When heroes commit crimes: A French resistance fighter reveals the execution of 47 German soldiers in 1944

Edmond Réveil, this Friday at his home in Meymac.Samuel Aranda

The secret was kept for almost 80 years. No one counted anything. It was not to be proud, better to forget it. Those who participated or attended the execution of 47 unarmed German soldiers, at the end of World War II in the French Massif Central, remained silent throughout their lives, some did not tell their wives or their children. It was a cause for shame.

Shame? "A little, but that's life," says Edmond Réveil in the living room on the first floor of his garden cottage in Meymac, a village of 2,500 in the rural, mountainous region of inland France. At 98 years old, Réveil welcomes visitors standing, up and down stairs, maintains an enviable physique. And it preserves the memory of those days.

Réveil was there, on June 12, 1944, when the Communist Resistance group to which he belonged shot the 47 German soldiers they had captured five days earlier in Tulle, the capital of the department of Corrèze, and a French woman accused of collaborationism. He was around 19 years old. He was a liaison officer in the Resistance and has explained that he did not participate in the shooting.

Now he has decided to speak. And it has illuminated an aspect of that war, of all wars: heroes, sometimes, can also commit atrocities.

"It was necessary to know," Réveil told EL PAÍS a few days after he made this unknown episode of the war in Corrèze known to the world in an interview with the local newspaper La Vie Corrézienne. "We were ashamed," he told the local newspaper. "We knew that we should not kill prisoners, although we were not subject to the Geneva Convention, because the Germans did not consider us soldiers."

Meymac is the closest thing to the image that a foreigner can make of the most picturesque France. The medieval church and tower, the Town Hall with the liberté, égalité, fraternité on the frontispiece, and a restaurant, Chez Françoise, which was a favorite of Jacques Chirac, a president who had his electoral fiefdom in Corrèze.

Leaving the village, the road parades through forests and passes under the viaduct on which, in early 1944, the guerrillas derailed a train carrying German weapons. History, its deeds and its dramas, hides behind every curve. Another road leads through a landscape of green hills and farms: somewhere, near the village of Le Vert, lie the remains of German soldiers.

The train derailed near Meymac, in 1944.

Where is the pit? Can it be visited? "Well, no," smiles the mayor of Meymac, Philippe Brugère. "We know where it stands with a margin of error of a few hundred meters, but we cannot say more, because we already know that there are grave looters waiting to know it to come. People have been seen with metal detectors..."

In 2019, Réveil first explained it at a meeting of the National Assembly of Former Combatants and, a few months later, in September 2020, Mayor Brugère and a group of fellow citizens recorded his testimony. But he hasn't revealed it in public until now.

"Some people knew it, but it was like family secrets, which are not told," says the mayor at a table in the Meymac bookshop-café, in the Plaza de la Iglesia. Why did Edmond Réveil speak? "Because he is old, because he knows that he is not eternal and because before leaving he wanted to relieve his conscience and, above all, to ensure that these soldiers have a place of memory, that the families know that their relatives were buried here."

Robert Gildea, professor at Oxford and author of Shadow Combatants. A new history of the French Resistance (Taurus, 2015), clarifies the context of that episode on the phone: "The period between the landing in Normandy, on June 6, 1944, and the liberation of Paris, at the end of August, was very volatile in France."

Fierce repression

Gildea explains that, in those weeks, many Resistance groups that, until then, had hidden in forests and mountains in France came out of hiding to attack the German occupiers. The repression, the historian adds, was fierce. For every German killed, if the occupiers did not find the suspect, they unleashed repression against the population.

Context is fundamental to understanding executions in Meymac. Two days earlier, the Das Reich division of the Waffen-SS had perpetrated one of the worst massacres of civilians of the war, 643, in Oradour-sur-Glane, just over an hour's drive from Meymac. The Nazis had just hanged 99 men in the streets of Tulle.

A few days earlier, a Resistance group had raided the Girls' Normal School in Tulle, which served as a barracks for the Wehrmacht, the German army, and had taken dozens of prisoners. They were taken to the bush, in the direction of Meymac. But there was a problem. What to do with them? How to feed them? How to prevent them from escaping and revealing the location of the guerrillas?

"Every time they went to piss, you had to accompany them," says Edmond Réveil in the 2020 recording. "We didn't want to kill them, but we couldn't keep them either: we had to find a solution."

The approximate place where the 47 German soldiers were executed, a few kilometers from Meymac.Samuel Aranda

Someone gave the order to kill them and the leader of the group, who answered by the nickname Hannibal and, being Alsatian, was fluent in German, "spoke to each one," recalls Réveil. He continues: "He cried like a child. It's not fun to shoot someone." He later says: "No one wanted to kill the French woman. They drew lots." He adds: "They dug the holes themselves."

"It is obvious that killing unarmed civilians was against the laws of war," says historian Gildea. "But it is also true that what the Germans were doing with collective reprisals was also against the laws of war."

Gildea recalls that, although the execution of the prisoners in Meymac may be shocking, in France thousands of collaborators were shot at the end of the war and women suspected of having had relations with the occupier suffered humiliating reprisals with the shaving to zero in the public thoroughfare.

Referring to Edmond Réveil's revelations, the author of Shadow Fighters states: "If you have a way of looking at the world where all the resisters were heroes and all the Germans, Nazis and barbarians, this is the kind of story that doesn't fit and is shocking, and people don't know what to do with it."

In a few weeks, at the end of June, work will begin to locate the mass grave with radar. If found, the remains can be recovered and identified. If the families claim them, they will be repatriated to Germany to be buried with dignity.

War veterans carry a French flag during the funeral of a neighbor who participated in the Algerian War, Friday in Meymac.Samuel Aranda

A young man wears war medals during the funeral of the war veteran, in the town of Meymac.Samuel Aranda

Veterans of different wars carry flags during a tribute in Tulle, this Saturday, National Day of Resistance in France. Samuel Aranda

Aerial view of Tulle, the place where the German soldiers who were later executed in Meymac in 1944 were captured on Saturday. Samuel Aranda

Monument to the fallen soldiers in World War II in the town of Meymac.Samuel Aranda

"I hope we can find them, but we are not sure," says Xavier Kompa, director in Corrèze of the National Office for Former Combatants and War Victims, which is preparing the location and exhumation work with the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the German association in charge of the burials of the fallen on battlefields abroad. "Not knowing is terrible for a family," adds Kompa, whose uncle, a resistance fighter in Lorraine, disappeared at the hands of the SS. "I put myself in the place of German families, who would like to hear from their ancestors."

In the living room of his house in Meymac, Edmond Réveil tells that, after the Resistance, he joined the First Army of General De Lattre de Tassigny, which participated in the liberation of France, and reached the German city of Stuttgart. He was a railway worker by profession, and proudly explains that in the seventies he held the position of deputy chief of the Austerlitz station in Paris, where trains from Spain arrived.

But there is a memory of the maquis that he has not forgotten: that of the Spanish Republicans who in 1939 went into exile in France, guerrillas who arrived with experience on the battlefield and who joined the Resistance. "Against the Germans," he says, "they were formidable."

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