2023-08-11 06:45:00
It’s a month of August that has nothing of the ordinary languor in this rural town of 2,500 souls. In Meymac, in the heart of Haute-Corrèze, the new chapter – and potential acme – will open in a few days in a story that, since May, has kept the whole town in suspense. “What an adventure and what an investigation! says Xavier Kompa, director of ONAC (National Office for Veterans) in the department.
Four months ago and after eighty years of silence, Edmond Réveil, a 98-year-old former resistance fighter, lifted the veil on the darkest secret of the inner resistance movement of the FTP (francs-tireurs et partisans) of the city: the summary execution, on June 12, 1944, of forty-seven Wehrmacht soldiers and a young French woman member of the Gestapo. “No resistance group could keep them, we ourselves didn’t know what to do with them…” then confided to the Point the former maquisard.
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A rare testimony, welcomed differently by the population to come and shake up the memorial story of this high place of the French Resistance, formerly bruised by German repression. Mobilizing, with great strides, authorities in France and across the Rhine, he launched, on June 27, a search operation placed under the aegis of ONAC and VDK (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge), association for the maintenance of German graves created after the war.
“Convincing” results
Passed through a fine-toothed comb with high-tech georadar, the perimeter (3,000 m²) indicated by the former resistant and corroborated by the eyewitness of a first exhumation undertaken at the end of the 1960s thus revealed, perhaps, its first secrets. . “The results of this soil analysis campaign seem convincing,” announced soberly, on July 19, the prefect of Corrèze, Étienne Desplanques.
“A change in the density of the soil has been observed over a rectangular area 45 meters long and 10 meters wide, which may correspond to a pit,” the statement said, officially paving the way for the continuation of the investigation. “Excavations are now necessary to verify whether or not this area contains wanted remains. »
READ ALSOThe ideological scenes of the Normandy landings “That would be good news,” says the Point Philippe Brugère, the mayor of Meymac, where the municipal registers did not even mention the event. “For the families of these soldiers, who could find an ancestor, as for Edmond Réveil, who would not have testified for nothing. ” And, concerned that these excavations do not add to the trouble, to add: ” For the links between France and Germany, too, which carry out these operations serenely and without the desire to rewrite history. »
An enthusiasm shared by Xavier Kompa, of Onac, who remembers this near-coup de theater, putting the nerves of the protagonists to the test. “An hour before the VDK interrupted the search, we received a message from the German authorities informing us that they had found data in their archives indicating that the grave was on a plot on which we had not carried out any excavation … »
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If the earth seems “to have been turned over”, suggesting “a modification of the structure of the soil”, the signals detected then analyzed by the georadars of the VDK “can only be confirmed by shovels and pickaxes…” thus recalls Alexandre de Bordelius, French delegate of the VDK, at the maneuver.
An “intense and meticulous” operation
No less than twenty anthropologists and archaeologists, from France and Germany, will converge in mid-August on the place called Le Vert, in Meymac. It is there, explains Xavier Kompa, in this grove surrounded by larches and Douglas fir trees, that “for about ten days, at the rate of twelve hours a day”, they will work in search of the bodies. “An intense and meticulous operation”, which could open a new chapter in the revelations of Edmond Réveil. READ ALSO Excerpts from the “Love Dictionary of the Resistance”
Taken to the Institute of Anthropology in Marseille, the remains – buried, according to his statements, with military booklets and license plates – would then be the subject of identification work. So, “finally, [les soldats] would be buried in dignified conditions,” says Alexandre de Bordelius. At the German military cemetery in Berneuil (Charente-Maritime) or, if the relatives so wished, “in the family vault or their town of origin”.
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