He remained silent for almost eight decades, until he was the last eyewitness. Now the 98-year-old Frenchman Edmond Réveil has reported on an alleged war crime that hardly anyone knew about until now. It happened a few days after the Wehrmacht massacres in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944.
However, in this case, French resistance fighters were the alleged perpetrators. They are said to have shot 47 Wehrmacht soldiers and a French woman suspected of collaboration on June 12, 1944 in a wooded area near the village of Meymac in the Limousin.
Réveil, then 19, belonged to a resistance group that had taken numerous prisoners in an attack on German soldiers in Tulle. They withdrew with them to a wooded area that was difficult to access. "We didn't know what to do with them," recalls Réveil in an interview with the newspaper "La Montagne".
"We got the order to shoot them," he reports. Each of them was supposed to kill one of the Germans. Since nobody wanted to shoot the woman, one was drawn at random. "We forced them all to dig their own grave. Then we poured lime in it. It smelled of blood," he reports. "And then we never talked about it again."
The partisan attack in Tulle had resulted in a massive retaliatory action by the SS, in which 99 civilians were publicly hanged from balconies and lampposts. A day later, the Waffen-SS carried out another massacre at the site of Oradour-sur-Glane, about a hundred kilometers away, chosen without any particular reason. There, 643 villagers were cruelly killed.
At that time the partisans from Tulle were fleeing to the hinterland with their prisoners. They had probably heard about the massacres. But there were also logistical reasons for the execution of the Germans, says Belgian historian Bruno Kartheuser. "One was not prepared for so many prisoners," says Kartheuser, who was one of the few to research the shooting of the German soldiers near Meymac.
"The Resistance often didn't know what to do with the prisoners," agrees the Potsdam historian Peter Lieb. "This is definitely a war crime." According to his research, a total of 350 German soldiers were shot by French resistance fighters in late summer 1944, for example in Vieugy and Les Rousses in the west of the country.
The case of Meymac, which his research did not cover, was unusual because the number was high and the Allies had only landed in Normandy a few days earlier. The historians are not surprised that contemporary witnesses kept quiet about the event. "They really wanted to let grass grow over it," says Lieb.
Réveil feels guilty today. "It was wrong to kill prisoners of war," says the 98-year-old. But he wanted to tell about it so that the descendants of those killed would learn about it.
"France is obliged to transfer the remains," said Xavier Kompa, head of the local veterans' department. The French authorities want to search for the mass grave in the coming weeks and recover the remains of the war dead. The German War Graves Commission, which takes care of war dead, is soon to send a ground-penetrating radar to France.
Already in 1967 there had been an excavation in which the remains of eleven dead people had been found. But at that time, the time for reappraisal was apparently not yet ripe. "There is no trace of it in our archives," says Mayor of Meymac, Philippe Brugère.
