Das Reich (27 page)

Every available man of the Panzergrenadier brigade was combing the Limousin on the morning of 10 June for any trace of Major Kampfe. Shortly after 10 am, at the village of Salon-la-Tour some twenty miles south of Limoges near the Tulle road, soldiers – probably from the 1st battalion of the Deutschland regiment – were approaching the village. They saw a large black Citroën approaching them, then pull up abruptly. A young boy got out and raced away into the fields. Then a man and a girl, both carrying submachine guns, broke away from the car and began to run. The Germans opened fire, and a running battle developed. A woman tending her cows by a nearby farmhouse was killed instantly by a German burst. The boy escaped, and the
man vanished in the maze of dense hedges and ditches that ran back from the road. They pinpointed the girl, firing a Sten gun from the base of an apple tree at the edge of a cornfield. They worked in towards her until her gun was empty.
⁷
Then, limping from a twisted ankle and with a slight flesh wound in her arm, she was led forward and put in a staff car to be taken to Limoges. The divisional interpreter, Dr Wache, was called to her initial interrogation by Major Kowatsch – the same Kowatsch who the previous day had acted as master of ceremonies in Tulle. She admitted that she was English, and that she had been parachuted into the area on the night of 6 June. In a subsequent statement, the interpreter claimed: ‘She was treated with great politeness and supplied with clean clothes. She was then passed to the SD in Limoges. I know nothing further of the treatment of this agent.’

Violette Szabo had been desperately unlucky. For months, the
maquis
had travelled with impunity by car and truck across the Limousin and the Corrèze. The FTP
maquis
in the area had no knowledge of the presence of the Das Reich and, as so often, their lack of Intelligence was fatal. The new arrivals from French Section were driven gaily through the night of 6 June from the dropping zone to the little village of Sussac, some twenty-five miles south-east of Limoges. There they were lodged above a grocer’s shop. Staunton, the commander of her party, wrote later in his report:

Sussac was in the area dominated by ‘Colonel’ Georges Guingouin, among the most ruthless of communist leaders, in his French Army tank helmet and sheepskin jacket a familiar and feared figure throughout the Limousin. Of all the Resistance leaders in the region, he was among the least susceptible to the influence of London.

The
maquisards
of the Châteauneuf forest around Sussac did not take to Staunton any more than he took to them. They considered that he behaved too much as an English ‘officer and gentleman’, though in reality he was a Frenchman. They preferred Bob Mortier, the more easy-going ‘Canadian’ with him, although Mortier also was French. Staunton decided that it was essential for the mission to make contact with some of the more amenable
maquis
of the Corrèze and Dordogne. It has been suggested that he also wanted to make direct contact with Jacques Poirier. He explained that he wanted to send Violette Szabo, his courier, to liaise with them. One of the section leaders, a wild, brave young man named Jacques Dufour – ‘Anastasie’ – volunteered to take her to a contact at Pompadour, some thirty miles south, from whence she could be passed on to local leaders.

Anastasie had a reputation for recklessness, but no one suggested to Staunton that his courier might be safer with a more prudent guide. Around 9.30 on the morning of the tenth, the two set off in the petrol-driven Citroën. One of the
maquisards
’ wives suggested to Violette that she would be better off with flat shoes
than her high heels, but there was nothing to be done about that there. ‘She looked like a little doll,’ the woman said, ‘but she had a lot of guts.’ They waved the Citroën off. A few miles on, Anastasie stopped to pick up a twelve-year-old boy, the son of a friend who wanted a lift into the Corrèze. They strapped his bicycle on the back of the car and drove cheerfully onwards, singing and chatting. Violette was the daughter of a Frenchwoman who married a British soldier named Bushell during World War I. She was brought up a cockney and worked as a shopgirl until she met and married a French officer in 1940. He was later killed in the desert. When French Section approached her, she left a three-year-old daughter to go to France. She was adored by the men and women of SOE, both for her courage and for her endless infectious cockney laughter.

Anastasie chattered enthusiastically about the countryside through which they passed and his own boyhood. He was still talking when they came to their fatal rendezvous with the Das Reich, combing the countryside for Major Kampfe. After Violette damaged her ankle and Anastasie perfectly properly abandoned her, he hid beneath a log pile for many hours until the Germans were gone. Eventually he made his way back to the
maquis
. His boy passenger also escaped.

The
maquis
of south-east Haute-Vienne learned the identity of their latest enemies only twenty-four hours later, when one of their section commanders was examining the contents of a truck stolen from the Germans. In a crate in the back, he found a uniform bearing SS runes and the wristband of the Das Reich.

On the day after Kampfe’s capture – the same 10 June on which Violette Szabo was captured – Major Stuckler issued a divisional Order of the Day to the men of the Das Reich:

Major Otto Dickmann, commanding the 1st battalion of the Der Führer regiment, had already fought through the
résistants
defending the bridge at Groslejac on the morning of 8 June, and he and his column had subsequently killed several
maquisards
and rather more innocent bystanders as they advanced through the eastern Dordogne. More recently it was Dickmann who had personally awakened Lieutenant Gerlach early on the morning of the tenth, to hear the tale of his experiences. Major Kampfe, Dickmann’s counterpart of the 3rd battalion, was a close personal friend, and Dickmann was desperate for any clue to the missing officer’s whereabouts.

The 1st battalion only reached Limoges, late and exhausted, at around 6.30 am on 9 June, four hours after the rest of the regiment. ‘It was very rough,’ Dickmann told Weidinger. ‘After many delays and a terrible journey,’ states the regimental history, whose account of this, as of many other episodes, is enigmatically terse, ‘the 1st battalion arrives at Limoges in the morning and then moves to its deployment area . . . During its covering movement on the left flank, it had encountered several heavy shooting attacks . . . and suffered its first losses. Many tree barriers had to be removed. The commander, Sturmbannführer Dickmann, seemed tense and strained.’ As soon as he had confirmed his orders, the major climbed wearily back into his car, and led the battalion south-westwards out of Limoges to the town of St Junien, some twenty miles distant.

The German dominance of the Limousin had been as rudely challenged since D-Day as that of the Dordogne and Corrèze. On the night of 7 June,
maquisards
sabotaged and severely damaged the railway viaduct carrying the Limoges–Angoulême main line through St Junien, a town of some 20,000 people notable for its tanneries and glovemakers. The attackers conducted a symbolic occupation of the
mairie
early on the morning of 8 June, and then took up positions covering the viaduct. That evening, a train from Angoulême halted at the southern end, and passengers began to walk across the weakened span to join another train sent from Limoges to meet them. Among them were ten German soldiers, two of whom were killed when the
résistants
opened fire. Five ran back to the Angoulême train, and three forward to go on to Limoges, where they urgently phoned their headquarters. By the time an armoured train arrived in St Junien at 9 am the next day, bearing a Wehrmacht detachment and Lieutenant Wickers of the Gestapo, the
maquis
had prudently vanished. The troops deployed through the town, and Wickers gave orders to the mayor that a hundred able-bodied civilians were to be assembled at once with picks and spades to dig trenches round the approaches. This was a combination of precaution and punishment. Some fifty mostly elderly men eventually gathered, and dug reluctantly under the eyes of their guards until about 1 pm.

At 10 am, Wickers had received a message from his headquarters in Limoges, informing him that the SS would be relieving the Wehrmacht as soon as they could get down to the town. At 10.30, the long file of Dickmann’s trucks and half-tracks crawled into St Junien. Dickmann dismounted, exchanged brief words with Wickers and several nervous local French officials, then set up his command post in the Hôtel de la Gare. He had brought with him a notorious Limoges Gestapo officer named Joachim Kleist, a Gestapo interpreter and four
miliciens.
By the standards of the Das Reich, St Junien escaped lightly. Germans commandeered all the petrol they could find in local garages, and conducted a grenade-throwing competition to amuse themselves.
As a security precaution, all the officers slept together under heavy guard.

Early the next morning – the tenth – Dickmann was back at Der Führer HQ in Limoges. According to Weidinger’s narrative:

Dickmann also spoke directly to Gerlach, from whom, according to post-war testimony, he received an indication that he believed his own captors had taken him through Oradour. In the regimental history, Weidinger also recounts a bizarre attempt to make contact with the
maquis
and bargain for the release of Kampfe by freeing a prisoner held by the Limoges SD. Weidinger claims that the freed
maquisard
telephoned once to say that he was doing his best to find Kampfe, but was then never heard from again.

Dickmann was back in St Junien by mid-morning. He held some discussion with Kleist of the Gestapo and the
milice
, then
ordered his 3rd company, commanded by Hauptsturmführer Kahn, to prepare to move out for an operation. At about 1.30 pm Dickmann, Kahn and 120 men in a convoy of two half-tracks, eight trucks and a motor cycle drove eastwards out of St Junien on an indirect route to Oradour-sur-Glane, via St Victorien. Dickmann himself rode in his commandeered Citroën
deux chevaux
with his young Alsatian driver and his adjutant, Lange. According to some – not surprisingly hesitant and confused – post-war testimony, they halted
en route
for Dickmann to give a cursory briefing for a ‘search and destroy’ operation of the kind that they had several times undertaken from Montauban. But an NCO named Barth was said to have implied that this would be something special when he declared buoyantly: ‘You’re going to see some blood flow today!’ to a group of young recruits, adding: ‘And we’ll also find out what the Alsatians are made of.’