Voices from the Dark Years (52 page)

Instead of shooting the prisoners so that the bodies fell into the wells, their killers made them kneel by the parapets and pushed them over alive, with the rocks and sacks of cement thrown in afterwards. The lucky ones died from a crushed skull or broken neck, others by asphyxiation as more bodies and rocks crashed down on them in a tangle of bodies that took local firemen days to extricate. Once the prisoners waiting their turn realised what was happening, they were frozen in terror, with the exception of one man who preferred to die attempting to escape rather than walk like a beast to the slaughter. Charles Krameisen dodged the bullets, running barefoot through the scrub, tearing clothes and flesh on brambles and thorns. That night, he emerged from hiding to knock on the door of a peasant bringing up his eight children with his wife in a farm near the execution site, by whom he was taken in and given food and clothes.

It would be nice to end the story on this note of courage and humanity, but the women and children were still locked up in Bourges prison. With
miliciens
and Gestapo now mostly preoccupied with saving their skins before the Allies arrived, they might all have survived until Liberation, had not the local head of the Milice been assassinated on 7 August. With no chance of catching the assassin, the other
miliciens
decided to execute hostages. Since all the men from St-Amand were dead, it was the turn of the women.

Those with children were exempted, but two women who had claimed to be childless, so that their children would not be rounded up, were included in the ten told they were ‘to be deported’. In the prison courtyard as they were getting into the Milice van, a German officer saw one of them weeping. Luckily able to speak German, she explained that she was not Jewish, and was returned to the cells with another woman. The other eight and a Jewish
résistant
who had been in prison for two months were then driven off to Guerry.

Bloodstains and bullet scuffs on the parapet of the well used this time bore witness to the fact that the man and five of the women were first shot before being dumped in the well. The body of the youngest, aged 18, was naked and mutilated. She had probably been raped. The last woman to be pushed in before rocks were dumped on the bodies was the wife of Charles Krameisen. Between 9 and 11 August the Gestapo fled from Bourges. On 17 August the prison gates opened to release the twenty-five women and nine children who survived the tragedy of St-Amand, the town where ‘nothing ever happened’.
¹⁵

N
OTES

  
1.
  Todorov,
Une tragédie française
, p. 30.

  
2.
  Ibid., pp. 17–23.

  
3.
  J.-P. Azéma and F. Bédarida,
La France des Années Noirs
(Paris: Seuil, 1993), vol. 2, p. 396.

  
4.
  Todorov,
Une tragédie française
, p. 37.

  
5.
  Ibid., p. 40.

  
6.
  Nossiter,
France and the Nazis
, p. 250.

  
7.
  Report of Adjutant-Chef Conchonnet, in
L’Express
, 6 October 2005.

  
8.
  
Arkheia
(magazine published in Montauban), No. 17–18 (2006), p. 58.

  
9.
  Ibid., pp. 58–9; A. Nossiter,
The Algeria Hotel
(London: Methuen, 2001), pp. 231–51.

10.
  Divisional orders signed by General Lammerding exhibited at Centre de Mémoire, Oradour.

11.
  Letter to OKW complaining of these problems and signed by Lammerding, exhibited at the Centre de Mémoire, Oradour.

12.
  Todorov,
Une tragédie française
, p. 78.

13.
  Ibid., pp. 117–20.

14.
  Ibid., p. 128.

15.
  A comprehensive account of the actions at St-Amand-Montrond and Tulle and elsewhere at this time may be found in D. Boyd,
Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass
(Stroud: The History Press, 2012).

22

M
URDEROUS
M
IDSUMMER

Laval was a lawyer to the end: his official line on the Normandy landings was that they were not French business because France was legally neutral in the war between the Allies and Germany. So whether he asked Abetz on 14 June to expedite the return of the LVF and the Charlemagne Division to stiffen the German resistance is a moot point. The date may be a coincidence, but it was then that de Gaulle first returned to France, landing at Courseulles in General Montgomery’s British sector of operations after crossing the Channel aboard the French destroyer
Combattante.
With Monty too busy to pay much attention to his visitor, after a brief motor tour to Isigny and Grandcamp in the American sector, de Gaulle re-embarked and returned to Britain, first jamming his foot in the political door by appointing his former
chef de cabinet
Francis Coulet to the post of Commissioner for Normandy and disproving American allegations that his presence on French soil would trigger a civil war. The Gaullist officials were rapidly accepted by the population, while the Vichy functionaries they replaced were only too happy to quietly disappear.
¹

In usually tranquil Ste-Foy-la-Grande on the south bank of the Dordogne, the bridges vital for German troop movements had been blown up by the Maquis on 8 June after ‘the fourth republic’ had been proclaimed by a self-appointed ‘representative of Gen de Gaulle’. By 13 June conscription had begun, the mayor being ordered to supply seventy-two able-bodied men aged 18 to 55 to serve ‘under military discipline’. The consequences were inevitable: by dawn on 18 June the town was under fire from an armoured column on the opposite bank and
résistants
taken alive were made to dig their own graves before being shot. Jean-Adolphe Blondel, mayor of nearby St-André-et-Appelles, begged a passing Wehrmacht major to intervene when SS troops threatened to set fire to his village after finding wounded
résistants
in the Mairie
.
The best compromise the major could achieve was for Blondel to be shot ‘as an example’ and the village left unburned.

On 22 June the strategic oil reserves of the Wehrmacht at St-Ouen and St-Denis were bombed and huge clouds of black smoke darkened the Paris sky as they had four years earlier. On 28 June, after his son left to rejoin his NSKK transport unit, Philippe Henriot and his wife visited a cinema on the Champs Elysées before returning to their apartment in the Ministry of the Interior. Alarmed by threatening calls on their direct line, Madame Henriot begged her husband to request a Milice bodyguard, but he was sure they were safe inside the Ministry. According to the subsequent police report: ‘At 5.30 a.m. six or seven black Citroën
traction avant
cars pulled up, disgorging thirty or so men in Milice uniforms, armed with automatic weapons.’ The uniforms tricked the concierge into letting the
résistants
into the building, where they killed Henriot in front of his wife.

The death of a high government official, whose anti-Semitic radio tirades continued long after it was known that the euphemism
d
é
portation
meant death, presented the Church with a problem that split its ranks. At the memorial service in Paris, Cardinal Suhard agreed to officiate and pronounce the absolution but not to read a eulogy. In Lyon cathedral Cardinal Gerlier officiated at the memorial service, but also refused to read a eulogy and left before the absolution. In Limoges Monsignor Rastouil went a step further by refusing to conduct a memorial service, for which Darnand had him arrested. Confronted with the warrant, the monsignor exclaimed, ‘Am I the first bishop to be arrested by Frenchmen? Is this an honour?’ He was released after three days, following protests from the Papal Nuncio. However, in Bordeaux on 5 July Monsignor Feltin condemned the assassination by saying, ‘No one has the right to impose justice without approval of the legal authorities. He who claims to serve his country otherwise is guilty of murder.’

At the far-right end of the politico-religious spectrum, Father Tabaillé of Vienne included in his eulogy the statement that Henriot had ‘fallen as a hero and a martyr’.
²

By the end of the Liberation, the Resistance claimed 3,136 sabotage operations, with 834 derailments putting out of action 1,855 locomotives and 5,833 wagons, plus 972 other ‘operations’. One of these took place on 9 June when a section of FFI blew up the rail tracks just outside Moissac and followed up by attacking a troop train guarded by military police in the station. The FFI commander Lieutenant Colonel Pommiès had an extraordinary record in the twenty months of his undercover war: 102 ambushes and 265 other operations, during which 4,529 Germans were taken prisoner or killed. The cost was high: 387 deaths, 1,200 wounded and 156 taken prisoner and deported, few of whom survived. After the FFI blew up a 150,000-volt, high-tension pylon at Castelsarrassin on 30 June, gendarmerie reports judged the mood of the population to be ‘calm’ compared with people over much of France,
³
although: ‘The sight of girls and young women flirting with the Germans in the town will lead to reprisals by the population on these women after the Liberation which cannot be far off.’
⁴

Not all the clandestine weapons were fired at Germans. One 30-year-old Moissac man was arrested for robbing a farmer of food at gunpoint, but most Moisagais were more concerned with the fine weather that promised a good harvest of fruits and vegetables, although the
viticulteurs
worried about hail storms bruising the dessert grapes on the vine and making them unsaleable. Grain reserves were sufficient to last until the harvest, but the Maquis threatened farmers with arson of their fields and homes if they handed over more than the minimum to the Germans. Bread and fats were becoming scarce and meat was distributed theoretically twice a month.

Françoise Armagnac was 26 years old on Tuesday 4 July 1944 – the day she was to marry 36-year-old fellow-agronomist Georges Pénicaut at the church of St Peter in Chabanais, halfway between Limoges and Angoulême. She was a guileless, outspoken and carelessly dressed young woman, whom not even her friends could call pretty, her poor eyesight compensated by unattractive wartime spectacles, but that day she had taken care with her appearance and was wearing a white silk dress with a diadem of pink roses in her hair.

The couple and friends set out after the ceremony to walk from the church to the house where the wedding breakfast was to be held. Nearly there, they were surrounded by a troop of FTP
maquisards
, who locked the couple and the bride’s mother with the priest in one room and the photographer in another. At gunpoint all the other guests were interrogated and made to prove their identity before being released. Interrogation of bride, groom and priest lasted for the rest of the day. Towards dusk, with the photographer and the bride’s mother, they were driven in a van 30km to the group’s temporary headquarters in the Château de Pressac. There, violence towards the prisoners was so excessive that their leader ‘Colonel’ Bernard threatened to shoot dead the next man who touched them.

Despite this, a mock trial was held, the evidence against Françoise boiling down to a Milice badge found in her bedroom and a diary, in which she had recorded joining the Milice on 3 May 1943. She pleaded that she had only attended a few meetings and left the organisation three months later. The page for 7 August, on which the resignation was clearly noted, was torn out of the diary by her accusers, saying that they decided what proof to take in evidence and what to disregard. The following day Françoise was constantly insulted by her captors and made to scrub floors in her soiled wedding dress. Growing tired of this around 9 p.m., they shot her – still in her wedding dress.