CHAPTER 9
In the years following the end of the War, the Oradour massacre tended to be overshadowed by various international developments. It was even dismissed by some with the popular French comment, ‘C’est la guerre.’ But the survivors and the relatives of the victims could not forget, in spite of the ‘soft soap’ of national recogition in the form of the Croix de Guerre for the monument to the dead and the Légion d’Honneur conferred on the village during one of several ministerial visits.
State funds were provided to build a barracks-type village near the ruins and plans were drawn up for ‘a magnificent new Oradour’. The ruins were classified as a historic monument and taken over by the Beaux Arts. The dead received the ultimate accolade – ‘Morts Pour La France.’ However, the Association des Familles des Martyrs was far from appeased. The members clamoured for the tracing of the guilty and their being brought to trial. This was not easy with the Das Reich survivors scattered and hiding in a divided Germany. Seven Germans were arrested and accused of having taken part in the massacre. But what about the rest?
One difficulty was that the law in France, and in certain other countries at that time was that no ex-serviceman could be punished for something he had done on the orders of a superior, however criminal the act might be. It was soon establisbed that men from Alsace-Lorraine had taken part. But how could one accuse anyone from a country which had suffered so much under the Nazi yoke? Altogether, 130,000 young men had been forcibly enrolled in the German forces and 42,000 had been killed or were missing. Those who were conscripted and managed to escape formed the Association of Deserters, Escapees and Forced Recruits. It was this body that rallied to defend the fourteen Alsatians who were eventually added to the list of the men for trial.
A number of men accused of having taken part in the massacres at Tulle and Oradour appeared before tribunals in the decade following the end of the war. The proceedings were confused and generally considered unsatisfactory. In each case the principal offenders were missing and the sentences imposed on those who appeared were considered inadequate and aroused widespread indignation.
There were three successive trials concerning the hanging of the ninety-nine men at Tulle. On 29 March 1949, members of the 95th Security Regiment were charged with killing railwaymen at Tulle on 7 June 1944. There were ten of them, two officers, a sergeant-major and seven corporals. They all claimed to be acting on the orders of their superiors. The officers and the warrant officer were condemned to prison with hard labour and the others were acquitted. The sentences caused an uproar in Tulle, being considered far too lenient.
Of the several men involved in the hangings, only two had been located and were tried on 4 July 1951.They were Major Wulf who headed the first convoy of the Das Reich division to enter Tulle and a warrant officer named Hoff who was regarded as the principal hangman. Wulf was condemned to ten years with hard labour and Hoff to life imprisonment. Lammerding and Kowatsch, who could not be traced, were sentenced to death in their absence. The proceedings and sentencing were subsequently considered to be irregular and, on 27 May 1952, Hoff alone appeared before another tribunal. His advocate astonished the court by revealing that Wulf had been released the previous week and returned to Germany. Hoff’s sentence was accordingly modified from life imprisonment to five years.
The most important trial took place at Bordeaux in January 1953. It was officially known as ‘L’Affaire Kahn et Autres’, but to the world it was known as the Oradour trial. It was rocked by politics, punctuated by outbursts and, in the end, none of the accused was executed. The deplorable part of the Bordeaux tribunal was that of the twenty-one accused none was an officer. The highest rank was that of a senior warrant officer.
Of the fourteen Alsatians, two had served in the French Army from 1939-40. Six had deserted from the SS in Normandy and surrendered to the British. They told of the Oradour massacre and, after interrogation by French officers, enlisted in the FFI. Two of them subsequently served with the French Army in Indo-China. Between 1945 and 1948, eight of the Alsatians had been interrogated from time to time as witnesses of the massacre. Between times they carried on their normal civilian occupations in Alsace. It was not until three weeks before the opening of the trial that the fourteen Alsatians were arrested and charged under a law of 1948 which created an offence of ‘collective responsibility.’ One of them was immediately regarded as a traitor. He was a sergeant who had volunteered to serve in the SS. Most of them had been between the ages of 17 and 19 when they took part in the massacre.
The accused Alsatians at the Bordeaux tribunal.
As soon as the accusations were announced the people of Alsace-Lorraine protested violently. They maintained that the young men of their country who were acccused were as innocent as the people who had been killed at Oradour. They were all victims of the Nazis. They pointed to what had happened to the young men who had evaded conscription. If they were caught they were shot. In any case, caught or not, their families suffered deportation. They referred to the Gauleiter who had been appointed to rule Alsace-Lorraine, Robert Wagner. He had compelled the young men to enlist in the German forces and had been shot for that crime. All the Alsatians who were conscripted, they claimed, were the victims of that evil man and it was utterly unjust to accuse them of actions for which they were not responsible, actions which they could not avoid without losing their lives.
At the time of the trial General Lammerding was believed to be in Düsseldorf in the British zone, and carrying on his old profession of civil engineer. The French government asked the British to extradite him so that he could be brought to the tribunal. It was then reported that he and his wife had left their home for an unknown destination, but neither the British nor the German authorities made any apparent effort to find them. Eventually it became known that they had taken refuge in Schleswig-Holstein. Lammerding was finally traced to Wiesbaden in the American zone. Thereafter interest was lost in him. The British reluctance to extradite Lammerding was based on their decision in 1948 to extradite no one from their zone ‘except where a charge of murder could be proved beyond any doubt’, and this involved a detailed accusation confirmed by numerous witnesses.
One of the sensations of the Oradour trial was the arrival of a letter from Lammerding in which he claimed that both he and Colonel Stadler (who was also known to be alive at that time) knew nothing of the massacre until it was over. The accused, he said, should be acquitted, because they could not disobey Diekmann’s orders and Diekmann himself had ‘exceeded his orders.’ To prove the authenticity of his letter, Lammerding had his signature witnessed by a solicitor. A number of German newspapers were critical of his behaviour. A Frankfurt paper stated that Herr Lammerding was formerly the chief of a group which claimed to represent the ideals of fidelity and virility. Yet when some of the men he had commanded were in a difficult situation at Bordeaux, surely his place should have been with them? Should not he have hastened to support them?
In 1965 Lammerding came into the news again when he sued a German journalist who had dared to recall, in an article, that he had been condemned to death in France for executing hostages. His accusation reiterated his plea of innocence in the Tulle and Oradour affairs. He sheltered behind dead men, Kowatsch who, he said, was responsible for the Tulle hangings, and Diekmann whose initiative led to the Oradour massacre. It is worth noting that he never accused Kahn who was believed to be alive somewhere in Sweden. His action failed.
In accordance with the custom of that time, the Bordeaux tribunal was a military one. It was composed of six officers who had been active in the Resistance and a presiding civilian, M Nussy Saint-Saens, a judge of the appeal court at Bordeaux, who managed to keep control of the court despite exceptionally awkward circumstances.
There were sixty-five names on the list of the accused, of whom forty-four, including Kahn, were regarded as en fuite (in flight from justice). As soon as the identity of the accused had been established, M Schrekenberger, president of the Bar of Strasbourg, who had been condemned by the Germans to imprisonment with hard labour for his work for the Resistance, referred to the forcible recruitment of the Alsatians as a war crime.
‘We cannot accept that these young Alsatians should be linked with the Germans when assessing the guilt of those responsible for the massacre.’
M Nussy Saint-Saens stressed that it was really the Nazi regime that was on trial. Everyone was horrified by the massacre and wondered how it could possibly have happened. His answer, and he would underline it, was that it happened because some beings who had lost all trace of human dignity had been bent on establishing by force a completely materialistic order. It was the blind obedience to the totalitarian state, he asserted, that had brought about this terrible thing.
The president had to curb many demonstrations in the courtroom, principally by the relatives of the dead and the survivors, who sat in a group towards the front of the court. The accommodation was primitive and overcrowded. The accused were divided into two groups, the Germans on one side, the Alsatians on the other. They were bunched up together on wooden benches.
When the indictment was read everyone in the court rose. The bereaved wept. The accused maintained an appearance of indifference. One of the Germans, named Nobbe, admitted having taken part in all the atrocities at Oradour. He pleaded guilty to all the accusations. However, he was proved to be mentally ill and was removed to hospital.
The trial lasted from 12 January to 13 February. There were sixty witnesses for the prosecution. Messrs Broussaudier, Roby, Borie and Hébras, survivors of the shooting in the Laudy barn, gave their story. The sole survivor of the women, Mme Rouffanche, engendered a great deal of emotion with her testimony and there was much use of handkerchiefs as well as outbursts of indignation.
The men could not identify any of the accused. Not unnaturally, in the heat and terror of the moment, the features of any individual executioner had not lingered in their memories. Besides, the machine-gunners were standing with their backs to the light at the entrance to the barn. In their camouflaged tunics and helmets they all looked alike.
Armand Senon, who had been immobilised by his fractured leg, described how, from his bedroom window, he saw the round-up of the people on the Champ de Foire. M Lamige said about twenty-three people were brought in from the surrounds. He saw the savage beating of a wounded survivor of the 1914-18 war. Mme Coudert and M Lévèque described how they saw the SS convoy approaching the village. M Tarnaud said the village was completely encircled and the soldiers methodically searched the surroundings. The brothers Martial and Maurice Beaubreuil said they saw the first of the trucks pass while they were in hiding. They jumped on their bicycles and dashed towards Les Bordes. They came under fire but were not hit.
Robert Besson and Jacques Garraud described how they climbed a wall to escape. They came under fire and scrambled for shelter among some brambles. They were not found, but a man and two women who had been hiding in a field were spotted by a patrol and shot. M Boissou told how, while fleeing from Les Bordes to another hamlet, by way of a field of corn, he came under machine-gun fire.
M René Hyvernaud said that when night fell he saw a convoy carrying loot pass near the station of Veyrac. The soldiers were singing while one played an accordion and another a mouth organ.
A number of witnesses asked about identification of the accused, said their sole aim that afternoon had been to get out of the way of the soldiers, not to concentrate on their faces. Besides, it was over eight years ago. In any case, they could not understand why they should have to identify any of them. They had been SS soldiers and if they admitted being at Oradour that day, surely that was enough to convict them?
Commissioner Massiéras, who was attached to the information service in Limoges, said he went to the ruins at the request of the regional prefect, on 12 June. At the church he noticed that the windows of the vestry had been broken and there were bullet holes inside. The SS must have fired at the women there, about thirty in all. He visited some of the other execution sites and noticed that the bullet holes in the walls were about the height of the chests or heads of the victims.
The accused Germans.
Doctor Bapt and Doctor Benech, who accompanied the salvage team, spoke of twisted arms and clenched fists of the dead, evidence of the suffering they had endured before dying. There were numerous fractures of the lower limbs and visible points of impact low down on the walls, from which it might be concluded that many of the victims had been deliberately shot below the waist.
A young priest, the Abbé Touch, who helped with the removal of the corpses from the church, said he found a number of dead children behind the altar. It was as if they had been put there by their mothers, hoping they might be spared.
During the testimony of the prosecution witnesses there was trouble when it was learnt that the French National Assembly had repealed the 1948 Act of ‘collective responsibility’. The effect in the courtroom was dramatic. The survivors and many of the bereaved refused to sit down. M Brouillaud, president of the Association des Familles des Martyrs addressed the judges. He maintained that, by their action, 350 deputies had weakened the case against the prisoners. The bereaved were afraid the killers might be reprieved. This could not be tolerated. He was ordered to sit down. He refused and was threatened with expulsion from the courtroom. There was general commotion. The Oradour people blocked the exits. The Press joined in the shouting. There was a demonstration outside the court as well, and speeches were made. The mayor of Bordeaux, wearing his tricolour sash, promised that the orphans of Oradour would be adopted by his city, overlooking the fact that nearly all the children had perished in the church.
Scharführer (sergeant) Boos who was condemned to death.
When the time came for the prisoners to give an account of their roles in the massacre, they said they had forgotten a great deal of what had occurred. Some said that when they were ordered to shoot certain people they aimed to miss. The Alsatians claimed they had been ‘bullied’ into their actions by the officers and NCOs. Prominent among the latter was Sergeant Georg Boos, the Alsatian who volunteered.
One of the Germans, named Pfeffer, who admitted killing people, said Kahn made him do it. He was among those who herded a group of men into a barn and used his machine-gun on them. He aimed at their chests.
Frenzel, another German, said the officers stood behind the firing squads. He also accused Kahn who, he said, personally took part in killing the wounded.
Lenz, a German warrant officer, said he took no part in the massacre. He said he spent the afternoon walking round the village. But he was contradicted by Boos who said Lenz had taken part in the shooting and had tossed grenades among the women and children in the church. He had also thrown incendiary devices into the houses.
One of the Alsatians, Daul, said they had been told at Saint-Junien that they were going to a town to free Major Kämpfe. He had been a member of a machine-gun crew positioned near a farm outside the village.They had been ordered to prevent people from entering or leaving Oradour. They had turned back a girl on a bicycle who had tried to get into the village, also a woman with a shopping bag and a man who wanted to pick up his tobacco ration. Later a music professor from Limoges (probably M Tournier who was among the dead who were identified) argued with them and they allowed him to go into Oradour to talk to an officer. When Daul went into the village he saw Boos shooting people.
Other prisoners described how Kahn took an active part in the massacre. An Alsatian named Elsässer, said one of the women in the church tried to get out and had shouted to Kahn in German that she was not French and should not be treated like the others. Kahn shot her and shoved her into the flames, saying he wanted no witnesses of what was happening.
Josef Busch (Alsatian) admitted being a member of the execution squad at the Desourteaux garage. He thought some of the victims were still alive when they covered them with brushwood and other material, but he was not sure. He was later sent down to the church to make sure no one escaped. He saw two women approach, asking about their children. Boos and a German soldier shoved them into a barn opposite the church, where a group of men had been killed, and shot them.
Paul Graff, another Alsatian, said he was in a field at the edge of the village with a German and a Russian when they saw two women hiding in a hedge. The women started to scream and they shot them. Their bodies were taken in a barrow to one of the burning houses.
Graff said he was ordered to go to the church and helped to carry brushwood inside. He heaped it on the bodies of the women and children. There was some screaming and groaning. One woman and a child who tried to escape were clubbed to death by a soldier. The church was full of soldiers at the time. They were under orders.
One man, Höchlinger, an Alsatian, claimed that he hid in a hedge outside the village throughout the afternoon and had actually gone to sleep. Raab, a German, told of the deployment of the troops when they entered the village. The first platoon went directly up the main street, while the second and third spread out to surround the village. He denied taking part in any of the executions and claimed he spent the time guarding the trucks.
Albert Ochs, an Alsatian who served in the FFI after deserting in Normandy, said he was conscripted in the SS in early 1944. His brother-in-law refused and was shot. He said a German sergeant named Steger had ordered the men to get all the people out of the houses. Anyone who refused or was incapacitated was to be shot. Ochs said he did not shoot anyone. He saw Steger and another German shoving an elderly woman out of her home. He told them, to leave her alone and Steger shouted, ‘Shut up, Alsatian!’ They shot her in her own doorway. Ochs said he was hit in the legs by ricochets and taken away for treatment by a medical orderly.
Grienberger (German) said he was in an execution squad but deliberately fired high. He deserted in Normandy.
Only one of the accused showed genuine remorse for what he had done. He was an Alsatian named Antoine Lönner, white-haired and soft spoken. He had been conscripted in the SS in 1944 and the deserted in Normandy. He said he had helped to round up the people in the village on the orders of Sergeant Steger. He had acted as interpreter for Kahn and interrogated Doctor Desourteaux when he arrived in the Champ de Foire. Steger’s squad took a party of men to the Denys coach house. Among them was an elderly priest. After the executions, Steger set fire to the building and the squad moved down to the church.
Löhner said he saw Boos shoot two women in the doorway of a barn opposite the church. He himself had carried brushwood into the church. He was still haunted by the screams of the women and children. He saw Boos throw grenades among them. Before the detachment left for Nieul, Kahn distributed wine and spirits. Löhner said he was one of the men who returned to Oradour to bury some of the dead.
The supposed villain of the piece, Sergeant Georg Boos, joined the SS in 1942 and was awarded the Iron Cross Russian Service Medal. He said the Oradour raid was planned by the officers. He just obeyed orders throughout the whole affair. Kahn was ‘a hard man’. At Saint-Junien they had been told about the disappearance of Major Kämpfe and had been warned to expect heavy fighting at their destination.
Boos admitted leading the last group of men to execution. He also admitted entering the church but could not clearly remember what happened there. He denied shooting two women in the barn opposite the church. He also denied firing a machine-gun in the church. He maintained that the other accused were saying things about him because they wanted revenge.
He was asked if he went into a bakery and after a long pause said he could not remember. The firebox of a bakery oven in which the remains of an eight-weeks-old baby were found was produced in court. Boos refused to reply to all questions about the incident.
So many of the accused claimed they could not remember what had happened, had fired to miss or were not in the village at the time, that the presiding judge was moved to remark at one stage, ‘The court finds it difficult to understand how anyone at all was killed at Oradour.’
The picture that emerged from the prisoners’ responses was that of a company of excited, brain-washed, frightened men jumping to obey orders barked by furious, brutal officers and NCOs. The soldiers dashed about in response to commands without having a clear picture of what the exercise was about. When the presiding judge asked if there were any among them who were truly repentant for what they had done only three stood up.
Summing up for the prosecution, Colonel Gourdon spoke of the systematic campaign of terrorism conducted by the Das Reich Division of the SS. He gave details of some of the crimes they had committed during their march from the south. The main argument for the defence was that the accused were acting under orders which could not be disobeyed. Rigorous discipline was a standard feature of armed forces, particularly in a time of war, but it had to be within the framework of international law. If the orders were manifestly illegal, if they constituted a serious crime, as at Oradour, a soldier had the right to disobey or he might be considered as guilty as his superiors who gave the orders.
At the Nuremberg trial, said Colonel Gourdon, reference had been made to the conception of obedience. The fact that a soldier claimed he had acted only in obedience to his superiors did not relieve him of all responsibility. He had no right to kill or torture in violation of the international laws of war. Another argument for the defence was that members of the SS could never consider disobedience in any form because they knew they would be shot for it. It was a case of killing to avoid being killed.
However, the behaviour of the soldiers at Oradour went beyond the mere slaughter of innocent people to order. No one could forget the statement by M Bellivier who saw them pounce like wild beasts on a woman who was doing her washing in her garden. Nor that of Mme Démery who saw them jump out of their trucks to run about the village, yelling and laughing as they battered the doors with their rifle butts. Then there was the martial music heard just before the shooting and the soldier who distributed sugar lumps, laughing, while he waited for the order to open fire. Professor Forest, who had tried to get into the burning village to find his sons had been amazed by the attitude of the soldiers. They behaved as if they had been to an enjoyable party.
One could not overlook the fact that the accused had been young men, some still in their teens, and knew only to obey their masters, but they should have taken notice of an example of true courage displayed by the mayor. He had offered himself as a hostage, and later his family too, in the hope of saving his fellow villagers. The whole French nation was in admiration of this man who had shown how fear need not prevent someone from offering his life to save others.
Turning to the Alsatians, Colonel Gourdon said he had only noticed a show of emotion, even tears, among them when the plight of their country under the Nazi occupation had been described. Otherwise they seemed singularly indifferent and unmoved by the accounts of the death of a French village, a village they had helped to exterminate.
‘The Germans at Oradour were our enemies,’ Colonel Gourdon added, ‘but the others were actually Frenchmen and they killed their brothers and sisters.’ He called for sentences of hard labour for all of the Alsatians except Sergeant Boos, the volunteer, a fanatic Nazi. He deserved to die. He concluded:
‘Messieurs les Juges,If you find the accused not guilty it will imply that on 10 June 1944, at Oradour-sur-Glane, in spite of the ruins which the whole world can see, the population was not exterminated nor was the village destroyed.’
The principal defence counsel, the Bâtonnier Moliérac, pleaded that the accused had been young men, robbed of all individuality and personality. Were such men intellectually capable of refusing to obey orders from the SS officers and NCOs in the face of the rest of the company?
He cited Jackson, the US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial, who had said one could not expect the inferior ranks to ponder on the legality of an order. One had to remember that a soldier had but one function – to obey orders, no matter how sickening might be the outcome.
The accused were not at Oradour to have a conscience, but to carry out the orders they had been given. Every army unit was wrapped inescapably in a mantle of discipline. They submitted to orders and to a certain intellectual superiority in those who gave them. They were, in fact, nothing more than an execution squad in both senses of the expression. The accused did not feel they were guilty. They saw themselves as trapped beasts and really didn’t know how they could have avoided doing the things of which they were accused. They would have had to be superhuman.
The trial, he went on, was basically that of a totalitarian regime. The chief culprits, many of whom were still alive, could not be brought before them that day, so their dupes, their first victims, were made answerable.
When the time came to review the history of the period, the supreme head of the Nazi regime would be seen to bear responsibility not only for the victims such as those at Oradour but also for the men who carried out his commands. ‘It was he who put these men in uniform,’ he concluded. ‘ It was he who held them in a vice of discipline and, after blacking out their intellect, led them by degrees to be involved in the most appalling bestialities.’
A surprise witness for the defence was an Alsatian school teacher, a sister of Odile and Emile Neumeyer, who were among the victims. She said she could not blame her compatriots who took part in the massacre because they had been forcibly recruited and acted under extreme duress.
M de Guardia, defending the Germans, pointed out that many of them, like the Alsatians, had been forced to join the SS. Was it possible for any man in the SS to refuse to execute an order, although it might seem to be a flagrant violation of the laws of war? If he obeyed, he was guilty of such a violation, and if he disobeyed he was guilty in the eyes of his superiors and would suffer the consequences. It seemed that the Germans at Oradour, being human, chose the easy way out. They obeyed because the punishment for disobedience was certain and almost immediate. The mïlitary code of many nations approved the death sentence for refusal to obey an order when faced with the enemy.
M de Guardia said a soldier might only appear before a tribunal if his side lost the war. If the commanders of the victorious as well as the defeated forces were to appear before a tribunal composed of victors, vanquished and neutrals, the International Red Cross could open a dossier of terrible crimes. It would reveal the barbarity not only of those involved in the Oradour massacre and the concentration camps, but also those responsible for Katyn, Hiroshima, Hamburg and Dresden for example. Masks would fall and the world would be horrified to see that there were certain strange resemblances between the behaviour of the chiefs on both sides. Then, how many of them would be freed of guilt?
Aerial view of the ruins.
The magistrates retired to consider their verdict on 12 February at 5 p.m. and returned to the courtroom at 2 p.m. the next day.
Of the Germans, Lenz, the warrant officer, was sentenced to death. One of them, Degenhardt, was acquitted and the others were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying from ten to twelve years most with hard labour. Forty-two other Germans, tried in their absence, were sentenced to death. Among the Alsatians, Boos was sentenced to death, nine others to prison with hard labour and the remaining four to prison. No sentence exceeded eight years.
When the sentences were announced there was a great outburst of indignation throughout France. They were considered utterly inadequate for such a terrible crime. There was a protest march through Limoges in which 50,000 people are said to have taken part. Posters were displayed and banners carried displaying: WE WILL NOT ACCEPT THE VERDICT.
On the other hand, the people of Alsace-Lorraine went into mourning over the injustice of the sentences on their countrymen. They were too severe. The mayors of all the towns in Alsace walked in silent procession past the war memorial in Strasbourg. The Bishop of Strasbourg advocated the quashing of the sentences. Meanwhile in Paris the legislature discussed an amnesty proposal. On 19 February the amnesty law was passed by 319 votes to 211, with 88 abstaining. The Upper House gave approval by 176 votes to 79.
The sentenced Alsatians, with the exception of Boos, were rapatriated in secret. Five of the seven Germans were also sent home, their sentences being less than the eight years they had been detained awaiting trail. In 1954 the two men who were sentenced to death had their sentences commuted to hard labour.
Oradour was outraged. The mayor removed the Croix de Guerre from the mairie in the new village and the president of the Association des Familles des Martyrs removed the Légion d’Honneur from the cemetery. At the main entrance to the ruins two notice boards were erected. One bore the names and addresses of the Alsatians who had been sentenced and the part that each man was said to have taken in the massacre. The other listed the parliamentarians who had voted for the amnesty.
The list of Alsatians was headed: ‘The monsters listed here took part in the murder of 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane. These are their names and the crimes they committed.’ The end of the list was inscribed,
‘Thanks to the amnesty law these criminals are free.’
The parliamentarians’ list was headed: ‘These 319 deputies pardoned the SS monsters who murdered, burnt and pillaged in Oradour-sur-Glane.’
A list of names followed. Then came:
‘These senators confirmed the deputies’ vote....’, followed by more names.
The boards remained there until 1966.