June the 6th, 1944.

While the Allies were landing on the beaches of Normandy, 700 kilometers to the south, a fighting division of the Waffen SS, the 2nd Panzer Das Reich Division, had been stationed for 3 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 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 Waffen SS battle formation was first recruited from the SS, National Socialist Party members, chosen to make up the protection sections.

Recruitment has since opened to other European nations.

This is not only a military unit, but also a powerful order where each member receives 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 Reich Führer Heinrich Himmler.

Number 2 in the regime, as well as the supreme head of the SS, he went in person to Montauban on April 11, 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.

69 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, which begun on June 22, 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 Dostoevsky 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.

Of the 15,000 men gathered in Montauban, 9,000 had never fired a shot in anger.

Youngsters from Hungary, Croatia, Romania, 3 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 Volksdeutscher, an ethnic German born outside of Germany.

In 1944, between 1,000 and 2,000 Alsatians were enlisted in the Das Reich Division.

When he set off for Normandy on June 8, 1944, LMR 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 armor 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 the 6th was unequivocal.

Wherever they are, whatever their duty, the simple and sacred duty is to fight by all means available.

It is a question of destroying 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 6 months of 1944, the Royal Air Force dropped 3,627 tons of arms over French territory, 10 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 the 7th, 4 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 Szabo, 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 Szabo left her 2-year-old daughter Tanya in London.

During a mission carried out 2 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 Gaincouin, head of the Limousin Maquis.

A member of the resistance since 1940, feared by the Gestapo, hunted by Vichy, Gaincouin 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 Gaincouin was a necessity.

He was the only one who could sound the call to order.

Scarcely had they arrived than the SOE agents were presented with a fait accompli.

They were told that the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, or FTP, a squad of irregulars, had entered the town of Tulle at dawn on June 7 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 the 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, armored columns were advancing towards them.

130 kilometers south, in the town of Cahors, the Das Reich division split into 3 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 Führer 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 2, 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 11 and 12, 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 21, in the hamlet of Frayssinet-le-Gélat , west of Figeac, 3 women were hanged from their balcony, and 10 men were executed before the village was torched.

June 7, on the eve of their departure, guided by the Gestapo in the town of Agen, a battalion of the Das Reich executed 10 partisans and 7 civilians.

At that point the villagers knew what to expect, and were unlikely to show themselves.

The commander of the 1st Der Führer Battalion, Adolf Rainer Diekmann, 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.

Diekmann 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.

Diekmann 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 Szabot, Philippe Lievre, Jean-Claude Guillet and Robert Maloubier were greeted by 30 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.

Diekmann’s men were attacked in the hamlet of Gros-Jacques.

A dozen resistance men died during the attacks.

10 kilometers from there in Rouffiac, Diekmann 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 16 civilians and 2 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.

Diekmann 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 Spurl, 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-Gaillarde 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 Crescent Sac, 20 kilometres previously.

This macabre trophy was a warning to the people of Brive, and to the Gaullist Maquis that organised 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 a hundred machine guns and a squadron of armoured 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 Trouillé, 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 Souilhac Quarter, the townsfolk found a message posted on the walls.

Citizens of Tulle, 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 Lamedink.

At 3.

30 in the afternoon, in the munitions factory, the 120 men demanded by Lammading 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 Truillé tried to convince Aurel Kovács to postpone the executions.

I’m sorry, Kovács retorted.

We got used to hangings in Russia, we hanged a 100,000 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 2 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 Pančevo, 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 Tulle, around 3.

30 p.

m.

, a first group of 10 from among the men selected was hanged from the street lamps, trees, and balconies of Suillac 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 10 men were led to the gallows.

Can we imagine the scene? asked Abbe Espinasse, chaplain of Tulle 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 Schmald pointed to a group kneeling to the left of the entrance, a dozen civilians, and a group of around 20 in front of him.

In front of them stood a chaplain in a faded cassock, his face sad.

It was Abbe Espinasse giving them absolution.

The 2 school chaplains ceaselessly negotiated with Walter Schmalt for the lives of the hostages, managing to save a handful of them.

At 7 in the evening, after 98 hangings and one man gunned down trying to escape, the lack of available ropes led Schmalt to end the executions.

The 500 forced spectators were imprisoned in Limoges.

Half of them would be deported to Dachau concentration camp.

Of the 120 men sentenced to the rope, only 21 escaped that fate.

The victims were between 17 and 46.

They included students, insurers, hairdressers, typographers, dairymen, plumbers, accountants, engineers, and only 2 resistance men.

In the evening, members of the French youth camps, an 8-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.

75 kilometers from Tulle, a wind of panic blew through a detachment of the Das Reich.

The car of the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the Der Führer Regiment had been found by the side of the road without its passenger.

Former printer- Helmut Kempfer, a hero among elite SS combatants, was a personal friend of General Heinz Lammerding and Sturmbannführer Otto Diekmann.

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