“Everyone knew, no one spoke about it,” said André Nirelli, a retired French farmer. From the terrace of his farm he could let his gaze wander over the hilly landscape of Corrèze in south-western France. “That’s where they stayed,” he said, pointing to a large limestone barn on his left.
They were 46 Wehrmacht soldiers and a French woman suspected of collaboration who were in the hands of a group of French resistance fighters in the early summer of 1944. From this barn the prisoners were led into a wooded area near the village of Meymac, where they had to dig pits. On June 12, 1944 they were shot and their bodies fell into the pits.
The region is known for serious war crimes committed by German soldiers: in Tulle, 50 kilometers away, SS soldiers had hung 99 civilians from balconies and lanterns three days earlier. Another SS unit committed the worst massacre of World War II in western Europe on June 10 in the town of Oradour-sur-Glane, killing 643.
At the end of June, the German War Graves Commission began searching for the remains of the Germans who had been shot near Meymac. Soil analysis provided evidence of a possible mass grave. The excavations for the bodies began on Wednesday – initially without any finds, as the Volksbund announced on Wednesday evening. The work should last until the end of August. In 1967 there had already been a first excavation, during which the bodies of eleven people were recovered.
“We would like to find the second mass grave, with probably 36 dead,” said Thomas Schock, head of the reburial service at the German War Graves Commission, at the beginning of the excavation. “The eyewitnesses showed us this place. The ground-penetrating radar has traveled over this area and there are anomalies in the earth,” he continued.
The search was triggered by the report of the last eyewitness to the executions, who broke his silence after more than seven decades. “It was a war crime,” said 98-year-old Edmond Réveil, who had no idea what a stir it would cause. For weeks he had told his story over and over again, patiently but cautiously.
How his French resistance group had “inherited” the German prisoners back then and didn’t know what to do with them. How its commander, a German-speaking Alsatian, had “cried like a child” when speaking to the Germans. How the Wehrmacht soldiers looked at photos of their families before the shooting. “They weren’t young soldiers, the boys were in Russia,” the old man recalls. He didn’t shoot himself.
He evaded questions about why he was silent for so long and what made him speak now in old age. “It had to be said,” he just murmured. Was he afraid of criminal prosecution? Didn’t he want to betray the comrades who had vowed not to talk about it?
Despite her vow of silence, word got around in Meymac at the time. “If they’d had a few glasses…” Nirelli recalled. When he was ten years old, he observed human skeletons being dug up in the forest. “The skulls impressed me,” he recalled. “One had a hole in the back.”
In fact, the German War Graves Commission had already been looking for the remains of German soldiers in the 1960s. Eleven of them were recovered and buried in a German military cemetery in western France.
It is unclear who initiated the search at the time. The prefect of Corrèze, Étienne Desplanques, mentioned a 1969 report by the Volksbund, after which the then mayor asked that the search not be continued.
There is some evidence that there was concern that the reputation of French resistance fighters could be tarnished. “There was an omertà,” said the mayor of Meymac, Philippe Brugère, referring to the collective silence surrounding the Italian mafia. “Nobody wanted history to boil over and tarnish the image of the resistance.”
This feeling can still be felt today. “Réveil would have done better to remain silent,” said former farmer Nirelli. On the other hand, he has understanding for the descendants of the German soldiers, who get certainty in this way. “Maybe you have to know what happened first,” he added thoughtfully.
The German historian Peter Lieb noted that there is no systematic investigation of possible crimes committed by the French resistance. “It remains a difficult issue,” he said. In his research, Lieb comes across ten cases – excluding Meymac – in which resistance fighters shot a total of 350 German soldiers.
Réveil, 98, said the partisans were unable to care for a large group of prisoners of war. “It was not an act of revenge,” he emphasized. He said he knew nothing about the SS massacres a few days earlier in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane.
Réveil looked relieved that his confession had lifted a lifelong burden. He would like a memorial stone to be erected in the Meymac Forest for the dead Germans. It would be a first in France.
