Das Reich (31 page)

Dickmann and his battalion spent the night of 11 June in new billets at Nieul, six miles east of Oradour, attracting nervous local
attention by their conspicuous array of loot. While the 1st battalion was at Oradour, Kampfe’s 3rd battalion had been engaged in a number of minor skirmishes with
maquisards
as they patrolled the area east of Limoges. The
maquis
situation all over southern and central France was causing acute concern. On 12 June, General Von Blaskowitz, commanding Army Group G, took over personal tactical direction of the anti-partisan war, and requested OKW that the south-west be formally designated a battle zone. On the eleventh – before divisional headquarters became aware of Oradour – the 2nd SS Pz signalled Army Group G: ‘Mopping up operations in the region Limoges, St Léonard, Ambazac, Bellac, Rochechouart. Provisional balance sheet: 337 killed, 36 prisoners. The road Tulle–Seilhac–Uzerche free of the enemy.’

That day, the units of the Das Reich in Tulle abandoned the town – they were relieved by the battle group from 11th Panzer division – and moved north to Limoges, laden with loot from the town. Early on the morning of the twelfth, once again preceded by the reconnaissance battalion, the roadborne elements of the division moved north out of Limoges, under orders to proceed with all speed to Normandy via Poitiers and Tours.

The scale of the tragedy at Oradour dwarfed other, isolated killings by the division on 10 and 11 June: Jean-Baptiste Legressy, a thirty-four-year-old workman; Charles Prima, a farmworker, twenty-four; Roger Bayard; Henri Dijoux, nineteen; Adrian Girette, twenty-one, tortured and hanged at Buissière-Poitevine; Marchal Roger, thirty-five; Achille Maren, forty-six; Henri Villesange, a coachbuilder’s apprentice, sixteen. The last, alone among all these, identified himself as a
résistant
, a member of an FTP
maquis
. Exact responsibility for their deaths cannot be pinpointed within the division. It is known only that the Frenchmen were shot by members of the Das Reich in the performance of their duties. Major Weidinger’s account declares simply:

It would be absurd not to acknowledge that the efforts of the Das Reich made a profound impression upon the population of Haute-Vienne. On the morning of 12 June, Gaston Hyllaire – ‘Léonie’ – the departmental commander of the
Armée Secrète
, paid a secret personal visit to Oradour. Major Weidinger was perfectly correct in asserting that a strong body of opinion among the local Resistance commanders now held that no gesture in arms was worth such a terrible price. Jean Sennemaut, commanding the AS unit around Bellac to the north-west, recalled that until the moment of Liberation, senior local AS officers opposed any attempt unilaterally to seize and free towns, lest the horror of Oradour be repeated. The FTP – and above all Guingouin’s
maquisards
south-east of Limoges – were rather less troubled by these risks. But it is surely significant that while the communists of Haute-Vienne had been discussing a full-scale attack on Limoges for months, in the event they did not move to take over the town until the Germans were in full retreat from the region. ‘Action taken during the passage of the Das Reich Armoured Division through Limoges and its surrounding countryside has made a visible impression on the population,’ noted the war diary of the 19th SS police regiment, based on Limoges. Painful though it may be for humanitarians to accept, a policy of unlimited repression can be formidably effective. Oradour made a lasting mark on the Haute-Vienne. If the exercise had a weakness from the SS point of
view, it is that it was not publicly announced as a reprisal for the seizure of Major Kampfe. It seems certain that if the Das Reich had been available to continue carrying out such appalling acts in reprisal for every operation carried out by the AS or the FTP,
maquis
commanders would have come under enormous pressure from the local population to desist absolutely from attacks. Mercifully, however, the Das Reich was compelled to move on.

The division suffered only one further clash with
maquisards
after moving north from Limoges. Jean Sennemaut’s AS company, deployed in the north-west of Haute-Vienne through which the divisions passed, was not even aware of its existence until, early on the morning of 12 June, their commander risked slipping home to Bellac from his
maquis
in the woods to collect some clothes. He heard the clatter and roar of a large German convoy moving up the
route nationale
, and at one point a burst of firing. He vanished hastily back into the fields, towards his
maquis
.

An hour or two later a small group of FTP
maquisards
, approaching a junction just north of Bellac in a lorry, glimpsed a German truck halted on the main northbound road. Only a short stretch of the highway was visible to them, and thus they could not see the great mass of German vehicles halted on each side. The
maquisards
dropped from their lorry and closed upon the single parked truck, firing as they came. Their Moroccan Bren gunner fired only one burst before his gun jammed. He then turned to his haversack of grenades, and hurled one at the truck. But now, to their consternation and dismay, the little group of Frenchmen – commanded, ironically enough, by yet another Alsatian – found themselves engulfed by the ferocious return fire of several hundred extremely wakeful Germans of Wulf’s
Aufklärungsabteilung
. Five
maquisards
were killed in a matter of moments, before the others fled back into the woods, abandoning their vehicle.

When the shooting began, Private Schneid and his young comrades of the anti-tank platoon hurled themselves for cover behind the body of their half-track. The furious ‘Hascha’ hurled them bodily from this refuge and made them deploy to return the
fire. ‘We won’t win the war with soldiers who hide behind their vehicle at the first shot!’ he shouted. Then he motioned Schneid to follow him, and as the
maquisards
retreated, slipped forward into the fields to reconnoitre. They found a dead man on his front in the grass, a bandolier over his shoulder. ‘Turn him over,’ said the ‘Hascha’. He picked up the Sten that lay under the man’s body, and gazed at the dead face. ‘They’re all the same, these bloody characters . . .’, Kurz muttered to Schneid, who was surprised to notice in his voice ‘. . . a kind of respect . . .’ They picked up the bandolier. Then the two men strode briskly back to their half-track and, at a signal from the front, the column rolled slowly away again towards Poitiers.

One eddy from the wake of the Das Reich’s operations reached the city a few hours before them. The 311 men who had been loaded into the lorries in the courtyard of the Tulle arms factory on 9 June, informed that they were being taken to the Hôtel Moderne, were in reality driven to the old cavalry barracks in Limoges, where they arrived at 3 am on the tenth. For the remaining hours of the night they were obliged to stand under the guns of the SS guards while their fate was discussed. Then the Wehrmacht relieved the sentries, and conditions improved. The prisoners were allowed to sit down, to eat and to receive visits from French Red Cross nurses. In whispered snatches of conversation, they heard for the first time that the Allied beach-head in Normandy was now firmly established. Towards 5 pm, the SS and a group of
miliciens
reappeared. The senior
milicien
announced: ‘The German authorities have allowed us to collaborate with them to separate the corrupt elements from the town of Tulle. We have done this work as good Frenchmen.
Vive le maréchal! Vive Darnand! Vive le milice! Vive la France!
’ It never proved possible to discover by what process of logic 162 of the detainees were now released, while the other 149 were selected for deportation. These were loaded aboard trucks once more, and driven north to Poitiers on the evening of the twelfth to await entrainment for Germany.

They joined some 250 other Frenchmen, already herded for
the night in the courtyard of Gestapo headquarters at 13 Rue des Ecossais. At about 1 am, the RAF’s Bomber Command attacked Poitiers railway yards, causing panic and substantial damage to the town. Not surprisingly, as bombs rained down within a few hundred yards of their prison, the desperate French captives tried to fight their way over the railings, or at least into the shelter of the building. The SS guards opened fire at once from the cover of the headquarters, killing six and wounding thirty-five. Four others were wounded by bomb fragments. Order was thus restored, and the prisoners were left to their own devices without food, water or medical assistance until 2 pm the following afternoon. On the evening of 13 June they were transferred to Compiègne, and taken from there by rail to concentration camps in Germany, arriving at Dachau on 5 July; 980 of the 2,521 prisoners on the train died during the three-day journey. In all, of 149 Tullois deported, forty-nine lived to come home in 1945.

The German-controlled press reminded the citizens of Poitiers in forceful terms of the source of their troubles.
Centre et Ouest
headlined its account of the RAF raid: ‘
POITIERS PAYS ITS OWN TRAGIC TRIBUTE TO THE WAR
.’ Its front-page story went on:

On the night of 12 June, on a hill a few miles outside the city, Major Heinrich Wulf and his men lay beneath the camouflage nets covering their lagered vehicles, watching the flashes and shock waves enveloping Poitiers. Somebody murmured: ‘Well, let’s thank God we’re not down there . . .’ In the woods just a mile or two away, another little uniformed group also saw the distant
raid. Much the same thoughts passed through their minds. These were officers and men of the British 1st Special Air Service Regiment, who were to cause the Das Reich Division its last significant inconvenience before it became enveloped in the battle for Normandy.

If the Allied staff at SHAEF headquarters had been given a free choice in the matter, it is unlikely that the forty men of D Squadron, 1st SAS would have been anywhere near Montmorillon on the night of 10 June. The roadborne elements of the Das Reich would have reached Normandy one, perhaps two or three days ealier than they did. SAS operations against the rail links south of Poitiers must also have contributed to the interminable delays suffered by the 2nd SS Pz tanks on the move from Périgueux via the city. An SAS-directed attack on the petrol dump at Châtellerault destroyed huge reserves upon which the Wehrmacht had relied to refuel the Das Reich’s wheeled elements for the last phase of their march to the coast.

An impeccably-bred Englishman who fought with distinction in Europe said afterwards: ‘The great thing about the 1939–45 war was that everybody did what they liked.’ By this he really meant that a few thousand Englishmen with access to the bars of the great St James’s clubs proved able to organize their own military destinies – sometimes even their own campaigns – in a manner impossible in any war before or since. The Special Air Service was among the most celebrated of the array of ‘private armies’ that emerged during the war. Almost all were conceived and partly officered by those with privileged access to high places. A posting to Phantom or the commandos was passionately coveted by a dashing young man. If the risks were greater than those of regimental soldiering, so were the fun and the company and the opportunity for extraordinary adventures.

In 1940–1, the ‘private armies’ were tolerated by the service hierarchies as playthings for the Prime Minister and some irregularly minded generals. But as the great confrontations of massed armies upon the battlefield developed, so did the impatience of the staff with the pirate forces on the fringes. Critics claimed that they threatened service discipline; were a grossly uneconomic drain on resources, even unto warships and air transport; and employed thousands of outstanding officers and men who might otherwise have stiffened rifle and armoured regiments on the main battlefield.

All these criticisms had some weight. The contribution of special forces of all kinds was always marginal. It is not surprising that in 1944, as SHAEF prepared for one of the great battles of history, its planners had little time or enthusiasm for any force that threatened to divert attention or resources.

Like the Special Boat Service, Popski’s Private Army, the Long Range Desert Group and the Special Interrogation Group, SAS was spawned in the desert, that happy hunting-ground of buccaneers and individualists. David Stirling conceived his force in 1941, to bring havoc to the enemy rear areas. In fourteen months of spectacular activity, he and a handful of other daring spirits destroyed hundreds of enemy aircraft on their landing grounds and created a legend throughout North Africa. Stirling himself was captured in February 1943, but the SAS had by then expanded into a force of two regiments, one of them commanded by his brother Bill. They were among the first Allied troops ashore in Sicily and Italy.