WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (12 page)

France: World War Ii

1940–44

During World War II, the Nazis wreaked vengeance on those civilians they suspected of opposing them, whether by harbouring or helping Jews, or by committing acts of sabotage, or by other acts of resistance. This was particularly so in France, which after the surrender of the French forces in 1940, pursued a policy of collaboration with the Nazis through the government at Vichy, in return for peace. This was widely opposed by many Frenchmen and women, and a resistance movement soon arose, both within and outside the country, which was secretly supported by many ordinary French citizens, particularly those living in the rural areas of France.

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EPRISALS

Knowing how much they were loathed by the ordinary country people of France, the Nazis constantly suspected individuals – and sometimes whole communities – of helping the guerrilla resistance movement, or ‘maquis’, as it was known. The regime did not tolerate any form of opposition and took savage revenge on the suspects. In this way, the Nazis maintained a rule of terror in the country; however, there were many who were brave enough to risk their lives, and the lives of their families, to stand up against the tyranny of the regime.

One such example was at Oradour-sur-Glane in the Limousin region of France. This small town was in the occupied region of France (the country had been divided into occupied zones, with a zone ruled by the French government at Vichy). In 1944, towards the end of the conflict, as the Nazis were becoming more and more desperate to maintain their power, it became the locus of a terrible atrocity in which hundreds of residents were brutally slaughtered.

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APTIVE 
G
ERMAN OFFICER

On the morning of 10 June, the Second Panzer Division of the SS, known as ‘Das Reich’, was travelling across the country to join the fighting between the Allies and the Nazis in Normandy. At this point, it was becoming clear that the Allies had a good chance of invading France and overwhelming the German presence. During the Division’s journey, the soldiers met with constant sabotage and disrupution to their progress from the French resistance, who had stepped up their activities as the defeat of the Nazis began to look like a distinct possibility.

That day, Stürmbannführer Otto Diekmann of the Waffen SS First Battalion had been tipped off that an important German official, Stürmbannführer Helmut Kampfe, was being held captive by members of the ‘maquis’ in the town of Oradour sur Glane. Diekmann, who was a friend of Kampfe, reported the news to Stürmbannführer Weidinger, who also knew Kampfe well. The tip-off had come from the hated French secret police, the Milice, who had also reported that the townspeople were planning to execute Kampfe and burn him at the stake as a way of celebrating the Germans’ imminent defeat.

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READFUL ATROCITY

Incensed at this news, Diekmann and his forces surrounded the town and ordered the soldiers to herd everyone into a public fairground. The soldiers told the townspeople that the authorities needed to examine their papers. When they were assembled, the soldiers singled out the women and children and took them to the church. The men of the town were taken to six barns nearby. Meanwhile, the troops set about looting the town.

What happened next has gone down in history as one of the worst atrocities of World War II. The Nazi troops, using machine guns, shot all the men in the legs, so that they would die slowly. They then set the barns alight, using kindling and torches, so that the men would burn to death. Out of 195 men, only five escaped: the rest met an agonizing end in the barns, having been shot and burnt to death.

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CENE OF CARNAGE

Having committed this dreadful atrocity, the soldiers then moved on to deal with the women and children in the church. They planted an incendiary bomb in the middle of the church, lit it and ran outside, leaving the women and children to die. Naturally, the occupants of the church tried to escape, but as they ran out of the doors or climbed through the windows of the church, the troops opened fire, machine-gunning the victims until they fell dead. In all, there were 247 women and 205 children who died that day.

Not content with this, the Nazis proceeded to burn the town to the ground. The soldiers then stole everything they could carry from the houses and continued on their journey to fight the Allies. When they left, the scene of carnage was discovered. A few dozen villagers had escaped as soon as the troops had arrived, and they returned to bury the dead. Over 640 victims had died, wiping out almost the entire community.

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URNT TO DEATH

When the news came out, the sheer brutality of what had gone on shocked the nation. There were stories of soldiers roaming the streets, hunting down victims who were hiding from them. In one instance, an old invalid was burnt in his bed; in another, a baby was put in a bakery oven and baked to death; and in another, victims were shot and bodies were thrown down a well so that they could not be buried. However, there were also tales of those who survived: one townswoman, Madame Rouffanche, managed to throw herself out of a high church window, and then dug herself into the earth between some rows of peas. In this way, she managed to hide until the next day, when the troops departed.

There are various theories as to why the atrocity happened. Some believe it was done as part of a deliberate policy by the Nazis to quell any kind of resistance. It came at a time when the French Resistance, especially its guerrilla arm, the Maquis, had been extremely active, sabotaging the movement of German troops through France in any way they could. However, there are those who think this is not a persuasive explanation. Oradour was not, in fact, a place that had a strong history of resistance activity. Moreover, the German troops at the time gave no reason for their actions.

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ONTROVERSIAL TRIAL

Many support the theory that Diekmann went to Oradour purely to kill everyone in sight, acting on his own, out of sheer brutality, rather than because he had been given orders to do so. Some accounts report that his superiors, such as his commanding officer, Sylvester Stadler, were shocked at what he had done, especially with regard to his treatment of the women and children. It is believed that Stadler threatened to court martial Diekmann over the affair; however, he did not relieve Diekmann of his command. In the event, Diekmann was killed in action, on 29 June, so he was never tried.

In 1953, the perpetrators of the Oradour massacre were brought to justice. In February of that year, 21 former members of the Der Führer regiment of the Das Reich Division came before the courts at Bordeaux. There was much controversy about the trial, since none of the men tried were high-ranking former Nazis. Also, some of the defendants came from Alsace, which in previous times had been a French province. This meant that many French people viewed them as French nationals, and felt that they should have refused to commit the massacre. In their clients’ defence, their lawyers argued that they were merely conscripted soldiers, who would have been shot had they disobeyed orders.

When the verdicts were finally reached, there was uproar in France. Two defendants were sentenced to death, the others to prison sentences of between eight and 12 years. Some felt these sentences to be too lenient, and demanded that all the defendants receive the death penalty, while others argued that there should be no penalties for acts committed by conscripted soldiers under pain of death in a war situation. Eventually, all the defendants were freed, which made a mockery of the whole trial.

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ISTAKEN IDENTITY?

Some commentators have pointed out that what happened at Oradour may have been a case of mistaken identity. The town of Oradour sur Glane is not far from another town with a similar name, Oradour sur Vayres, where in 1944, a high-ranking German officer, Karl Gerlach was being held. According to this account, Diekmann’s informants, the Milice, had got their facts wrong and named the wrong town. Not only this, but Diekmann had assumed, without checking, that it was his friend Kampfe, not Gerlach, who was being held there. Thus the massacre was the result of a mistake. Be that as it may, massacres and atrocities of this nature were not unusual among Nazi troops, and we know that little attempt was made to discipline Diekmann for his appalling crime.

Today, the town of Oradour still stands in its ruined state as a memorial to those who died, so that visitors can witness the true horror of what happened. Many people travel there to see the ghost town, which stands as a testament to the death and destruction wreaked by the Third Reich in its final days and as a reminder that such a regime of intolerance and hatred must never be allowed to exist in the future.

France: The Jews

1940–44

One of the most shameful aspects of the French capitulation to the Germans in 1940 was the country’s collaboration in sending thousands of French Jews and others to the gas chamber. Because the French government decided to surrender to the Germans early on in the war, so as to gain favourable peace terms, many ordinary Frenchmen and women became involved in the process of persecuting the Jews and other groups that the Nazis thought undesirable, such as those with disabilities, homosexuals and others. Because the mass genocide of the Jews required a large administrative and bureaucratic structure, many French citizens became involved in the daily tasks of identifying individuals, arranging for their transportation to the death camps, and so on.

In this way, the French people became polarized into two factions: those who collaborated with the Nazis, and those who helped the Resistance forces. With the threat of death and torture hanging over anyone who resisted the regime, there were also many who changed sides, or who played a game of double dealing throughout the war. The whole atmosphere of the country was rife with paranoia, as spies and tale-tellers vied with resistance sympathizers, causing an immense burden of guilt and shame, together with bitter feuding on both sides, which lasted well beyond the war years. Even today, there is much controversy as to how much the French were forced to collaborate in sending the Jews to the concentration camps, and how much their actions were due to entrenched anti-Semitism within the country.

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HE 
P
ARIS 
D
EPORTATIONS

When the Germans first occupied the country, it did not immediately become clear that mass genocide of the Jews was one of their main objectives. The sheer scale of what was intended went well beyond most people’s worst nightmares, and there were many – including Jewish people themselves – who simply did not believe what was going on, in terms of mass extermination in the concentration camps, until it was too late to escape. One such group were the Jewish people of Paris.

After the invasion of the Germans, many Jewish Parisians moved to the French countryside or abroad to avoid the restrictions that were placed on them. As the result of the Nazis’ regulations, many lived in fear of the authorities and were unable to earn a living. Given the fact that many had been forced to flee communist Russia and were attempting to rebuild their lives in a foreign country, this new form of persecution was particularly harsh. However, most had no inkling that they would be rounded up, sent to concentration camps and gassed to death, and therefore remained where they were, rather than abandon everything they had built up and move abroad. Some went to the countryside with the intention of returning as soon as the war was over, or as soon as conditions became more favourable to their leading a normal life in the city once more.

They could not have known how swift, and how deadly, their end would be. On two days in July 1942, the 16th and 17th, the Nazis rounded up 12,884 non-French Jews to be deported to their concentration camps in Poland. Before they left, almost 7,000 of them were held in a single stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, on the Boulevard de Grenelle. The majority of the victims were children. Incredibly, there were only four toilets available for them to use. After a whole week, during which they were not given adequate supplies of food or water, the victims were transferred to ‘collection’ camps at Pithiviers and Drancy, outside Paris, where the children were separated from their parents. The parents were then taken to Auchwitz, where they were herded into gas chambers and gassed to death. The children followed soon after. All 4,051 of them died. At the end of the war, only 30 of the adults who had been sent to Auchwitz in the Paris Deportations were still alive.

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HILDREN EXTERMINATED

In total, around 60,000 Jews died in France during the war, under the German occupation. Not only adults, but many children and teenagers were also sent to the concentration camps, often alone without their families. For example, on 11 June, 1941, 300 Jewish boys aged between 14 and 19, were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. All of them died.

In another instance, Jewish orphans aged between fiveand 17, living at an orphanage in Izieu, central France, became victims of the Gestapo. On 6 April, 1944, Gestapo Officer Klaus Barbie, known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ because of his brutality, arrived with a convoy of trucks outside the building. His soldiers gained entry and forcibly removed 44 children and seven adults, throwing them onto the waiting trucks as they cried out in terror. The defenceless children were then taken to the camp at Drancy, where they were put on trains going to the concentration camps. Most of them were gassed to death in Auchwitz, while others met their end in Tallin, Estonia, shot by a firing squad.

After the war, Klaus Barbie was arrested for this and other war crimes, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison of cancer in 1991. He was thought to have been responsible for the deportation of over 7,000 people to the death camps, and to have ordered the murder of over 4,000 more. In addition, he oversaw the torture of around 14,000 members of the Resistance movement.

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HE 
F
INAL 
S
OLUTION

It was not until after the war that the full extent of the Holocaust became apparent. In the early days of Jewish persecution under the Nazis, death squads were used to round up and shoot Jews in conquered territory. However, this method proved too slow for Hitler and his henchmen, so from 1941, a policy of mass genocide was pursued, known as the Final Solution. Under this new scheme, extermination camps were set up with the specific aim to kill as many Jews as possible, as quickly as possible. Industrial methods were developed to exterminate victims in gas chambers and burn their bodies in large furnaces on a scale never known before. Jews who had been living in overcrowded, disease-ridden ghettos all over Europe were arrested and transported to the camps on trains and in cattle trucks, still in many cases unaware of the fate that was to befall them. Once there, they were either gassed, shot or left to survive as best they could, in conditions of unimaginable filth and neglect. Many did not survive the war, starving to death or dying of disease.

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RENCH ANTI-
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EMITISIM

It became shamefully apparent after the war that the French collaboration with this barbaric scheme had been extensive. Philippe Petain, leader of the Vichy government and a hero of World War I, supported the Nazi regime, arguing that the French people would suffer less under it if his government cooperated. However, it seems that his government did more than cooperate with the Germans: it actively participated in the persecution of the Jews, setting up a secret police, the Milice, to inform on individuals and have them arrested and deported. The Milice, along with right-wing activists, such as members of Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français (PPF), are thought to have been responsible for arresting at least 75,000 Jews for deportation to the death camps. It has also been argued that it was the Milice, and not the Nazis, who were responsible for the Paris Deportations, in which over 12,000 Jews were rounded up in a stadium for deportation. According to this account, the Nazis did not demand the arrest of the 4,051 children who were included in the round-up.

Many commentators also claim that there were many far-right factions in French society who were all too eager to help the government in their task of sending Jews to the concentration camps, and that anti-Semitism had been deeply entrenched in France for centuries. Thus, when the Nazis took over power, this provided an ideal opportunity for the far right, both within and outside the government, to put their racist beliefs into practise on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

 
MAURICE
 
PAPON

One individual who was singled out as a collaborator was Maurice Papon, a high-ranking government official and the supervisor of its so-called ‘Service for Jewish Questions’. Papon switched allegiances during the war and moved up the political ladder swiftly, until his war crimes were uncovered. He was known to have had regular contact with Nazi Germany SS corps who were responsible for the mass cleansing of the Jewish population. As a high-ranking official, he is thought to have been responsible for the deportation of 1,560 Jews to Auchwitz from 1942 to 1944, but he skilfully managed to cover his tracks. Among his victims were children and the elderly.

After the war, Papon moved to Paris and went on to become a successful civil servant with many top appointments, including Chief of the Paris Police and Budget Minister for President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing. He was even decorated by General Charles de Gaulle and kept a position in the cabinet for 30 years before his past caught up with him.

However, Papon’s history was eventually brought to light by the radical newspaper
Le Canard Enchaîné,
and on 2 April 1998, Papon faced the longest trial in all of French history. He was charged and convicted of ‘crimes against humanity’. He was given a ten-year prison sentence, but he was released four years later because of health problems.

The decision to release Papon was met with angry outbursts by the relatives of those who had died. Human rights activitists, who had fought to bring him to justice, said that victims of Nazism felt ‘insulted’ by this decision.