been alleged that a tragic error was made – that Dickmann’s men moved against Oradour-sur-Glane, whereas the
maquisards
whom they sought were to be found around Oradour-sur-Vayres, twenty miles south-westwards near the forest of Rochechouart where the FTP had killed a number of German soldiers in recent weeks. There is no evidence to support this view. Oradour-sur-Vayres is geographically even more distant than Oradour-sur-Glane from the seizure of Kampfe and all the activity
concerning the Das Reich. Second, some Germans allege to this day that the
maquis
had perpetrated an abominable atrocity against Wehrmacht soldiers – some say against an ambulance convoy – near Oradour. Had this been the case, it is unthinkable that the Das Reich and for that matter the propaganda apparatus of Berlin would have failed to proclaim the fact at the time, as they did the alleged killing of prisoners at Tulle. This possibility can be discounted. Third, the evidence is overwhelming that there was no
maquis
presence in or around Oradour-sur-Glane. The nearest
maquis
camp was some seven miles south-westwards.

Yet it is impossible to believe that French historians have been justified in asserting so often since the war that Oradour was the victim of an entirely arbitrary, blind stroke of savagery by the Germans. Even at their most ruthless moments, the SS contrived to pursue a policy that in their own terms possessed some logic. With so many scores of villages from which to choose for Dickmann’s purge – many of them with well-known links with the
maquis
– why should he have chosen Oradour? It seems most probable that Dickmann acted upon misplaced intelligence received from some deluded or malignant French source. The Germans, in their mood of frustration that day, were questing urgently for a clue to a target. Someone in Limoges or St Junien placed the finger upon Oradour. Once the hint had been given, Dickmann showed no interest in confirming its accuracy. A pretext was enough. It seems almost certain that his officers expected Dickmann. to do little more to Oradour than they had done to scores of suspect French villages that summer – search, and make an example with a clutch of salutary executions and burnings. But from the unhesitating conduct of the major that afternoon of 10 June, it seems equally clear that, in his own mind, Dickmann drove into Oradour knowing precisely what he proposed to do.

Englishmen or Americans would describe Oradour-sur-Glane as a small town rather than a village. Its 254 buildings included two
small hotels and more than a score of shops. The tramway to Limoges, built in 1911, had marred the appearance of the main street, the Rue Emile Desourteaux, with overhanging cables and pylons, but it had also provided electricity and brought the village within easy commuting distance of Limoges. It was a community of twentieth-century suburban architecture and privet hedges – never beautiful, but set in the perfectly rural woods and fields of the flat countryside west of Limoges.

There was a strong leavening of bourgeois and professional families among its inhabitants – some of them were lingering over an expansive Saturday lunch at the Hôtel Milord on the afternoon of 10 June, for the black market ensured that there was no shortage of food for those able to pay for it. In the past four years of war, the population had become swollen with the sort of ragtag of refugees who had descended upon even the most remote French rural communities to escape persecution, or to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Allied bombing targets. The BBC French Service had been warning since 16 April that ‘all vital points on the railways in Belgium and France will be subjected to attack in the coming weeks. Get away from them.’ Some of those in Oradour on 10 June had paid heed. There were Jews and Alsatians; Parisians and Lorrainers; a group of thirty Spaniards, flotsam of the Civil War who had taken local manual jobs. The town was crowded, and not discontented. Like every other community in France, it had received the news of the Allied landings as the promise of an end to the long struggle, and the fighting was far enough distant to present no threat or cause for fear. Many people had drifted into the village to collect their tobacco ration, issued every ten days, or to do the weekly shopping. The three schools were full, because it was the day of a medical inspection and vaccination. The boys’ schools opposite the tram section held sixty-four children, while the girls’ – divided into three classrooms – held 106. There was also a special school for the little Lorrainer refugees.

Every circumstance conspired to ensure that Otto Dickmann
found the village crowded with people. By early afternoon the farmworkers had come in from the fields. A few weekend fishermen had ridden the tram from Limoges to try their luck on the Glane. There was the usual Saturday foraging party from the city, seeking food that was more readily available in the countryside. The streets were still damp from a morning shower, but the sky had cleared and the sun was shining, warming the grey, creeper-clad houses. Oradour was a drab, unprepossessing place, but in the midst of war, Occupation and so many troubles and uncertainties it seemed a haven of sanity. ‘This place’, a young refugee named Michel Forest wrote in his diary, ‘is pervaded by a classical tranquillity, in which one can live as a human being should. Everything here is done in moderation in the best sense of the word.’

He was a twenty-year-old law student, the son of a philosophy teacher, Professor Forest, who had been born in Oradour, and had now returned to find some peace and quiet with five of his six children – the eldest was an STO evader with a
maquis
in George Starr’s area. In March 1944 the Germans had closed all the universities in France, and Professor Forest moved into the pleasant little Château de Laplaud, a mile west of Oradour, rented to him by a family friend, the Vicomtesse de Saint-Venant. Michel, a deeply religious young man, was to take his first communion on 11 June. On the afternoon of the tenth he walked into Oradour with his six-year-old brother Dominique – the family favourite – to get a haircut and see his grandfather. Professor Forest took the other three children with him on the tram to Limoges.

An insurance agent from Avignon was also on the Limoges tram that afternoon. M. Levignac had just moved his sons to Oradour because of the intense Allied communications bombing. An overshoot from the railway yards killed their neighbours in their own home, and M. Levignac decided that enough was enough. His eldest son Serge, sixteen, was now billeted with a farmer on the edge of Oradour, and the younger Charles, twelve, was staying with two elderly women. M. Levignac himself had
travelled up from Avignon on the afternoon of the ninth to visit the boys, and had spent the night in the Hôtel Avril. He scribbled his wife a postcard to say how well he found them: ‘I feel I am giving our sons life itself.’ Then he left them for a couple of hours, promising to be back by early evening.

Another refugee was the wife of Robert Cordeau, a French POW working as a forced labourer near Danzig. The family came from Paris, but found life there very difficult during the Occupation. Mme Cordeau originally came from Oradour and after discussing the matter in letters with her husband, she decided to return to the Limousin. She found a job as secretary to a Limoges doctor, and her sixteen-year-old daughter Bernadette began to learn dressmaking in Oradour. On the afternoon of the tenth Bernadette was in the village, while her mother was in Limoges because the doctor was on call.

Denise Bardet, a twenty-four-year-old teacher at the girls’ school, was one of the few people in Oradour who knew that the SS were in the area. The previous day she had boarded the rickety
gazogène
bus to St Junien with a little group of her girls who had to sit an examination in the town. They arrived to find a company of the Der Führer billeted in the classrooms, and SS troopers striding through the playground. The first thought of any woman in France when she saw Germans sweeping the district was fear for the men – they could be seized as hostages or carried off for forced labour. Denise Bardet was engaged to a young man in Limoges, and her brother was at the teacher training college there. She returned safely to Oradour on the evening of the ninth, but lay awake for hours in the big bed that she shared with her widowed mother in her cottage outside the village, discussing the alarming scene in St Junien. The next day she was at school as usual. She returned home for lunch, then mounted her bicycle and pedalled unhurriedly back to the classroom to supervise the afternoon medical check.

Here then, at 2.15 on the afternoon of 10 June, the tableau is frozen for the rest of history: an undistinguished Limousin town, its normal population of 330 swollen to some 650 by the pressures of war, lingering over the remains of its lunch on a sunny early summer afternoon; a community that had hitherto glimpsed the German Occupiers only as a convoy roaring past upon the main road, or a handful of officers slipping out from Limoges for dinner at the Hôtel Emile. There had been no battles around Oradour, no descents by the Gestapo, no brutalities. Insofar as life in France in June 1944 could anywhere be declared to be normal, in Oradour it was so. The men tilled the fields beyond the little back gardens of the town with their two-seat privies and neatly tended bushes. The women eked out the erratic food supplies and complained about the chronic queues and shortages, but there was no real hardship in Oradour.

Two young trainee teachers from the college in Limoges finished lunch at the Hôtel Milord and strolled to the edge of the village together before one, who was on an assignment with one of its schools, turned back to her classroom. The other making for a hamlet a little way off, waved, turned, and disappeared down the road. She was the last French civilian to leave Oradour at peace that afternoon.

The spectacle of Otto Dickmann’s trucks and half-tracks grinding up the main street of Oradour, laden with helmeted and camouflaged-smocked infantry covering the houses with their weapons, caused immediate astonishment and bewilderment. ‘Let’s hide,’ said a motor mechanic named Aimé Renaud to his elderly wine merchant friend M. Denis. I am not afraid of the Germans, replied Denis phlegmatically. ‘They’re only ordinary men like us, and anyway I am too old to be frightened any more.’

But some people in Oradour had reason to be terrified by the very sight of Germans. Martial Brissaud was a teenager from Les Bordes, just arrived to visit a friend, and appalled by the thought of being seized for forced labour. Dr Desourteaux, mayor of Oradour like his father before him, sought to reassure the boy
when he ran to him in the street, but Brissaud was not persuaded. He fled homewards and took refuge in the loft. He tried in vain to persuade his family that they were all in urgent danger, then took to the fields and stayed there all afternoon. Other parents were more prudent. ‘Hide! Hide!’ shouted Mme Belivier to her eighteen-year-old son, who also fled into the fields. A Jewish couple staying at the Hôtel Avril frantically drove their two daughters of eighteen and twenty-two, together with their nine-year-old son, into a bolthole under the staircase just by the garden door. A Jewish dentist from Rennes named Lévy ran for his life to the fields. His wife was already in a concentration camp. His lunch companion, a Mme Jeanne Leroy from St Malo, remained composedly at her table. Her papers were perfectly in order – she had been driven out of St Malo when her home was taken over by German workmen strengthening the fortifications. She had nothing to hide or fear.

One of Dickmann’s men led Dr Desourteaux to the major, who spoke briefly to him. M. Depierrefiche, the town crier, was hastily dispatched through the handful of streets escorted by two SS troopers, beating his drum and calling on the entire population to assemble instantly in the Champ de Foire, the little central square, bringing their identity papers. Apprehension gave way to relief and irritation. After all, it was only another identity check.

But as the troopers fanning out through the town began to fire in the air, to hammer doors with their rifle butts and push and jostle families through the streets, uncertainty increased again. A strange convoy appeared at the end of the road: families from outlying farms and hamlets were being herded towards the Champ de Foire – a pretty enough place with its trees and a covered well – by impatient, dead-eyed infantry, A local tenant farmer named Jean Rouffranche was in the crowd with his wife Marguerite, their son Jean and their daughters Amélie and Andrée – Amélie pushed a pram bearing her seven-month-old daughter, and behind her came their eighty-year-old grandmother. The Le Lamand family came with their small grandson and granddaughter,
maid and elderly mother. Their son and daughter were away at a wedding. Other men were being driven in from the fields. Mme Binet, the principal of the girls’ school, was ill in bed, but now appeared with a coat thrown over her nightdress. Another sick old man was carried by his two sons. The Abbé Lorich, the Lorrainers’ own priest, was pushed out of his house with his sister and a friend.

SS troopers burst into the school classrooms calling ‘
Alle ’raus!
’ The teachers hurriedly mustered their charges and bustled them in orderly crocodiles towards the square. Some cried, but they were hurried onwards, because everyone in Oradour that afternoon was desperate to be compliant. It is a rule of civilized or even semi-civilized existence that if threats and provocation are met only by submissiveness, the aggressor has no pretext for resorting to violence.