French Resistance Fighter Reveals Execution Of 47 German Soldiers In 1944

Edmond Réveil, at his home in Meymac.Samuel Aranda

The secret remained hidden for almost 80 years. Nobody said a word. It was nothing to be proud of; it was better to forget it ever happened. Those who attended or witnessed the execution of 47 unarmed German soldiers in the Massif Central in southern France at the end of World War II remained silent all their lives. Some didn’t even tell their wives or children. Did you feel any regrets? “A little bit, but that’s life,” says Edmond Réveil in the first-floor living room of his small house in Meymac, a village of 2,500 people in the mountainous countryside of inland France. At 98, Réveil greets visitors standing, walks up and down stairs, and maintains an enviable physique. He also keeps the memory of that day.

Réveil was there on June 12, 1944 when the communist resistance group to which he belonged shot dead 47 German soldiers they had captured five days earlier in Tulle, the capital of the Corrèze department, along with a French woman accused of collaboration. He was almost 19 years old and a liaison officer in the resistance. He says he did not take part in the shooting. Now he has spoken up, highlighting an aspect of World War II that applies to all wars: heroes can sometimes commit atrocities.

“It was necessary for it to be known,” says Réveil to EL PAÍS, a few days after revealing this unknown episode of the war in Corrèze in an interview with La Vie Corrézienne. “We were ashamed,” he told the local newspaper. “We knew we shouldn’t kill prisoners, even though we weren’t subject to the Geneva Convention, because the Germans didn’t see us as soldiers.”

Meymac brings a foreigner as close as possible to the idyll of picturesque rural France: a medieval church and tower, a town hall with the French flag on the facade, and a restaurant, Chez Françoise, which was a favorite of Jacques Chirac, former President, whose electoral fiefdom was in Corrèze.

On leaving the village, the road winds through forests and under the viaduct where, in early 1944, guerrillas derailed a train carrying German weapons. The story, its deeds and its dramas lurk around every bend. Another road meanders through a landscape of green hills and farms: somewhere near the village of Le Vert lie the remains of German soldiers.

The derailed train carrying German weapons near Meymac, 1944.

Where is the tomb and can it be visited? “Well, no,” smiles the mayor of Meymac, Philippe Brugère. “We know where it is, with a margin of error of a few hundred meters, but that’s all we can say because there are serious predators who would like to find out.” People with metal detectors were seen…”

In 2019, Réveil first told the story at a session of the National Assembly of Ex-Combatants, and a few months later, in September 2020, Mayor Brugère and a group of fellow citizens recorded his testimony. However, he had not previously spoken publicly about the events.

“Some people knew about it, but it was like a family secret that is never shared,” says the mayor, seated at a table in the Meymac bookstore-café on Place de l’Église. Why did Réveil decide to speak out now? “Because he’s getting old, because he knows he’s not immortal, and before he left, he wanted to salve his conscience and most importantly, make sure these soldiers have a memorial, that their families know that their relatives are buried here .” ”

Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and author of Fighters in the Shadows. A new history of the French Resistance (2015) clarifies the context in which the events on the phone occurred: “The period between the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944 and the liberation of Paris at the end of August was very volatile in France.”

brutal oppression

Gildea explains that during these weeks, many resistance groups hiding in the forests and mountains of France emerged to attack the German occupiers. The repression that followed, the historian adds, was brutal. When the occupation authorities failed to arrest a suspect for every German soldier killed, they took revenge on the population.

The context of Nazi reprisals is fundamental to understanding the executions carried out at Meymac. Two days earlier, at Oradour-sur-Glane, just over an hour’s drive from Meymac, the Waffen-SS division “Das Reich” committed one of the worst civilian massacres of the war, killing 642 people. Also, the Nazis had just hanged 99 men in the streets of Tulle.

A few days earlier, a resistance group in Tulle had stormed a school building that had served as barracks for the Wehrmacht and taken dozens of prisoners. They were taken into the woods towards Meymac. But there was a problem: what should the resistance do with them, how should they feed them and how should they prevent them from escaping and revealing the whereabouts of the guerrillas?

“Every time they went to pee, we had to accompany them,” Réveil said during his 2020 testimony. “We didn’t want to kill them, but we couldn’t keep them with us either: we had to find a solution.”

The approximate place where the 47 German soldiers were executed, a few kilometers from Meymac. Samuel Aranda

Orders were given to kill them, and the leader of the group, nicknamed Hannibal, from Alsace and fluent in German, “spoke to each of them,” Réveil recalled. “I grew up like a kid. It’s not pleasant to have to shoot someone. Nobody wanted to kill the French woman. They drew lots.” He adds that the prisoners “dug the holes themselves”.

“It is clear that the killing of unarmed civilians violates the laws of war,” says historian Gildea. “But it’s also true that what the Germans were doing in collective reprisals was also against the laws of war.”

Gildea points out that while the execution of German prisoners at Meymac may be shocking, in France at the end of the war, thousands of collaborators were shot and women suspected of having links with the occupying powers suffered humiliating reprisals, such as shearing off heads in public.

Commenting on Réveil’s revelations, the historian adds, “If you look at a world where all resistance fighters were heroes and all Germans were Nazis and barbarians, that’s the kind of story that doesn’t fit and it’s shocking, and so people know.” don’t know what to do with it.”

Radar localization of the mass grave is to begin at the end of June. If found, the remains can be recovered and identified. If the soldiers’ families claim them, they will be returned to Germany to be buried with dignity.

“I hope we can find them, but we’re not sure,” says Xavier Kompa, director of the National Office for Ex-Combatants and War Victims in Corrèze, which is preparing to carry out the search and exhumation work alongside the German War Graves Commission . “Not knowing is terrible for a family,” adds Kompa, whose uncle, a resistance fighter in Lorraine, disappeared at the hands of the SS. “I put myself in the shoes of German families who would like to know what happened to their ancestors.”

At his home in Meymac, Réveil explains that after collaborating with the resistance, he joined General De Lattre de Tassigny’s First Army, which took part in the liberation of France, and pushed the advance as far as the German city of Stuttgart. A railway worker by trade, he proudly recounts that in the 1970s he held the position of deputy manager of the Austerlitz train station in Paris.

But there is another memory of the Maquis that he has not forgotten: that of the Spanish republicans who went into exile in France in 1939; Guerrillas who came with war experience and joined the resistance. “Against the Germans,” he says, “they were mighty.”