Excavations will soon begin to recover the bodies of up to 40 German soldiers executed by the French Resistance in June 1944. The move comes after a former Resistance fighter, one of the few survivors, broke eight decades of silence and told how the Germans were shot in a forest near Maymac in central France, the BBC reported, citing news.ro

Edmond Revay, 98, is the last surviving member of the local branch of the FTP (Francs et Tireurs Partisans) resistance movement and personally witnessed the mass execution at a place called Le Verre.

In recorded testimony, Revey described how his squad of 30 soldiers was escorting German prisoners into the countryside east of Thule when the order came to kill them. The unit commander, codenamed Hannibal, “wept like a baby when he got the order. But there was discipline in Opor,” Revay said.

“He asked for volunteers to carry out the order. Each fighter had someone to kill. But there were some of us – and I was among them – who said they would not take part,” says Edmond Revay.

“It was a terribly hot day. We made them dig their own graves. They were killed and we poured quicklime over them. I remember the smell of blood. We didn’t talk about it anymore,” said a former member of the French resistance.

DISCLOSURE BLOCKED BY COVID

Revel, whose wartime code name was Papillon (Butterfly), kept the secret for 75 years, even from his family. Then suddenly, in 2019, he stood up at the end of a local meeting of the National Veterans Association and announced that he had something to say.

Maymac mayor Philippe Bruger told the BBC that a burden had been lifted from Reveille’s head. “He had many opportunities to tell the story over the years, but he never did. But he was the last witness. It was a burden for him. He knew that if he didn’t talk, no one would ever find out,” the mayor explained.

But before the local authorities could take action, Covid hit and only a few weeks ago the case was reopened and the story appeared on Tuesday in the local newspaper La Montagne.

French and German historians confirmed the sequence of events described by Revel.

WHAT HAPPENED IN JUNE 1944

Shortly after D-Day, on June 6, 1944, Resistance fighters staged a mutiny of sorts in Tuile, the capital of the Corrèze department, during which 50 to 60 German soldiers were taken prisoner.

However, on June 9, the Germans responded by publicly hanging 99 hostages.

In addition, not far from this place, on June 10, the SS division Das Reich killed 643 people in the village of Oradour-sur-Glans, which has since remained an empty monument.

Revel took part in the uprising in Thule and then joined the escort group heading east. “None of the Resistance groups wanted anything to do with (the prisoners). We didn’t know what to do with them,” he recalled.

Once, some of the prisoners – those who came from countries such as Poland or Czechoslovakia – were separated from the rest of the prisoners. And there remained about 50 of them who arrived in Maymak on June 12.

“If a prisoner wanted to pee, two of us had to guard him. We had nothing to eat. We were under the orders of the Allied command center in Saint-Fréjus, and they were the ones who gave the order to kill them,” said the former Resistance fighter.

THEY WANT TO KILL HER

Among the prisoners was a French woman who collaborated with the Gestapo. None of the Resistance fighters wanted to shoot her, so they drew lots and eventually killed her, Revey said.

Officials from the German War Graves Commission (VDK) are expected in Meimak in the coming weeks. Their first task is to use ground-penetrating radar to determine the exact location of the graves.

Local historians claimed that 11 German bodies were exhumed from Le Vert in 1967, but the excavations were halted and no records were kept of the exact location of the excavations. Due to its sensitivity, the operation was shrouded in secrecy. However, a local resident who was a child in 1967 recalls seeing the excavation and gave an estimate of where the graves of the approximately 40 remaining soldiers might be.

Although he was not directly involved in the killings, Revay, who later became a railroad worker, now wants the fallen soldiers to be remembered and their families told where they lie. And perhaps a small memorial should be erected at that place.