2023-08-24 16:31:14
During the excavations to find the bodies of German soldiers killed on August 12, 1944 by resistance fighters, in Meymac (Corrèze), August 16, 2023. PASCAL LACHENAUD / AFP
The clearing of the heights of Meymac (Corrèze) did not speak. The exhumation campaign undertaken from August 16 to 24 by the National Office for Combatants and War Victims and the German Volksbund Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK) did not make it possible to find the remains of the forty or so German soldiers shot on June 12, 1944.
Taken prisoner by the resistant Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) during the attack on Tulle, on June 8 and 9, 1944, these soldiers had been brought to this site, on the edge of the Millevaches plateau, after the resumption of the prefecture of Corrèze by the sinister SS Das Reich division. The repression had been particularly atrocious with 99 hangings and 160 deportations of civilians in Tulle, and 643 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne) burned in the village church the next day.
Also read the investigation: Article reserved for our subscribers The secret of Meymac, a village in search of the bodies of German soldiers executed in 1944
Hunted by the German columns, the maquisards had received the order to eliminate their prisoners before dispersing. Forty-seven were shot, as well as a French woman, after digging a grave, not far from the hamlet of Le Vert. Forgotten from the collective memory but known to some historians, this fact was recalled, in 2019, on the occasion of the general assembly of Meymac veterans, by Edmond Réveil, 95, former FTP and last witness to this execution. . “The families of these guys have the right to know what happened to them”he dropped after delivering his testimony.
The case went up to the competent authorities, French and German, and we learned for the occasion that a first excavation, in this sector, in 1967 or 1969, had already made it possible to exhume eleven remains of soldiers. Quickly closed, this research, undertaken by the VDK, does not appear in any French archive. Relaunched following the revelations of Edmond Réveil, corroborated by the testimony of André Nirelli, a kid in the 1960s, who had seen the excavation site, new research was decided.
Waiting for “new elements”
A ground-penetrating radar was used, in June, to delimit an area of 45 meters by 10 meters, in this landscape now wooded, but formerly made up of moors. Undertaken by a Franco-German team of eighteen people, equipped with two mini-diggers, the exhumation campaign did not allow the remains to be found in this area prohibited to the public. In a press release, the prefecture of Corrèze stresses that “the search perimeter was widened by integrating a large adjacent wooded plot, which had not been explored by ground-penetrating radar (…). In this plot, several artefacts were found over ten square meters: twenty bullets and casings of French, German, American and Swiss weapons… These elements show the presence of a resistance group in this place in 1944. (…). The surveys carried out around the place of discovery of these objects did not make it possible to identify any human remains”.
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