16
At the moment Jean Claude was tapping out his first coded message to London, a band of Resistance fighters in Tulle, a town forty-five miles to the south, was savoring an early taste of victory over the German occupiers. It quickly proved to be a cruel illusion.
Tulle was an industrial town that clung to the steep hills above the river Vézère, known for the manufacture of lace, munitions, and accordions. Local political sentiment was strongly Communist—not out of any special love for Moscow, but deriving from a homegrown, militant workers’ movement that went back generations. The thick woods around Tulle were home to thousands of maquisards belonging to the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, the armed wing of the French Communist Party (the name translates roughly as Partisan Sharpshooters). This band of FTP fighters was armed with Sten guns, Bren guns, grenades, and bazookas supplied by SOE. But they did not have agents sent from London to train them in weapons handling, organization, or tactics.
On the morning after D-Day, June 7, the maquisards determined to do their part in the liberation: They would storm the German garrison at Tulle and take over the town. The German forces consisted of several hundred elderly reservists, backed by secret police and a contingent of despised Vichyite Nazi sympathizers.
At 5:00 A.M., signaled by a bazooka blast, about a thousand FTP fighters emerged from the woods and began streaming into Tulle. They advanced street by street, house by house, the Germans returning fire from windows and rooftops. Both sides incurred casualties. By late morning the maquisards had taken over the city hall, the post office, and the train station. A group of Vichyites left the town that afternoon under a white flag, but the German troops, holed up in solid buildings with plenty of ammunition, showed no inclination to surrender. The guerrillas had neither air support nor artillery to dislodge them.
Night fell on an uneasy stalemate: the maquisards held most of the town, but the Germans still occupied two schools and Tulle’s big munitions factory. Some of the guerrillas slipped back into the woods to rest; others collapsed with fatigue in houses in the town.
When fighting resumed in the morning, it had the flavor of a siege: The maquisards closed in on the German strongholds, and the Germans stayed put, firing back. In the afternoon the guerrillas worked their way close enough to one of the schools, the École Normale, to set it on fire. At about 4:00 P.M. a white flag was thrust out the door. About forty Germans came out with their hands over their heads and were led away by triumphant maquisards. By nightfall the guerrillas considered Tulle to be theirs. They looked after the wounded, carried away the dead, and made plans to roust the remaining Germans in the morning.
That’s when the Waffen SS arrived.
At around 9:00 on the evening of June 8, tanks of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich roared into Tulle from three directions, accompanied by about five hundred soldiers. The maquisards immediately fled into the hills. The SS troops swept the streets, freed the besieged Germans, and set up a command post near the munitions factory.
The next morning, the German soldiers rounded up all the boys and men in Tulle between the ages of sixteen and sixty. They herded the hostages, about three thousand in all, into a big courtyard in front of the factory. They commandeered the town fire engine and sent it through the streets. A man on the fire engine rang its bell for attention and read a proclamation:
“Because of the indescribable murder of forty German soldiers by communist maquisards, the German authorities have decided that three Frenchmen will pay for each German killed, as an example to all France.”1
The SS officers claimed to have found, early that morning, the bodies of forty Germans who had been taken prisoner and subsequently executed, their corpses horribly mutilated. The claim, never verified, has been dismissed by French historians as Nazi propaganda.
The SS men selected 120 men and boys from the crowd in the courtyard. In groups of 10 they were escorted to the avenue de la Gare, the main thoroughfare, where they were greeted by a ghastly sight: nooses dangled from lampposts, tree branches, and balconies.
The hangings began at around 4:00 in the afternoon and went on for three hours. Two ladders were used for each execution. A Frenchman was led up one. An SS man climbed the other, adjusted the noose around the victim’s neck, and pushed him off. SS officers watched from a table outside the Café Tivoli, drinking wine and listening to music from a gramophone.
At around 7:00 in the evening, with 99 corpses suspended along the avenue, the killings were halted. It isn’t clear why the Germans didn’t murder all of the condemned. Another 149 men were transported to Dachau, where 101 of them lost their lives.
The commander for this operation was an SS intelligence officer, Sturmbannführer (Major) Aurel Kowatsch. Just before the hangings began, he received a last-minute plea from the prefect of Tulle to carry out reprisals in some other way. He replied, “We have developed on the Russian front the practice of hanging. We have hanged more than one hundred thousand in Kharkov and in Kiev. This is nothing to us.”
This sketch, the only known visual record of the massacre at Tulle on June 9, 1944, was made by a Nazi officer present. At least thirty bodies can be seen hanging from lampposts and balconies.
THE STURMBANNFÜHRER DID not exaggerate. By the time they reached that part of France, the troops of the 2nd SS Panzer Division were old hands at murdering noncombatants. There is no doubt that the Waffen SS was among the most effective fighting forces the world has ever seen. It was also found, at the postwar International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, to be a criminal organization.
The SS did not have its roots in the regular military. It originated before the war as a personal security service for Hitler—SS stands for Schutzstaffel, or “protection squadron.” (Waffen in this context simply means “armed.”) Under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, it grew into a vast cult of violence that undertook the worst of the Nazi atrocities, including the construction and operation of death camps. The SS had its own schools, publications, rituals, and institutions—even a monumental castle in Westphalia. Its soldiers were indoctrinated to believe in their own “Nordic” racial superiority, and to treat the enemy as vermin. They were the fruit of Hitler’s promise to turn Germany’s young Nazis into “magnificent beasts of prey.”
The most savage killing grounds in Europe were in the east, and it was there that the 2nd SS Panzer Division served before coming to France. The scale of the brutality there was almost unimaginable, as it was intended to be: In what they called the “Hunger Plan,” Nazi leaders aimed to win a quick summertime victory over the Red Army, and then starve 30 million Soviets to death. The plan envisioned the “extinction of industry as well as a great part of the population,” leaving a vast, depopulated eastern prairie ready for German agrarian colonization. Before the project was defeated by the Red Army and the Russian winter of 1941–42—“General Winter,” as rueful Germans called it—millions of Soviet civilians and soldiers lost their lives.
The Germans wiped out many hundreds of villages during their advance and retreat through the Soviet Union. Civilian massacres large and small were routine. Jews and others considered “subhuman” were regularly rounded up to be hanged, shot, buried alive, or asphyxiated in vans that had their exhaust fumes piped into sealed passenger compartments—a Soviet invention, but one that was adopted enthusiastically by the Nazis.
The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, regarded as the “jewel” of Hitler’s thirty-eight Waffen SS divisions, campaigned across the eastern front. It fought in the major battles of Moscow, Kharkov, and Kursk. In Lahoysk, a city in what is now Belarus, it took part in the murder of 920 Jews.
By October 1943 the division was exhausted. It had won more Iron Crosses than any other Panzer division, but it had lost 70 percent of its men. It was ordered by Himmler to withdraw and regroup.
The Das Reich division rolled westward, leaving a trail of murdered civilians in Czechoslovakia and Belgium before coming to a halt in Montauban, near Toulouse, in south-central France. There it spent the winter of 1943–44, refitting and rebuilding its ranks. By D-Day it was back at full strength, with fifteen thousand infantrymen, more than two hundred Panzer and Tiger tanks, and extensive armored artillery. Commanded by Brigadeführer (Brigadier General) Heinz Lammerding, the division was held in central France with the expectation that it would rush north to the English Channel, or south to the Mediterranean, depending on where the Allied invaders came ashore.
Resistance groups in the countryside around Montauban harried the Germans that winter and spring. SOE’s F Section had at least three circuits—code-named Wheelwright, Clergyman, and Footman—operating in the region. On May 2, Das Reich tanks on a training exercise were fired upon. In retribution, German soldiers murdered sixteen civilians in the village of Montpezat-de-Quercy, including a two-year-old girl they burned to death. Over the next nine days, in response to guerrilla attacks and acts of sabotage, they burned and looted scores of houses and barns to the northwest of Montauban; more than fifty civilians were arrested and deported to Germany. On May 12, after finding a Resistance arms cache in Figeac, Das Reich soldiers rounded up more than eight hundred townspeople. Some were tortured, some were shot, and 540 were sent to the concentration camps at Dachau and Neuengamme.
When D-Day finally arrived, the Das Reich division was ordered to move north to the Normandy beaches. On the way, it was instructed to crush the French Resistance. “For every German wounded or killed,” Lammerding told his men, “we will kill ten terrorists.” On June 8, the division set out on the N20 highway toward Limoges, 160 miles to the north.
The simple fact that Das Reich traveled by road represented a victory for the Resistance. Tanks were customarily moved between battlegrounds by rail or by flatbed truck; they were chronically prone to break down if they had to drive long distances on their own treads. But maquisards led by SOE officers blew up the north-south rail lines in the region, and kept blowing them up as fast as the Germans could repair them.
Climbing into the beautiful hill country of the Lot region, chewing up the highway as it went, Das Reich split into three parallel columns. A little band of maquisards in the hamlet of Groslejac opened fire with bolt-action rifles as one of the columns passed through; the Germans machine-gunned them, killing them all, along with five civilians. At Carsac, the Germans fired on villagers, killing thirteen. When they reached Rouffillac, the SS men found the road barricaded. They swept the roadblock aside, killing one maquisard and fifteen civilians. As dusk fell, the sky was lit with flames from houses and barns torched by the Germans. That night the German tanks began arriving in Limoges—though not the Aufklärungsabteilung, or reconnaissance battalion. That was the unit sent to Tulle.
The next day, June 9, the Germans continued their campaign against the guerrillas. Maquisards attacked the town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, to the east of Limoges. The 3rd Battalion of Das Reich took the town back, killing fifty-four people, including boys and women.
The commander of that battalion was one of the most highly decorated men in the Third Reich, Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe. A thirty-four-year-old who had been a printer before the war, Kämpfe was wounded ten times in combat and was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, the Reich’s highest honor. He was friendly with Hitler and well regarded by his men.
As evening fell, Kämpfe headed back toward Limoges, alone, driving a car on the N141 road. With about fifteen miles to go, he was ambushed and surrounded by a group of FTP maquisards. The Resistance fighters spirited Kämpfe away to their encampment in the woods, leaving his car in the road with its doors open and its engine running. They quickly realized what a prize they had—Kämpfe was, in fact, the highest-ranking German officer captured by the Resistance during the war.