Das Reich (37 page)

But Barry was considering merely the military balance sheet. Much more than this, much more than the number of days that the
maquis
delayed the Das Reich, every man and woman who played his part and survived was exalted by the experience even through the terrible layer of pain. The great contribution of Resistance – that which justified all that SOE did and made worthwhile the sacrifice of all those who died – was towards the restoration of the soul of France.

There is one further matter upon which there should be some reflection here: the conduct of the Das Reich Division in southern France. It is ironic that, to find a ready historical parallel for the way in which Hitler’s army sought to suppress Resistance in Occupied France, it is necessary to look back to the manner in which Masséna’s army dealt with the guerillas of Spain in 1808–9: ‘In Spain . . . The French military leadership responded as leadership
always will. It resorted, when it seemed profitable, to terror,’ in the words of a modern historian. The French today display an undiminished reverence for the memory of Napoleon and his armies. Yet until the coming of Hitler no leader in modern European history had ruled conquered people with such savagery, or inflicted such misery.

Regular armies have always detested guerillas. In the Franco-Prussian War, some 58,000 French
franc-tireurs
killed around 1,000 Germans, and compelled the Prussians to deploy 120,000 men – a quarter of their army – to cover the lines of communication. ‘We are beating them down pitilessly,’ declared Bismarck. ‘They are not soldiers. We are treating them as murderers.’

A British liberal historian, Thomas Arnold, wrote in 1842:

Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commanding the British 21st Army Group in 1944, was a Brigade-Major fighting the Irish guerillas in 1921. ‘My whole attention was given to defeating the rebels,’ he wrote, ‘and it never bothered me a bit how many houses were burned. Any civilian or Republican, soldier or policeman, who interferes with any officer or soldier is
shot at once
.’
⁹
Until domestic public opinion compelled them to rescind the order, the British employed a policy of Official Reprisals against the rebels, including the burning of houses of those who assisted them. General Maxwell executed the leaders of the 1916 uprising, and sent their followers to camps in England. ‘My own view’, Montgomery reflected later on his Irish experience, ‘is that to win
a war of that sort you must be ruthless; Oliver Cromwell, or the Germans, would have settled it in a very short time.’

It is interesting that while General Eisenhower paid fulsome tribute to the contribution of the French
résistants
after the Liberation, Montgomery never displayed either interest in or respect for them. He always seemed to retain the regular soldier’s distaste for irregulars, whatever they fought for. He might have felt a sneaking sympathy for those Wehrmacht officers who asked during the Occupation in France why, if it was just for the British to shoot Sinn Feiners in 1921, it was unacceptable for the Germans to shoot French
résistants
bearing arms when their own government had signed an armistice with Germany?

This, of course, was the professed opinion of the SS in France in 1944. It is worth recalling that not all their dreadful killings were illegal by the accepted usage of war. General Eisenhower could not reasonably expect the Germans to accept his broadcast demand that all captured
maquisards
be treated as prisoners of war. Historically, civilians in arms have always been liable to summary execution, whatever the Hague Convention may say in defence of those equipped with brassards or other distinguishing marks. The Das Reich was within its rights, for instance, to shoot the captured twenty-nine
résistants
on the road to Gueret; to hang the captured
maquisard
at Terrasson. The Germans were entitled to execute Violette Szabo and any other SOE agent who fell into their hands. It would be foolish to make too much of German looting – horrible though it was for the communities that had to endure it – when Allied forces were equally liable to appropriate anything not nailed down or within immediate sight of its owner. The Liberating armies were no more popular with civilians in many parts of France – above all, Normandy – than were the Occupiers, ‘levelling everything in front of them on the ground, towns, villages, monuments; and distributing to the civil population in the same breath chocolate and phosphorus shells,’ as Tillon wrote acidly.

Yet beyond all this, when every conceivable allowance has been made for the circumstances of war, the march of the Das Reich will always be remembered among the most dreadful episodes of World War II.

There is not a great deal that anyone other than a philosopher or a psychiatrist can say about the men who carried out the massacre at Oradour. To those with knowledge of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, it is not surprising that the leaders of the SS detachment, Dickmann and Kahn, were capable of ordering such an act. They were young men who since their earliest years had been imbued with the spirit of Nazism and of the SS. Dickmann was a product of a National Socialist cadet school, said by his comrades to have a pleasantly infectious laugh. Long before his operations on the road through the Dordogne on 8 June, he had commanded a
ratissage
at Fraysinnat-le-Gelat, when the Das Reich was still quartered at Montauban; 400 civilians had been assembled in the central square in much the same fashion as Oradour. A frightened old woman who fired a shotgun at the German intruders was hanged, along with the two nieces who shared her house. Their bodies were thrown into the flames when it had been fired. Ten hostages were chosen and shot, and when a father among them asked permission to embrace his fifteen-year-old son for the last time, the imaginative Kahn shot them together as they stood in each other’s arms.

It seems almost certain that neither General Lammerding nor Colonel Stadler gave Dickmann an order that could be said to have authorized the destruction of Oradour. But throughout their years in the SS, Dickmann and his fellow-officers and NCOs had been shooting civilians as an almost routine exercise. On 3 February 1944, Field-Marshal Sperrle signed a notorious order to the Occupation forces in France, decreeing the most ruthless attitude to civilians at the slightest sign of attack or recalcitrance: ‘There will be an immediate return of fire . . . immediate burning down of the houses . . . If thereby innocent people are hit that is
regrettable, but entirely the fault of the terrorists.’ General Lammerding had issued repeated orders demanding savage reprisals in terrorist areas.

No authority had ever suggested to Dickmann or his colleagues that there was a precise moral and military limit, beyond which a certain number of executions or burnings became unacceptable. In Fraysinnat, Dickmann had killed thirteen people and this had been considered a proper performance of his duty. In Tulle, the division had hanged ninety-nine people without a single officer suggesting that this was unreasonable. Why should Dickmann have supposed that if he killed 642 people in Oradour, he would be considered to have exceeded his discretion?

It has been found surprising that Dickmann’s soldiers, many of them young recruits, so readily carried out his terrible orders on 10 June. But many of these, too, had previous experience of shooting civilians, albeit in smaller numbers. Again and again it has been shown that the chief motive forces in war are the example of one’s fellows, and the fear of revealing weakness before them. These were seen in the most grotesque form at Oradour. Even young Alsatians – half-countrymen of those they killed – found it easier to press their triggers alongside their comrades than to show revulsion or to flinch from the slaughter. Had they done so, they knew that it was possible – even probable – that they themselves would have been before a firing squad within hours. The SS made a fetish of toughness from the moment that a young recruit joined their ranks. It made them the most formidable fighting soldiers of World War II, and its perversion on such occasions as 10 June 1944 also made them the most detested. Again and again the SS showed that there were no limits to their concept of their own duty, or to their ruthlessness. I have made little in the account above about some of the more extraordinary stories told of Oradour: the baby said to have been burnt in the baker’s oven, the breaking open of the champagne in the grocer’s shop and the round of accordion music as the troopers waited for the fires to finish their work, the grazing horse left
tethered to the outstretched arm of M. Poutaraud’s corpse, because, as with all horrifying historical events, the story of Oradour was allowed to grow extravagant sideshoots and to develop its own emotional myths as the tale was told afterwards. I have omitted a number of stories and remarks which seem to bear the scent of retrospective garnishing. And yet all the evidence of SS history shows that the story of the baby in the oven could conceivably be true. Even thirty-seven years later, I find myself hoping desperately that it is not.

In the years after Oradour, countless acres of paper were filled and gallons of ink spilt in exploring the motives of the men who did these things. Even after so many other terrible tragedies that were inflicted upon France in World War II, this one developed a fascination of its own. I will quote only one passage from the trial at Bordeaux in 1953 of twenty-one men of Dickmann’s company. Joseph Busch from Strasburg was a former Hitler Youth, forced by his father – an ardent Nazi – to join the Waffen SS in February 1944. He subsequently deserted from the Das Reich Division in Normandy in July.

It is important to remember that if Oradour was an exceptionally dreadful occurrence during the war in the West, it was a trifling sample of what the German Army had been doing on a national scale during the war in the East, since 1941. Of Russia’s 20 million war dead, a countless number were killed during massacres as terrible as Oradour. Russia was where Otto Dickmann had learnt his soldiering, and become accustomed to the manner in which Hitler’s Germany fought its wars.

To emphasize this, it is worth reporting a conversation that I had with an SS officer – of the Death’s Head, not of the Das Reich Division – while writing this book. He told me that, long after the war, he met a fellow SS veteran who had taken part in the destruction of Oradour. The other man spoke of his astonishment about the international uproar which followed the revelation of
the massacre. Speaking as one old SS man to another, said Dickmann’s officer confidentially, ‘. . . in our circle, Herr Muller, it was
nothing
’.

General Lammerding’s defence of his own and of his division’s conduct, made after the war to his former subordinate Colonel Weidinger, is worth quoting only for the record: