Oradour and Tulle massacres: And the murderers had their photos taken

During the days of D-Day, the occupying powers in France experienced a significant upsurge in the resistance movement, whose actions supported Operation Overlord. The SS and Wehrmacht responded with a form of war of annihilation that had previously only been known from the Eastern Front and the Balkan region. Two of these massacres still shape the French narrative today.

Following news of the Allied landing, armed Resistance units attacked the central French town of Tulle in the Corrèze department. In direct combat with the German troops, they liberated Tulle and trapped units of the German security regiment in the city’s ammunition factory. In support of this regiment, the 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” under the command of SS-gruppenführer Heinz Lammerding advanced against the city on June 8, 1944. The Resistance fighters had to retreat. Claiming that communist fighters had “beastly murdered” German soldiers, Lammerding called for atonement for the “insult done to the German flag.” SS men then hunted down male residents of the city, primarily those of military age. The prisoners were incarcerated in the ammunition factory.

An SS judge declared the impending execution “legal” for so-called gang fighting. The executions began on the afternoon of June 9, 1944. City residents watched as executioners tied ropes into nooses and tied them to lampposts, balcony railings, trees and telephone poles. Ten prisoners were hanged in public. 99 Frenchmen died that afternoon on the gallows of the 2nd SS Panzer Division. The youngest was the 17-year-old apprentice Viellefond, the oldest was the 45-year-old bicycle dealer Maury. After the executions, the murderers had themselves photographed with the hanged victims as a souvenir. In addition, more than 100 of the city’s citizens were deported to the Dachau concentration camp.

The following day, another unit of the same SS division raged in Oradour-sur-Glane. The French town was destroyed on June 10, 1944, almost at the same time as a mass atrocity committed by the Wehrmacht in Distomo (Greece). Here too, an action by the Resistance served as a pretext. This had the SS battalion commander Helmut Kampf captured near the town. But instead of a prisoner exchange, Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed. The SS carried out a brutal massacre. More than 400 women and children were crammed into the village’s small church. After about an hour and a half, the SS men set fire to the stone church. The wooden roof of the church tower burst into flames and eventually burned through the roof of the nave onto the trapped crowd. The trapped people had previously been shot at from windows and doors and pelted with hand grenades.

The remaining 200 men and older boys were held in garages and barns. At a signal, the soldiers opened fire. The bodies were then covered with straw and set on fire with no regard for injured survivors. A total of 642 people were murdered. An entire town was wiped out. Reports of these massacres spread throughout France within days. However, contrary to what the murderers had planned, they did not lead to deterrence but to an intensification of military resistance.

When these massacres are remembered, it should not be forgotten that the perpetrators remained largely unpunished. Heinz Lammerding and others involved in the crime were charged in absentia in France. The court in Bordeaux in 1953 could not have given any other sentence than the death penalty for this crime. Extradition to France was out of the question, but there was also no federal German court that would have held Heinz Lammerding accountable. Only in the GDR was Heinz Barth, a former platoon commander in Oradour, convicted in 1983. After reunification, this verdict was overturned as “unjust justice”.

It is therefore not enough if the German Federal President, like other presidents before him, travels to Oradour on a “dismayed” tour this year and utters unctuous words there. What would be required is a statement on behalf of the federal government that would be understood as appropriate by the victims and their relatives. Such a declaration would also have to refer to the victims of German war crimes, for example in Greece, the former Yugoslavia and Italy. But even 80 years after the historic events, the federal government is not prepared to express more than words of regret for the fascist crimes during the days of D-Day.

Our author, historian, is Secretary General of the International Federation of Resistance Fighters (FIR) and, among other things, author of a book about the Resistance in France (PapyRossa)