Das Reich (21 page)

When the war crimes tribunals were examining the ‘
affaire de Tulle
’ years afterwards, the SS witnesses concocted various alibis to excuse or conceal their own role. French historians have always assumed that the supposed murder of German prisoners was a Nazi fabrication, and indeed it may have been. The FTP insisted that when they evacuated the town, they released several large groups of prisoners, having no means of holding them.

Nothing can excuse what the Das Reich did in Tulle, but it is important at least to consider the motives that the Germans advanced. Both in the past and the future,
maquisards
– above all those of the FTP – frequently shot German prisoners out of hand. The author, during his researches for this book, never credited the possibility of the truth of the German allegations until the subject was raised in conversation with a former leading member of the
Armée Secrète
in the Corrèze, who since the war has done much research on local Resistance history. He told me:

It would be absurd to accept the truth of the SS allegations on the unsupported private testimony of one man who was not an eyewitness. There was intense bitterness and ill-will between the AS and FTP in the Corrèze, as we have seen, and it is possible that this coloured the willingness of an AS veteran to believe the worst of the communists. But I am impressed by another, admittedly circumstantial piece of evidence. The FTP claim to have lost seventeen killed and twenty-one badly wounded in the original Tulle attack. Yet there were 139 German corpses. Is it really possible to believe that the garrison, fighting from strong defensive positions, in a battle which the FTP themselves admitted did not go as they had planned it, suffered such disproportionate loss in action? The balance of suspicion must be that the FTP indeed executed a substantial number of Germans who had surrendered to them.

The second significant controversy concerns the source of the order for mass reprisals in Tulle. Throughout the long post-war struggle to indict Lammerding for war crimes, from his secret refuge in Germany the general asserted repeatedly that he did not even arrive in Tulle until the later afternoon of 9 June, when the reprisals were already ended: ‘I am still ignorant of the source of the order for executions in Tulle,’ he said, ‘but I do not think that it was given by a higher authority.’ The hangings were, therefore, entirely the responsibility of his senior staff officer, Major Albert Stuckler. General Lammerding’s alibi rested upon the interesting claim that at the time of the hangings in Tulle, he himself was in Uzerche, conducting an entirely separate hanging of his own.

Uzerche is a small town on the Limoges road twenty-five miles north of Brive-la-Gaillarde. After many hours visiting the scattered lagers of his units, up and down the main road, Lammerding passed the night of 8 June in the flat above the shop of a tanner named Laporte. Early on the morning of the ninth, one of his officers reported to him with three
maquis
prisoners. When the Das Reich advanced into Tulle the previous evening, the Frenchmen had escaped north-westwards in a Citroën van. At the outskirts of the town, they were flagged down by two frightened girls, who begged a lift. Uzerche is only fifteen miles distant by the direct road, and they were approaching the town when an SS patrol surrounded and seized them. The two girls, it transpired, were the mistresses respectively of Lieutenant Schmald and the late Lieutenant Beck of the SD, and they immediately denounced the young Frenchmen. Then, damningly, it was discovered that one of them was carrying three
Feldgendarmes
’ neck shields, which in a moment of madness he had retained as souvenirs.

The young men were brought before Lammerding himself. The Laporte family were bewildered by the courtesy with which he received them. He offered one, Raymond Monteil, a cigarette. The boy declined, saying that he was too hungry to smoke. Lammerding ordered food to be brought. There was no debate about the future of the
maquisard
who had been found in possession
of the
Kettenhunden
chains. A rope was tossed over an electric pylon, and he was hanged. The two women pushed and twisted the body as it swung, joking with the SS executioners. Raymond Monteil and the other
maquisard
were spared, for deportation to Dachau where they died, not yet twenty.

According to Lammerding’s later testimony, he had had no radio communication with his headquarters in Tulle since the previous evening because of the steep hills intervening. Only late in the afternoon of the ninth did he leave for the town, travelling because of the security situation, via Brive in a slow-moving armoured vehicle rather than taking the direct route in a staff car. Lammerding also drew particular attention to the fact that the proclamation of Tulle’s doom was signed by ‘The General Commanding the German Troops’. If it had been his own signature, he said, he would naturally have signed himself ‘Lammerding’.

Colonel Stuckler and Major Wulf – not surprisingly, whatever the truth of the matter – testify emphatically that Lammerding reached Tulle about 1 pm, and personally ordered the executions. The balance of probability favours this version. It is difficult to imagine a conscientious staff officer like Stuckler giving such an order entirely on his own initiative without consulting his commanding general. It is also significant that Stuckler testifies that ‘there was no specific order to carry out hangings from 66th Reserve Corps’. Had he wished to shift responsibility from himself, the least difficult means of doing so would have been to cite the order of a higher formation. There was ample encouragement from OKW and Army Group G to carry out ruthless reprisals. Finally, however, the printed proclamation bears the authentic odour of Lammerding, as witnessed by his memorandum to 58th Corps of 5 June. If anyone still doubts that the reprisals in Tulle were a cold-blooded act of divisional policy, for which Lammerding bore full moral and military responsibility, it only remains to read the text of the division’s memorandum on anti-guerilla operations, issued to all units that day of 9 June, and published
here as Appendix A. It is extraordinary that a senior SS officer who had commanded anti-partisan operations in Russia could have attempted to persuade a post-war generation that he did not authorize a divisional mass execution.

It is at this point in the narrative that a sullen, grudging tone enters the voices of the surviving SS witnesses. Major Wulf claims to have been affronted when he was ordered to assemble an execution squad: ‘I protested that this sort of thing was the responsibility of the
Feldgendarmerie
.’ But the battalion found the men anyway. Private Schneid reported:

Schneid claims to have seen a fellow-Alsatian named Pierre walk away in tears ‘saying that he could not do “that” ’. He himself was told by an NCO who despised ‘
Franzenköpfe
’ like himself ‘that if I did not have the courage to do some hanging, I could at least act as an escort’. So Schneid and some twenty of his fellow-troopers took up position on the street at the lower end of Tulle, close to the courtyard of the arms factory, for the odious tragedy that now unfolded.

All that morning, Lieutenant Schmald and his colleagues had been screening the great crowd of Frenchmen in the courtyard of the arms factory. Many had been allowed to depart. By early afternoon
something over 400 remained, and they were becoming increasingly apprehensive. Schmald strode among them, asking acid questions: ‘Why are your shoes so dirty? If you were a decent citizen, they would be clean. You must be a
maquisard
.’ He did not conceal his personal craving for revenge for the days of terror that the
maquis
had inflicted upon him: ‘I am one of the few survivors of yesterday’s battle,’ he told the Abbé Espinasse, the tall, slender almoner of the
lycée
who had been allowed to remain with the captives. ‘We were almost all Rhine Catholics. We would very much have liked a priest to comfort us.’ As soon as it became known that many of the prisoners were to die, Herr Brenner, the German director of the arms factory, intervened. Some of the men in the courtyard were key workers, almost irreplaceable. Surely they could be excluded? His interpreter, a thirty-two-year-old Ulm woman named Paulette Geissler, moved busily through the ranks, selecting a man here and another there, and gesturing to the SS to release him. Twenty-seven in all were allowed to go. Then Fräulein Geissler joined Schmald and a little group of other Germans at a table outside the Café Tivoli, where they could watch the balance of the afternoon’s activity in comfort – some witnesses later claimed to the music of a gramophone.

The essential difficulty facing the Germans was that among all the men in the courtyard, only two were indeed
maquisards
. Among all the remainder, there was not even a shred of evijdence to implicate them as accomplices of the FTP. Schmald was compelled to resort to methods arbitrary even by SD standards. One by one, the young, the dirty and the unshaven were ordered to join a group at the side of the courtyard. They were men like Louis Chieze, twenty-six, hairdresser; Marcel Demaux, thirty, a teacher married to another teacher, with a child of four; Georges Gloria, forty, fitter in a bicycle works; Raymond Le Souef, forty, manager of a
gazogène
works; Guy Peuch, twenty, a worker in the arms factory; and his brother André, twenty-three, a restaurant-owner; Jean-Marius-Joseph Rochedix, nineteen, a tramway employee compulsorily
transferred to the Tulle armament factory . . . And so on, 120 men in all, of whom the youngest was seventeen and the oldest forty-two.

The first group of some fifty victims was marshalled in the courtyard. The Abbé Espinasse was permitted to address them: ‘My friends, you are going to appear before God. There are Catholics among you, believers. Now is the time to commend your souls to the Father who will receive you. Make an action of contrition for all your sins, and I will give you absolution.’ An SS officer read the order for their execution in German, incomprehensible to most of them. At a gesture from the officer, the guards began to move the group out of the yard, round the corner into the street that passes over the river Vézèré at the southern end of the town. Schneid, watching them come with their hands tied behind their backs, was struck by the absurdity that some still carried loaves of bread or coats tucked under their arms, because when they left home that morning, they had not known whither they were to go. A squad of young Vichyite
chantiers de la jeunesse
had been recruited by the Germans to help with the arrangements – gathering ladders and ropes from the town when it was found that the cables on the SS vehicles were too heavy for the purpose. ‘Hascha’ Kurz nudged Schneid and pointed to the tall, blond French teenager at the head of the
chantiers
squad: ‘You see this boy, Schneid? These are the sort of men we need – I’d make a fine Waffen SS of him!’

The operation was commanded by Major Kowatsch, a big man of around thirty who had been in the police for some years before joining the SS. Several witnesses claimed that Kowatsch taunted the condemned men before their execution. The hangings themselves were carried out by a pioneer NCO of thirty-one from the Saar, named Otto Hoff. ‘Because our wounded were so well-treated,’ Kowatsch told Prefect Trouillé, ‘we shall be merciful and not burn the town.’

The captives were halted by the first lamp post in the street, from which a noose already dangled, and against which two
ladders stood, one for the victim and one for the hangman. The first Frenchman mounted, Hoff adjusted the noose and pushed him off. He moved on to the next lamp post and repeated the process. A routine was established. Some of the pioneers laughed as they worked, but even among the SS most found silence less disturbing. As the lamp posts filled, they began to tie nooses a yard or two apart on the first-floor balconies overhanging the street. A few prisoners sobbed as they waited, but most mounted the ladder submissively enough. Some died instantly. Others twisted and twitched convulsively for several minutes, occasionally irritating a German into delivering a brief burst as a
coup de grâce
. There were brief moments of drama. A man suddenly broke free from his group and sprang over the bridge into the rock-strewn river below. An NCO emptied his Schmeisser from the parapet, and the Frenchman’s body drifted down to the lodge against the foot of the bridge. Some men leaped from their ladders with deliberate force, to end their suffering instantly. One of these caused his own rope to snap. He fell heavily onto the road. His neck was broken, and the Germans saw him twist and shake as he staggered to breathe. After a pause that seemed to Schneid interminable as he gazed on the man’s ‘terrible look of mute supplication’, one of them shot him. He lay still. Then a prisoner fell from his ladder, apparently accidentally, and dropped into the river. He was dispatched with two pistol shots. Another suddenly sprang from his waiting group and darted to a body already swinging from a balcony, to shake it by the hand. Was it his brother, mused Schneid? He was instantly shot down.