New searches to find the remains of around thirty German soldiers, executed by French resistance fighters in June 1944, according to the account of one of them, began Monday in Meymac, in Corrèze, 14 months after unsuccessful excavations .
On June 12, 1944, a group of 46 Wehrmacht soldiers and a French woman suspected of collaboration were allegedly executed by Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP), of communist persuasion, a few days after the Nazi massacres of Tulle and Oradour -sur-Glane, according to the late testimony of a surviving member, Edmond Réveil, aged 18 at the time.
On the basis of this publicized testimony in the spring of 2023, a team of archaeologists explored for ten days, and without success, a wooded hill in the town of Meymac the following summer, almost 60 years after the first secret excavations organized in the end of the 1960s, which allowed the exhumation of 11 bodies.
New searches began on Monday nearby, in an area of 3.5 hectares, where, according to Mr. Réveil, there is a pit in which the bodies were buried at the time.
This area, examined with georadar and metal detectors, was also located by two witnesses to the unfinished excavations of the 1960s – the exact date remains unknown to this day -, a farmer from the town, then a child, and a former soldier , on leave in the region at the time.
More “the survey was interrupted due to heavy rain, the georadar vehicle having sunk in the mud”said Diane Tempel-Bornett, spokesperson for the VDK, the German organization responsible for maintaining German war graves.
Mardi, “if the weather conditions do not permit it and the vehicle cannot travel, it will be necessary to carry out manual prospecting”she added, specifying that the work should continue until Thursday.
Archaeological excavations will then be launched in the event of matching clues collected by these analysis tools, indicated the authorities on site.
This new campaign is led by the National Office for Veterans and War Victims (ONACVG) in conjunction with the VDK.
“These testimonies are all we have left. The VDK, which finances this operation, once again wanted to try. This will be the last operation carried out. If it’s not there, it could be absolutely everywhere.”specified the prefect of Corrèze, Étienne Desplanques.
The 46 soldiers had been taken prisoner by the Resistance in Corrèze on June 7 and 8, 1944, and executed shortly after the massacres committed by the SS Das Reich Division in Tulle on June 9 (99 civilians hanged, and 101 killed during deportation) and in Oradour-sur Glane (Haute-Vienne) on June 10 (643 inhabitants machine-gunned and burned in barns and the village church).
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