Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (26 page)

In response to the call of 25 May, Colaudon had an army of 2,700 men, organised in fifteen companies. Each man was issued a rifle, carbine or Sten and wore a uniform of khaki shorts, a brown or black windcheater with a red armband on which was a blue Cross of Lorraine on a white background. They were shod in good-quality British footwear, specially parachuted in, the Vichy shoes and boots available by then being of such poor quality that a few weeks’ rough usage would make them fall to bits. Five companies also had light machine guns and 100 hand grenades each. Another 1,200 men joined Colaudon’s army and were organised into companies numbered 31 to 36. Even Colaudon was embarrassed when a further 400 men arrived, for whom he had no weapons. They were told to go home again as there was no way of arming them or feeding them. Some of them were arrested by the Milice on the way back and shot.

The pessimistic priest was proven right on Sunday 28 May when seventy
maquisards
, about to set off on an ambush were themselves ambushed by a mixed force of GMR and German troops, who killed thirty-two of them outright and took twenty-seven prisoners. On the Monday eight others, mostly wounded, surrendered and were shot out of hand. The twenty-seven prisoners were tortured for information and then shot. In all, three men survived the tragedy of 28 May.

This was only a foretaste of what was to come. Newly arrived in Clermont-Ferrand to suppress all Maquis and Resistance activity in central France, General Fritz Brodowski gave Major General Kurt von Jesser a mixed force of 2,800 Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht troops, supported by GMR and
miliciens
who knew the territory, to eliminate the Maquis on Mount Mouchet. At dawn on 10 June they attacked the south flank of the massif
with automatic weapons and mortars.

Von Jesser’s private army was variously designated in different accounts as a division, a column, a brigade and a
Kampfgruppe.
The
Kampfgruppen
were battle groups constituted in emergency from men from many different permanent units, adapting themselves to orders from officers they did not know. Their creation in the brutal chaos of northern France after the Allied breakout from the beachheads, and their effectiveness, came as a surprise to many British and American commanders, who had thought the German soldier a hidebound creature who would simply surrender when his command chain was broken with no chance of being restored.

Von Jesser’s brigade comprised six
Kampfgruppen
designated A to F, each including Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Sipo-SD security troops, sappers, an armoured company, two battalions of infantry and anti-aircraft units. Significantly, in view of the reputation they earned in central France, they also included battalions of Volga Tatars, Ukrainians and Azerbaijani troops conscripted in the Caucasus, making a total of 2,550 men travelling in 500 vehicles. By this stage of the war, the faces and skin colour of the men in Waffen-SS uniforms bore little resemblance to Himmler’s Aryan ideal.

Of course, von Jesser did not deploy all his troops at the same time and same place. They were usually, as in this case, divided up and allocated to the needs of each of the multiple anti-partisan conflicts in central France during the summer of 1944, sometimes being the aggressor, but sometimes being ambushed several times in a day as they moved about the country. Again, one could write a book about the little-known war von Jesser led against differently armed and trained FFI groups in the three months from June–August 1944. After being talked out of destroying Tulle by Maurice Roche on 18 or 19 August, the column was ambushed five times on the 75-mile journey to Clermont-Ferrand.

Fighting on Mount Mouchet continued all day. In the evening, von Jesser’s men retired after suffering casualties. The
maquisards
congratulated themselves that they had won a battle, but all they had done was to allow the enemy to measure their strength and assess their arms and equipment. Now considerably less confident than he had been, Colaudon organised an evacuation of arms and ammunition in expectation of a renewed attack in the morning. It began at 0900hrs with artillery support. Casualties among the defenders were high: some companies lost a third of their men. Ordered to hold until 0000hrs, they then filtered away towards the neighbouring La Truyère massif, so that when von Jesser’s men reached the remote forestry camp that had been Colaudon’s HQ they found nothing – except ten badly wounded men who had not been able to accompany the others
.
Their death by shooting almost certainly came as a relief.
To punish the neighbourhood, at the village of Ruynes von Jesser’s men shot twenty-seven male inhabitants in front of their wives and children. Other villages were pillaged and burned down. By the evening of 14 June, the day’s total of civilians executed had mounted to fifty-four. Captured
maquisards
were also shot, regardless of their uniforms and FFI armbands.

By 20 June the forces that had driven Colaudon’s little army from Mount Mouchet had also encircled the Massif de la Truyère, burning homes and whole villages as they came. By the time he was ordered by his FFI superiors to disperse his forces, his initiative had cost the lives of 280 men killed and 180 wounded in action, with a further 100 civilians executed in reprisals. Colaudon seems not to have understood that the airdrops of heavy weapons and paratroops he expected could never have materialised while the holding of the Normandy bridgeheads was the overriding Allied preoccupation. In the legends of the liberation, the Battle of Mount Mouchet was credited with delaying the arrival of a whole division in Normandy. The locals, on the other hand, had suffered greatly, for no advantage that any of them could see.

By this stage, the Allies had landed 325,000 men in Normandy, which was a formidable achievement logistically, but territorial gains had fallen far short of their objectives. In the west, VII Corps of the US First Army had failed to occupy the line it was meant to have reached on D-Day. In the east, British I Corps under General John Crocker was still nowhere near occupying the town of Caen, which had been its target for D-Day – this despite massive air raids and naval bombardments of the town that killed hundreds of civilians and very few Germans.

In addition to the severe delays in breaking out of the Allied bridgeheads, on 13 June the first V1 cruise missile landed on London, making the launch sites in northern France the top priority targets for the overstretched Allied air forces based in Britain. There was thus less chance than ever of bombers being spared to drop arms to the Maquis or fighters being despatched to support a rising in central France that should never have taken place.

Meanwhile, a company of Lammerding’s 2nd Das Reich Division had been writing its name in blood. If the hanging of ninety-nine men at Tulle was arguably no more than predictable reprisals for the illegal killing of the German garrison by Chapou’s FTP, 3rd Company of 2nd SS Regiment Der Führer immortalised the division’s name at a village that had done nothing to merit its complete eradication from the map after the massacre of virtually the whole population.

At 1400hrs on the balmy summer afternoon of Saturday 10 June, 120 men under Major Adolf Diekmann cordoned off the village and ordered the mayor to assemble the inhabitants for an identity check by beating the traditional drum. In such a quiet village, unlikely to be the target of Allied air raids, there was no warning siren. Obediently, the adult population emerged from homes and shops and workshops and gathered in front of the
Mairie
to hear whatever announcement was to be made – as did the teachers and pupils of the village school and the school for refugee children from Lorraine who were living there. By a cruel irony, few children were absent that afternoon because the local doctor had just arrived to give them all a medical check-up. His car still stands where he parked it, in front of the main school with the tyres burned off, the window glass cracked by heat and the bodywork rusted by seven decades of wind and rain.

The single child not present at the mock roll call was a boy from Lorraine, 8-year-old Roger Godfrin. Many of the Waffen-SS men were
malgré nous
conscripts from Lorraine. Overhearing what they were saying to each other in dialect, he hid himself in a garden. By the end of the afternoon Roger Godfrin was to be the sole child alive in Oradour.

A party of cyclists – five thirsty young men and a girl seeking refreshments in the village – were allowed through the cordon to share the fate of the villagers, as were a number of mothers living in outlying hamlets who came looking for their sons and daughters after the time they should have returned home from school. Eventually, 240 women and 205 children – some accounts say 247 children – were herded into the church at gunpoint. That sounds an orderly, if menacing, procedure, yet evidence was given at the post-war trial that groups of men, women and children were also shot in the streets, perhaps to terrify the rest into obedience. Some of them were left there wounded and finished off later. That could account for the discrepancy in the body count of children killed. Several of these bodies were stuffed down a well only
60
cm in diameter.

The 202 adult males rounded up were locked inside several barns. Of these, only five survived to testify 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, most of them still alive and writhing in pain from their wounds, before setting fire to everything by throwing in several phosphorous grenades and barring the doors. While 197 of their friends and relatives died of wounds or were burned alive, the five survivors threw themselves flat when the first shots were fired and crawled into a corner of the barn that the flames did not reach, subsequently finding a way out and making their way with extreme caution into the countryside.

The SS next turned their attention to the church. The one woman who survived the massacre later testified that at about 1700hrs two soldiers carried in a large chest with fuses coming out of it, which they lit and retired. At the eventual trial, witnesses said that the chest contained what they described as ‘asphyxiating grenades’. Whatever that may mean, the church swiftly filled with choking smoke that panicked the 240 desperate women into breaking down the door into the sacristy, where they found SS men standing at the windows with sub-machine guns, like farmers waiting for rabbits to break from the last stand of corn to be harvested. Bullet scars and holes still visible in the masonry show how they shot without discrimination in all directions at the trapped women and children.

In desperation, 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche used the stepladder kept for lighting the altar candles to climb up to a stained-glass window behind the altar. She smashed a hole in the bottom panel and fell through it, landing on the ground outside. Another woman climbed up the ladder and threw her baby to Madame Rouffanche. It fell to the ground, both mother and child being immediately shot. Madame Rouffanche, although bleeding from several bullet wounds, managed to drag herself behind a stone wall in the presbytery garden, where she was found by civilians the following morning.

At 1900hrs the evening commuter tram from Limoges was halted at the SS cordon, instead of proceeding as usual to the tram station at the other end of town. The tram lines are still there and the terminus station still awaits the last passengers of the day, who never arrived. Those passengers who could show identity papers with a domicile other than in Oradour had come to buy black-market food. They were ordered back on board and allowed to return to Limoges. The twenty-two passengers whose papers showed Oradour as their place of residence were lined up against a wall with a heavy-calibre machine gun pointing at them.

One can imagine their feelings as they were kept there, with the smoke from the burning village darkening the evening sky and their nostrils filled with the stench of burning human flesh. Many of the SS were drunk on looted wine and spirits, but after three hours the twenty-two terrified people were simply told to get lost. Entrance into the village being forbidden to them, they hurriedly sought refuge on nearby farms or hid in the woods until dawn.

By the time a late summer dusk hid some of the horror, out of all the people in Oradour when the SS cordoned the village off from the rest of the world that morning, only the boy from Lorraine, one woman and five men were still alive. Of the 642 people definitely killed only fifty-two corpses were positively identifiable; the others were so badly carbonised that many were not even recognisable by their nearest and dearest as human remains. Some time after dawn on 11 June, when the church bell should have been tolling for Mass, the last SS departed and the handful of surviving inhabitants of Oradour walked into the stinking, smouldering ruins that had been their homes. Every house was gutted. Nearly seven 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.

Note

1
In his book
La Bataille du Mont Mouchet
, Villebois, La Plume du Temps, 1996, p. 2.

‘UNDERSTAND? OFFICER, BANG BANG!’

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. This version maintains that Major Diekmann misread his maps and that his company should have been at nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres, a village where the Maquis had been active. The German version does not differ greatly as far as the massacre of the men is concerned, but claims that the village was the right one, to be destroyed in reprisal for three local Resistance operations, in which an ambulance convoy had been ambushed and two German officers had been kidnapped by the Maquis, and one of them killed.