French and German experts have begun exhuming the remains of a group of Nazi soldiers who were executed by French Resistance fighters during World War II. They were buried in a mass grave that lay hidden for almost 80 years before it was uncovered last month.
Members of the Resistance shot dead 47 German soldiers in June 1944 near the small town of Meymac, around 500 kilometres south of Paris in the department of Corrèze.
A French woman who was accused of collaborating with the Nazis was also executed.
The mass killing went largely unknown for the next eight decades, until a former Resistance fighter told the media what he witnessed earlier this year.
Edmond Réveil, aged 18 at the time and 98 today, said that he wanted to speak out so that the bodies could be returned to their families.
His story prompted an official search for the remains, led by France's national veterans office in collaboration with the German War Graves Commission.
In June experts began hunting for the grave over a three-kilometre-square area, using radar scans and soil analyses to pinpoint the location.
On Wednesday, the process of exhuming the bodies began. It is expected to continue until the end of August.
The remains retrieved will first be taken to the city of Marseille for analysis, then handed over to Germany's War Graves Commission which will decide where they should be reburied.
Last witness
The mayor of Meymac, Philippe Brugère, told French news agency AFP that the aim was to take the soldiers "back to Germany and, above all, where possible, to their families".
The soldiers had been taken prisoner by local partisans fighting to resist the Nazi forces occupying France during World War II.
German troops had recently committed several atrocities in the area, including the infamous massacre of an entire village of civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane.
Réveil belonged to the Resistance group responsible for marching the prisoners east. But there was nowhere to keep them, no supplies to feed them and German troops still controlled most of the surrounding area, he said.
Speaking to reporters earlier this year, Réveil recounted that his group received orders from the commander of the French Resistance forces to execute the prisoners.
On 12 June 1944, the soldiers were made to dig their own graves in the woods near Meymac. Then the 30 or so Resistance fighters shot them – with the exception of Réveil and a couple of others who refused, he says. No one wanted to kill the woman, so the men drew lots.
"We never spoke of it again," he told France 3 television. "It remained a secret."
Local secret
The partisans knew they didn't have the right to execute prisoners, Réveil says, which led to a collective silence that lasted almost 80 years. He first spoke about the episode in 2019 at a meeting of local veterans, but it wasn't until he went to the media in May that it got wider attention.
Local residents later said that the killings have been an open secret around Meymac for decades.
Eleven bodies believed to belong to the soldiers were removed in 1967, when local authorities quietly conducted a search without keeping official records.
Those remains, which were never publicly identified, were reburied in the German military cemetery established the same year in Berneuil, western France.
