Das Reich, Hitler's death squads (6-10 June 1944) UNCENSORED

the south, a fighting division of the Waffen-SS, the 2nd Panzer-Das-Reich-Division, had been stationed for three months around the town of Montauban in the south of France. After many feats of arms on the Eastern Front, the veterans were resting. The 15,000 men that made up the division were divided into the barracks and camps along the banks of the Garonne River, down to Toulouse. Higher-ranking officers and NCOs were billeted to requisitioned houses where the residents supplied them with board and lodging. New recruits were subjected to a diet of steady training and taught to handle weapons. On the morning of D-Day, the Das-Reich-Division received this alarmist message, broadcast by German headquarters. Dawn, June the 8th. The 2nd Panzer-Das-Reich-Division left Montauban, heading north toward Normandy. The Das-Reich was the flagship of the SS-Divisions. Devised in 1925 as Adolf Hitler's personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel, or SS, became a huge militia in the service of the Hitler regime. A real state within a state. The combat divisions of the Waffen-SS were called the Firefighters of the Front. The members of the National Socialist Party were chosen to form the Protection Sections. Since then, the recruitment has spread to other European nations. It is not only a military unit, it is also a powerful order, where each member receives a moral and political instruction that makes him worthy of being part of an elite. Unlike the Wehrmacht, the regular army, the better-equipped Waffen-SS only answered to the orders of Reichfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. Number two in the regime, as well as the supreme head of the SS, he went in person to Montauban on April 11th, 1944, where he was greeted in great pomp by the officers of the Panzer-Division. His men were among the most decorated of the Third Reich. Sixty-nine Iron Crosses rewarded the soldiers who had distinguished themselves in battles in France and the Soviet Union. The Das Reich Division was placed under the command of Heinz-Bernhard Lammerding. Born in 1905, this former civil engineer, a Nazi from the beginning, had an impressive pedigree. He was an experienced SS soldier, coupled with a mass murderer, who led special commando units in Belarus and the Baltic states. Intelligent, ambitious and unscrupulous, Lammerding took part in all the battles that followed the invasion of the Soviet Union, begun on June 22nd, 1941. In Ukraine, he commanded a combat unit of the Das Reich Division. Chiefly composed of Panzer IV latest generation tanks and armored vehicles, the Panzer Division was a cornerstone of Operation Barbarossa, the plan to invade and annex the Soviet Union. The Das Reich had nevertheless suffered a terrible defeat against the Soviets in Kursk, in the Kharkov region. In August 1943, Hitler lost 50,000 men and 16,000 tanks, in what remains the greatest armored confrontation in the history of the Second World War. In the summer of 1944, the Das Reich Division lost half of its men on the Eastern Front. 15,000 men gathered in Montauban, 9,000 had never fired a shot in anger. Youngsters from Hungary, Croatia, Romania, three countries allied with Nazi Germany, but also former Soviet prisoners of war, freed in exchange for signing up, had been recruited by the Division SS. Most of the troops came from a French region called Alsace. Elimar Schneider, age 17, had been enlisted months earlier in an Alsace annexed in 1940 by the Third Reich. He would long remember his Waffen-SS medical examination. At the review board, a Waffen-SS officer, assessing my young sportsman body and looking me straight in the eye, asked me if I had flat feet. He smiled at my negative response and retorted, you too will get the stamp. I didn't understand right away, but after an extremely thorough medical examination, I received my military record book bearing the famous stamp saying, passed for service in the Waffen-SS. It was one way of claiming that I was a volunteer, though I had signed nothing, no enlistment papers. To the Nazi military administration, Elimar Schneider was a Volksdeutsche, an ethnic German born outside of Germany. In 1944, between one and two thousand Alsatians were enlisted in the Das Reich Division. When he set off for Normandy on June 8, 1944, Elimar Schneider was part of a division whose combat equipment was for the most part obsolete or faulty. Despite that, the Das Reich still represented a major threat to the Allies. With its armour and its numbers, the ferocity of its officers, the SS Division alone could counteract the Anglo-Americans, and quite possibly reverse the outcome of the conflict. Its generals also knew that the road trip would be no picnic. The Das Reich would have to cross territory where the most feared resistance groups in France operated. Attack and ambush would be a permanent fear. For the resistance movement, the time for open confrontation with the occupying troops had come. General de Gaulle's message via the BBC on the evening of June 6th was unequivocal. Wherever they are, whatever they are, the simple and sacred duty is to fight by all means available. It is to destroy the enemy. In the regions that the SS Division was about to cross, Dordogne, Limousin, the partisans' mission was clear. To prevent the Das Reich from reaching Normandy. The resistance had to do anything in its power to slow its progress. Between the Gaullist Secret Army and the Communist FTP, it could count on 20,000 members eager to fight. The resistance, which until then had to cope with a constant shortage of arms and equipment, finally had the means to give battle. During the first six months of 1944, the Royal Air Force dropped 3,627 tons of arms over French territory, ten times more than the preceding year. The drops weren't limited to combat equipment. In Britain, men and women from Norway, Yugoslavia and France were being trained in sabotage and commando tactics before being parachuted into their country of origin to unite resistance groups scattered over the territory. Agents of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, British intelligence, supporting the resistance from their London headquarters, had but one watchword. Set Europe ablaze. This meant actions of sabotage, blowing up bridges and factories, sinking enemy ships. And at the same time, they had to re-establish radio links with London, and train resistance fighters, mostly civilians, to handle small arms. On the night of June 7th, four of the best French SOE agents were parachuted into the Limousin region. All were seasoned combat veterans who had already tangled with German roadblocks and Gestapo undercover agents in the Rouen region. All were under 35. Philippe Lievre, alias Staunton, a Jewish resistance fighter, underground since 1940. Robert Maloubier, alias Mortier. The young radio operator Jean-Claude Guillet. And Violette Sabo, codename Louise. This Anglo-French woman of 23 split her childhood between London and Paris. A dazzling beauty with an intense gaze, she was the widow of a soldier of the Free French Forces who died at the Battle of El Alamein. Violette Sabo left her two-year-old daughter Tania in London. During a mission carried out two months earlier, on French soil, she had shown exceptional coolness and daring. Despite her youth, she was one of the most valuable SOE assets. To halt the Das Reich, it was vital to establish contact with the FTP Colonel Georges Gingois, head of the Limousin Maquis. A member of the resistance since 1940, feared by the Gestapo, hunted by Vichy, Gingois was the architect of many operations to sabotage the occupying forces. The Communist resistance was in the habit of going it alone and taking no notice of directives from London. They took initiatives that seemed to ignore any chain of command, their own chiefs included. In this context, meeting Gingois was a necessity. He was the only one who could sound the call to order. Scarcely had they arrived, then the SOE agents were presented with a fait accompli. They were told that the Front Tireur Partisan, or FTP, a squad of irregulars, had entered the town of Tulle at dawn on June 7th to liberate the Corrèze Prefecture, a reckless operation with unpredictable consequences. In a few hours, the resistance managed to drive the German troops back into the munitions factory. After a few exchanges of gunfire at the end of the day, the town fell to the FTP. On the morning of June 8th, buoyed by the success of their action, some members of the resistance had left town, not suspecting that the Das Reich and its long armoured columns were advancing towards them. 130 kilometres south, in the town of Cahors, the Das Reich division split into three to follow separate itineraries. It had received the order to clean the zones it was passing through of gangs of terrorists. This meant that all pockets of resistance on the way, mainly those in Limousin, were to be eliminated. The 1st Battalion of the Der Fuehrer Regiment took a different route. The divisional staff continued on its way towards the city of Limoges. 7,500 Waffen-SS, armed and experienced, along with hundreds of vehicles, led the way to Tulle. Their progress was slowed somewhat by the panzers and other armour that the Wehrmacht refused to transport by rail. Nonetheless, a certain number had been loaded onto flatbed freight cars in the town of Montauban, to be taken, far brief, to Normandy. Along the country roads, the Das Reich crossed ghost towns. The SS had left no good memories there. A few kilometres north, in the village of Montpezat-de-Quercy, on May 2nd, 1944, soldiers of the Das Reich division shot 15 civilians in retaliation for sabotage of the Toulouse-to-Paris rail line. Around the small town of Figeac, on May 11th and 12th, 1944, assisted by the Gestapo and the militia, they stormed into around 20 villages, arresting almost 800 people in two days, burning and looting farms as they went. On May 21st, in the hamlet of Fréciné-le-Gelat, west of Figeac, three women were hanged from their balcony, and ten men were executed, before the village was torched. June 7th, on the eve of their departure, guided by the Gestapo in the town of Agin, a battalion of the Das Reich executed ten partisans and seven civilians. At that point, the villagers knew what to expect, and were unlikely to show themselves. The commander of the 1st Defuehrer Battalion, Adolf Rainer Dieckmann, was charged with protecting the division's left flank. Artillery battalions and part of the Deutschland Regiment were in the vanguard, to counter any resistance attacks. Dieckmann was on his guard. His regiment had just entered the Dordogne region, a reputedly dangerous zone. Next came Limousin, where the resistance was particularly active, a region the general commander of the SS forces called Little Russia. Dieckmann was well aware of the partisans' trump cards, their knowledge of the terrain and their mobility, compared to the slow column of military vehicles. At the same time, SOE agents Violette Sabot, Philippe Lievre, Jean-Claude Guillet and Robert Maloubier were greeted by thirty secret army members, commanded by Jacques Dufour, alias Anastasie. They stared at the Gaullist combatants in Limousin with concern. Despite their numbers and enthusiasm, they were mainly young with no combat experience. Hotheads driving with full headlights down roads the Das Reich would soon be coming up. But they'd have to make do. The resistance set to work. They set up roadblocks and watched keenly, awaiting the passage of the panzer division. Barely had the SS set foot in Dordogne, than they found themselves under fire from the resistance. Dieckmann's men were attacked in the hamlet of Gros-les-Jacques. A dozen resistance men died during the attacks. Ten kilometers from there, in Rouffillac, Dieckmann faced another group of combatants at the bridge marking the entrance to the village. In front of the people gathered at the village restaurant, he had sixteen civilians and two resistance men shot as reprisals. Their remains were doused in gasoline and burned where they lay. Women and children were among the victims. Then the regiment continued its way toward the city of Limoges. Dieckmann knew he had nothing to fear from his superiors. Any sanctions or punitive operations were covered by his hierarchy. In fact, they were encouraged. The orders of Marshal Sperl, deputy commander of the Western Front, issued on February the 10th, exposed in detail the procedures to be implemented. Order concerning the fight against terrorists. Respond promptly to any attacks by terrorist gangs. If innocents should be slain, then the fact is regrettable, but due to the terrorists alone. Owing to the current situation, showing excessive severity in the measures taken will not result in any sanctions. The arrival in the town of Brive-la-Gaillard of the reconnaissance battalion that preceded the column was an ominous sign. The SS had tied to the hood of a half-track the remains of Maurice Vergne, a resistance man killed in a skirmish in Crescensac, 20 kilometers previously. This macabre trophy was a warning to the people of Brive and to the Gaullist Maquis that organized the ambush. An ambush meant to protect resistance weapons caches in barns around Brive, the last stage before Tulle. When the residents of Tulle awoke on the morning of June the 9th, the town was once again under German control. In the night, assisted by the French militia, the reconnaissance battalion, 500 men armed with 100 machine guns and a squadron of armored vehicles, had easily retaken the town from the resistance. Exhausted by the previous day's fighting and short of ammunition, the FTP fled the town, caught in a pincer movement in order to limit the loss of human life. Reprisals were not slow in coming. Dragged forcibly from their beds, all men from 16 to 60, more than 2,000 people, were herded at dawn into the courtyard of the munitions factory. Aurel Kovacs, divisional intelligence officer, gave the order. Walter Schmalt, a member of the Gestapo, and Heinrich Wulf, commander of the Das Reich reconnaissance battalion, were charged with its execution. During the morning, Pierre Truillet, prefect of the region, negotiated with the SS to free the hostages. He managed to obtain the release of men who were needed to keep the town running. A low-key victory. At noon, 600 were still waiting to learn their fate. Meanwhile, Alsatian Elimar Schneider was patrolling the town, warning inhabitants of the punishment they faced. Gathered in the streets around Swiak Square, the townsfolk found a message posted on the walls. Citizens of Truillet, 40 German soldiers were murdered in the most dreadful manner by communist gangs. For resistance fighters and those who aid and abet them, there is but one sentence, that of hanging. 40 German soldiers were murdered by the resistance. 120 of the resistance or their accomplices will be hanged. Their bodies will be thrown in the river. The warning was signed by the SS Division General Heinz Lamedinck. At 3.30 in the afternoon, in the munitions factory, the 120 men demanded by Lamedinck were selected and taken from the ranks. In the town centre, soldiers from Heinrich Wulf's reconnaissance battalion were asking the town's inhabitants for ropes, which they then tied around street lamps and from the balconies of buildings. A mission, as Elimar Schneider points out, entrusted to the most experienced. We chose hanging because it is more humiliating than being shot. The executioners were appointed from the company of pioneers, mainly composed of German men, half of them soldiers from our company who'd come from the Russian front. After obtaining the release of several hostages, Prefect Trier tried to convince Orel Kovach to postpone the executions. I'm sorry, Kovach retorted. We got used to hangings in Russia. We hanged a hundred thousand men between Kharkov and Kiev. To us, this is nothing. The officers of the Das Reich, all veterans of the Eastern Front, were only repeating in two practices already tried out in Kiev, Minsk and Kharkov. In the wake of the invasion by the Third Reich that began in June 1941, Soviet towns were turned into forests of hanged men. This war terrorism, designed to humiliate the punished by inflicting an unmanly death, according to the SS expression, had a dissuasive function. Like here in Pantservo, Yugoslavia, on April 22, 1941, when the Das Reich was present. In the conquered territories, the Nazis enlisted the assistance of local collaborators, such as the militia in France. They're the ones we see in these pictures, doing the dirty work. In Tula, around 3.30 p.m., a first group of ten from among the men selected was hanged from the street lamps, trees and balconies of Sviat Square and the adjacent streets. The SS forced the residents to witness their ordeal. On the other side of the square, on the terrace of the Tivoli Café, men from the Das Reich, drinking and laughing to the sound of a gramophone, attended the show. One SS soldier drew pictures of the hangings. The victims were finished off with a pistol shot or a burst from a machine gun. Then, the next ten men were led to the gallows. Can we imagine the scene? asked Abbe Espinas, chaplain of Tula High School. Men, immobile under duress, soldiers below the gallows, groups of hostages led to their crucifixion. The hangings continued throughout the afternoon. At the end of the day, Elimar Schneider went to the munitions factory, where the last few prisoners awaited. Entering by the factory gate, I asked how many hostages remained, informing him that there were not enough ropes. Walter Schmalb pointed to a group kneeling to the left of the entrance, a dozen civilians, and a group of around twenty in front of him. In front of them stood a chaplain in a faded cassock, his face sad. It was Abbe Espinas giving them absolution. The Tula school chaplains ceaselessly negotiated with Walter Schmalb for the lives of the hostages, managing to save a handful of them. At seven in the evening, after ninety-eight hangings and one man gunned down trying to escape, the lack of available ropes led Schmalb to end the executions. The five hundred forced spectators were imprisoned in Limoges. Half of them would be deported to Dachau concentration camp. Of the one hundred and twenty men sentenced to the rope, only twenty-one escaped that fate. The victims were between seventeen and forty-six. They included students, insurers, hairdressers, typographers, dairymen, plumbers, accountants, engineers, and only two resistance men. In the evening, members of the French youth camps, an eight-month military service set up by the Vichy collaborationist regime, cut down the hanged men, who were transported by truck to the town dump and tossed onto the rubble. Seventy-five kilometres from Toul, a wind of panic blew through a detachment of the Das Reich. The car of the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the Der Fuehrer regiment had been found by the side of the road without its passenger. Former printer Helmut Kempf, a hero among elite SS combatants, was a personal friend of General Heinz Lammerding and Hitlerbundfuhrer Adolf Dieckmann. This giant, called Golden Mouth by his comrades as he had replaced all his teeth with gold ones, had disappeared without trace. Roadblocks were hastily set up. Roads and copsies searched thoroughly. A few hours earlier, in Camp Bouvert, the Kempf regiment had fallen into an ambush set by the Communist resistance. Thirty-one partisans had been taken prisoner and immediately shot on his orders. Laid out along the road, their corpses had then been crushed by the Das Reich panzers. Georges Guingouin's FTP unit was suspected of having abducted Kempf as retaliation. After a day's hunting, night fell and interrupted the quest. They continued the next day at first light. Not far away, Violette Sabot and Anastasie headed for Pompadour, outside of Limoges. There, they were to meet other SOE agents in order to coordinate their actions with the Gaullist secret army. Neither knew that the Waffen-SS were combing the area in search of Major Kempf. Suddenly, on the outskirts of Salon Latour, they noticed a motorcyclist taking a bend at top speed, followed by a detachment of the Das Reich. It was too late to turn tail. A shootout began. The resistance fighters abandoned their vehicle and made for the undergrowth. Violette stumbled and twisted her ankle. Helpless, she emptied her magazine on the SS to give Anastasie a head start. He escaped his pursuers, but Violette Sabot was taken prisoner. Meanwhile, the Der Fuehrer regiment had obtained intelligence to put it on the trail of Helmut Kempf. Captured the day before by the FTP, Lieutenant Karl Gerlach suddenly reappeared. He had escaped from the village where the resistance had set up its base, he confirmed. Their arms caches were no doubt there. Gerlach had heard that an SS officer had also been taken prisoner. In all probability, this was Major Kempf. Though the indications supplied by Gerlach didn't match its location, it was a village called Oradour-sur-Glane that Adolf Dieckmann pointed out on the map at headquarters. This calls for ruthless repression, declared the SS officer, a cold-blooded killer, barely 30 years old, responsible for many massacres in the East. Otto Kahn, commander of the Third Company, a career soldier who joined the Das Reich in 1940, and his direct subordinate, Heinz Barth, would head operations. Entering the SS at 18, after ideological and sporting training with the Hitler Youth, Barth was a veteran at fighting the Soviets. An instructor with the Das Reich in 1943, then a policeman in Czechoslovakia, he went from one Waffen-SS unit to the next, including the 3rd Totenkopf Division with its sinister reputation. Elite troops, the Deathshead SS soldiers. Barth, Kahn, and other veterans from the Russian front hadn't only been fighting the Soviet army in the East. The invasion of the USSR in June 1941 also had the goal of eliminating any potential enemies of the Reich, in other words, communists and the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe. Men old enough to bear arms were the first victims of the repressive units of the SS. They were shot en masse as the German troops progressed through Soviet territory, from Latvia to the south of Ukraine, from Galicia to Russia. From August 1941, the Genocide Order was given to German formations in the field. Jewish women and children were among the main targets of the mass slaughter led by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units. Too weak in numbers, these special commandos enlisted the collaboration of the Wehrmacht, the Feldgendarmerie, and the Waffen-SS. The Das Reich Division, in which Kahn had learned his trade, was mentioned in Report No. 92 of Einsatzgruppen, dated September 23, 1941, which reported on the activities of Group B in the region of Minsk, Belarus. In a few hours, 920 men, women, and children, the entire Jewish population of Luhansk, were massacred in the large pits dug for them on the road to Gena. With the extermination of the Jews accomplished, the German occupying forces, harassed by the communist partisans, took revenge on the civilian population. From 1942, missions of repression followed one another at a frenzied rate. The modus operandi was identical. The inhabitants were gathered in the village square, the men were executed, the women and children held in a barn or in the church, which was then sprayed by machine gun fire before being torched. The whole village was then burned. In Belarus, 628 villages were razed and their inhabitants burned alive by the SS. Over less than four years German occupation, that represents one village every two days. As for Heinz Barth, he became a criminal against humanity in Czechoslovakia. The head of the Reich Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich, had just met his death in Prague following an attack carried out by two Czech SOE agents. The Fuhrer had designated the village of Lidice suspected of protecting resistance fighters as the Price of Atonement. On June 10, 1942, Heinz Barth took part in surrounding the town before commanding a firing squad. 184 men, aged 16 and over, were shot under his command in Lidice. The women were deported to Ravensbrück camp, the children to the extermination camp of Cherno or entrusted to Lebensborn, the nurseries for the ideal Aryan society imagined by Hitler. The dwellings were first burned and then blown up with dynamite. After the German road workers had passed through, no trace of Lidice remained, not even ruins. These were the men who were about to enter Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944. A village with no links to the resistance but whose population had almost doubled, swelled by Spanish, Alsatian and Jewish refugees. Oradour was a typical village of the region. Its 15th century church, its small shops and farms, its tramway line made the vibrant little township into a picture postcard. That Saturday, in the market square, men were standing in line for the distribution of tobacco and children gathered at the gates of three municipal schools for their medical exam. A weekend like any other. As if the war had spared this village since the round-up in August 1942 when the Jewish members of the 642nd Foreign Workers Group were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. While the two armored cars and Diekmann's trucks stopped a few kilometers short of the village, Heinz Barth turned to his men before they continued and said, today you will see blood flow. Diekmann, Kahn and Barth were about to subject Oradour to the same treatment as Lugoysk, as Lidice, as the 628 Belarusian villages raised from the surface of the earth by the death troops of the SS. Procedures of intense violence, perfectly reconstructed in the film by the Soviet director L. M. Klimov, come and see. Set in Belarus, the gripping realism of this 1985 fictional account completely corroborates the testimonies of the survivors of Oradour-sur-Glane, Marguerite Ruffranche, 47 at the time, and Robert Hébras, 90. On June 10, 1944, I was on leave in Oradour with my parents. Around 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the Germans arrived in armored cars. They got out and they made us go to the market square. I was there at the roundup with my mother and my two sisters. Soldiers who were doing the rounds came to our home. They said, everyone, market square. And that was it. We all had to go. They separated the women and children from the group. Up to the age of 14, children went with their mothers. Above that, they were considered men. I was 19. I went with the men's group. The worst moment was when we had to split up. They separated the men from the women, and my son wouldn't let me go. We were taken to the church, and the men went to the barns. All the young people were together. We weren't thinking of what was going to happen. We were interested in the next day's football match. They made us all get to our feet. Just then, I had an Alsatian friend who could speak German, and he was next to me, and he said, look out, they're shooting. He didn't even have time to finish the sentence. Right then, they fired several bursts of machine gun fire right at us. When they'd stopped shooting, they checked the bodies and finished off those they saw stirring. They were firing handguns, machine guns. They fired into the crowd. I was wounded. Then they covered us in hay and firewood, whatever was in the barn, and they set fire to us. We had been locked in the church. The Germans brought in this big crate. I said to someone, see that? That's a bomb. We're going to be blown up with the church. Oh, she said, don't say such things. And the fact is, the box exploded. It gave off such a lot of smoke, we were suffocating. We couldn't see in the church, and cries went up on all sides. My eldest girl had lost her little baby. Then she found him, but I don't know if he was alive or dead. But my youngest girl was killed by a bullet from outside. As for the other, the eldest, she was burned alive. And that's when I jumped out of the window. At nightfall, while Marguerite Rouffanche, between life and death after three bullets to the body, waited for the Germans to leave, while Robert Ebrasse, hidden, witnessed the burning of the village, the SS, under Diekmann, seized motorcycles, cars and cattle. Kahn helped himself to a blue Peugeot, and Bach to the grocer's cash register. In Nieule, not far from the still-smoking ruins of Oradour, the SS requisitioned a school, in which they feasted and drank, late into the night.