by Douglas Boyd
There had been few Jews in St-Amand before the war brought a number of refugees to the area. Lécussan had already rounded up several. Some had been tortured and killed, their bodies left floating in the river. Determined to make St-Amand judenrein, Lécussan organised a total round-up for the following day and summoned to his aid forty-five German soldiers and a motley band of miliciens and other hangers-on. The men were catered for in the local cinema, the bosses repairing to a hotel for a large meal with plenty of drink.
That night, doors were smashed in by rifle butts and the victims dragged out in night attire or underclothes, some elderly ones not even allowed to collect their false teeth. There was no longer a pretence of deportation to a labour camp. One bewildered grandmother, arrested with her 3-year-old grandson, asked permission to bring her sewing things, only to be told: ‘You won’t need them. You’re going to paradise.’ Already dressed and ready for the miliciens, 76-year-old veteran Colonel Fernand Bernheim told them, ‘You must have sunk really low to come and arrest me.’14
By the evening of 22 July, the prisoners were all locked in overcrowded, stifling cells in the Bordiot prison at Bourges, where eighteen people had to share one toilet bucket, emptied every twenty-four hours. The only food was dry beans twice a day. Any valuables had been stolen. During the afternoon of 24 July, Lécussan arrived to oversee what he considered proper revenge for the killing of the milicien hostages. The full details are too obscene to recount, but in short the male prisoners were transported in a closed van to a deserted farm in a military training ground known as Guerry. In groups of six they were made to carry solidified sacks of cement and heavy rocks to a deep well, where miliciens waited with pistols and sub-machine guns.
Instead of shooting the prisoners so that the bodies fell into the wells, their killers made them kneel by the parapets and pushed them over alive, with the rocks and sacks of cement thrown in afterwards. The lucky ones died from a crushed skull or broken neck, others by asphyxiation as more bodies and rocks crashed down on them in a tangle of bodies that took local firemen days to extricate. Once the prisoners waiting their turn realised what was happening, they were frozen in terror, with the exception of one man who preferred to die attempting to escape rather than walk like a beast to the slaughter. Charles Krameisen dodged the bullets, running barefoot through the scrub, tearing clothes and flesh on brambles and thorns. That night, he emerged from hiding to knock on the door of a peasant bringing up his eight children with his wife in a farm near the execution site, by whom he was taken in and given food and clothes.
It would be nice to end the story on this note of courage and humanity, but the women and children were still locked up in Bourges prison. With miliciens and Gestapo now mostly preoccupied with saving their skins before the Allies arrived, they might all have survived until Liberation, had not the local head of the Milice been assassinated on 7 August. With no chance of catching the assassin, the other miliciens decided to execute hostages. Since all the men from St-Amand were dead, it was the turn of the women.
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 told they were ‘to be deported’. In the prison courtyard as they were getting into the Milice van, a German officer saw one of them weeping. Luckily able to speak German, she explained that she was not Jewish, and was returned to the cells with another woman. The other eight and a Jewish résistant who had been in prison for two months were then driven off to Guerry.
Bloodstains and bullet scuffs on the parapet of the well used this time bore witness to the fact that the man and five of the women were first shot before being dumped in the well. The body of the youngest, aged 18, was naked and mutilated. She had probably been raped. The last woman to be pushed in before rocks were dumped on the bodies was the wife of Charles Krameisen. Between 9 and 11 August the Gestapo fled from Bourges. On 17 August the prison gates opened to release the twenty-five women and nine children who survived the tragedy of St-Amand, the town where ‘nothing ever happened’.15
NOTES
1. Todorov, Une tragédie française, p. 30.
2. Ibid., pp. 17–23.
3. J.-P. Azéma and F. Bédarida, La France des Années Noirs (Paris: Seuil, 1993), vol. 2, p. 396.
4. Todorov, Une tragédie française, p. 37.
5. Ibid., p. 40.
6. Nossiter, France and the Nazis, p. 250.
7. Report of Adjutant-Chef Conchonnet, in L’Express, 6 October 2005.
8. Arkheia (magazine published in Montauban), No. 17–18 (2006), p. 58.
9. Ibid., pp. 58–9; A. Nossiter, The Algeria Hotel (London: Methuen, 2001), pp. 231–51.
10. Divisional orders signed by General Lammerding exhibited at Centre de Mémoire, Oradour.
11. Letter to OKW complaining of these problems and signed by Lammerding, exhibited at the Centre de Mémoire, Oradour.
12. Todorov, Une tragédie française, p. 78.
13. Ibid., pp. 117–20.
14. Ibid., p. 128.
15. A comprehensive account of the actions at St-Amand-Montrond and Tulle and elsewhere at this time may be found in D. Boyd, Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (Stroud: The History Press, 2012).
22
MURDEROUS MIDSUMMER
Laval was a lawyer to the end: his official line on the Normandy landings was that they were not French business because France was legally neutral in the war between the Allies and Germany. So whether he asked Abetz on 14 June to expedite the return of the LVF and the Charlemagne Division to stiffen the German resistance is a moot point. The date may be a coincidence, but it was then that de Gaulle first returned to France, landing at Courseulles in General Montgomery’s British sector of operations after crossing the Channel aboard the French destroyer Combattante. With Monty too busy to pay much attention to his visitor, after a brief motor tour to Isigny and Grandcamp in the American sector, de Gaulle re-embarked and returned to Britain, first jamming his foot in the political door by appointing his former chef de cabinet Francis Coulet to the post of Commissioner for Normandy and disproving American allegations that his presence on French soil would trigger a civil war. The Gaullist officials were rapidly accepted by the population, while the Vichy functionaries they replaced were only too happy to quietly disappear.1
In usually tranquil Ste-Foy-la-Grande on the south bank of the Dordogne, the bridges vital for German troop movements had been blown up by the Maquis on 8 June after ‘the fourth republic’ had been proclaimed by a self-appointed ‘representative of Gen de Gaulle’. By 13 June conscription had begun, the mayor being ordered to supply seventy-two able-bodied men aged 18 to 55 to serve ‘under military discipline’. The consequences were inevitable: by dawn on 18 June the town was under fire from an armoured column on the opposite bank and résistants taken alive were made to dig their own graves before being shot. Jean-Adolphe Blondel, mayor of nearby St-André-et-Appelles, begged a passing Wehrmacht major to intervene when SS troops threatened to set fire to his village after finding wounded résistants in the Mairie. The best compromise the major could achieve was for Blondel to be shot ‘as an example’ and the village left unburned.
On 22 June the strategic oil reserves of the Wehrmacht at St-Ouen and St-Denis were bombed and huge clouds of black smoke darkened the Paris sky as they had four years earlier. On 28 June, after his son left to rejoin his NSKK transport unit, Philippe Henriot and his wife visited a cinema on the Champs Elysées before returning to their apartment in the Ministry of the Interior. Alarmed by threatening calls on their direct line, Madame Henriot begged her husband to request a Milice bodyguard, but he was sure they were safe inside the Ministry. According to the subsequent police report: ‘At 5.30 a.m. six or seven black Citroën traction avant cars pulled up, disgorging thirty or so men in Milice uniforms, armed with automatic weapons.’ The uniforms tricked the concierge into letting the résistants into the building, where they killed Henriot in front of hi
s wife.
The death of a high government official, whose anti-Semitic radio tirades continued long after it was known that the euphemism déportation meant death, presented the Church with a problem that split its ranks. At the memorial service in Paris, Cardinal Suhard agreed to officiate and pronounce the absolution but not to read a eulogy. In Lyon cathedral Cardinal Gerlier officiated at the memorial service, but also refused to read a eulogy and left before the absolution. In Limoges Monsignor Rastouil went a step further by refusing to conduct a memorial service, for which Darnand had him arrested. Confronted with the warrant, the monsignor exclaimed, ‘Am I the first bishop to be arrested by Frenchmen? Is this an honour?’ He was released after three days, following protests from the Papal Nuncio. However, in Bordeaux on 5 July Monsignor Feltin condemned the assassination by saying, ‘No one has the right to impose justice without approval of the legal authorities. He who claims to serve his country otherwise is guilty of murder.’
At the far-right end of the politico-religious spectrum, Father Tabaillé of Vienne included in his eulogy the statement that Henriot had ‘fallen as a hero and a martyr’.2
By the end of the Liberation, the Resistance claimed 3,136 sabotage operations, with 834 derailments putting out of action 1,855 locomotives and 5,833 wagons, plus 972 other ‘operations’. One of these took place on 9 June when a section of FFI blew up the rail tracks just outside Moissac and followed up by attacking a troop train guarded by military police in the station. The FFI commander Lieutenant Colonel Pommiès had an extraordinary record in the twenty months of his undercover war: 102 ambushes and 265 other operations, during which 4,529 Germans were taken prisoner or killed. The cost was high: 387 deaths, 1,200 wounded and 156 taken prisoner and deported, few of whom survived. After the FFI blew up a 150,000-volt, high-tension pylon at Castelsarrassin on 30 June, gendarmerie reports judged the mood of the population to be ‘calm’ compared with people over much of France,3 although: ‘The sight of girls and young women flirting with the Germans in the town will lead to reprisals by the population on these women after the Liberation which cannot be far off.’4
Not all the clandestine weapons were fired at Germans. One 30-year-old Moissac man was arrested for robbing a farmer of food at gunpoint, but most Moisagais were more concerned with the fine weather that promised a good harvest of fruits and vegetables, although the viticulteurs worried about hail storms bruising the dessert grapes on the vine and making them unsaleable. Grain reserves were sufficient to last until the harvest, but the Maquis threatened farmers with arson of their fields and homes if they handed over more than the minimum to the Germans. Bread and fats were becoming scarce and meat was distributed theoretically twice a month.
Françoise Armagnac was 26 years old on Tuesday 4 July 1944 – the day she was to marry 36-year-old fellow-agronomist Georges Pénicaut at the church of St Peter in Chabanais, halfway between Limoges and Angoulême. She was a guileless, outspoken and carelessly dressed young woman, whom not even her friends could call pretty, her poor eyesight compensated by unattractive wartime spectacles, but that day she had taken care with her appearance and was wearing a white silk dress with a diadem of pink roses in her hair.
The couple and friends set out after the ceremony to walk from the church to the house where the wedding breakfast was to be held. Nearly there, they were surrounded by a troop of FTP maquisards, who locked the couple and the bride’s mother with the priest in one room and the photographer in another. At gunpoint all the other guests were interrogated and made to prove their identity before being released. Interrogation of bride, groom and priest lasted for the rest of the day. Towards dusk, with the photographer and the bride’s mother, they were driven in a van 30km to the group’s temporary headquarters in the Château de Pressac. There, violence towards the prisoners was so excessive that their leader ‘Colonel’ Bernard threatened to shoot dead the next man who touched them.
Despite this, a mock trial was held, the evidence against Françoise boiling down to a Milice badge found in her bedroom and a diary, in which she had recorded joining the Milice on 3 May 1943. She pleaded that she had only attended a few meetings and left the organisation three months later. The page for 7 August, on which the resignation was clearly noted, was torn out of the diary by her accusers, saying that they decided what proof to take in evidence and what to disregard. The following day Françoise was constantly insulted by her captors and made to scrub floors in her soiled wedding dress. Growing tired of this around 9 p.m., they shot her – still in her wedding dress.
It was true that she had briefly belonged to the Milice – for social reasons, in the same way that she had also founded a troop of Girl Guides. According to local résistants, the real reason the FTP men killed her was that, as a grand-niece of a president of the Republic, her death had more impact on local people than that of lower-class Pétainists.5
It was a summer of atrocities on both sides, some famous, others now forgotten. At St-Genis-Laval, just outside Lyon, German troops revenged themselves on the local population by executing 110 prisoner-hostages, including a boy of 18 and a young girl, all taken from Montluc prison. In groups of six, hands tied behind their backs, they were hustled into a room and machine-gunned. Petrol was poured over the bodies and phosphorus grenades lobbed on top. The wounded, who managed to crawl out with flesh and clothing burning, were machine-gunned in the doorway.
The dilemma of the French forces of law and order was summed up by a gendarmerie captain in Haute-Savoie:
The present situation confronts my men with a delicate moral choice. They can blindly obey orders and expose themselves and their families to certain reprisals from the Maquis, or adopt a passive attitude. As most of them do not have the strength of character to adopt the first option, I believe that the second is the only one acceptable.6
Relative inactivity was not enough for the population; 30 per cent of the captain’s men had to be transferred elsewhere after the Liberation to avoid revenge by relatives of men they had arrested. Another report of the same period criticises a gendarme who ‘betrayed his uniform by consorting with a person of previously good reputation, but who was discovered to be a dangerous terrorist, in the share-out of an illegally slaughtered animal to get food for his family’.7
In the north and west of France, innocent civilians far from the fighting in Normandy continued to be killed by British and American bombs. At St-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast, which had 45,000 inhabitants at the start of the war, 85 per cent of homes and all public buildings had been destroyed. There was no water, electricity or gas and many streets were impassable even on foot. In the Channel port of Le Havre, where sirens sounded 1,060 times between the beginning of the war and D-Day, the Parks and Gardens service recovered 3,000 corpses from the rubble. All had to be identified, transported and buried – often with no time for coffins or prayers at the graveside. When the survivors went to church on Sunday, they found their priest sleeping beneath the altar and eating at a street kitchen after the destruction of the presbytery. Instead of a sermon, he announced from the pulpit the timing of gas and electricity cuts and made appeals for information about the missing.
On 2 July, 500 political prisoners in the French wing of Toulouse prison were handed over to German personnel and locked into freight cars in the main station with planks nailed over every opening – for which SNCF added a supplementary charge to the customary invoice for providing locomotives and cattle trucks of deportation trains. In the midsummer heat, prisoners started dying because the guards allowed then neither food nor water. Braving the guards, some Quakers managed to push a loaf and a can of sardines through the small gaps between the planks to be shared between two men. On the evening of 3 July, the train started a nightmare journey for the men locked in their stinking prisons. With the Toulouse-Brive line cut by sabotage, the train headed for Bordeaux and then back towards Toulouse, turning back again to Bordeaux after being strafed by RAF Mosquitoes. On 5 and 6 July, the guards opened the doo
rs for fifteen minutes to allow men to relieve themselves on the line and bury the dead.
At Angoulême, the Red Cross managed to distribute fruit, bread and water. With the lines impassable northwards, it was back to Bordeaux, where they waited three days, fed by the Red Cross on a cup of noodle soup and some bread. On 12 July, they were herded through the empty streets at 2 a.m. and locked into the looted, vandalised synagogue – for three entire weeks. The Red Cross brought soup each day, except on Sunday when the Germans forbade it, but allowed the prisoners sugar, butter and biscuits instead.
On 10 August they were marched back to the station and locked inside freight cars coupled to a long train, direction Nîmes. During the single fifteen-minute halt that day, they relieved their bowels and bladders by the tracks within sight of two wagon-loads of flea-ridden, equally filthy women prisoners doing the same. On 15 August in Provence they were again a target for Allied fighters. With the train stopped, the guards could take cover beside the track, but the prisoners could only huddle together in the wagons, each hoping that someone else’s body would stop the bullets. In one raid, three died and sixteen were wounded.
Where the line had been cut by sabotage, they were forced to march along the permanent way. On 19 August – the day that St Michel prison was liberated by the Toulouse FFI and the remaining résistants there released – they were mobile again, but with neither food nor water. By way of Montélimar and Valence they headed up the Rhône Valley. On 21 August in Chalon-sur-Saône one bucket of water and 2.5kg of bread had to suffice for seventy men. At 10 p.m. on 24 August, with the train making 20km per hour, eleven desperate prisoners hacked through the floor of their wagon and dropped through onto the tracks, two of them losing legs under the wheels. The train continued without them – destination, no one knew where.8