Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (35 page)

The full details are too obscene to recount, but in short twenty-six male Jewish prisoners were crammed into a closed van with barely space for half that number by Paoli and his men, and then driven to a deserted farm in a military training ground a few kilometres from the town at a place called Guerry. In groups of six they were made to carry heavy rocks and solidified sacks of cement weighing 50kg each to a deep well, where
miliciens
armed with automatic pistols and sub-machine guns were waiting.

Instead of shooting the prisoners so that the bodies fell into the well shafts, their killers made them kneel by the parapets and pushed them over alive head-first, with the rocks and sacks of cement thrown in afterwards. The lucky ones died from a crushed skull or broken neck, others more slowly by drowning, already injured, under the weight of subsequent victims as more bodies and rocks crashed down on them, making a tangle of bodies that later took local firemen several days to extricate.

Once the prisoners waiting their turn realised what was happening, they were frozen in terror with the exception of one young man named Charles Krameisen, who decided that he preferred to die with a bullet in the back while attempting to escape rather than submit like a beast to the slaughter. Told to get out of the van in the last group, he was careful to be the last man to emerge, having already taken off his heavy boots to make it easier to run faster. Marched outside the courtyard of the farm where the van was parked, he overheard one Gestapo man say to another, ‘
Hier werden wir die Hasen töten
’.
Understanding German, he realised that the talk of killing hares was a jokey way of saying that they were going to kill their prisoners.

His run for freedom took the two guards at the rear of the group by surprise. By the time they started firing, he was sheltered by a corner of the farmhouse, off which the bullets ricocheted as he ran through scrub and low bushes, tearing clothes and flesh on brambles and thorns. Afraid that others might try the same trick, the guards designated one man to pursue the fugitive while they stayed with the group. One other man did try to escape, but was immediately shot down. Hiding in brambles, Krameisen heard several shots fired in his direction by the man detailed to kill him, who eventually went back to the others and saved face by reporting that he had killed the runaway and thrown his body down another well. Waiting until after darkness, Krameisen emerged from hiding shocked and dishevelled, to knock on the door of a peasant family with eight children living on a farm near the execution site, by whom he was taken in and given food and clothes.

The sorry story did not end on this note of courage and humanity. The female hostages were still locked up in Bourges prison, with a gruesome fate awaiting them too. The
miliciens
and Gestapo officials were by now mostly preoccupied with saving their skins before the Allied spearheads drove into the town. So the women might have survived until the liberation of Bourges, had not the commander of the local Milice been assassinated on 7 August. With no chance of catching the assassin, his men used the same ‘logic’ as Lécussan and decided to execute their Jewish hostages in reprisal.

Since all the male Jews taken from St-Amand were dead, it was the turn of the women. For ‘humanitarian’ reasons, 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 who were now told they were to be deported to a concentration camp in Germany. In the prison courtyard, as they were being herded into the Milice van, a German officer saw one of them weeping. Fortunately for her, she could speak enough German to explain that she was not Jewish, and was returned to the cells with another woman. The other eight and a male Jewish
résistant
who had been held in the prison for two months were then driven off to the killing ground at Guerry.

As evidenced by bloodstains and bullet scuffs on the parapet of a different well that was used for this round of killings, the man and five of the women were probably first shot before being dumped in the well. The body of the youngest, aged
18
, was naked and mutilated, with indications that she had been raped. The last woman to be pushed in before rocks were dumped on the bodies was Marthe Krameisen, who should not have been there because she had two children, but had denied this to save their lives, as she thought.

Between 9 and 11 August the Gestapo and their French hangers-on evacuated Bourges in style by motor transport, ignoring the plight of many Wehrmacht soldiers who had to commandeer bicycles after all their transport had been destroyed in combat or when strafed by Allied aircraft.

When the town was finally liberated on 17 August by a mixed force of FFI men, Free French troops and some SAS paras, the gates of Bordiot prison opened to release twenty-five women and nine children who survived the tragedy of St-Amand. Not for them the dancing in the streets of Bourges that went on until dawn. All they wanted was to get home and try to put their lives together again.

Administration in the areas that had been liberated by the Allied advance was complicated by de Gaulle insisting on replacing any functionary who had served under Vichy with a man untainted by his activities during the occupation. In Bourges the unanimous choice for the new mayor was a 77-year-old retired schoolteacher. Charles Cochet had been active in the region’s political life for many years until declared unsuitable for public office by Vichy because of his frequent criticisms of the regime.
⁴
In a climate of vengeance that saw a number of
collabos
beaten up and some killed, Cochet and the local liberation committee made an announcement that this impromptu
épuration
– or purging – was to stop: anyone who had an accusation to make should contact the forces of law and order, whose job it was to make arrests for punishment after due legal process.

The new incumbents all over liberated France had their hands full simply arranging food and shelter for the local inhabitants and the thousands of refugees unable to return to their homes on the wrong side of the battling armies. In this context, it is understandable that no one in Bourges had the time to listen to Charles Krameisen’s account of what had happened to him and others at Guerry, partly because he spoke French poorly and also because it sounded like the ravings of a madman. The missing Jews from St-Amand having been temporarily listed as missing or deported to camps in Germany, Krameisen was written off for several weeks as a man demented by suffering. Finally, on 18 October 1944, he was able to guide an ad hoc commission of inquiry to the killing ground at Guerry, where the presence of a US army photographer and cameraman permitted irrefutable coverage of the atrocity. The decomposing corpses of twenty-six men and eight women in the two wells used for the executions bore out Krameisen’s gruesome story. The first body to be brought out of the second well was that of his wife Marthe, recognisable only by the torn and soiled dress she had been wearing.

In October 1945, Paoli was condemned to death
in absentia
for the crime. He and the other guilty men had fled Bourges with their Gestapo protectors, but not headed straight for the illusion of safety in the Reich, as did so many of their ilk. Paoli and nine others, including François Rutz, heavyweight boxing champion of France in 1938, posed as a travelling band of
maquisards
in the Ardennes and elsewhere en route, repeatedly dodging the advancing US troops of General Courtney Hodge while tricking many genuine FFI groups into accepting them as comrades. Because they moved about frequently and covered their tracks well, there is no count of the number of their victims duped and killed in this way, but it is considerable. At some point, they retreated into Germany, where Paoli asked Gestapo HQ in Berlin to arrange German nationality for him. After this was refused, he and his band finally gravitated with some 2,000 French fascists and other Vichy riffraff to Sigmaringen in southern Germany, where Pétain was being held under house arrest.

In the final days before the German surrender, Paoli’s gruesome odyssey ended at Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, a few kilometres from the Danish border, where the last German troops were still holding out. It was there that he was arrested by British military police on 16 May 1945. In January 1946, he was handed over to French justice after many delays by the British occupation authorities. Others of the band were later also handed over. At his retrial in Bourges, Paoli lied consistently. Defying the incontrovertible evidence of the autopsies, he pretended that all the hostages from St-Amand had been humanely executed by the traditional bullet in the back of the neck before being dropped into the wells. On 15 June 1946 he was executed in Bourges prison, scene of his many depredations. The previous week, four other
miliciens
were also condemned to death and executed. Defiant to the end, one of them cried out to the firing squad, not ‘
Vive la France!
’ but ‘
Vive Bucard!
’
Marcel Bucard was the founder of the pre-war French fascist party known as ‘Francisme’, whose followers had been the most enthusiastic members of Darnand’s Milice.
⁵

Accorded French citizenship in recognition of his suffering, Charles Krameisen died in a mental hospital. Lécussan was tried for his crimes and executed in Lyon in September 1946. Simone Bout de l’An and her children remained in France, but her husband fled to Italy and lived there to die a natural death in 1977. Chaillaud returned to St-Amand, always ready to justify the hanging of the Milice and became an increasingly bitter man, angry that more people were not punished for collaboration.

Thus ended the sad story of St-Amand – the town ‘where nothing ever happened’.

Notes

1
Todorov, pp. 117–20.

2
Ibid., p. 128.

3
Although French, he held the SS rank of Scharführer (sergeant).

4
Bulletin municipal de Bourges
, 1944, BYP11.

5
Article in
Le Patriote Résistant
, January 2009.

KILL THE HERO!

In the days, weeks and months after D-Day, General Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were concentrating on the drive out of Normandy and eastwards into Hitler’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr as the quickest way to end the war in Europe. They had no wish to expend non-French lives in liberating areas of France outside this grand design. Since de Gaulle was the man who had given them so much trouble in the past with his insistence that he knew what was best for his country, the task of liberating areas of France irrelevant to the drive into the Reich was largely left to his Free French forces, in collaboration with the local units of the FFI under the command of General Koenig.

While most PCF members blindly obeyed the party’s instructions during the months of France’s slow liberation with no thought for the lives of those who would be killed in German reprisals after spurious ‘liberations’ that lasted hours or a few days, 31-year-old schoolteacher Georges Guingouin was one party member who refused to do this. Brought up by his schoolteacher mother after his father died in the First World War before Georges’ second birthday, he had a strong sense of right and wrong, which often conflicted with the PCF party line. As one example, in September 1940 he refused to distribute issue No. 9 of
La Vie du Parti
, in which the editorial urged party members to be ‘without hatred for the German soldiers [because] we are against de Gaulle and the capitalist clan whose interests Vichy shares’. That may not seem much of a rebellion, but it meant that he was a marked man in the eyes of the PCF leadership.

Guingouin fought his own war, going underground in February 1941 to escape arrest and setting up a clandestine printing press in a remote area, where he lived in abandoned houses, huntsmen’s cabins and even caves that had not been inhabited since the Wars of Religion in the Middle Ages. To the party, he was known dismissively as ‘that crazy man who lives in the woods’. His tracts, never tame reprints of the party line, were distributed by the thousand wherever people gathered at traditional fairs and agricultural meetings. He also augmented rations by stealing the entire stock of ration cards in St-Gilles-des-Forêts, a crime for which he was sentenced in his absence by a Vichy court to hard labour for life. In May 1943 the PCF ordered his execution for defying party discipline and raising a band of partisans that blew up essential equipment in a rubber processing factory in Limoges, but Guingouin was not an easy man to kill, although one of the party’s later attempts very nearly succeeded. Two months later, another of Guingouin’s coups was the sabotage of the underground cable connecting the U-boat base in Bordeaux with the HQ of the Kriegsmarine in Berlin. So successful was his personal brand of communism that the German occupation forces branded the eastern part of Haute Vienne
département
where he held sway ‘little Russia’.