2023-05-17 16:47:00
Edmond Revey was silent for almost eight decades. Today, the Frenchman is 98 years old and he is the last witness to the execution of Wehrmacht soldiers in June 1944. Only now Edmond Revey decided to tell about what had happened. Until now, almost no one knew about it. From the point of view of experts, apparently, we are talking about an alleged war crime that took place a few days after the bloody tragedy in the city of Tulle and the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France in June 1944. As a result of the punitive operation, the Nazis killed hundreds of civilians there.
What is known about what happened
In the story described by Edmond Revey, the alleged perpetrators of the war crime are French resistance fighters. Judging by the latest data, on June 12, 1944, in a wooded area near the village of Meimak in the French region of Limousin, they shot 47 Wehrmacht soldiers and a French woman suspected of collaborating.
Edmond Revey, then 19 years old, was part of a group of Resistance fighters that captured a large group of German soldiers in Tulle. They took the captives to a hard-to-reach forest area. “We didn’t know what to do with them,” Revey recalls in an interview with La Montagne. “We got orders to shoot them.” Each had to kill one of the Germans. Since no one wanted to shoot the woman, lots were cast. “We made them all dig their own grave. Then they poured lime into it. It smelled of blood,” recalls Edmond Revey. “And then we never talked about it again.”
After the partisan attack in the city of Tulle, the CC command carried out a punitive operation, during which 99 civilians were hanged. A day later, the Nazis carried out another act of retribution – in the village of Oradour-sur-Glan, located a hundred kilometers away. A company of SS troops brutally killed 643 villagers, including women and children, and the settlement itself was completely destroyed.
At this time, the partisans from Tulle retreated with their prisoners. Probably, information about the massacres reached them. Speaking about the reasons for the execution of prisoners by partisans, the Belgian historian Bruno Cartoiser, who studied the circumstances of this execution of German soldiers near Meimak, names, among other things, the problem with their maintenance. “No one was prepared for this amount of prisoners,” Kartoiser said. Potsdam-based historian Peter Lieb agrees: “The resistance often didn’t know what to do with the prisoners… It’s definitely a war crime.” According to Lieb’s research, at the end of the summer of 1944, French Resistance fighters shot a total of 350 German soldiers, including in Viege and Le Rousse in the west of the country.
There were especially many shots at Meimak, while the Allies had landed in Normandy only a few days earlier. But the fact that the witnesses were silent about this event does not surprise historians. “I wanted the incident, literally and figuratively, to be overgrown with grass,” says Lieb in an interview with German media.
Search for a mass grave
But now the last witness broke the silence. Frenchman Edmond Revey feels guilty. “It was wrong to kill POWs,” the 98-year-old admits. He decided to tell about this story so that the descendants of the executed would know about what had happened.
“France is obligated to hand over the remains,” said Xavier Compat, head of the local veterans’ organization. The French authorities are planning in the coming weeks to start searching for a mass grave in order to bury the remains of the dead. In 1967, excavations were already underway, during which the remains of eleven soldiers were found. But then the time for understanding this story, apparently, has not yet come. “There is no trace of this event in our archives,” Maymack Mayor Philippe Bruger said.
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