A search is underway in central France for the remains of 47 German soldiers and one French woman who were shot dead by members of the French Resistance during World War II in a mass execution that went largely unknown for nearly 80 years.
French and German authorities this week began looking for signs of a mass grave in the small town of Meymac, around 500 kilometres south of Paris in the department of Corrèze.
The soldiers and local woman, who was accused of collaborating with the Nazis, were killed there in June 1944. But their deaths only became common knowledge last month, when a former Resistance fighter told the media what he witnessed.
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.
"It had to be made known; it's a historical fact," Réveil told the regional France 3 TV station. "I'm glad it's no longer a secret today."
Under occupation
Codenamed "Papillon" (Butterfly), Réveil was a member of the local branch of the FTP ("Francs-Tireurs et Partisans") armed group that resisted the Nazi forces occupying France during World War II.
In early June 1944, shortly after the Allies' D-Day landings in northern France, he and other Resistance fighters attacked German soldiers in the central town of Tulle, killing several of them and taking around 50 prisoner.
Nazi forces retaliated by publicly hanging 99 men and sending 149 to a concentration camp, where most died. A few days later, the same SS division would massacre 643 people around 100 kilometres away in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, the worst mass killing of civilians in France in all of World War II.
Réveil's group was 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 recalls.
After four days on the move, Réveil says, 47 Nazi prisoners remained – one having been shot while trying to escape and others who came from Poland and Czechoslovakia having been transferred to another Resistance group.
There was also a French woman of around 20 years old. Réveil did not know her name, but she was accused of being a collaborator.
The partisans received orders from the overall commander of the French Resistance forces, Marie-Pierre Kœnig, to execute the prisoners, according to Réveil.
He remembers the head of his division, who came from the border region of Alsace and spoke German, crying as he told the prisoners one by one.
Decades of silence
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.
The bodies were covered with quicklime, says Réveil, who recalls the summer heat and the smell of blood.
"We never spoke of it again," he told France 3. "It remained a secret."
The partisans knew they didn't have the right to execute prisoners, he 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.
"He was the last witness. It was a burden to him," the mayor of Meymac, Philippe Brugère, told the BBC. "He knew that if he didn't speak out, no one would ever know."
An open secret
But historian Nathalie Sage-Pranchère, the daughter of another Resistance fighter from the same region, disputes that version of events.
She points to an account given by the commander of Réveil's division in the 1970s in which he described offering the Nazi prisoners a choice between fighting for the Resistance or being shot.
"It was a local decision," Sage-Pranchère said in an interview with France 3, adding that presenting the story out of context risked sullying the memory of the Resistance.
Meanwhile local residents told the channel the executions have been an open secret around Meymac for decades.
Local authorities in fact first searched for the remains in 1967, though without announcing it publicly or keeping official records. Eleven bodies were found and subsequently reburied in the German military cemetery established the same year in Berneuil, western France.
'History is not fixed'
The latest investigation was launched earlier this year, with France's national veterans office working with the German War Graves Commission to lead the search.
"The goal is to help the families of these soldiers find them and learn what happened to them," said Xavier Kompa of the Corrèze branch of the veterans office, who is hopeful that the remains can be identified from dog tags, uniforms and DNA.
Using ground-penetrating radar, specialists spent four days this week scanning the area where witnesses indicated the prisoners were buried.
The results will be analysed in Germany and used to identify where to begin digging. Further searches are expected to be carried out over the summer, including the possible exhumation of any remains found.
If the bodies are retrieved, Germany's War Graves Commission will decide where they should be reburied.
France is obliged by law to return the remains of war victims, Kompa said. There is also a bigger reason to uncover the story, he added: "History is not fixed. This work will help to shed light on certain events that are little known or unknown altogether."
