This giant, called Goldenmouth by his comrades as he had replaced all his teeth with gold ones, had disappeared without trace.

Roadblocks were hastily set up.

Roads and copses searched thoroughly.

A few hours earlier, in Combeau Vert, the Kempf regiment had fallen into an ambush set by the communist resistance.

31 partisans had been taken prisoner and immediately shot on his orders.

Laid out along the road, their corpses had then been crushed by the Das Reich panzers.

Georges Guingouin’s FTP unit was suspected of having abducted Kempf as retaliation.

After a day’s hunting, night fell and interrupted the quest.

They continued the next day at first light.

Not far away, Violette Szabo and Anastasie headed for Pompadour, outside of Limoges.

There they were to meet other SOE agents, in order to coordinate their actions with the Gaullist secret army.

Neither knew that the Waffen SS were combing the area in search of Major Kempfer.

Suddenly, on the outskirts of Salon-la-Tour, they noticed a motorcyclist taking a bend at top speed, followed by a detachment of the Das Reich.

It was too late to turn tail.

A shootout began.

The resistance fighters abandoned their vehicle and made for the undergrowth.

Violette stumbled and twisted her ankle.

Helpless, she emptied her magazine on the SS to give Anastasia a head start.

He escaped his pursuers, but Violette Szabo was taken prisoner.

Meanwhile, the der Führer Regiment had obtained intelligence to put it on the trail of Helmut Kempf.

Captured the day before by the FTP, Lieutenant Karl Gerlach suddenly reappeared.

He had escaped from the village where the resistance had set up its base, he confirmed.

Their arms caches were no doubt there.

Gerlach had heard that an SS officer had also been taken prisoner.

In all probability, this was Major Kempf.

Though the indications supplied by Gerlach didn’t match its location, it was a village called Oradour-sur-Glane that Adolphe Diekmann pointed out on the map at headquarters.

This calls for ruthless repression, declared the SS officer, a cold-blooded killer, barely 30 years old, responsible for many massacres in the East.

Otto Kahn, commander of the Third Company, a career soldier who joined the Das Reich in 1940, and his direct subordinate, Heinz Barth, would head operations.

Entering the SS at 18, after ideological and sporting training with the Hitler Youth, Barth was a veteran at fighting the Soviets.

An instructor with the Das Reich in 1943, then a policeman in Czechoslovakia, he went from one Waffen SS unit to the next, including the 3rd Totenkopf Division with its sinister reputation.

Elite troops, the death’s head SS soldiers.

But, Kahn and other veterans from the Russian front hadn’t only been fighting the Soviet army in the East.

The invasion of the USSR in June 1941 also had the goal of eliminating any potential enemies of the right, in other words, communists and the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe.

Men old enough to bear arms were the first victims of the repressive units of the SS.

They were shot en masse as the German troops progressed through Soviet territory, from Latvia to the south of Ukraine, from Galicia to Russia.

From August 1941, the Genocide Order was given to German formations in the field.

Jewish women and children were among the main targets of the mass slaughter led by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units.

Too weak in numbers, these special commandos enlisted the collaboration of the Wehrmacht, the Feldgendarmerie, and the Waffen SS.

The Das Reich division, in which Kahn had learned his trade, was mentioned in report number 92 of Einsatzgruppen.

dated September 23, 1941, which reported on the activities of Group B in the region of Minsk, Belarus.

In a few hours, 920 men, women,and children, the entire Jewish population of Lahoysk, were massacred in the large pits dug for them on the road to Gomel.

With the extermination of the Jews accomplished, the German occupying forces, harassed by the Communist partisans, took revenge on the civilian population.

From 1942, missions of repression followed one another at a frenzied rate.

The modus operandi was identical.

The inhabitants were gathered in the village square, the men were executed, the women and children held in a barn or in the church, which was then sprayed by machine gun fire, before being torched.

The whole village was then burned.

In Belarus, 628 villages were razed and their inhabitants burned alive by the SS.

Over less than 4 years German occupation, that represents 1 village every 2 days.

As for Heinz Barth, he became a criminal against humanity in Czechoslovakia.

The head of the Reich Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich, had just met his death in Prague following an attack carried out by 2 Czech SOE agents.

The Führer had designated the village of Lidice, suspected of protecting resistance fighters, as the price of atonement.

On June 10, 1942, Heinz Barth took part in surrounding the town before commanding a firing squad.

184 men aged 16 and over were shot under his command in Lidice.

The women were deported to Ravensbrück camp, the children to the extermination camp of Czernow, or entrusted to Lebensborn, the nurseries for the ideal Aryan society imagined by Hitler.

The dwellings were first burned, and then blown up with dynamite.

After the German road workers had passed through, no trace of Lidice remained, not even ruins.

These were the men who were about to enter Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, a village with no links to the Resistance, but whose population had almost doubled, swelled by Spanish, Alsatian, and Jewish refugees, Oradour was a typical village of the region.

15th century church its small shops and farms its tramway line made the vibrant little township into a picture postcard.

That Saturday, in the market square, men were standing in line for the distribution of tobacco, while the children gathered at the gates of 3 municipal schools for their medical exam.

A weekend like any other.

As if the war had spared this village since the round-up in August 1942, when the Jewish members of the 642nd Foreign Workers Group were arrested and deported to Auschwitz.

While the 2 armoured cars and Diekmann’s trucks stopped a few kilometres short of the village, Heinz Barth turned to his men before they continued and said, Today you will see blood flow.

Diekmann, Kahn, and Barth were about to subject Oradour to the same treatment as Lugoisk, as Lidice, as the 628 Belarusian villages raised from the surface of the earth by the death troops of the SS.

Procedures of intense violence, perfectly reconstructed in the film by the Soviet director L.

M.

Klimov, “Come and See”.

Set in Belarus, the gripping realism of this 1985 fictional account completely corroborates the testimonies of the survivors of Oradour-sur-Glane, Marguerite Rouffanche, 47 at the time, and Robert Hébras, 90.

On June 10, 1944 I was on leave in Oradour with my parents.

Around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, the Germans arrived in armored cars.

They got out, and they made us go to the market square.

I was there at the roundup with my mother and my 2 sisters.

Soldiers who were doing the rounds came to our home.

They said, everyone rush to market square.

And that was it.

We all had to go.

They separated the women and children from the group.

Up to the age of 14, children went with their mothers.

Above that, they were considered men.

I was 19.

I went with the men’s group.

The worst moment was when we had to split up.

They separated the men from the women, and my son wouldn’t let me go.

We were taken to the church, and the men went to the barns.

All the young people were together.

We weren’t thinking of what was going to happen.

We were interested in the next day’s football match.

They made us all get to our feet.

Just then, I had an Alsatian friend who could speak German.

He was next to me, and he said, “look out, they’re shooting.

” He didn’t even have time to finish the sentence.

Right then, they fired several bursts of machine gun fire right at us.

When they’d stopped shooting, they checked the bodies and finished off those they saw stirring.

They were firing handguns, machine guns.

They fired into the crowd.

I was wounded.

Then they covered us in hay and firewood, whatever was in the barn, and they set fire to us.

We had been locked in the church.

The Germans brought in this big crate.

I said to someone, “see that? That’s a bomb.

We’re going to be blown up with the church.

” “Oh”, she said, “don’t say such things.

” And the fact is, the box exploded.

It gave off such a lot of smoke, we were suffocating.

We couldn’t see in the church and cries went up on all sides.

My eldest girl had lost her little baby.

Then she found him, but I don’t know if he was alive or dead.

But my youngest girl was killed by a bullet from outside.

As for the other, the eldest, she was burned alive.

And that’s when I jumped out of the window.

At nightfall, while Marguerite Rouffanche, between life and death after 3 bullets to the body, waited for the Germans to leave, while Robert Ebras, hidden, witnessed the burning of the village, the SS under Diekmann seized motorcycles, cars, and cattle.

Kahn helped himself to a blue Peugeot and bathed to the grocer’s cash register.

In Niuel, not far from the still-smoking ruins of Oradour, the SS requisitioned a school, in which they feasted and drank, late into the night.

On the General Staff map dated June 11, the Germans drew a ring around the area where the butchery was committed the day before, and in red ink noted the figure of 500 dead.

In actual fact, 642 people were murdered in Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944.

Of the men locked in barns and sheds, there were only 5 survivors.

Of the women and children burned alive in the church, only Marguerite Rouffanche survived.

For Diekmann, this was also about completing the training of the rookies under his orders.

These young Alsatians, Ukrainians, and Hungarians had only just joined the Das Reich.

Before the massacre, they hadn’t been blooded, as extermination strategists in the East called it.

None of them now could claim to be innocent of the crimes of the SS.

Oradour wasn’t an isolated case in Western Europe.

In Italy, in Belgium, in Greece, SS divisions sent to the West after operating in the Soviet Union perpetrated similar slayings, using methods employed daily in Ukraine and Belarus.

In Italy, August 12, 1944.

The battalion of the 16th Panzer Division, led by Walter Redder, veteran of the Totenkopf Division and the Battle of Kharkov, executed the 560 women, children, and old men of the Tuscan village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema before setting it alight.

Several weeks later, near Bologna, this same unit executed the 955 inhabitants of Marzabotto, as in Ouradour.

No link was established between the civilian population and any group of partisans.

When leaving Oradour-sur-Glane, Diekmann asked his men to say nothing of the events of the day.

If necessary, they would say they had discovered an arms cache belonging to the resistance to justify the repression.

As for Helmut Kempf, whose disappearance triggered the massacre, he was executed on the direct orders of Georges Guingouin after the head of the Communist FTP heard of the SS crimes in Oradour.

His body was never found.

The next day, a contingent of the Das Reich returned to Oradour to erase all traces of the massacre.

The sheds were cleared.

The charred bodies of women and children buried in a mass grave.

Kahn and Bart’s men were already back in the main unit.

The order had been given to waste no time in reaching the Normandy front.

The third day of the Allied offensive in Normandy was marked by continued activity of enemy aviation.

Reinforcements were brought from the West and Germany, but it was obvious that those forces wouldn’t be enough to push the enemy into the sea.

So the Führer ordered reinforcements be sent: the 2nd armored division.

the 1st tank regiment, the 116th Panzer division, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich which oversaw cleansing operations in the South of France.

June the 12th, 8 45 a.

m the der Führer regiment was on route north to the cities of tour and Poitiers not without difficulty rounding up a division spread over a 30 kilometer radius had been no easy task what’s more its equipment and combat vehicles were in an alarming state 60 % of tanks and 30% of half-tracks were unserviceable.

The defective panzers should have been ditched between Montauban and Tulle.

Lammerding complained to his superiors.

Despite these annoyances, the Das Reich still held a few trump cards, in particular the dozens of panzers that left Montauban on flatbed cars heading for Normandy.

The SOE was aware of this based on information delivered by Andre Malraux the allied commander in the region of dordogne bombers were sent to pound them in the cities of Angouleme and Poitiers Philippe Llever, head of Violette Szabo’s commando unit, asked the Gaulish secret army to step up sabotage operations.

The electricity supply to the German submarines based in Rochefort was cut.

The Paris to Limoges railway line was dynamited.

In Salon-la-Tour, the same place that days earlier Violette had tangled with the Das Reich, L’Hiver and Montloubier derailed two trains launched one against the other.

It took the Germans 2 months to repair the rails.

By June the 13th, 91% of the 1,055 operations against the railway programmed by Allied command had been carried out.

As for Violette Szabo, she was in deed trouble.

Captured by the Das Reich, she had been handed over to the Gestapo in Limoges.

Her true identity had quickly been discovered, and the task of interrogating her had fallen to the executioner of Tulle, Aurel Kovács.

Her SOE comrades couldn’t bring themselves to abandon her.

A rescue operation was planned for June the 16th.

Twice a day, Violette was taken out of her cell, and walked between 2 policemen to Gestapo headquarters.

They had to take advantage of those 200 meters during which she was not handcuffed.

Maloubier was to fire at the 2 policemen from the back seat of a car before taking Violette.

The day came, but SOE commandos drew a blank.

That same morning, Violette had been transferred to Gestapo headquarters in Paris.

By June the 18th, the Das Reich division was only kilometers from the Normandy front.

With its regiments gathered in Saint-Lô, it readied itself for battle.

The Allies still only occupied a thin strip of land along the coast.

Though the Americans gained ground heading towards Cherbourg, the Germans defended better than expected and held General Montgomery’s British troops in check at Caen.

While equipment was being unloaded on the landing beaches by the Allies, Charles de Gaulle, just back on French soil, was given an ovation in the liberated town of Bayeux.

But nothing was yet decided.

Taking advantage of a storm to cut the Allies’supply lines, the Germans took back the advantage.

This was the decisive moment for the Das Reich, which had only lost 40 men on its slow climb toward the north.

Elmar Schneider, the Alsatian from the Deutschland Regiment, had a heavy heart as the fighting drew near.

On the way, a huge aircraft flew over us.

At the same time, we heard explosions.

It didn’t bode well, and my heart began to beat faster.

I thought it must be an American bomber getting rid of its last bombs, that it couldn’t drop over Germany.

Hitler, who by now was directing operations personally, decided to attempt a breakthrough between Commant and Saint-Loup.

On June 29, 4 Panzer SS divisions were mobilized to take back Palleux, with the Das Reich in the vanguard.

Lammeding sent in the 1st Battalion of the Der Führer Regiment, that of Diekmann and Kahn, 2 of the main culprits of the massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane.

In reality, the operation was a dismal failure.

It ended in carnage for the Germans.

After 2 days fighting, the Der Führer Regiment had lost 600 men.

Diekmann was dead, decapitated by a Sherman tank.

Kahn had his left arm ripped off.

He was repatriated to be treated at the rear.

Next day, the Das Reich positions were pounded by 250 bombers from the Royal Air Force.

During the month of July, the Wehrmacht fell back but held firm.

The Das Reich units in support of the German army, constantly shifted around to contain the Allied offensives, were at the end of their tether.

Sometimes the enemy was British, sometimes American.

Successes were short-lived, and the balance of power was shifting daily in the Allies’ favor.

The Das Reich had joined battle too late, but for the resistance ambushes and the abuses committed on the way it could have made the difference it had to make do with plugging the holes.

Operation Cobra commenced on July the 24th.

No fewer than 4,000 tons of bombs rained down on Normandy in what was the largest display of carpet bombing in the Second World War.

Das Reich Commander General Heinz Lammerding, wounded during the bombing, was evacuated from the front.

The Americans maintaining their positions gained ground everywhere in 4 days Coutances, Avranches, and then Granville were liberated.

At the rear in the region of san lo a welcoming committee awaited khan who was recovering from his wounds A military SS judge had come to hear his version of events in Oradour-sur-Glane.

The Apostolic Nuncio and the Prefect of the Limoges region, who visited the scene of the massacre, had complained to Pierre Laval’s government of collaborationists.

“I want to emphasize that the village of Oradour was one of the quietest towns in the region, and its hard-working, peaceful population was known for its moderation.

These details enable you to renew your protest to the government of the Reich, insisting on the appallingly heinous nature of such reprisals, the huge emotion they have aroused, and the terror in which the people now find themselves.

” The Vichy government demanded explanations.

“The Marshal was greatly moved to learn about the cruel and inhuman treatment meted out to the town of Oradour-sur-Glane and its population.

Having made a solemn protest to the head of the German government about such acts that nothing can justify, he proposes to send, as soon as circumstances permit, a member of his cabinet to bow in his name at the scene where so many innocent victims, and even children, met with the most appalling death.

” The members of the resistance who entered Oradour on June 12th filmed the village in ruins.

The discovery of charred corpses and ruined buildings was an unprecedented shock.

They sent a damning report to London, based on the testimonies of the survivors and evidence provided by forensic examiners.

In his statement, Kahn stuck to the line dreamed up by Diekmann.

Oradour was hiding stocks of weapons for the resistance.

The SS judge, who delivered his verdict 6 months later, aligned with this version of events.

Internally, the case was dismissed.

French protests were not passed on to Hitler.

The Fuhrer’s special envoy refused to disturb him for something so trivial.

Hitler had other fish to fry.

Outraged by what he saw as his general’s defeatism and the military setbacks on the Normandy front, Hitler decided that the counter-attack would take place at Mortain.

It would be led by the 2nd Panzer-Das-Reich Division.

Its mission, beyond all reality, was to throw the Allies back into the sea.

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