WW2HANGAR.NET

As France prepares to mark the 70th anniversary next week of Charles de Gaulle’s call to arms against the Nazis, one village is trying to forget the darker side of the wartime resistance.

After furious protests, Coussay-les-Bois, in the rolling green farmland of Poitou, has decided it is too early to allow a German man to put up a memorial to his father and 16 other Wehrmacht prisoners who were executed there in September 1944.

The quarrel testifies to lingering bitterness over the Nazi occupation in a part of France that suffered multiple atrocities, and to a reluctance to touch the heroic image of the young insurgents who fought them.

“If they put a plaque there, it will be smashed within a day,” said Jean Herault, who was a 16-year-old fighter in the bloody summer of 1944. Mr Herault, a retired blacksmith, recalled the day in June that year when the Germans took 120 villagers to roadside ditches and prepared to shoot them in reprisal for an attack from the Maquis underground movement.

They were spared after the intervention of a priest, but Mr Herault was forced to watch later that evening as three of his young comrades were executed. One was 17.

They are commemorated at a memorial to the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) but no-one wants to be reminded of the night of September 9 when the German prisoners were machine-gunned against the school wall.

Officially, the massacre never happened. It figures in no histories, only in local memory. It came to light because of the dogged effort by Rudolph Greuel, 67, to find out what happened to his father, a sergeant-major with a Wehrmacht construction battalion. Mr Greuel, a former editor of the Kolnische Rundschau newspaper, unearthed the truth with the help of a German survivor and a French journalist.

Andreas Greuel was an unusually old 47 when he fled the coastal defences at St Malo, riding bicycles and horses ahead of the advancing Allies. A French SAS unit parachuted in from Britain captured his group as it crossed Poitou, still behind German lines.

The Maquis at Coussay put the men to work in the fields for a few days before tying them up and taking them to the village to be shot. Local women persuaded “Lieutenant Pierre”, the maquisard in charge, to spare a few of them. The 17 bodies were dumped in unmarked graves and in 1961 were reburied in a German cemetery at Mont Saint Michel. In 2003 the school wall which bore the impacts from the firing squad was demolished…

[click for full story]

In the 1930s the Maginot Line was viewed as a military marvel, an impregnable network of underground fortifications stretching along France’s border with Germany — from Belgium to Switzerland — designed to stop the Nazi onslaught and prevent a repeat of the bloody trench warfare of World War I.

But then in 1940, the Germans simply bypassed the vast, hugely expensive network of bastions, bunkers, tunnels and artillery batteries, and the Maginot Line turned into a metaphor for exaggerated military confidence resulting in disaster.

History buffs and military enthusiasts from around the world now come to tour some of the amazing subterranean forts which began reopening for visitors in the 1980s. Guided tours, including rides on electric trains that once ferried troops and ammunition from fort to fort through tunnel networks, are available from April to October.

Their massive concrete construction helped preserve the fortresses, which still stand guard along the frontier as though frozen in time. Visitors say the sites, often located in mountainous terrain far from urban centers and not marked on road signs, can be hard to find but are worth the effort.

“A lot of people have heard something about it, and they’re interested in finding out more, discovering what exactly was this thing called the Maginot Line,” said Armand Jacques, a guide at the fort of Schoenenbourg, located about 34 miles north of the French city of Strasbourg…

[click for full story]