Voices from the Dark Years (64 page)

Many of the children had lost all their relatives. They came from hiding or concentration camps to live as Scouts and Guides in Moissac with camp-fire singsongs, school classes and music lessons (below) – a normal life in abnormal times. (Reproduced by permission of Jean-Claude Simon)

After Maj Helmut Kämpfe (above, left) was assassinated by
maquisards
in June 1944 his friend Maj Adolf Diekmann (above, right) unleashed the men of SS Regiment
Das Reich
on the civilian population of Oradour-sur-Glane. They destroyed the entire town (below).

The SS burned 197 men alive. After herding 240 women and 205 children, including infants, into the church (above), they set fire to it too.

Bullet holes in the walls show they continued firing through the windows until everyone was dead.

At the concentration camp of Natzwiller/Struthof in Alsace (above), starving prisoners were worked to death in the quarry.

Camp commandant Josef Kramer hanged prisoners on his gallows (right) during roll calls that lasted
hours in all weather. He was given a Christmas bonus for watching women prisoners die in his improvised gas chamber (above).

The Atlantic coast resort of Royan (above in its heyday in the first decade of the twentieth century) was in a pocket of German resistance. On 5 January 1945 the RAF was ordered to destroy the town ‘occupied by German troops only’.

The result (above) killed 284 female and 158 male French civilians – and just thirty-seven Germans because their positions were not
in
the town. Hundreds were wounded.

Most of the work containing the pocket was done by men like these three
maquisards
(below
)
with their parachuted Stens. German forces in the pocket included these Sikhs (above, right), who had changed sides when captured in the Western Desert. They held on until Berlin capitulated on 8 May 1945. The exhaustion of this surrendering Wehrmacht soldier (above, left) tells all.