Das Reich (30 page)

In the countryside around the town the distant sound of gunfire and the columns of smoke from the village of fire aroused puzzlement rather than alarm. There was no
maquis
anywhere near the village, so there could scarcely be a battle. The fires appeared to be burning in the woods beyond Oradour. Towards late afternoon, the mystery deepened. Where were the children, due back from school? Little knots of mothers began to gather and chatter at the roadside, gazing towards the distant smoke. Mme Forest, at the Château de Laplaud, waited at the tea table with her husband for Michel, Dominique and their grandfather. A certain M. Deschamps had the most extraordinary, almost spectral experience of the afternoon. When he came in from the fields to his home at La Fauvette and found his wife beginning to worry about the children, he walked into Oradour to look for them. At the moment that he reached the school on the eastern edge, the Germans were fully occupied in the centre. He found the school deserted, the
children’s possessions still in their places, their caps and satchels in a neat row on their pegs, yet no sign of life. It seemed that Oradour had been evacuated. He glimpsed German soldiers at the other end of the street, and beat a prudent retreat.

A little later another parent, Mme Demery, mother of three children at the schools, had almost the same experience. She too visited the schoolhouses and escaped unmolested. But by this time she saw flames and heard screams and shooting. The news that she carried back across the fields heightened the growing alarm.

Other intruders were less fortunate. A young miller named Antoine cycled towards Oradour despite warnings from the roadside – ‘Don’t go into the town! They’re shooting in there!’ Antoine shrugged cheerfully: ‘The Germans had me as a prisoner of war. I know them – they don’t frighten me.’ Waving his white handkerchief high in one hand, he rode towards a German picket covering the approach to the village. There was a single shot and he fell. A trooper finished him with a pistol.

Around 6 pm, when the shooting had subsided, Marie-Léon Foussat walked towards Oradour, despite advice to stay away. He also waved a handkerchief. He also was shot. So was the driver of a small maintenance tram who arrived from Limoges late in the afternoon. Jacques Boissou, a farmer from Mas de l’Arbre, was fired upon as he approached the village, and pursued as he fled. He lay in a little stream until nightfall, seeing one man killed as he did. When he returned to his own home, he found that his mother and grandmother had gone to Oradour. Blanche Taillander had an extraordinary escape. Dickmann’s men burst into the house where she was having lunch with a woman friend, shot the friend, but spared Mme Taillander because her identity card showed that she was from Paris.

When the tram bearing M. Levignac and all the other weekend shoppers back from Limoges reached the edge of Oradour, they gazed up the hill in utter horror at the palls of flame and smoke, and the infantry still moving briskly among the houses, tossing in grenades. A German picket boarded the tram and began to check
papers. When he found a man whose card showed that he lived in Oradour, the German said briefly: ‘That’s bad.’ Another SS trooper doubled away up the hill, obviously for orders. He returned a few moments later: ‘All residents of Oradour must dismount. All others will remain in the car and return to Limoges.’

Twenty-two terrified men and women dismounted slowly and walked into a ring of SS men around the car. They were separated by sexes and their papers were inspected again. Then they were put together once more. There was a heated debate between several of the Germans. The agonized minutes dragged on. It was hideously apparent that the lives of the tram passengers were at stake. Suddenly a German turned to them and shouted: ‘Disappear! Into the country – not into Oradour!’ Another French-speaking trooper cried after them: ‘You’re being let off ! Believe me, you’re lucky!’ There was a last, grotesque afterthought. A German noticed from one girl’s papers that she lived many miles away. Picking up a bicycle that he had seized from one of the doomed houses of Oradour, he offered it to ease her journey.

M. Levignac, the insurance agent from Avignon, dismounted from the tram as soon as it was once more out of sight of Oradour, and lingered on the road in an agony of terror for his children. Professor Forest, the philosopher, walked from Laplaud to Oradour at about 7 pm. The church and much of the town were still burning fiercely. He approached a sentry and asked in German where his children might be. The trooper – probably an Alsatian – replied in French, to Forest’s surprise, that all the women and children were off in the woods: ‘They’re safe.’ They were standing twenty-five yards from the church, perhaps fifteen from Mme Rouffranche’s hiding place. Professor Forest turned and walked uncertainly back to Laplaud.

All that night, frightened mothers scoured the woods around Oradour for their missing children. The conviction that they were somewhere in the countryside was strengthened when the exhausted Aimé and Jeannine Renaud, escaped from their hiding place in the Desourteaux yard, stumbled into a farmhouse at La
Place and announced simply: ‘All the men were shot, and all the women and children were led away.’

Very early on the morning of the eleventh, a handful of brave and intolerably apprehensive people made their way towards Oradour, determined to get news. M. Lévèque, at Orbagnac, was missing not only his children but his brother and the family maid. He was one of the first to return from the terrible scene with a blurred but definite picture: everyone in Oradour had been killed. Professor Forest made his second journey at about 5 am. ‘Where are the children?’ he asked a sentry. ‘
Alles kaputt
’, said the German succinctly. M. Levignac reached the house where his eldest son had been staying and found it intact, but abandoned and looted. The couple who had gone to a wedding returned to their home to find the table still set for lunch, but their parents and children nowhere to be found.

At about 11 am on Sunday morning, Dickmann’s men drove out of Oradour, their vehicles loaded with loot and livestock. One truck was towing a car taken from the street which suddenly snapped its cable, careered into a pylon and crashed, injuring the SS driver. Then they were gone, and the last vestiges of doubt about what had taken place were removed from the minds of the region’s inhabitants. A farmer from Le Breuil named Hyvernaud, with two sons of thirteen and six at the school in Oradour, made his way into the smoking, deserted church;

Hyvernaud walked home to Le Breuil, gathered his wife and some sheets, and returned to the church to fetch back the little body.

On the morning of Monday, 12 June as the news of Oradour spread by word of mouth across the horrified Limousin, a Wehrmacht convoy drove into Oradour and worked for some hours digging two mass graves, and carrying into them some of the bodies. Towards lunchtime the Germans departed, taking with them many of the loose beasts and fowls not already appropriated by the Der Führer. That afternoon, the first of many volunteers from among local doctors and sanitary workers, civil defence teams and priests moved into Oradour and began the dreadful task of removing and identifying the bodies, already corrupted by two days of warm sunshine, or crumbling to ashes at the touch, Even for experienced medical teams it was a terrible task to work among the debris of an entire community – its burnt-out cars and sewing machines, crockery and cutlery, scorched living-rooms and charred bedding, straying cats and dogs, discarded children’s toys. At one moment, the medical team saw that another lorryload of Germans had halted in the middle of the main street, and were busy loading the Frenchmen’s bicycles, lying against the houses. The Germans obviously imagined that previous looters had overlooked these. The medical team remonstrated with them. The Germans unloaded the cycles and drove away.

For what it is worth, this is the manner in which the regimental history of the Der Führer, compiled by Major Weidinger, records the first news of Oradour:

The logic of these remarks may be judged by the reader. Only two points of substance need to be made. First, since no Resistance group possessed radio-telephone, it is impossible that Kowatsch could have intercepted such messages. It is possible, though unlikely, that he could have intercepted Free French signals to or from London, but there is no evidence that any traffic of this
nature was ever passed. Second, although Dickmann was indeed brought before a court-martial (which never reached a verdict) in Normandy, he remained in command of his battalion until his death. The first action of a commander in any army who is seriously displeased by the action of a subordinate is to relieve him of his command. Stuckler asserts that he never heard of events in Oradour until he arrived in Normandy, The Der Führer’s war diary, and the situation reports signalled to division, assert blankly that ‘the town of Oradour-sur-Glane was surrounded, and ammunition found stored in almost every house. Results: 548 enemy dead. Our casualties: one dead, one wounded.’ In reality, as far as the investigators were ever able to ascertain, 393 residents, 167 people from the surrounding countryside, thirty-three from Limoges and fifty-five from other places were killed – only fifty-two bodies were identifiable. Remarkably enough, Dickmann’s detachment had indeed suffered casualties: falling masonry from the church injured one man and killed another, Lieutenant Knug. He was reported to his family as: ‘Died for the fatherland’.

The balance of circumstantial evidence suggests that the Das Reich Division made nothing of Dickmann’s doings at Oradour until forceful inquiries from Vichy officials and army headquarters caught up with them in Normandy. The local garrison commander in Limoges, General Gleininger, realized as he heard the news that the SS had over-reached themselves at Oradour, and offered effusive apologies to the Bishop of Limoges and other local dignitaries. The Germans also made clumsy attempts to conceal the nightmare. The local censor imposed a blanket ban on publication of any news of Oradour’s fate in the region’s newspapers. The Gestapo instituted a mercifully unsuccessful search for survivors. They realized, as the officers of the Das Reich did not, that this had been something special.