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75 Years Ago Today; The SS massacres 99 civilians in Tulle, France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulle_massacre
The Tulle massacre was the roundup and summary execution of civilians in the French town of Tulle by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich in June 1944, three days after the D-Day landings in World War II.
After a successful offensive by the French Resistance group Francs-tireur on 7 and 8 June 1944, the arrival of Das Reich troops forced the Maquis to flee the city of Tulle (department of Corrèze) in south-central France. On 9 June 1944, after arresting all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) men ordered 120 of the prisoners to be hanged, of whom 99 were actually hanged. In the days that followed, 149 men were sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where 101 lost their lives. In total, the actions of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS, and the SD claimed the lives of 213 civilian residents of Tulle.
A day later, the same 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich was involved in the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.
<snip>
Massacre
Mass arrests
On 9 June, between 9 and 10 am, SS-Sturmbannführer Aurel Kowatsch declared to Prefect Trouillé and the Secretary General of the prefecture, M. Roche: "Your gesture [care of wounded Germans] will not be ignored by the German commander who will take this into account in favor of the population in the inevitable crackdown following the crime committed against our comrades of the Tulle garrison." He told them that the mass arrests had already begun, detaining all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty and authorizing only "the release of all essential elements after verification of their loyalties."
According to Trouillé and Roche, Kowatsch took his orders directly from General Heinz Lammerding, presumably by radio. The mass arrests affected a population already distraught from the battle: "In small groups, the SS scoured the homes and the streets; they entered lodgings, examined the men that they found there; to the women, they claimed that it was an identity check, that the absence of their husband, sons or brothers would not last long so not to bother packing supplies. "We were led by the S.S. down to the docks of Rigny. A larger group joined ours. We slowly approached Souilhac : the half-tracks, the tanks in good order, parked along the sidewalks. Our group joined with others; other groups joined with ours; and as concern grew, our hands started to shake. We walked with heads high, the better to hide our anxiety." The members of the [French paramilitary] Chantiers de jeunesse [fr] were gathered in the barracks of the Enfants de troupe [fr] and taken away to the weapons factory. In total, close to five thousand men and boys were assembled in front of the weapons factory.
Selection
In accordance with the agreement with Kowatsch that authorized the release of those essential to the resumption of normal activity in the city, French officials went to the arms factory to negotiate who among those rounded up would be counted among these. "It was soon noticed that the mayor (Colonel Bouty) was accompanied by several people, department heads, the director of industrial energy, the stationmaster, and other staff with their large gold caps, the school inspector—among us—but these gentlemen stood up there on the road with the German officers... it smelled of collaboration." The representatives of the French government obtained the release of 3500 of the 5000 men and young people. Among them, employees of the State and of the prefecture, of the mayor's office, of the Post, Telegraph, and Telephone company, of the gas company, of the water company, financiers and holiday camp workers, electricians, foremen and supervisors of the factory in La Marque and of the weapons factory, bakers, grocers, gardeners, and doctors... but neither dentists nor teachers... "This first part of the selection of the hostages had been designed by the SS to undermine local authority; when questioned in 1962 General Heinz Lammerding said that the mayor pointed out the Resistance fighters.[36]" Among those tortured there were certainly some members of the Resistance, including Pierre Souletie [fr] and his brother-in-law, Lucien Ganne [fr].
After the intervention of the French authorities, a second selection of the hostages was made, this time by the Germans themselves. The main person responsible for this second selection was the spokesman of the SD unit, Walter Schmald [fr], who had survived the fighting of the previous two days. Though Schmald without a doubt did not act alone and was likely assisted in this selection by other members of the SD units stationed in Limoges, his presence and his actions struck all the witnesses, for whom Schmald was emblematic of the victim selection process. Alongside Schmald, known as "the hunchback" or "the Jackal", was Paula Geissler, spokesperson for the German Wehrmacht attached to the director of the arms factory, nicknamed "the bitch", who was also involved in sorting and release of sixteen or seventeen hostages, engineers from the factory or men that she knew, such as the son of the pharmacist.
Father Jean Espinasse, arrested at his home around 9:30, described Schmald as "a German wearing a shabby old coat, without stripes or insignia of any kind, bareheaded, with an air of fatigue" and recalled that Schmald addressed him "in excellent French", saying: "I am one of four survivors of the battle yesterday. We were almost all Rhenish Catholic. We would like to have a priest to attend to us." Antoine Soulier described Schmald as having long blond hair with tan highlights swept back, clean-shaven, a dark complexion, about 30 years old, his eyes always squinting half-shut in order to see better, and most of all the right half of his upper lip was always raised in a venomous sneer.
The remaining hostages were divided into three groups of different size and composition as the selection gradually ended up creating two groups of sixty men, suspected, according to Schmald, of participation in the Resistance based on factors like being unshaven or wearing shoes that weren't polished. According to H. Espinasse, even though Schmald asked for verification of some Identity Cards, he judged people based on their appearance and, for no apparent reason, sent them to join the small group on his left [the future victims]. According to Trouillé, "the three groups were constantly changing, either by the interplay of releases, or by the choice of some of the S.S. with Walter, the darkly unfathomable Walter". Schmald sought to maintain the number of 120 men destined for execution, though this number had not yet been announced: when various interventions resulted in the release of one man, Schmald selected a replacement from the main group: "To save a friend, you would condemn another man with the same stroke, and which one was unknown with the result that only the most vulnerable, the loners, the weakest or the luckless, those with no one to defend them, were left to the hands of the executioner." This process led to the following reflection by one of the survivors, Jean-Louis Bourdelle: "I was dismayed to learn that the French and the Germans took pride in having freed some hostages, it seems these wretches didn't realize that in doing so they had thus admitted their part in the executions. I remember how terrified my friends and I were after each release, Lieutenant Walter would approach our group and make a new choice to complete the group of future victims." According to General Lammerding's note of 5 June and the order given by him at the end of the morning of the 9th, these 120 men were condemned to death by hanging.
Hangings
Forty German soldiers were murdered in the most horrible manner by a band of communists. For the guerillas and those who helped them, there is a punishment, execution by hanging. Forty German soldiers were murdered by the guerrillas, one hundred and twenty guerrillas and their accomplices will be hanged. Their bodies will be thrown in the river -- Poster signed by the commanding General of the German troops, posted in Tulle.
Around 3:30 pm, in response to a last minute plea from the prefect that the executions not be carried out by hanging, Kowatsch responded that "we have developed on the Russian Front the practice of hanging. We have hanged over a thousand men in Kharkov and in Kiev, this is nothing to us." He asked Colonel Bouty, president of the special delegation, to report to the main group of prisoners that they would be required to attend the executions. Before they were led to the square in Souilhac, Bouty told them: "I have some very painful news to tell you: you are going to witness the execution. I ask you to remain calm. Do not make a move, do not say a word". On their arrival, the prisoners discovered, over many hundreds of meters, nooses hung from trees, lampposts, and balconies. The preparations had been made, by the end of the morning, by the SS-Hauptsturmführer Hoff, head of a pioneer section, all of whom had volunteered to perform hangings.
The victims selected for hanging were led in groups of ten to the place of their execution. "Each of them was soon led to the foot of a ladder in the hands of two executioners. Two SS stood by each noose; one of them then climbed the steps of the ladder or stepladder with the condemned. Once he reached the desired height, he put the noose on the prisoner, held him, and then the other SS brutally removed the prisoner's stepladder". In certain cases, the executioners, all volunteers, hung from the legs of the victim, struck them or finished them off with a submachine gun or a pistol. "Sometimes, to speed up the execution, the barbarians would shove their victims with rifle butts and with terrible screams kick their stepladder over". As a result of the intervention of Colonel Bouty on behalf of a German officer, Father Espinasse was authorized to offer his ministry to those who would die. He attended the first executions. During that of the first group, "in one case [...], the victim, badly hung without a doubt, was wracked by spasms; then I saw the soldier who had removed his ladder used it to hit the tortured man until he stopped moving completely". After that, he noted that "the execution squad forced the condemned to walk, and not without violence; I can still see the soldier, in a fit of rage, breaking the butt of his rifle on the back of a victim who had frozen in horror at the sight of the noose". "Can we imagine the scene? Of men assembled under duress, of soldiers below the gallows, of groups of hostages led to their deaths, and the silence". Throughout the operation, Paula Geissler and a group of SS watched the hangings while downing bottles of good wine on the terrace of the Café Tivoli, listening to music on a gramophone.
99 victims
In successive versions of his account, Father Espinasse attributes to himself alone the credit for having stopped the hangings. According to him, while nine groups, or 90 men, had already been hanged, and after being brought back into the courtyard of the weapons factory after the murder of 20 or 30 citizens of Tulle, he found that the tenth group included 13 men. He intervened with Walter Schmald and obtained not only that four men would be removed from the group, but also that this would be the last march to the noose and thus the number of victims was 99.
This version, repeated by many authors, is challenged by Bruno Kartheuser who finds the story inconsistent and implausible. Kartheuser first points out that the decisive intervention that is attributed to Father Jean Espinasse is not confirmed by any witness, though several hundred people were gathered in the courtyard of the factory at that time; this intervention is not mentioned in the declaration made in 1948 by the president of the special delegation from Tulle, Colonel Bouty, that attributed the interventions and rescues to the director of the Brandt facility Factory at la Marque, Henry Vogel, Deputy Director of Weapons Manufacture in Tulle, Laborie, and Chief Engineer of Roads and Bridges, Lajugie. Nor does Trouillé attribute the saving of the three men to the Father, "Vogel debated splendidly with the SS officers to free some of his workers condemned to this torture […]. In this way, he earned four pardons and allowed the Deputy Director of the weapons factory, Laborie, to claim and remove these men; Lajugie, Chief Engineer in the region further argued exhaustively to save an engineer in his service but his efforts were in vain. The "decisive intervention" of Espinasse is also not mentioned in the citation for the award of the Médaille d'argent from the French Red Cross to the Father in 1945 which was awarded on the basis of his priestly merits and his material assistance he had given to those executed. Finally, for Kartheuser, given the strict hierarchy in place in the SS, it is not possible that Schmald could have made the decision to stop the executions because they had been ordered by General Lammerding (who said after the war that it was on his order that the hangings were stopped before the predetermined 120 victims), that the hangings were supervised by Kowatsch and that one of the superiers of Schmald in the SD (either Korten or Butsch) were present at the time.
For J.J. Fouché and G. Beaubatie, "the number of 99 victims was the consequence of an accumulation of material facts independent of each other […] But more than the number, the staging of the hangings would reinforce the terror for a long time. The efficacy was not related to a specific figure, but much more, the staging of a spectacle of violence designed to humiliate the men."
The bodies of the executed were taken down at the beginning of the evening by the members of the Chantiers de Jeunesse, under the orders of men of the 4th company of the battalion of scouts; despite the intervention of local authorities, they were buried on the site of a garbage dump in Cueille, without any effort for identification, and with only a brief impromptu ceremony that was cut short by the Germans, during which Father Espinasse, in the presence of the uniformed Prefect and his Cabinet Director, blessed the bodies.
Deportations
Dachau Concentration Camp main entrance building
On 10 June, the hostages remaining at the weapons factory in Tulle were treated in the same manner as in the selection of the hanging victims the previous day: negotiations between members of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich and the SD, including Walter Schmald, and the French authorities, divided them into groups destined for deportation and those who would be pardoned by interventions. 311 men and 660 young members of the Chantiers de Jeunesse were transferred from Tulle to Limoges. After a new selection, in which members of the Milice played an essential role, 162 men and all the members of the Chantiers de Jeunesse were freed; 149 of the remaining prisoners were transferred to Poitiers, then on to Compiègne, and from there they were taken to Dachau concentration camp on the July 2: 101 would not survive.
On 11 or 12 June, the 2nd SS Panzer Division began moving North to join the Normandy Front. With the massacres at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane, and other killings, it had killed 4000 people, including many civilians.
Repression continued in Tulle in the weeks following the hangings. From 11 June to 31 July, the laboratory of the weapons factory was used as a center of torture, where Collaborator militia cooperated with Walter Schmald. On 21 June, Prefect Trouillé saw there three militiamen no older than 20 pour acid on the facial wounds of a man they had just beaten with a blackjack. Tulle would also endure another raid on 21 June, following which 80 men were sent for forced labor in Austria. The German troops in Corrèze departed on 16 August 1944.
In total, the crimes of the Wehrmacht, of the Waffen-SS and of the SD had claimed 218 civilian victims in Tulle. "Somehow, the SS General had achieved his goal: the discrimination of the Resistance and the terror of the population."
</snip>
The Tulle massacre was the roundup and summary execution of civilians in the French town of Tulle by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich in June 1944, three days after the D-Day landings in World War II.
After a successful offensive by the French Resistance group Francs-tireur on 7 and 8 June 1944, the arrival of Das Reich troops forced the Maquis to flee the city of Tulle (department of Corrèze) in south-central France. On 9 June 1944, after arresting all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) men ordered 120 of the prisoners to be hanged, of whom 99 were actually hanged. In the days that followed, 149 men were sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where 101 lost their lives. In total, the actions of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS, and the SD claimed the lives of 213 civilian residents of Tulle.
A day later, the same 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich was involved in the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.
<snip>
Massacre
Mass arrests
Residents of Tulle, you have followed my instructions and remained calm in exemplary fashion during the difficult days that your city has just gone through. I thank you. This attitude, and the protection of wounded German soldiers were the two things that enabled me to obtain assurances from the German command that normal life will resume within the day." - Proclamation of Prefect Pierre Trouillé, broadcast by loudspeaker on the 9th of June 1944 at 10 o'clock in the morning.
On 9 June, between 9 and 10 am, SS-Sturmbannführer Aurel Kowatsch declared to Prefect Trouillé and the Secretary General of the prefecture, M. Roche: "Your gesture [care of wounded Germans] will not be ignored by the German commander who will take this into account in favor of the population in the inevitable crackdown following the crime committed against our comrades of the Tulle garrison." He told them that the mass arrests had already begun, detaining all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty and authorizing only "the release of all essential elements after verification of their loyalties."
According to Trouillé and Roche, Kowatsch took his orders directly from General Heinz Lammerding, presumably by radio. The mass arrests affected a population already distraught from the battle: "In small groups, the SS scoured the homes and the streets; they entered lodgings, examined the men that they found there; to the women, they claimed that it was an identity check, that the absence of their husband, sons or brothers would not last long so not to bother packing supplies. "We were led by the S.S. down to the docks of Rigny. A larger group joined ours. We slowly approached Souilhac : the half-tracks, the tanks in good order, parked along the sidewalks. Our group joined with others; other groups joined with ours; and as concern grew, our hands started to shake. We walked with heads high, the better to hide our anxiety." The members of the [French paramilitary] Chantiers de jeunesse [fr] were gathered in the barracks of the Enfants de troupe [fr] and taken away to the weapons factory. In total, close to five thousand men and boys were assembled in front of the weapons factory.
Selection
In accordance with the agreement with Kowatsch that authorized the release of those essential to the resumption of normal activity in the city, French officials went to the arms factory to negotiate who among those rounded up would be counted among these. "It was soon noticed that the mayor (Colonel Bouty) was accompanied by several people, department heads, the director of industrial energy, the stationmaster, and other staff with their large gold caps, the school inspector—among us—but these gentlemen stood up there on the road with the German officers... it smelled of collaboration." The representatives of the French government obtained the release of 3500 of the 5000 men and young people. Among them, employees of the State and of the prefecture, of the mayor's office, of the Post, Telegraph, and Telephone company, of the gas company, of the water company, financiers and holiday camp workers, electricians, foremen and supervisors of the factory in La Marque and of the weapons factory, bakers, grocers, gardeners, and doctors... but neither dentists nor teachers... "This first part of the selection of the hostages had been designed by the SS to undermine local authority; when questioned in 1962 General Heinz Lammerding said that the mayor pointed out the Resistance fighters.[36]" Among those tortured there were certainly some members of the Resistance, including Pierre Souletie [fr] and his brother-in-law, Lucien Ganne [fr].
After the intervention of the French authorities, a second selection of the hostages was made, this time by the Germans themselves. The main person responsible for this second selection was the spokesman of the SD unit, Walter Schmald [fr], who had survived the fighting of the previous two days. Though Schmald without a doubt did not act alone and was likely assisted in this selection by other members of the SD units stationed in Limoges, his presence and his actions struck all the witnesses, for whom Schmald was emblematic of the victim selection process. Alongside Schmald, known as "the hunchback" or "the Jackal", was Paula Geissler, spokesperson for the German Wehrmacht attached to the director of the arms factory, nicknamed "the bitch", who was also involved in sorting and release of sixteen or seventeen hostages, engineers from the factory or men that she knew, such as the son of the pharmacist.
Father Jean Espinasse, arrested at his home around 9:30, described Schmald as "a German wearing a shabby old coat, without stripes or insignia of any kind, bareheaded, with an air of fatigue" and recalled that Schmald addressed him "in excellent French", saying: "I am one of four survivors of the battle yesterday. We were almost all Rhenish Catholic. We would like to have a priest to attend to us." Antoine Soulier described Schmald as having long blond hair with tan highlights swept back, clean-shaven, a dark complexion, about 30 years old, his eyes always squinting half-shut in order to see better, and most of all the right half of his upper lip was always raised in a venomous sneer.
The remaining hostages were divided into three groups of different size and composition as the selection gradually ended up creating two groups of sixty men, suspected, according to Schmald, of participation in the Resistance based on factors like being unshaven or wearing shoes that weren't polished. According to H. Espinasse, even though Schmald asked for verification of some Identity Cards, he judged people based on their appearance and, for no apparent reason, sent them to join the small group on his left [the future victims]. According to Trouillé, "the three groups were constantly changing, either by the interplay of releases, or by the choice of some of the S.S. with Walter, the darkly unfathomable Walter". Schmald sought to maintain the number of 120 men destined for execution, though this number had not yet been announced: when various interventions resulted in the release of one man, Schmald selected a replacement from the main group: "To save a friend, you would condemn another man with the same stroke, and which one was unknown with the result that only the most vulnerable, the loners, the weakest or the luckless, those with no one to defend them, were left to the hands of the executioner." This process led to the following reflection by one of the survivors, Jean-Louis Bourdelle: "I was dismayed to learn that the French and the Germans took pride in having freed some hostages, it seems these wretches didn't realize that in doing so they had thus admitted their part in the executions. I remember how terrified my friends and I were after each release, Lieutenant Walter would approach our group and make a new choice to complete the group of future victims." According to General Lammerding's note of 5 June and the order given by him at the end of the morning of the 9th, these 120 men were condemned to death by hanging.
Hangings
Forty German soldiers were murdered in the most horrible manner by a band of communists. For the guerillas and those who helped them, there is a punishment, execution by hanging. Forty German soldiers were murdered by the guerrillas, one hundred and twenty guerrillas and their accomplices will be hanged. Their bodies will be thrown in the river -- Poster signed by the commanding General of the German troops, posted in Tulle.
Around 3:30 pm, in response to a last minute plea from the prefect that the executions not be carried out by hanging, Kowatsch responded that "we have developed on the Russian Front the practice of hanging. We have hanged over a thousand men in Kharkov and in Kiev, this is nothing to us." He asked Colonel Bouty, president of the special delegation, to report to the main group of prisoners that they would be required to attend the executions. Before they were led to the square in Souilhac, Bouty told them: "I have some very painful news to tell you: you are going to witness the execution. I ask you to remain calm. Do not make a move, do not say a word". On their arrival, the prisoners discovered, over many hundreds of meters, nooses hung from trees, lampposts, and balconies. The preparations had been made, by the end of the morning, by the SS-Hauptsturmführer Hoff, head of a pioneer section, all of whom had volunteered to perform hangings.
The victims selected for hanging were led in groups of ten to the place of their execution. "Each of them was soon led to the foot of a ladder in the hands of two executioners. Two SS stood by each noose; one of them then climbed the steps of the ladder or stepladder with the condemned. Once he reached the desired height, he put the noose on the prisoner, held him, and then the other SS brutally removed the prisoner's stepladder". In certain cases, the executioners, all volunteers, hung from the legs of the victim, struck them or finished them off with a submachine gun or a pistol. "Sometimes, to speed up the execution, the barbarians would shove their victims with rifle butts and with terrible screams kick their stepladder over". As a result of the intervention of Colonel Bouty on behalf of a German officer, Father Espinasse was authorized to offer his ministry to those who would die. He attended the first executions. During that of the first group, "in one case [...], the victim, badly hung without a doubt, was wracked by spasms; then I saw the soldier who had removed his ladder used it to hit the tortured man until he stopped moving completely". After that, he noted that "the execution squad forced the condemned to walk, and not without violence; I can still see the soldier, in a fit of rage, breaking the butt of his rifle on the back of a victim who had frozen in horror at the sight of the noose". "Can we imagine the scene? Of men assembled under duress, of soldiers below the gallows, of groups of hostages led to their deaths, and the silence". Throughout the operation, Paula Geissler and a group of SS watched the hangings while downing bottles of good wine on the terrace of the Café Tivoli, listening to music on a gramophone.
99 victims
Why were the executions stopped at 99 victims? [...] 99 is an incomprehensible figure that cannot be explained. With its absence of significance, the number of victims remains a mystery. – Jean-Jacques Fouché et Gilbert Beaubatie.
In successive versions of his account, Father Espinasse attributes to himself alone the credit for having stopped the hangings. According to him, while nine groups, or 90 men, had already been hanged, and after being brought back into the courtyard of the weapons factory after the murder of 20 or 30 citizens of Tulle, he found that the tenth group included 13 men. He intervened with Walter Schmald and obtained not only that four men would be removed from the group, but also that this would be the last march to the noose and thus the number of victims was 99.
This version, repeated by many authors, is challenged by Bruno Kartheuser who finds the story inconsistent and implausible. Kartheuser first points out that the decisive intervention that is attributed to Father Jean Espinasse is not confirmed by any witness, though several hundred people were gathered in the courtyard of the factory at that time; this intervention is not mentioned in the declaration made in 1948 by the president of the special delegation from Tulle, Colonel Bouty, that attributed the interventions and rescues to the director of the Brandt facility Factory at la Marque, Henry Vogel, Deputy Director of Weapons Manufacture in Tulle, Laborie, and Chief Engineer of Roads and Bridges, Lajugie. Nor does Trouillé attribute the saving of the three men to the Father, "Vogel debated splendidly with the SS officers to free some of his workers condemned to this torture […]. In this way, he earned four pardons and allowed the Deputy Director of the weapons factory, Laborie, to claim and remove these men; Lajugie, Chief Engineer in the region further argued exhaustively to save an engineer in his service but his efforts were in vain. The "decisive intervention" of Espinasse is also not mentioned in the citation for the award of the Médaille d'argent from the French Red Cross to the Father in 1945 which was awarded on the basis of his priestly merits and his material assistance he had given to those executed. Finally, for Kartheuser, given the strict hierarchy in place in the SS, it is not possible that Schmald could have made the decision to stop the executions because they had been ordered by General Lammerding (who said after the war that it was on his order that the hangings were stopped before the predetermined 120 victims), that the hangings were supervised by Kowatsch and that one of the superiers of Schmald in the SD (either Korten or Butsch) were present at the time.
For J.J. Fouché and G. Beaubatie, "the number of 99 victims was the consequence of an accumulation of material facts independent of each other […] But more than the number, the staging of the hangings would reinforce the terror for a long time. The efficacy was not related to a specific figure, but much more, the staging of a spectacle of violence designed to humiliate the men."
The bodies of the executed were taken down at the beginning of the evening by the members of the Chantiers de Jeunesse, under the orders of men of the 4th company of the battalion of scouts; despite the intervention of local authorities, they were buried on the site of a garbage dump in Cueille, without any effort for identification, and with only a brief impromptu ceremony that was cut short by the Germans, during which Father Espinasse, in the presence of the uniformed Prefect and his Cabinet Director, blessed the bodies.
Deportations
Dachau Concentration Camp main entrance building
On 10 June, the hostages remaining at the weapons factory in Tulle were treated in the same manner as in the selection of the hanging victims the previous day: negotiations between members of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich and the SD, including Walter Schmald, and the French authorities, divided them into groups destined for deportation and those who would be pardoned by interventions. 311 men and 660 young members of the Chantiers de Jeunesse were transferred from Tulle to Limoges. After a new selection, in which members of the Milice played an essential role, 162 men and all the members of the Chantiers de Jeunesse were freed; 149 of the remaining prisoners were transferred to Poitiers, then on to Compiègne, and from there they were taken to Dachau concentration camp on the July 2: 101 would not survive.
On 11 or 12 June, the 2nd SS Panzer Division began moving North to join the Normandy Front. With the massacres at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane, and other killings, it had killed 4000 people, including many civilians.
Repression continued in Tulle in the weeks following the hangings. From 11 June to 31 July, the laboratory of the weapons factory was used as a center of torture, where Collaborator militia cooperated with Walter Schmald. On 21 June, Prefect Trouillé saw there three militiamen no older than 20 pour acid on the facial wounds of a man they had just beaten with a blackjack. Tulle would also endure another raid on 21 June, following which 80 men were sent for forced labor in Austria. The German troops in Corrèze departed on 16 August 1944.
In total, the crimes of the Wehrmacht, of the Waffen-SS and of the SD had claimed 218 civilian victims in Tulle. "Somehow, the SS General had achieved his goal: the discrimination of the Resistance and the terror of the population."
</snip>
13 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Lost in lush countryside, two hours north of the most popular and scenic stretch of the Dordogne River, Oradour-sur-Glane is one of the most powerful sights in all of France, and worth going out of your way to see.
The "Village des Martyrs," as it is now known, was machine-gunned and burned by Nazi troops on June 10, 1944 (four days after D-Day). With chilling attention to detail, the Nazis methodically rounded up the entire population of 642 townspeople, of whom about 200 were children. The women and children were herded into the town church, where they were tear-gassed and machine-gunned as they tried to escape the burning chapel. Oradour's men were tortured and executed. The town was then set on fire, its victims left under a blanket of ashes.
The reason for the mass killings remains unclear. Some say the Nazis wanted revenge for the kidnapping of one of their officers (by French Resistance fighters in a neighboring village), but others believe the Nazis were simply terrorizing the populace in the wake of D-Day.
Today, the ghost town, left untouched for more than 70 years (by order of then-general Charles de Gaulle), is well known by French schoolchildren, most of whom make a pilgrimage here. A sign greets every pilgrim who enters with only one English word: Remember.
The "Village des Martyrs," as it is now known, was machine-gunned and burned by Nazi troops on June 10, 1944 (four days after D-Day). With chilling attention to detail, the Nazis methodically rounded up the entire population of 642 townspeople, of whom about 200 were children. The women and children were herded into the town church, where they were tear-gassed and machine-gunned as they tried to escape the burning chapel. Oradour's men were tortured and executed. The town was then set on fire, its victims left under a blanket of ashes.
The reason for the mass killings remains unclear. Some say the Nazis wanted revenge for the kidnapping of one of their officers (by French Resistance fighters in a neighboring village), but others believe the Nazis were simply terrorizing the populace in the wake of D-Day.
Today, the ghost town, left untouched for more than 70 years (by order of then-general Charles de Gaulle), is well known by French schoolchildren, most of whom make a pilgrimage here. A sign greets every pilgrim who enters with only one English word: Remember.
https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/read/articles/oradour-sur-glane
The church where the women and children were burnt to death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre
original French village.
