Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (43 page)

On the Vercors, Central Asian conscripts, like these captured in Normandy, tortured and raped their female prisoners before killing them.

The men taken prisoner were brutally tortured and then hanged.

The village of Valchevrières was left with only the walls still standing.

The military cemetery of Vassieux. One-third of the graves are marked ‘Unknown’ because the bodies were unrecognisable. Another third bear names of women, girls and infants.

Illicitly taken photographs of Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht troops hunting down
maquisards
on Mount Mouchet in central France. They also exacted brutal reprisals on civilians living there.

For every one of their own casualties, they exacted brutal reprisals on uninvolved civilians living there.

Schoolteacher Georges Guingouin saved hundreds of lives at Limoges by arranging a peaceful surrender of the German garrison in August 1944. For this, the French Communist Party sentenced him to death.

French stamp commemorating Wehrmacht Corporal Alfred Stanke, in civilian life a Franciscan monk, who nursed tortured Gestapo prisoners in Bourges prison.

French Gestapo interpreter Pierre-Marie Paoli, who tortured Resistance suspects in Bourges prison.

The lock-keeper’s cottage outside St-Amand-Montrond, where parachuted weapons were distributed on the evening of D-Day. The town was then prematurely liberated for a few hours, triggering terrible reprisals.

One of the deep wells near Bourges into which Paoli’s men pushed living men and women hostages head-first during the reprisals. When brought out weeks after the real liberation, the bodies were unrecognisable.

During the liberation, thousands of women guilty of
la collaboration horizontale
had their heads shaven, like these publicly humiliated at Bergerac.

Marked with swastikas on face and breasts, sometimes stark naked, they were forced to run the gauntlet between jeering crowds.