Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (28 page)

Her account continues similarly to that of Madame Roy, except after they left the cellar, when:

… the soldiers lined us up against a wall, pointing their sub-machine guns at us. I was standing next to Madame Gandar. It seemed to last a long time. When she changed her little girl Annette from one arm to the other, she put her free arm around my shoulders and said, ‘Be brave, girl. We’re all going together.’ That was when Abbé Payon came up, talking in German with the soldiers. It seemed to go on for a long time until he said to us in French, ‘I’m going to come with you to the level crossing. Keep calm.’ When we got there, he went back into the village. We had no idea then how terrible it had been. Next morning I had to let my parents know that I was all right. Madame Gandar tried to stop me by saying it was too dangerous. but I went anyway, keeping off the roads, walking through the fields and crawling at times until I got down to the river. At the slightest sound, I hid in the long grass. I was frightened when a man approached, until I recognised my father, who took me across the river in his little boat, back to our home. I didn’t sleep properly for more than a month. On the Sunday we all attended the mass funerals, feeling completely numb. Now, fifty-six years later it still gives me pain to write these lines.

Although Schlueter was condemned to death in his absence at a trial in 1952, he was never tracked down. Unlike Oradour, which was preserved as the symbolic ‘martyred village’, Maillé was completely rebuilt by 1950.

There were, sadly, many Oradours and Maillés during that awful summer of 1944. As late as 29 August an unidentified Waffen-SS unit shot eighty-six men, women and children in and around the village of Couvonges in Lorraine, and thus technically German under the armistice agreement of June 1940. It was a small village of not more than 120 inhabitants, most of whom earned a living on the land. On 27 August a retreating column of 3rd Division of Panzer Grenadiers arrived and requisitioned accommodation. The locals, mistrusting the intention of all soldiers by this stage of the German retreat, although never guessing what was in store for them, set about hiding everything stealable, from household linen to wine, food and clothing. In the evening of 28 August the news went round that trains from Germany could get no further into France than nearby Revigny-sur-Ornain. After that, the lines had been blown up. Artillery fire could be heard to the west and the sky in that direction was lit by explosions at night.

On the morning of 29 August the artillery fire was much nearer, making windows rattle. At 0500hrs a motorised Wehrmacht column halted at the entrance to the village. Some of the German troops got out, seemingly to stretch their legs before concealing their vehicles in a barn. An NCO asked the mayor three times whether there were any partisans operating locally. Each time he was told there were none. At 0700hrs a Waffen-SS convoy rolled up with men dressed in khaki shorts and shirts. They set up two machine guns at the entrance to the village and two more by the church. The officer in command ordered the mayor to stay in his house with his family while soldiers searched the place, stealing everything that took their fancy. He then announced that no one might leave the village without written permission, but the villagers were not unduly worried as yet because this seemed reasonable in expectation of the arrival of American spearheads.

On the contrary, they set about making themselves as comfortable and as safe as possible from both German and American fire once the battle started. Eight men were arrested. Two were released. An accusation was made that arms were hidden in the village and that someone had fired on the Germans, which was patently untrue and made the villagers uneasy. It sounded like an alibi. One soldier with a conscience advised an elderly couple to hide in the woods. In broken French, he said, ‘Understand? Officer, bang, bang.’

An Italian living in the village who could speak German asked several soldiers what was happening. Looking pale with shock, he translated for the villagers’ benefit: ‘They are going to kill all the men and set fire to the village. But they will spare the women and children.’

Accused again of harbouring partisans who had attacked German troops, the mayor denied the charge and asked what had become of his two sons, arrested shortly before. A lieutenant took him to where all the men had been lined up and freed the two sons, ordering them to stay indoors with their father all day. Two FFI men travelling through Couvonges, but without weapons, were arrested. Three Waffen-SS men headed for the post office, where they tore out the cable of the only phone in the village, helped themselves to money from the cash drawer and took the jewellery of the postmistress at gunpoint.

Around midday, after pillaging and looting every house, soldiers with flame-throwers and phosphorous grenades set fire to buildings at both ends of the village. Other soldiers were breaking down doors and arresting all the men found in the houses, herding them into a barn. Two young girls were raped in front of their mother’s eyes. By 1300hrs the fires had taken hold and the whole village seemed to be burning. The prisoners in the barn were marched into a field and lined up in front of the machine guns, to be mown down like grass before the scythe. People running out of their burning homes were gunned down and the bodies robbed of anything of value. So terrified were the villagers who had escaped the massacre that it was three days before they dared to return and bury the bodies, which by then were decomposing in the heat.

One could go on, listing the villages and towns of France that were pillaged and burned down in autumn 1944, with all or most of their inhabitants killed for no military purpose, since Germany had obviously lost the war long since and liberation by the Allied spearheads was in many cases only a matter of hours away.

Notes

1
Divisional orders signed by General Lammerding exhibited at the Centre de Mémoire, Oradour.

2
Letter to OKW complaining of these problems, signed by Lammerding, exhibited at the Centre de Mémoire, Oradour.

3
More details on family website http://acroy.perso.neuf.fr/cave.htm.

THE TOWN WHERE NOTHING EVER HAPPENED

During the occupation, the town of Bourges in central France stood just 4 miles north of the Demarcation Line, firmly in the Occupied Zone. In the Gestapo wing of the Bordiot prison torture was routinely used to extract information from the
résistants
and others arrested for helping people cross the line. One of them, Marc Toledano described his first agonising session as follows:

Scharführer Schultz looked like a rat. Everything about him was grey: his uniform, his hair, his skin. He was like something that had never seen daylight. As a torturer the Gestapo could not have made a better choice. His henchman was Ernst Basedow. I thought Schultz was going to kill me [in the interrogation cell]. He grabbed a pistol, cocked it, took aim at me and changed his mind. Then he got a dog whip and swished it through the air so that the lash caught me on the eye. The pain was so acute that I lost my balance and fell. Later, Schultz forced my head right down the dirty toilet, blocking the outflow while Basedow repeatedly activated the flush so that I was drowning.

Between two sessions of torture, Toledano was lying in a dark cell, his hands cuffed in front of him. The handcuffs had sharp teeth on the inner faces that cut into the flesh and nerves of the wrists, like the jaws of a man-trap:

I was in a semi-coma, when a man appeared, placed his hand on my face and whispered in heavily accented French, ‘Don’t move. Don’t say anything. I am a German nurse, Brother Alfred of the Order of St Francis. I’ve come to look after you, to comfort you and take care of you.’

Toledano was not hallucinating. This was his first meeting with Wehrmacht corporal Alfred Stanke. He was born at Danzig in 1904 into a Polish Catholic family, whose original name was Stanicewski until his father changed it to sound more German. A religious child from very young, Alfred entered the Franciscan order of nursing monks dedicated to the Holy Cross. The community must have appreciated his talents in the staff kitchen, because four years later he was officially appointed cook to Pope Pious XI in the Vatican.

Returning to Germany, he became a nurse in a hospital in Cologne run by the nursing nuns of the Order of Poor Clares. There, for the first time, he was in daily contact with extremely poor people in ill health, who could not afford to pay for treatment. Imprisoned by the Nazis when another convent in which he was working at Coblenz was closed down by them in 1936, with all its property confiscated, Brother Alfred experienced the inside of a cell at first hand. Released and compulsorily mobilised for military service in 1940, he found himself a Wehrmacht corporal in the very different world of the occupation forces in France. By 1942 he was working as a warder/medic in the Bordiot prison at Bourges. There he became known to hundreds of grateful detainees as ‘the Franciscan of Bourges’.

The worst tortures, the effects of which he tried to alleviate, were carried out not by the German Gestapo but a Frenchman from the area named Pierre-Marie Paoli, whose many specialisations included the pulling out of fingernails, use of electric shocks and slicing prisoners’ skin in fine strips with a razor – known to Chinese torturers as ‘the death of a thousand cuts’. A fluent German-speaker, this former tax clerk had first been employed as an interpreter until his sadistic inclinations led to him being enlisted in the Gestapo, where his workload rose to ‘treatment’ of as many as 300 victims in one year, almost all of whom either died in the prison or were transferred to concentration camps.

On arriving in Bourges, Brother Alfred could hardly speak French. Georges Ruetsch, the interpreter at the prefecture, spoke fluent German and agreed to teach him French. The teacher-pupil relationship soon exceeded language lessons by far. On one occasion, Ruetsch confided that the Resistance was planning to attack the prison and liberate the prisoners. Brother Alfred saved many lives by warning him to abort the plan because the prison guards were too numerous and too well armed.

In the same building as Paoli, Schultz and Basedow, Brother Alfred was ignoring all the regulations and doing his best to alleviate the sufferings of the prisoners by comforting them in any way possible and moving them into cells with their comrades so that they could prepare uncontradictory watertight defences and possibly avoid an appointment with a firing squad. He also carried messages to and from their families outside. By offering to do other warders’ night duties, he not only had more freedom to help the prisoners during the hours of darkness when the prison was less well staffed but also got paid for the favour. The money was used to buy food for the starving prisoners. In this way men and women suffering from the tortures of Paoli and the other interrogators were given back some strength in the hope that this might enable them to survive the rigours of deportation under atrocious conditions. Brother Alfred was, in short, a saint, albeit never canonised.

It was a black day for prisoners in the Bordiot when he was discovered by an officer praying at the grave of a recent victim of the prison firing squad – something strictly forbidden by the Vichy government and totally
verboten
for a German soldier. Aghast, the officer screamed at him, ‘This is a serious affair. I am compelled to take severe measures against you.’ As a result, Brother Alfred was posted to another prison at Dijon in April 1944.
¹

On the other side of the Demarcation Line – about 20 miles south of it at the nearest point – the twin town of St-Amand-Montrond boasts that it is the plumb centre of France. Geography teachers and students may like to know that the precise coordinates are longitude 2° 52" E and latitude 46° 72" N. A stele in the neighbouring commune of Bruère Allichamps supposedly marks the exact spot. It was originally a Roman milestone erected in the reign of Emperor Alexander Severus to mark, uniquely, the junction of three imperial roads, and was later hollowed out for use as a sarcophagus. Unearthed in the eighteenth century, it was placed in its present position in 1758.

In terms of tourist attractions, the casual visitor to St-Amand can go fishing in the Canal du Berry – Berry was the pre-Revolutionary name for the region – or take river trips on the canal in gently puttering motorboats. The twelfth-century parish church is an interesting mixture of Romanesque and Gothic styles. The Cité de l’Or is a permanent jewellery exhibition celebrating St-Amand’s position as the third most important jewellery producer in France. There is a medieval castle in Montrond, unfortunately largely dismantled for building materials by an impoverished owner in the nineteenth century. The twelfth-century Cistercian abbey at Noirlac still stands and is worth a visit. The Musée St Vic purports to trace local history over the past 100,000 years. Local history there certainly is, for Berry was the heartland of witchcraft in medieval France.

In the Place de la République is a handsome bronze bust of General de Gaulle. There is also a memorial to the commander of the locally recruited 1st Infantry Regiment, who died in a German camp. The
mur des fusillés
is a wall of remembrance commemorating ‘our brothers who died so that we might be free’ and were shot there on 8 June 1944, two days after the Normandy landings. In many places in France, when war memorials have to be refurbished, the current European political correctness apparently demands that the wording is changed, so that
fusillés par les Allemands
– shot by the Germans – becomes ‘
tués par l’occupant
’, meaning ‘killed by the occupiers’. It is politely vague and may mean nothing to most people in a couple of generations. Here, on this wall, the visitor is left to guess who committed the deed, since the perpetrators are not identified.