Voices from the Dark Years (51 page)

The following day, units of the same SS division immortalised its name at a large village which has become France’s national shrine to the victims of the German retreat. Less than 20km north-west of Limoges, Oradour-sur-Glane is frozen in time. The roofless homes and shops, barns and workshops could be the result of an earthquake or area bombing; as the roofs collapsed they brought the walls down with them in many cases. Yet all this ruination was accomplished by fire and a few bullets.

At 2 p.m. on the balmy summer afternoon of Saturday 10 June, 120 men of SS Division Das Reich cordoned off the village. Major Adolf Diekmann ordered the mayor to assemble the villagers. One 8-year-old refugee boy from Lorraine hid in a garden, either because he recognised the SS uniforms or because he understood what the men were saying in German: Roger Godfrin was to be the sole child alive by the end of the afternoon. The other 247 pupils in the refugee school and the main school obediently lined up with their teachers for what they were told was an identity check.

A party of cyclists – five young men and a girl – were allowed through the cordon to share the fate of the villagers, as were a number of mothers who came looking for sons and daughters after they should have returned home. The women and children were herded into the church and the men locked into several barns. Small groups of all ages were shot in the streets, some left wounded and finished off later. Several bodies were stuffed down a well only 60cm in diameter.

The five adult male survivors of the massacre testified that the SS shot at the mass of bodies jammed into their barn, aiming low to hit the legs and throwing straw and other combustible material on top of the bodies, many still alive, before setting fire to everything with phosphorous grenades. Whilst 197 of their male friends and relatives died of wounds or were burned alive, the five survived by throwing themselves flat when the first shots were fired and hid in a corner of the barn the flames did not reach, subsequently escaping into the countryside.

The SS next turned their attention to the church. The one woman to survive, with several wounds, testified that at about 5 p.m. two soldiers carried in a large box with fuses coming from it, which they lit and retired. The church was filled with choking smoke, panicking the press of 240 desperate women and 205 children into breaking down the door into the sacristy, where soldiers were waiting at the windows. Bullet holes in the masonry show how they shot at the trapped women and children. In desperation, one woman clambered through a stained glass window, through which she fell to the ground outside, hit by several bullets. Another woman and baby were shot trying to follow her.

At 7 p.m. the evening tram from Limoges was halted at the SS cordon. Passengers who had come just to buy black market food were ordered back on board for the return trip, but twenty-two inhabitants of Oradour were lined up against a wall with a machine gun pointing at them. One can imagine their feelings, standing there with the smoke from every building in the burning town darkening the evening sky and their nostrils filled with the stench of burning flesh. Many of the SS were drunk on looted wine and spirits, but after three hours the hostages were simply told to go away, seeking refuge on nearby farms or hiding in the woods till dawn.

By the end of the day, out of the 700 people who had woken up that morning in Oradour only the boy from Lorraine, one woman and five men were alive. Only fifty-two corpses were definitively identified; the others were carbonised, many not even recognisable as human. The SS drove away some time after dawn, leaving every house gutted. Decades later, rusting motor vehicles and children’s prams and bicycles have almost completely disintegrated. The melted bronze bell still lies on the church floor for tourists to photograph.

As to the reasons why it all happened, on the French side it is claimed that there was no Resistance activity in Oradour-sur-Glane and that the SS misread their maps, when they should have been at nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres, where the Maquis had been active. The German version does not differ greatly as far as the massacre is concerned, but claims that the village was the right one, to be destroyed in reprisal for local Resistance operations in which two German officers had been kidnapped by the Maquis and an ambulance convoy ambushed. Stripped to his underclothes, Lieutenant Gerlach managed to escape after capture while his driver was being killed in some woodland. He found his way back to his unit by following a railway line, and indicated that his kidnapping had occurred near Oradour-sur-Glane. After his traumatic experience, and since he had fallen into the hands of the Maquis after misreading his map and getting lost, he may well have confused one village called Oradour with the other.

In the second incident, a German ambulance unit was attacked by
maquisards
, and the medical personnel and wounded men they were transporting burned alive in the vehicles. In the third, while prospecting ahead of his unit, Major Helmut Kämpfe, a personal friend of Diekmann, was taken prisoner by a band of FTP
maquisards
. The major’s papers were found by a despatch rider in a street in Tulle the next day, where he had presumably thrown them to leave a clue while being transferred from one vehicle to another. An offer to return him unharmed against the release of
maquisard
prisoners was agreed to, but the Maquis killed him anyway. His remains were found by German war graves investigators after the war, 10 June 1944 given as the date of death. It was afterwards claimed by the Maquis that he was killed in retaliation for what happened at Oradour.

With the
maquisards
neither wearing uniform nor carrying their arms openly – and thus not protected by military law –
Ordnung
Sperrle
, the Standing Orders for dealing with Resistance attacks on German troops, required the area of an attack to be routinely cordoned off, houses from which shots had been fired to be burned, and three hostages shot for every soldier wounded and ten hanged for each dead German. Major Diekmann, commanding the troops at Oradour, claimed to have found bodies of murdered Germans on arrival there, as well as caches of weapons and ammunition. According to his account, there was no intention to kill the women and children, and the men were to be taken hostage. However, when the houses were set on fire the flames spread to the roof of the church, where the Maquis had a store of explosives, which blew up and brought the flaming roof down onto the victims below, producing heat sufficient to melt the bronze bell.

Diekmann’s superior, Colonel Sylvester Stadler, was sufficiently disturbed by the number of civilians killed to refer the matter to divisional commander General Heinz Lammerding, who on 5 June had issued divisional orders to arrest 5,000 hostages as ‘punishment for attacks on German personnel by mobile bands of terrorists’.
¹⁰
Lammerding ordered an investigation as soon as the situation permitted. Given the urgency of getting his tanks and men to the Normandy front as swiftly as possible, with insufficient transporters and a lack of many spare parts for the tanks,
¹¹
no priority was given to this. Whatever his intention, when on 29 June Diekmann was killed in action together with many of his men who had taken part in the ‘operation’ at Oradour, the enquiry was abandoned.

That awful Saturday when Oradour was destroyed, 150km to the north-east, the mayor of St-Amand and a friend were stacking up the miles hunting for the FFI, with the deadline already extended several times. On one occasion they missed a rendezvous by less than a kilometre. Meanwhile, Bout de l’An decided the local Milice were too ‘soft’ to carry out the reprisals he had in mind and sent for Joseph Lécussan, the man who had killed Victor Basch and his wife in January. Drinking heavily from the moment he arrived, Lécussan ordered houses blown up and embarked sixty-five hostages in motor-coaches on 11 June – destination Vichy. Inhabitants of St-Amand who listened to the BBC caught a message from General Koenig, commander-in-chief of the FFI: ‘Since it is impossible for us to supply you with food, arms and ammunition, I repeat that all guerrilla activity should be kept to a minimum. Stay in small groups.’
¹²
If only, they must have thought.

The efforts of the mediators finally bore fruit – despite the FFI calling them Milice stooges and Lécussan letting them know he considered them closet
résistants
to be liquidated after they had served their purpose – when a letter from Simone to her husband arrived in St-Amand:

My dear Francis,

I am in the hands of the liberation army. I am being well treated.

Spare the hostages to avoid the worst happening. I put my trust in

God. I am worried about the children. Give them a hug for me.

Kisses, Simone

Although the term ‘liberation army’ implied that part of the message had been dictated, the letter proved that she was still alive, which was enough to keep the reprisals on hold. The urgent concern of Mayor Sadrin was now to arrange the exchange in a climate of extreme mutual mistrust. Finally, the FFI gave up their female hostages, but not the
miliciens
. In return, Bout de l’An kept his word to return his hostages to St-Amand, after being urged to do so by Simone, who had not been physically ill treated. They arrived back home on 25 June, and there the sad affair should have ended.

However, the
miliciens
were still prisoner on 20 July, when their captors were on the run from a massive German anti-Maquis operation directed by General Von Jesser, under orders to engage and destroy all Maquis units in central France. Twice they managed to break through the cordon of German and Ukrainian troops hunting them, but never to distance themselves from their pursuers. The largest group of thirty-five men still had with them the thirteen prisoners. Because of the risk that one would escape and give them away, the group’s 28-year-old temporary commander Georges Chaillaud decided to kill the prisoners. Not all his men agreed because, during the six weeks they had all been on the run, old friendships had re-blossomed among men who had gone to school and played football together, and who had even courted the same girls. Chance alone had led one to the Maquis and another to the Milice. Chaillaud actually owed his life to
milicien
Louis Bastide, who had allowed him to flush some compromising papers down a toilet before an interrogation several months earlier. As Chaillaud admitted later:

There was no question of shooting the prisoners because the Germans would have heard the shots. So we hanged them. We made running knots with parachute cord attached to high branches. We didn’t have a step-ladder or a chair, so we put the cord around their necks, lifted them as high as we could – and let them fall. When I told their boss they were going to be killed, he said simply, ‘You chose England and we chose Germany. You’ve won and we’ve lost.’ The
miliciens
died bravely.

Other accounts differ, some implying that Bastide begged the man whose life he had saved to let him live in return.
¹³

The same parachute cords could have been used to tie up and gag the
miliciens
, leaving them to be found by the Germans, instead of leave thirteen strangulated corpses hanging from the trees. But then, they would have given away their captors’ names, so perhaps it was fear of reprisals that caused the gruesome hangings. Some of Chaillaud’s men were so nauseated that they threw away their weapons and walked home. Within hours, Lécussan received a phone call from one of them, identified only as ‘the Traitor’, saying that eight
miliciens
had been hanged. Had this informant been present only for the first executions before leaving in disgust? At any rate, the number is not important. Lécussan’s rage would have been directed at his favourite target anyway.

There had been few Jews in St-Amand before the war brought a number of refugees to the area. Lécussan had already rounded up several. Some had been tortured and killed, their bodies left floating in the river. Determined to make St-Amand
judenrein
, Lécussan organised a total round-up for the following day and summoned to his aid forty-five German soldiers and a motley band of
miliciens
and other hangers-on. The men were catered for in the local cinema, the bosses repairing to a hotel for a large meal with plenty of drink.

That night, doors were smashed in by rifle butts and the victims dragged out in night attire or underclothes, some elderly ones not even allowed to collect their false teeth. There was no longer a pretence of deportation to a labour camp. One bewildered grandmother, arrested with her 3-year-old grandson, asked permission to bring her sewing things, only to be told: ‘You won’t need them. You’re going to paradise.’ Already dressed and ready for the
miliciens
, 76-year-old veteran Colonel Fernand Bernheim told them, ‘You must have sunk really low to come and arrest me.’
¹⁴

By the evening of 22 July, the prisoners were all locked in overcrowded, stifling cells in the Bordiot prison at Bourges, where eighteen people had to share one toilet bucket, emptied every twenty-four hours. The only food was dry beans twice a day. Any valuables had been stolen. During the afternoon of 24 July, Lécussan arrived to oversee what he considered proper revenge for the killing of the
milicien
hostages. The full details are too obscene to recount, but in short the male prisoners were transported in a closed van to a deserted farm in a military training ground known as Guerry. In groups of six they were made to carry solidified sacks of cement and heavy rocks to a deep well, where
miliciens
waited with pistols and sub-machine guns.