Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (27 page)

In the first of these operations, Lieutenant Gerlach – unit unknown – was about to be shot by
maquisards
who stopped his vehicle at gunpoint in some woodland. After being forced to strip to his underclothes, Gerlach managed to escape while his captors were busy machine-gunning his driver. Finding his way back to his unit by following a railway line through the woods, he indicated that the incident 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. Two unidentified
miliciens
also directed the SS to Oradour-sur-Glane on the morning of 10 June.

In the second incident, a German ambulance unit was attacked by
maquisards
, who set fire to the vehicles and burned alive the medical personnel and the wounded soldiers they were transporting.

In the third event, 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 personal papers were found by a Wehrmacht despatch rider the next day, on a road where he had presumably thrown them to leave a clue to his whereabouts while being transferred from one vehicle to another. An offer to return him unharmed against the release of
maquisard
prisoners was agreed to. There was also an unverifiable rumour that gold bullion, looted from a dynamited bank by the SS, was handed over as a ransom. Whatever the truth of that, the Maquis killed him anyway. His remains were found by a German war graves team after the war, with 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
involved neither wearing uniform nor carrying their arms openly, the Sperrle-Erlass
required reprisals, including the executions of hostages. Major Diekmann, commanding the troops at Oradour, alleged that he found bodies of murdered Germans on arrival there, as well as caches of weapons and ammunition. According to his account, there was no intention of killing the women and children, but when their homes 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 on to the victims below, producing sufficient heat from their body fat to melt the bronze bell.

Diekmann’s immediate superior SS Colonel Sylvester Stadler was sufficiently disturbed by the number of civilians killed to refer the matter to General 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’.
¹
Hearing what had happened at Oradour-sur-Glane, 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 wheeled transporters and a lack of many spare parts for the tanks,
²
this was unlikely to happen in the near future. 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 idea of an official inquiry, followed by a possible court martial, was abandoned.

At the post-war trial – there could hardly not be a trial for what had happened at Oradour – an unrepresentative few of the killers of Oradour were arraigned by the Haut Tribunal Permanent des Forces Armées sitting in Bordeaux from 13 January to 12 March 1953. Strangely, General Lammerding was not extradited to give evidence, nor ever brought to trial, although known to be practising as a civil engineer at Düsseldorf in the British zone of Germany. He subsequently claimed to have offered to attend the trial in Bordeaux and also to provide the war diary of 2nd Division Das Reich to be used in evidence. Whether he did or not, neither he nor the war diary was called in evidence. Lammerding died of natural causes on 13 January 1971 at Bad Tölz in Bavaria.

Forty-three members of Diekmann’s company were condemned to death
in absentia
,
most of them having been killed during the subsequent fighting in Normandy after the tragic event at Oradour. Present in court were seven Germans and fourteen men from Alsace and Lorraine – one volunteer and thirteen conscripts. Whether for political reasons – Alsace and Lorraine were technically German in 1944 but belonged to France again in 1953 – or for diplomatic reasons with the Cold War at its height, or because of a need to cover up the alleged Maquis atrocities, the sentences were not exemplary.

The senior accused was sentenced to death, as was one Alsatian volunteer. Nine of the conscripts were given forced labour ranging from five to twelve years; one was acquitted.

In the Limousin, the sentences were considered outrageously inadequate, yet in Alsace-Loraine there was public indignation that the
malgré nous
conscripts should be sentenced at all for obeying German orders, no matter what they had done. Since the accused had already spent eight years in custody, the Alsatian and Lorrainer conscripts were released immediately, as the judges had known would be the case when passing sentence. All the Germans, except the one sentenced to death, were liberated a few months later. The two death sentences were commuted, with both men released in 1959.

Oradour-sur-Glane has become France’s national shrine to the tens of thousands of victims who died during the German retreat. It lies some 65 miles north-east of Tulle and 15 miles from the major city of Limoges. Frozen in time, the roofless homes and shattered 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, 1940-model cars, prams and bicycles stand or lie rusting but otherwise undamaged. It is hard to think that all this ruination was accomplished by men, many of whom had grown up as French, using a few bullets and some phosphorous grenades.

When the author first visited Oradour, the ruined village was open to all comers. Parking a car and walking into it was like stepping back into a Ground Zero of horror. The site is now walled and fenced off from the modern world and the only access is through a visitor centre, where one goes underground to emerge into a nightmare scene, frozen in time. Many visitor centres ruin the effect of the sites to which they guard access. The one at Oradour is respectful and informative, with facsimiles of contemporary documents and also personal mementoes: the intact porcelain inkwells from the school desks, of which the woodwork was burned to a cinder, some children’s shoes, a faded junior school photograph – the last ever taken in Oradour. This is all that remains of the little children in their best clothes, gazing solemnly at the camera with no idea of the terrible fate awaiting them.

Oradour is far from the only town or village in France to suffer like this. Most tourists and international truckers hastening along the A10 motorway 25 miles south of Tours on their way to south-west France, Spain or Portugal have no idea that, in passing the picturesque little village of Maillé, on the western side of the motorway, they are at the scene of another massacre in summer 1944. On 25 August – the very day that Paris was liberated and the tricolour flag was flying on the Eiffel Tower – a detachment of German troops commanded by Second Lieutenant Gustav Schleuter, a Nazi Party member since 1931, who was stationed in St-Maure-de-Touraine, killed 124 people in Maillé, allegedly in reprisal for Resistance activity in the region. Most of the victims were women and children.

Only 241 people lived in the village, including eighty-eight refugees. Many of them were personally known to German officers and troops who had been billeted in the village for several weeks. The Resistance had been active in the region, actually blowing up the railway lines in Maillé station three times since the Normandy landings. On 11 August an RAF pilot had parachuted from his stricken aircraft and been spirited away from the troops searching for him.

The reprisal ‘operation’ was methodical and thorough. During the night, Schlueter brought up the supporting artillery and concealed the trucks of his reinforcements among some trees. At 0800hrs his men blocked all access to, and exits from, the village. A squadron of RAF aircraft chose this moment to overfly Maillé and attack a train passing through, destroying one of Schlueter’s 88mm cannons. Unfortunately, the noise of the attack distracted the villagers, some of whom might otherwise have realised what was going to happen in time to flee. Waffen-SS men started shooting dead any person – adult or child – they came across. People in hiding were dragged out and shot. Those who tried to escape were hunted down like animals. In early afternoon, with 124 people killed, the troops set fire to many houses before withdrawing to leave a clean field of fire for German artillery, including several 88s to shell the village. The shelling continued until late evening.

In the village post office that morning was postmistress Jacqueline Roy and her neighbour Christiane Benoist, who worked as housemaid for Maillé’s two schoolteachers. Long afterwards, Madame Roy, who was a girl of 18, pregnant with her second child at the time, talked about the experience to a grandchild:
³

That morning, I was on duty alone. My daughter Liliane was 15 months old and asleep in her bedroom. My husband, who was the postman, had left on his bicycle with the outgoing mail that had to be taken to the main post office in Celle St Avent, the next village. We heard the train being machine-gunned by the English planes. My husband was about to use the level crossing and had to throw himself into a ditch to avoid all the bullets. He rode back to the post office and told me that something strange was going on. He had seen smoke rising from [some outlying farms that had been torched] but we thought it was coming from German vehicles that had been attacked by the RAF.

Our neighbour André Metais came in at the same time and said that there were German soldiers in camouflage uniforms firing at people near the cemetery. I was worried and went to get my little daughter from her bedroom. When I came back, my husband and Monsieur Metais had decided to go down into the cellar, where we could take shelter. From some instinct – I don’t exactly know why – I refused to follow them, so they agreed we should all go next door to Monsieur and Madame Gandar, the schoolteachers. We tried to slip quietly through the gardens, but the communicating door was locked, so the men had to break it down.

Madame Gandar saw us in the schoolyard and made signs for us to follow her down to the cellar beneath the school, where we found her husband and children aged 2 years and 10 years old and seven other people. The cellar door was closed and we sat among the wine casks. Through the ventilation holes in the walls we could see booted feet in the garden we had just run through. There were some bursts of fire very close and bullets pierced the door of the cellar, but no one was hurt. The children were terrified and crying, but we had our hands over their mouths to silence them. We smelled smoke. The teachers’ apartment over our heads was burning. We heard the noise of china and glass shattering.

Then everything seemed to calm down. Madame Gandar opened a jar of conserved fruit for the children, who were hungry and thirsty. About two p.m. the shelling started, with some firing closer. It went on until around five o’clock. The men went out of the cellar and peered over the garden wall, to see bodies on fire lying in the street. My husband hurried to our house to get the baby’s pram and some milk for her, but found himself facing three young Germans pointing rifles at him. They shouted, ‘Terrorist!’ He replied, ‘No, not a terrorist,’ and they let him go.

Abbé Payon, the parish priest, now came along with some Germans. Madame Gandar asked them to help us leave the village, which they did. The priest came with us as far as the level crossing and told us to walk slowly, stay together and not look back. We spent the night at a farm, how I don’t know. In the morning, Madame Gandar and my husband went into the village. Most of the houses were burned down, but the post office was still standing, although a shell had blown away the gable end. A grenade had been thrown into its cellar, where we should have died, but for my sudden panic. My sister-in-law Georgette was killed in her cellar with her little 4-year-old boy. His father was a prisoner of war in Germany, so he never saw his child. Fifty-six years later, I still wonder by what miracle we were spared.

Christiane Benoist, the other young woman in the post office that morning, wrote down her account:

I had left school at fourteen and went to work in the home of Monsieur and Madame Gandar. This all happened on the day after my seventeenth birthday. That morning, the sky was blue and the sun already hot. We had been occupied for four years and we knew that the war must end soon. I heard a train being machine-gunned by English planes and, not realising the danger, went up into the attic to see what was going on. I’m not sure what the time was. There was smoke going up outside the village and I thought the planes must have attacked a German convoy. It was time to prepare the vegetables for lunch, but Monsieur Gandar told me to go down to the cellar. I hadn’t realised there were bullets flying around outside, and I took the potatoes with me to continue peeling them down there. With us were Monsieur and Madame Roy and their little girl, and a neighbour called Metais. We shared our fears but soon fell silent.