The mortar counter offensive quickly halted by the Royal Air Force was another fiasco.

Einspar was evacuated from the front to have his wounded leg amputated.

The Das Reich was decimated.

From over 200 operational panzers, it was reduced to 15.

Elimar Schneider was caught up in the turmoil.

“Wherever the going was tough, our company was involved.

Mortain, Don Franc, Argentin, Falaise.

All these names remind me of episodes, but I can’t place them exactly.

With hunger gnawing away at us, we climbed the apple trees.

But the apples were always too green and weren’t good for you.

In fact, everything here was too green.

The soldiers too young, the officers too young.

Even the weapons we couldn’t try out before for lack of ammunition.

There were so many dead and wounded that one more or less made no difference.

Unless we’re talking about comrades.

” Even in the heart of the battle, the Waffen SS divisions continued to hunt down partisans and notch up war crimes.

On August 13, 1944, 18 people were eliminated in Toureau-Verdun-Lorne and part of the town burnt.

American prisoners of war were summarily executed by the Das Reich on the pretext that they looked Jewish.

A German defeat was no longer in doubt.

The 100,000 soldiers in the field, the remains of around 30 divisions in tatters, were overwhelmed by the Allied battery.

On August the 14th, the Wehrmacht chiefs of staff gave the order for a general withdrawal.

Already weakened by the loss of 28,000 prisoners of war and 12,000 deaths in July, the Germans lost an additional 10,000 soldiers in the Falaise pocket.

50,000 were taken prisoner.

In a huge mass grave from Caen to the Seine, Hitler saw his powerful army reduced to ribbons by the British tanks.

Germany had to pay its debts.

For 40 days of fierce fighting, Montgomery had the measure of the German armor.

Then, this deluge of fire and steel drowned the German power.

First single, then by hundreds, the German prisoners were sent to the concentration camps that they themselves built for French patriots.

The Das Reich was but a shadow of the elite division it once was.

Those who miraculously survived the Battle of Falaise slipped through allied fingers at the last minute.

They crossed the Seine at Elbeuf.

Before crossing the Ardennes, they then disappeared the other side of the Siegfried Line, while the Allies were making for Paris.

On August 15, the Allied landings in Provence on the French Mediterranean coast opened a new front to the west and accelerated the disintegration of the German forces, putting an end to any remaining hopes of recovery.

In Paris, the staff prepared to withdraw.

The Gestapo’s most valuable prisoners, resistance leaders and SOE agents, were evacuated.

Exhausted by the harsh interrogation, Violette Szabo had lost none of her determination.

While incarcerated, she had met up with two SOE comrades, Denise Bloch, 28 a first-class secret agent whose Jewish family had been rounded up by the Gestapo in 1942, and Lilian Rolfe, 30 half Russian, half British radio operator, arrested during a French police crackdown.

Violette spared no effort to come to their aid and comfort them.

The nightmare was coming to an end, she promised them.

In reality, it had only just begun.

On August the 8th, the three women were taken to the Gare de l’Est station, where a cattle train awaited them.

Destination Ravensbruck.

Located some 90 kilometers from Berlin, this concentration camp for women was overcrowded.

Thousands of female forced workers were piling up there.

Resistance fighters of every nationality, as well as race internees, both Jewish and Gypsy.

They served as an easily exploitable workforce for German industries in the region.

Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch, and Lillian Rolfe were sent to the munitions factory in Torgau.

Working conditions were apocalyptic.

For the 3 resistance women, all that mattered was surviving the camp.

They never imagined that Belarus had been liberated by the Red Army, which was now marching on Berlin.

While Paris had been liberated on August 25, the outline of the Great Reich was shrinking with each new Allied victory.

But the war was not yet over.

In September, US paratroopers failed to break through the front in the Netherlands.

The following month, It was the Canadians who struggled to free up access to the port of Antwerp and fought a difficult battle at the Escaut.

Germany was bending, but not yielding.

Hitler decided to attack the Anglo-Americans in the Ardennes, where they were billeted.

The mountain range is close to the Siegfried Line, the equivalent of the Maginot Line, which runs along the border with the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

Reputedly impassable, it had just been reinforced on the orders of the Führer.

The German attack would be a chance to pierce the Allied front and retake Antwerp.

This was the last chance saloon.

It wasn’t about winning the war anymore.

It was about signing a separate peace on the Western front.

Back in Germany, where it had taken refuge, the Das Reich was licking its wounds.

Alsatian Elimar Schneider, like the rest of the division, was recovering from the harsh fighting of the summer.

“I celebrated my 18th birthday in Rossebeck.

It was the first time we had some relative peace.

The ranks of Arbeitseinheit were swelling visibly.

Young Hungarians and Germans joined us.

The news came in December.

Hitler had given the order to take back the Ardennes from the Allies.

To the enemy’s surprise, early on December 16, the powerful German forces launched a totally unexpected attack.

Hundreds of batteries of all calibers delivered death to the enemy.

Heintz Lammerding, who had recovered after being wounded in Normandy, was keen to get back on the horse.

The Das Reich was renewing its offensive.

“With the Rundstedt offensive triggered, it was action stations once again.

After tasting the joys of life, we were scared again, very scared of dying.

” On December the 23rd, while the fighting raged around Bastogne and Saint-Vite, the Das Reich division made a sensational entry onto the battlefield.

It fought without moderation to keep the Americans at bay.

But once the front was set, the SS made no headway.

Doubt set in.

Alsatian Elimar Schneider sank like the rest into the American fog.

At night, while the corporal and I were sleeping the sleep of the just, our company received the order to take back a hill from the Americans.

Another third of the company was out of action, and the Americans were still there.

Once the surprise had worn off, and the dire weather that prevented reinforcements being dropped and support bombing had dissipated, the Allies restarted air attacks, and threw all their forces into the battle.

In 3 days, German hopes were destroyed.

On December 26, the Das Reich was defeated in Saint-Vite.

Bastogne was liberated by General Patton.

In the months following the Ardennes defeat, the men of the Das Reich were no more than cannon fodder, dismantled into 3 groups to face the Soviet advance in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Dresden, the SS division was wiped out by the Soviets in the last exchanges of spring 1945.

Like so many others, Aurel Kovács, who had picked out the hanged men in Tule, was killed in the fighting.

Those who escaped death and the Red Army fell back to Prague to surrender to the Americans.

The whole of Germany was a heap of ruins.

After Hitler’s suicide in his bunker, Lammerding, whose last mission had been to defend Berlin, managed to slip through the mesh of the Allied net.

Germany capitulated on May the 8th, 1945.

Violette Szabo would not taste the victory to which she devoted her young life.

Along with her SOE comrades Denise Bloch and Liliane Rolfe, she was executed behind the Ravensbrück crematorium in February 1945, 2 months before the liberation of the camp by the Red Army, 3 months before the German surrender.

Of 130,000 women deported to Ravensbrück, only 40,000 survived the forced labour and the medical experiments carried out in the camp.

Violette’s daughter, Tanya, awaiting her return in London, wasn’t 3 years old.

She would later receive the most prestigious decorations awarded to her mother by the British and French authorities.

The General de Gaulle visited Oradour-Sur-Glane, wiped out by the Germans.

“You are our savior”, the mayor of Oradour told him.

“We ask you be our avenger.

” After a visit to the cemetery of this cemetery of this town, General de Gaulle said, “If our friends help us, fine.

But it is up to us to see justice is done, and prevent such crimes from ever happening again.

” The war was over, but the crimes of the Das Reich lived on in memory.

From 1946, the Tulle hangings and the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane were mentioned in post-war courtrooms.

At the Nuremberg trials, the prosecution tried in vain to find out who had given the order for the massacres.

None of the Das Reich officers was present.

The question remained unanswered.

Until the beginning of the next decade.

In January 1953, after 7 years’ investigation, the Oradour-sur-Glane trial opened in Bordeaux.

A law, passed in September 1948, enabled the collective responsibility of the accused to be tried.

It had been passed in order to sentence the SS for its crimes, for it had been established at the Nuremberg trials that it was a criminal organization.

Robert Hebras and Marguerite Rouffanche, 2 of the 6 survivors, came to present their testimony.

The military court in Bordeaux had to investigate the responsibilities of 21 accused, including 14 Alsatians, who claimed they were innocent.

They were press-ganged into the SS, they protested.

They were known as the “Malgré nous”, which means, against our will.

The Verdict delivered on the night of February the 12th, triggered a wave of protests.

There was only one death sentence and some hard labor.

The victims’ families deplored the leniency of the judgment.

Those of the Alsatians sentenced to hard labor or prison cried injustice.

They were all amnestied the following year on the altar of national reconciliation.

Outraged, the families of the Oradour martyrs engraved the names of the 319 members of Parliament who voted to pass the amnesty law on the sign at the entrance to the ruined village.

Up until 1968, they would not allow any representatives of the French Republic to attend commemorations.

The protests also concerned those hanged in Tulle.

The victims’ families pushed for the extradition of Heinz Lammerding, the Das Reich General who had issued the order for the hangings.

Sentenced to death in absentia at the trial in Tulle in 1949, the former Waffen SS officer was living a quiet life in West Germany, as this December 1965 report showed.

Lammerding lives here, 1, Falcon Street, next to Düsseldorf Airport, Lammerding is in the phone book in Düsseldorf, where he is a publics work contractor.

His name is seen on trucks and during the 3 days of this shoot it has been impossible to meet him, even by surprise.

Despite several extradition requests, all rejected by the German federal authorities, Lammerding was never bothered.

He died aged 66 in Bavaria on January 13, 1971.

His comrades in the SS and the Das Reich paid him a glowing tribute at his funeral.

7 years later, Otto Kahn, one of those responsible for the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, died in his turn near Munich without ever having to answer charges for his acts.

He was 69.

Heinz Barth, his subordinate, although sentenced to death in absentia in Bordeaux in 1953, made a career in an industrial cooperative.

But his past did catch up with him, and he was finally tried in 1983 by a West German court.

By order of the Attorney General of West Germany I file a complaint against former Walten SS Obersturmführer Heinz Barth, born on 15 October 1920.

I accuse him of having participated in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Robert Ebras, the Oradour survivor who had come to testify in Bordeaux, made the journey.

Heinz Barthes’ trial was also followed in France.

The media and the TV news gave it prominent coverage.

Heinz Barth is 63 years old, sound in mind with perfect memory.

He is permitted to sit as his leg was amputated after the Battle of Normandy.

He speaks in front of the court as if reciting a history lesson to a school room.

It is the banal story of a miserable SS who became a torturer and assassin for the only reason that he wanted to be promoted officer.

Sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the Lidice and Oradour massacres, Barth was released in 1997.

He died 10 years later in Gransee, town of his birth, after a quiet retirement at the age of 87.

Of the 15,000 men who took to the road with the Das Reich, only a handful had to answer for its crimes.

Death sentences and life sentences were all amnestied or commuted to less severe penalties.

The reasons cited were rebuilding, national reconciliation, and the Cold War.

Of the Alsatian volunteers and the “against our wills” that made up the Lyon’s share of the troops in 1944, none served the slightest prison sentence.

The Alsatian Elmer Schneider was one of them.

Convinced he had saved a man from hanging, Schneider wasn’t charged at the Tulle trial.

And because he wasn’t present in Oradour during the massacre, his case was never tried.

Yet doubts persisted about his enlistment in the SS.

In 1982, he expressed no regrets.

I don’t agree when they always declare that the Waffen SS were murderers.

There is a question of honor involved.

What I saw the Red Resistance do in Limousin didn’t encourage me to become a deserter.

I stayed in my unit to avoid becoming a murderer.

 

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