by Douglas Boyd
When Bertrand learned of the planned local uprising, he was horrified. A single glance at the map was enough to show that it had no hope of success, and would certainly incite German and Vichy reprisals long before any Allied troops could get there from the beachheads. Also, de Gaulle’s order dated 16 May was that no confrontation was to be sought by the FFI in the early stages of the Liberation because it was ‘likely to break the impetus of French Resistance and cause considerable harm to the general population, without any compensating gain’.3
Having no authority to stop the local commanders from going ahead, Bertrand reluctantly requested the CO of the locally-based Vichy 1RF regiment not to intervene, whatever happened in St-Amand. At 5.30 p.m. de Gaulle’s hastily written speech was broadcast from London, containing the ambiguous phrase that ‘the duty of the sons of France is to fight with all the means at their disposal’.4 As with Pétain’s ambiguous broadcast in June 1940, it set the stage for tragedy. Although exact numbers were afterwards disputed, about seventy men assembled in St-Amand-Montrond, mostly aged between 20 and 25, on the run from the STO and looking for a way of proving their courage and manhood. Many were strangers to each other and introductions were made at the same time as automatic weapons parachuted to a combat group were handed out to men who had never handled anything more lethal than a shotgun. Fortunately only one résistant was killed before they learned how easy it was to loose a burst accidentally from the Stens.
The PCF members among the group had been instructed that day to ‘exterminate all the German garrisons and kill without mercy all the murderous rabble of the Milice’.5 Feeling trigger-happy with weapons in their hands, but no training to use them, they surrounded the Milice headquarters and opened fire. An impressive hail of bullets struck the building, but hit no one inside. Nor did the return fire and hand grenades of the miliciens score a hit, until a stray shot killed an innocent passerby. The attackers having no unified command, each man kept in touch only with the others he knew, allowing one milicien to escape on a motorcycle and give the alarm by telephone.
Inside the building were some girlfriends of the miliciens and Simone Bout de l’An, the wife of their national commander. Since one of her children was ill and needed hospitalisation, she thrust a white sheet out of a window about 11 p.m. The miliciens walked out, hands above their heads, followed by the women and children. In compliance with the FTP directive, some men wanted to kill them all, but they were locked up as POWs in the sub-prefecture, while the résistants used their database to launch a manhunt, with so many people dragged out of their houses at gunpoint that Mayor René Sadrin had to turn the town hall into a prison. The only Germans in the town were three civilians from the STO. They were also locked up, but not maltreated.
Francis Bout de l’An was awoken in his Paris hotel next morning with the news that his wife and children were hostages of the FFI. Darnand, also in Paris, told him to use all necessary German and French forces to retake the town and liberate his family. At the same time, the FFI men in St-Amand-Montrond learned from a patrol of 1RF the disquieting news that the Allies were still bottled up in a few square miles of beachhead and no other city in France had ‘liberated itself’.
Telephoning the sub-prefecture in the hope of getting an update from a Vichy official, Bout de l’An found himself talking to Van Gaver, sitting in the sub-prefect’s chair. The conversation degenerated into an exchange of threats. At more or less the same time, a 35-year-old communist teacher known as ‘Col Kléber’ Chapou ordered his private army of 400 FTP and other maquisards to occupy the city of Tulle in central France. With the nearest Allied troops over 400km away, it was obvious that the town could not be held and that killing the forty or so German soldiers there was an invitation for reprisals.
Travelling via Vichy, where he collected thirty miliciens, Bout de l’An headed towards St-Amand, stopping 60km short at Moulins, where the Wehrmacht commander promised to attack St-Amand in force the following morning, meantime estimating the enemy’s strength by over-flying a light observation aircraft, whose pilot reported that the town was in a holiday mood, with only a few barricades here and there. Having failed to park their transport under cover, the maquisards panicked at the sight of the small aircraft with Maltese cross markings and left town after posting warning notices that the miliciens and their women they were taking with them would be shot in the event of reprisals on the townsfolk. Although her captors knew exactly who Simone was, she, alone among the hostages, showed no fear, calling the girlfriends of the miliciens ‘the little sluts’.
When the German attack came, nineteen civilians were killed, six homes burned to the ground and 200 hostages locked up in the 1RF barracks. As one local summed up bitterly, ‘On 7 June the Maquis ordered drinks all round, leaving us to pay for the drinks next day’.
Finding their three compatriots unharmed, the Germans withdrew in good order, handing the town over to the Milice, who plundered and burned the homes of the departed FFI men. The fact that his wife was still a hostage sent Bout de l’Am into a rage. He ordered all the 200-odd prisoners to be executed if she were not liberated within forty-eight hours.
Tanks of the SS armoured division Das Reich were patrolling all the main streets of Tulle by 6 a.m. on 9 June. SS men forced entry into houses and dragged out any men found inside, also arresting any male on the streets. André Gamblin, a 22-year-old accountant, was shopping for milk for his baby daughter when they picked him up; gazogène engineer Raymond Lesouëf was having breakfast with his wife and two children when he was led away. In all, more than 3,000 men were herded inside the walls of the MAT armament factory on Place Souilhac while the SS went around the town collecting ladders and rope. Their commander, Major Kowatsch, remarked to the town prefect: ‘We hanged more than 100,000 at Kiev and Kharkov. What we are doing here is nothing for us.’6
From the hostages in the factory yard, doctors, postal clerks and other people essential for running the town were released and the remainder divided into two groups. At 1.30 p.m. a loudspeaker truck toured the town, announcing that life should go back to normal. To keep the victims calm, they were assured they were being held for an identity check. At 4.30 p.m. several gendarmes were released in time to hear a loudspeaker announcement that hostages were to be hanged and their bodies thrown into the river.7
An amateur sketch of the scene, possibly done by an SS officer, shows soldiers casually walking along a street with corpses hanging from each lamppost. In the centre, an officer watches a soldier on a ladder against a lamppost reaching down to help a hostage awkwardly climbing a second ladder with his hands tied behind his back towards the noose above his head; another soldier steadies the victim’s ladder, ready to pull it away. Three or four other victims under guard watch what is going to happen to them.8 In the end, every balcony, telegraph pole and lamppost along the main street had a body hanging from it.9
The following day, units of the same SS division immortalised its name at a large village which has become France’s national shrine to the victims of the German retreat. Less than 20km north-west of Limoges, Oradour-sur-Glane is frozen in time. The roofless homes and 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 all this ruination was accomplished by fire and a few bullets.
At 2 p.m. on the balmy summer afternoon of Saturday 10 June, 120 men of SS Division Das Reich cordoned off the village. Major Adolf Diekmann ordered the mayor to assemble the villagers. One 8-year-old refugee boy from Lorraine hid in a garden, either because he recognised the SS uniforms or because he understood what the men were saying in German: Roger Godfrin was to be the sole child alive by the end of the afternoon. The other 247 pupils in the refugee school and the main school obediently lined up with their teachers for what they were told was an identity check.
A party of cyclists – five young men and a girl – were allowed through the cordon to share the fate of the villagers, a
s were a number of mothers who came looking for sons and daughters after they should have returned home. The women and children were herded into the church and the men locked into several barns. Small groups of all ages were shot in the streets, some left wounded and finished off later. Several bodies were stuffed down a well only 60cm in diameter.
The five adult male survivors of the massacre testified that the SS shot at the mass of bodies jammed into their barn, aiming low to hit the legs and throwing straw and other combustible material on top of the bodies, many still alive, before setting fire to everything with phosphorous grenades. Whilst 197 of their male friends and relatives died of wounds or were burned alive, the five survived by throwing themselves flat when the first shots were fired and hid in a corner of the barn the flames did not reach, subsequently escaping into the countryside.
The SS next turned their attention to the church. The one woman to survive, with several wounds, testified that at about 5 p.m. two soldiers carried in a large box with fuses coming from it, which they lit and retired. The church was filled with choking smoke, panicking the press of 240 desperate women and 205 children into breaking down the door into the sacristy, where soldiers were waiting at the windows. Bullet holes in the masonry show how they shot at the trapped women and children. In desperation, one woman clambered through a stained glass window, through which she fell to the ground outside, hit by several bullets. Another woman and baby were shot trying to follow her.
At 7 p.m. the evening tram from Limoges was halted at the SS cordon. Passengers who had come just to buy black market food were ordered back on board for the return trip, but twenty-two inhabitants of Oradour were lined up against a wall with a machine gun pointing at them. One can imagine their feelings, standing there with the smoke from every building in the burning town darkening the evening sky and their nostrils filled with the stench of burning flesh. Many of the SS were drunk on looted wine and spirits, but after three hours the hostages were simply told to go away, seeking refuge on nearby farms or hiding in the woods till dawn.
By the end of the day, out of the 700 people who had woken up that morning in Oradour only the boy from Lorraine, one woman and five men were alive. Only fifty-two corpses were definitively identified; the others were carbonised, many not even recognisable as human. The SS drove away some time after dawn, leaving every house gutted. Decades later, rusting motor vehicles and children’s prams and bicycles have almost completely disintegrated. The melted bronze bell still lies on the church floor for tourists to photograph.
As to the reasons why it all happened, on the French side it is claimed that there was no Resistance activity in Oradour-sur-Glane and that the SS misread their maps, when they should have been at nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres, where the Maquis had been active. The German version does not differ greatly as far as the massacre is concerned, but claims that the village was the right one, to be destroyed in reprisal for local Resistance operations in which two German officers had been kidnapped by the Maquis and an ambulance convoy ambushed. Stripped to his underclothes, Lieutenant Gerlach managed to escape after capture while his driver was being killed in some woodland. He found his way back to his unit by following a railway line, and indicated that his kidnapping 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.
In the second incident, a German ambulance unit was attacked by maquisards, and the medical personnel and wounded men they were transporting burned alive in the vehicles. In the third, 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 papers were found by a despatch rider in a street in Tulle the next day, where he had presumably thrown them to leave a clue while being transferred from one vehicle to another. An offer to return him unharmed against the release of maquisard prisoners was agreed to, but the Maquis killed him anyway. His remains were found by German war graves investigators after the war, 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 neither wearing uniform nor carrying their arms openly – and thus not protected by military law – Ordnung Sperrle, the Standing Orders for dealing with Resistance attacks on German troops, required the area of an attack to be routinely cordoned off, houses from which shots had been fired to be burned, and three hostages shot for every soldier wounded and ten hanged for each dead German. Major Diekmann, commanding the troops at Oradour, claimed to have found bodies of murdered Germans on arrival there, as well as caches of weapons and ammunition. According to his account, there was no intention to kill the women and children, and the men were to be taken hostage. However, when the houses 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 onto the victims below, producing heat sufficient to melt the bronze bell.
Diekmann’s superior, Colonel Sylvester Stadler, was sufficiently disturbed by the number of civilians killed to refer the matter to divisional commander General Heinz 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’.10 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 transporters and a lack of many spare parts for the tanks,11 no priority was given to this. 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 enquiry was abandoned.
That awful Saturday when Oradour was destroyed, 150km to the north-east, the mayor of St-Amand and a friend were stacking up the miles hunting for the FFI, with the deadline already extended several times. On one occasion they missed a rendezvous by less than a kilometre. Meanwhile, Bout de l’An decided the local Milice were too ‘soft’ to carry out the reprisals he had in mind and sent for Joseph Lécussan, the man who had killed Victor Basch and his wife in January. Drinking heavily from the moment he arrived, Lécussan ordered houses blown up and embarked sixty-five hostages in motor-coaches on 11 June – destination Vichy. Inhabitants of St-Amand who listened to the BBC caught a message from General Koenig, commander-in-chief of the FFI: ‘Since it is impossible for us to supply you with food, arms and ammunition, I repeat that all guerrilla activity should be kept to a minimum. Stay in small groups.’12 If only, they must have thought.
The efforts of the mediators finally bore fruit – despite the FFI calling them Milice stooges and Lécussan letting them know he considered them closet résistants to be liquidated after they had served their purpose – when a letter from Simone to her husband arrived in St-Amand:
My dear Francis,
I am in the hands of the liberation army. I am being well treated.
Spare the hostages to avoid the worst happening. I put my trust in
God. I am worried about the children. Give them a hug for me.
Kisses, Simone
Although the term ‘liberation army’ implied that part of the message had been dictated, the letter proved that she was still alive, which was enough to keep the reprisals on hold. The urgent concern of Mayor Sadrin was now to arrange the exchange in a climate of extreme mutual mistrust. Finally, the FFI gave up their female hostages, but not the miliciens. In return, Bout de l’An kept his word to return his hostages to St-Amand, after being urged to do so by Simone, who had not been physically ill treated. They arrived back home on 25 June, and there the sad affair should have ended.
However, the miliciens were still prisoner on 20 July, when their captors were on the run from a massive German anti-Maquis operation directed by General Von Jesser, under orders to engage and destroy all Maquis units in central
France. Twice they managed to break through the cordon of German and Ukrainian troops hunting them, but never to distance themselves from their pursuers. The largest group of thirty-five men still had with them the thirteen prisoners. Because of the risk that one would escape and give them away, the group’s 28-year-old temporary commander Georges Chaillaud decided to kill the prisoners. Not all his men agreed because, during the six weeks they had all been on the run, old friendships had re-blossomed among men who had gone to school and played football together, and who had even courted the same girls. Chance alone had led one to the Maquis and another to the Milice. Chaillaud actually owed his life to milicien Louis Bastide, who had allowed him to flush some compromising papers down a toilet before an interrogation several months earlier. As Chaillaud admitted later:
There was no question of shooting the prisoners because the Germans would have heard the shots. So we hanged them. We made running knots with parachute cord attached to high branches. We didn’t have a step-ladder or a chair, so we put the cord around their necks, lifted them as high as we could – and let them fall. When I told their boss they were going to be killed, he said simply, ‘You chose England and we chose Germany. You’ve won and we’ve lost.’ The miliciens died bravely.
Other accounts differ, some implying that Bastide begged the man whose life he had saved to let him live in return.13
The same parachute cords could have been used to tie up and gag the miliciens, leaving them to be found by the Germans, instead of leave thirteen strangulated corpses hanging from the trees. But then, they would have given away their captors’ names, so perhaps it was fear of reprisals that caused the gruesome hangings. Some of Chaillaud’s men were so nauseated that they threw away their weapons and walked home. Within hours, Lécussan received a phone call from one of them, identified only as ‘the Traitor’, saying that eight miliciens had been hanged. Had this informant been present only for the first executions before leaving in disgust? At any rate, the number is not important. Lécussan’s rage would have been directed at his favourite target anyway.