CHAPTER 10
After the war the East Germans created a special force whose job was to search for war criminals and, between the end of the war and 1981, they caught 12,867. The last one to be hanged was in 1970 after which the death sentence was abolished and life imprisonment became the ultimate punishment.
On 14 July 1981 they arrested the 12,868th who was among their biggest catches. He was Heinz Barth, a former lieutenant in the 1st Battalion of the Der Führer Regiment of the Das Reich 2nd Panzerdivision Waffen SS. He was the man who told the soldiers before they set out to sack Oradour, ‘Today you are going to see the blood flow.’ He was the only officer of the division concerned with the massacre to be brought to trial. He was among those condemned in their absence by the Bordeaux tribunal.
The extraordinary thing was that he had been living in his home town Gransee, on the edge of a lake, under his own name ever since he returned openly to Germany in 1945, handicapped by the loss of a leg in Normandy. He had escaped detection for nearly forty years because he had faked his service record. An analysis of records eventually trapped him. Barth was kept in custody for two years. His trial in East Berlin opened on 25 May 1983. It was a show trial, lasting ten days, with full television coverage and was attended by journalists from many countries.
Prior to the hearing, the presiding judge, Herr Heinz Hugot, had written to the state prosecutor in Limoges asking for the attendance of survivors of the massacre. Five undertook the journey – Maurice Beaubreuil, Martial Machefer, Yvon Roby, Jean-Marcel Darthout and Robert Hébras. A request was also sent to West Germany for men who had appeared at Bordeaux. The Germans named were Daul, Molinger, Boos, Frenzel and Okrent. Two Alsatians who had been critical of Barth’s ruthless behaviour at Gradour, Graff and Elsässer, were also summoned. An odd appeal was sent by Mme Wirtwaz, a relative of Kahn, though how she could provide reliable testimony about Barth was not disclosed. Anyway, none of these people appeared.
Barth came into the courtroom leaning heavily on a stick and looking much older than 62. The walls were lined with maps of France, Haute-Vienne and Oradour.
Barth was charged with taking part in the killing of 92 people at Lidice, Czechoslovakia in 1942 as a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (pictured right).
All males in the village were shot and (below) all trace of the village was obliterated.
Apart from the participation in the massacre of 642 people at Oradour, Barth was charged with taking part in the killing of 92 people at Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in 1942 as a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS general who controlled that country. He admitted volunteering for three firing squads and standing guard for a fourth. He had been a member of an SS police squad.
Barth was questioned about the preparation for the Oradour massacre. He said about a dozen officers attended the conference at the Hôtel de la Gare in Saint-Junien. Diekmann told them that Oradour must be razed to the ground as a punitive measure and to discourage further Resistance activity.
‘Our orders were to spare nobody’, he said. ‘If I had not obeyed I would have been put before a court martial.’ He indicated on the map the route the convoy had taken. His section halted at the river bridge before going slowly up the main street. Men were dropped off to surround the village. There were few people in the street, apart from a small crowd outside a bistro:
‘We were armed with machine-guns and rifles, I had a machine-pistol and an automatic. In accordance with the plans I told the NCOs to arrange the surrounding of the village in such a way that every man could see another and was within earshot. My job was to ensure that this was satisfactorily completed.’
Barth said he had been ordered to block all the exits from Oradour and to shoot anyone trying to get out. When the encirclement was completed, he said, he went to get the people out of their houses and herd them to the Champ de Foire.
‘We had orders to kill anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave their homes,’ he said. Asked if he remembered ordering the execution of an elderly man in his bed, Barth said he couldn’t remember but he may have done. He was told to search the houses for arms. The presiding judge: ‘How long did this search last?
Barth: ‘About five minutes.’
The President: ‘Do you think an experienced policeman could have done the job properly in so short a time?’
Barth: ‘No.’
The President: ‘What did you find?’
Barth: ‘Nothing.’
Barth said that, so far as he knew, no arms or munitions of any kind were found in the village. The president: ‘How did the people react?’ Barth: ‘They were very frightened. We ordered them out of their houses, shoving and insulting them. We formed them into small groups for escorting to the Champ de Foire. We knocked before entering each house.’
The President: ‘ What do you mean by ‘Knocked’?’
Barth said : ‘We used rifle butts.’
The President: ‘The searching of the houses was only a pretext, wasn’t it? You knew everyone was to be killed.’
Barth: ‘No.’
The President pointed out that this was contrary to his previous statement. He said he had been told that the whole population of Oradour was to be exterminated.
Barth: ‘Oradour was only an incident in the march of the Das Reich towards Normandy.’
Asked how many people he conducted to the Champ de Foire, Barth said he had not counted them but he had probably dealt with around 150. The round-up was completed in half an hour.
The President: ‘The orders you received were quite clear?’
Barth: ‘Yes. We had to kill everybody, even the children.’
The President: ‘What did you do next?’
Barth: ‘My group had the job of fetching the children from the schools.’ He was next ordered to go to a ‘sort of barn or garage’ to execute a number of men. The men were inside with the soldiers standing facing them. There were no windows. The men could not escape. They were lined up in two rows. He thought there were about twenty of them, aged between about 25 and 40.
The President: ‘Did these men ask what had happened to their wives and children?’
Barth: ‘No.’
Barth said he had to await a signal which would ensure that all the executions took place at the same time.
The President: ‘What was the signal?’
Barth: ‘An explosion. As soon as I heard it I cried, “Fire!” and I and the men with me opened up. I fired two bursts with my machine-pistol of about twelve to fourteen rounds. I aimed at the men’s chests.’ Pressed to describe his feelings at the time Barth showed his first signs of emotion. He recalled the men’s wordless terror and wept as he said in a barely audible voice, ‘It is difficult for me to talk about this.’
The president: ‘Were there any survivors?’
Barth: ‘I don’t know. I think they were all dead. When we had fînished firing we shut the doors. That part of the operation was finished for me. My next job was to burn the village.’
On his way back to the trucks that had brought them, Barth walked past the church where he knew the women and children were to be executed. He heard moans and saw flames at the windows.
‘Is it possible that the women and children were being burnt to death?’ asked the President.
Barth: ‘I don’t know. I had nothing to do with the killings in the church. That was another group.’
The President: ‘Did it ever occur to you that such acts were in contravention of the laws of war?’
Barth: ‘I had my orders and I obeyed them. It all seemed to me to be part of war. And there was this new front in Normandy to be taken into account. I thought it was essential to wage war as rigorously as possible.’
The President: ‘Didn’t you have any qualms about your orders?’
Barth: ‘No. They were part of war.’
Asked what he had done about the bodies of the men he had killed, Barth said he had not thought any more about them. He knew they would be burnt with the village. He claimed there was no difference in attitude between the Germans and the Alsatians. They all did their duty.
‘The population had been condemned in advance,’ he said, ‘and there was no need to give them any explanation for our action. A man who spoke a little German came to me. He wanted to make me understand he had been working for us. I went to find Kahn to ask what I should do with him. “Kill him” said Kahn, “and hurry up. He’s seen too much already.’”
Barth said the blame for what they had done could be attributed to the maquis. ‘But it was a one-sided action,’ said the president. ‘There was no retaliation by the French.’ Barth said the officers got together when it was all over and they were instructed to tell everyone that they had found arms and ammunition in the village.
The President said: ‘That was a lie. What you did was an act of terrorism, pure and simple, wasn’t it?’
Barth replied : ‘Yes.’
When it came to the turn of the Oradour survivors to give evidence, Robert Hébras (58) said he was about 19 at the time of the massacre. He lost his mother and two sisters.
‘About forty to forty-five of us were ordered into a barn,’ he said. ‘Five soldiers with machine-guns faced us. When they started firing we all fell in a heap. I was at the bottom and was only slightly wounded.’
Jean-Marcel Darthout (59) said, ‘I was lucky to be one of the first to drop down. Others fell on top of me. The soldiers came to give us the coup de grace. They shot a friend who was on me.’
Maurice Beaubreuil (59) told how he hid under the floorboards in his aunt’s kitchen when he saw the SS men coming along the street. When the house started to burn he fled into the garden and saw smoke belching from the tower of the church. The steeple suddenly twisted and fell. The screams he had heard from the church seemed to carry on after the fall of the steeple. They seemed to be screams of pain.
Marguerite Rouffanche, who was then 84 years old, was too old and infirm to make the journey but sent a written statement. She spoke of the heart-rendering cries as the women were separated from the men and forced to go into the church. She described how she was struck by bullets as she escaped from the burning church. Her right arm and leg were crippled.
Heinz Barth at his trial in East Berlin in 1983 and, right, as a young second lieutenant (Untersturmführer).
A surprise feature of the trial was a reference to a letter from Otto Kahn which had been received by the East German Authorities in 1962 when they were investigating the case of Lammerding. Kahn had written that he had tried to dissuade the men from committing some of the atrocities but Barth had insisted that the orders must be carried out to the letter.
In his summing up Herr Horst Busse quoted a clause in the German military code of 10 October 1940. Barth had claimed that his superiors had demanded blind obedience to orders and he could not hesitate to carry them out. However, according to the code, obedience in carrying out a criminal act did not exclude the perpetrator from blame, if he was aware of the nature of the act. Two German experts on criminal acts in war, Alfred Spiesz, public prosecutor of the court of Wippertal, and Adalbert Rükel, chief of the department involved in the search for war criminals in East Germany, had stated that during the Second World War no German soldier had been condemned for invoking Article 47 of the military code, which allowed a soldier to refuse to obey an order if it involved an act that was undoubtedly criminal.
At Treblinka concentration camp an SS NCO had ordered a soldier to kill one of the inmates, a Jew. The soldier had invoked Article 47 and the NCO had dismissed him. A number of soldiers ordered to carry out the slaughter of 780 Russian prisoners, by means of a bullet in the back, had said the order was contrary to the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners of war. The offïcer who gave the order was furious and told them they were cowards, but he allowed them to retire and attend to other duties. (Needless to say, another squad carried out the executions). Apparently none of the men involved at Oradour had thought of invoking the laws of war.
Herr Busse recalled Barth’s career from the executions in Czechoslovakia to the extermination of Oradour.
‘We are not trying this man solely on the number of murders he committed,’ he said, ‘but also on the fact that, in full knowledge of the criminality of what he had been ordered to do, he committed and helped to commit bestial crimes against humanity.’ He regretted the necessity of summoning the men who had escaped and causing them to relive the horror they had experienced while facing one of the killers of their people. Their presence in East Berlin was a symbol of East Germany’s continued fight against fascism at a time when other countries were allowing ideologies destructive to humanity to breed in their midst.
Although it was nearly forty years after the event the men’s testimony was clear and confirmed the case for the prosecution. Herr Busse demanded a sentence of life imprisonment. Barth should be excluded from socialist society and deprived of his civil rights for ever.
The defending council, Herr Friedrich Wolf, pleaded for a lenient view of his client; As a credulous young man who fervently believed in Hitler, Barth had been ‘caught up’ in the guilt of his people. His crimes should be viewed in the light of the collective crimes of that era. At the age of 12, in common with thirteen million other young Germans, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth Movement. The entire mental outlook of these youths had been moulded by the Nazis for their benefit. Barth had openly returned to Germany in 1945 to start a new life. He had been a good father and an honest citizen. At the time of his arrest he held a responsible post as a textile buyer for Konsum, a co-operative in Gransee.
‘We are dealing with a life that has been twice as long since the act as before it. I am not asking you to forget or defend the fascist regime this man served,’ he added, ‘but to think of Barth as a man instead of an SS executioner. A lighter sentence would not be contrary to the objectives of the court.’
After hearing his advocate, Barth was invited to return to the witness stand where, leaning heavily on his stick and with tears on his cheeks, he exclaimed:
‘I am ashamed that as a young man I took part in these operations in occupied countries and I hope such things can never happen again. Politicians should see to it that such things can never happen again.’
Barth was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in an East German jail, but was released in 1997 because of his age (78), his health and his repentance. He would continue to receive a pension awarded to a war invalid.