Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (24 page)

From behind curtains and over garden walls the women of Tulle watched one of their sex chatting freely with the SS men who were now killing their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons. From that day, the women of Tulle call Paula Geissler
la chienne
– the bitch – alleging that she laughed at the men being hanged and blew cigarette smoke into their faces. At Bouty’s request, Father Jean Espinasse was allowed to accompany each group of condemned men in turn, to give absolution and pray with them as they were hanged. He said afterwards that Geissler was chain-smoking as usual while she chatted with the SS, seated on the terrace of a cafe to watch the executions, laughing and joking with each other while accordion music and popular songs were played on the cafe’s gramophone.

The released gendarmes also noted that the SS were in holiday mood, smoking and laughing. Seeing corpses dangling everywhere, the Tulle gendarmes were then escorted to the railway station, where twenty-one colleagues abducted from the Lot
département
as hostages by the SS had already taken off their ties, to speed up their own deaths. Thanks to the mayor’s intervention, the gendarmes were not hanged.
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A competent amateur sketch exists of the horrific scene. Whether done by an SS officer, as some believe, or not, it shows a recognisable street with soldiers casually walking along the pavement and corpses dangling from each lamppost. In the centre is a group of figures reminiscent of a Renaissance painting of the Crucifixion. An officer watches with hands on hips, a soldier on a ladder against a lamppost is reaching down to help a hostage with his hands tied behind his back awkwardly climbing a second ladder towards the noose above his head. Another soldier steadies the victim’s ladder, ready to pull it away as soon as the noose is round his neck. Three or four other victims under armed guard numbly watch what is about to happen to them also.
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Father Espinasse described how the SS divided the condemned men into groups of ten, with their hands tied behind their backs:

When a condemned man’s head reached the level of the slip knot, the soldier put it around his neck. The other soldier yanked away the second ladder. So far as I could see, the hanged men showed no sign of life afterwards, which made me think that death was immediate or at least the loss of consciousness was total. In one case, I suppose because the slip knot was carelessly made, the man jerked spasmodically. Then I saw the soldier with the second ladder hit him with it until all movement ceased.
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The concern of Father Espinasse and other witnesses was to keep their accounts as painless as possible for the relatives of the hanged men. In several cases a soldier clung to the victim’s feet to accelerate strangulation, and some men awaiting their turn were too numbed with horror to step on to the ladder and were beaten with rifle butts to force them forward, being gunned down on the pavement if they could not be forced on to the ladder. And so it went on, ending life after life until it seemed that every balcony, telegraph pole and lamppost along the main street had a body hanging from it, the last ones to be hanged still convulsively twitching.
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It is a truism of police work that eyewitness accounts of any event vary. In this case, such was the horror of the scene that no two accounts come even close to each other. Dr Alfred Pouget was present in Tulle that day, attempting to minister to civilians and gendarmes who had been injured and intervening to obtain the release of doctors and other medical workers necessary for this. Even his professional recollection is disjointed:

The faces of the hanged men were all pale and waxy, with tongues slightly protruding. The knot of the rope was at the back of the neck. Death was due to complete interruption of the brain’s oxygen supply inducing an immediate loss of consciousness, followed by convulsions. I noticed the body of Loulou Chieze the barber’s apprentice in his check suit. In front of the Tivoli Café there was an SS tank, camouflaged with branches.
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One of the many unlikely features of the executions was claimed by Father Espinasse as due to his intervention with Schmald, after he noticed that the penultimate group was comprised of thirteen men. According to the priest, four men were released and Schmald agreed this should be the last group to be executed. The executions thus stopped after ninety-nine men had been hanged. While agreeing that the priest saved the lives of three men in the last group actually hanged – which makes more sense – Colonel Bouty gave the credit for saving the twenty-one men not executed to the literally last-minute intervention of the municipal engineer and company director Henri Vogel, manager of the arms factory.

‘Vogel in particular,’ he said, ‘argued brilliantly with the SS officers present to persuade them to free several of his workmen in what should have been the last group to be executed.’ Of several other claims to have ended the executions prematurely, given the severe discipline of the Waffen-SS, the most likely to be true is that which Lammerding made after the war, to the effect that he decided to stop at ninety-nine deaths despite his earlier announcement.

Perhaps to exonerate himself for his minor role in the hangings, Elimar Schneider told it differently:

I went into the factory yard rather disturbed [sic] and asked the officer in charge of the selections how many men remained to be hanged because we were running out of ropes. Lt Schmald indicated a group of ten kneeling to the left of the entrance gate and another group of about twenty. I went up to the group of ten. In front of them was a sad-looking priest with a dirty
soutane
giving them absolution
.
This was the next group for execution. I said to the youngest one, ‘Don’t be afraid. It doesn’t last long.’ It was a stupid thing to say, but he said, ‘Since you can speak French, please tell them that I was not in the Maquis. I work here in the armament factory. Oh, my poor mother. She has nobody else but me.’ So I said to Lt Schmald, ‘Why are you hanging this one? He worked in the factory here.’ Schmald replied, ‘Kid, I can’t do anything about it. I must have 120 Frenchmen. This is to serve as an example for the whole of France. We’re pissed off with the partisans. Haven’t you seen what they did to our guys?’ That was in German. When I relayed this to the condemned men, the two youngest ones broke down and wept. I wept too. And Schmald said, ‘Oh, take the young one then. And you can have the other as well.’ So I took Pierre Torquebiau by the arm and he put his arms around me and hugged me so tightly, I couldn’t breathe. Then those two were moved across to the group to be deported for the STO, just before Sergeant Piel gave the order for the others to be brought out.

Whatever the truth about the men released from the last group hanged, it was forbidden for relatives or friends to touch the bodies of the hanged men or cut them down. That evening, Maurice Roche wrote a report as follows:

I went that evening with Col Bouty (and others) to the factory yard. The colonel was near tears describing his sense of impotence and the dignity with which the men died. I was in my civil service uniform and went outside alone to salute the men who had died. It was a terrible sight – all those young men hanging there. They all had their hands tied behind their backs. The expression on their faces was generally calm. Lying on the pavement were some bloody bodies of men whose ropes had been severed by their last struggles, and had been finished off by a burst from a machine pistol.
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In fact, other evidence is that only the first men executed had their hands tied. Apparently the cord used for this ran out, so that the others were hanged with their hands free. Roche later went to the site where the SS were burying the first bodies and protested at the lack of respect being shown as corpses were dumped from a truck in the dust. He then negotiated a deal with the SS, under which the young men from the Vichy youth labour camp known as Les Chantiers de Jeunesse were allowed to take the bodies down and dig two mass graves at a municipal rubbish tip outside town, where the bodies were carefully buried. His report continued:

I made the young men from the Chantiers handle the corpses respectfully, four men to each body, and lay them in the grave in ranks of ten separated by a layer of soil about 10–15 centimetres thick. Given the number of men hanged, this was the best we could do. Several times I returned to the scene of the hangings to oversee the work there too. There was nobody about. The streets were full of troops and tanks. Doors and windows were closed and shutters too and I could imagine the terror of the people indoors.
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The SS had forbidden Prefect Trouillé to attend the burial as a gesture of respect but, at about 2100hrs, Roche persuaded them to permit this, providing no attempt was made at identification of individuals or to remove objects on their persons. The two senior civil servants were thus present when Father Espinasse pronounced a benediction over the graves, which contained also the bodies of several FTP men shot down along the road in the fighting of the previous day.

On the following day units of Lammerding’s force spread out in the countryside, trying to find traces of Chapou’s band. Wherever they went, additional reprisals were exacted, both under the Sperrle-Erlass and because local commanders grew increasingly short-tempered after repeatedly having to remove trees deliberately felled across the road to impede their progress. Villages were burned down, farms and barns set on fire. In one incident on the road to Uzerche a half-track rolled into the yard of a farm owned by M. and Mme Bordas, the soldiers loosing precautionary bursts of sub-machine gun fire in all directions. Her testimony was clear:

My husband and my son Pierre were in the yard, bringing the cows into the dairy for milking. The soldiers took aim at them, shouting and saying things we could not understand, except for the word ‘terrorist’. Our men were kept under guard in the farmyard while other soldiers searched the house, saying that we had hidden other terrorists there. They didn’t find anything and set off in their half-track, making my husband and son march in front of them. My daughter-in-law and I wanted to follow, to see what they did with our men, but they shot in our direction, happily without hitting either of us, but forcing us to turn back. Sheltering in the house, we heard many shots and thought that they were firing into every piece of woodland in case the Maquis were hiding there in ambush. All afternoon we heard them coming and going along the main road, which is only half a kilometre from our house, and we saw the thick smoke going up from houses they had set fire to. We didn’t go out to look for our men because we were afraid they would fire at us again. The next day, when the men still had not returned, we went out to look for them, but very cautiously because the Germans were still patrolling along the roads and in the woods. It was about eight o’clock when we found them lying near each other in our meadow, only 150 metres from the house. They had been shot and finished off with a coup de grâce – you could see the hole made by the bullet, the exit wound was much bigger. The Germans had no reason to kill them because they had done nothing, but I think it happened because they had found, on the road leading to our farm, not far from where the bodies lay, a car with German markings that was covered in blood. Near it was a freshly dug grave. So I think they believed that our men had done that. My husband Jean-Baptiste was seventy-two and my son Pierre was forty-four.
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It was not always the innocent who were killed. Shortly after the shooting of M. Bordas and his son, three armed FTP men drove a Citroën requisitioned from the Gestapo right into the middle of a German patrol and were taken prisoner. They were driven to Uzerche and hanged there.

On 10 June a further selection was made by Schmald of the men who had been held in the factory overnight, after which the SS transported to Limoges 311 men and 660 young members of the Chantiers de Jeunesse. There, they were subjected to yet another selection carried out by the Milice, at the end of which 162 men and all the youths from the Chantiers were set free while 149 prisoners were despatched to the concentration camp at Compiegne – and from there to Dachau on 2 July. Either in transport or at Dachau, 101 of them died.

Back in the home town they would never see again, after the departure of 2nd Das Reich on 11 and 12 June, the laboratory of the armament factory was used for six weeks as a torture chamber by Schmald and several
miliciens
in attempts to identify the members of Chapou’s bands and find where they had gone. On 21 June Prefect Trouillé managed to gain access to the laboratory and found three teenage
miliciens
pouring some kind of acid on the facial scars of a man whom they had severely beaten with coshes. On the same day, a new round-up by the Milice resulted in eighty men being sent to Austria as forced labourers.

Roche’s command of German came in useful for his fellow citizens also on 13 June, when he was able to stop the shelling of the town by a German artillery unit installed on the surrounding hills for reasons unknown. On 16 August, nine weeks after Chapou’s premature ‘liberation’ that cost so many lives and ruined so many others, Roche negotiated the surrender of the new German garrison but, his report continues: