Scholars of Mayhem by Daniel C. Guiet & Timothy K. Smith

Author:Daniel C. Guiet & Timothy K. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

18

German soldiers came across Sturmbannführer Kämpfe’s abandoned car on the evening of June 9, about the time Jean Claude was listening to the Broadcast. Its front wheels were nosed off the road onto the grassy verge. A Schmeisser machine pistol without a clip lay on the ground. There was no blood or other sign of struggle.

When word of Kämpfe’s disappearance reached the Das Reich commanders at their billet in Limoges, they reacted with fury. They ordered roadblocks to be set up, and sent search parties to scour the countryside around the abandoned car throughout the night. SS soldiers stopped two farmers, questioned them, found that they had no information, shot them, and left their bodies in a roadside ditch.

Early the next morning, Saturday, June 10, two French collaborators approached Adolf Diekmann, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 4th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, with a rumor. Diekmann held the same rank as Kämpfe, Sturmbannführer, and was his close friend. The collaborators were members of the Milice, the French paramilitary force organized by the Vichy government to fight the Resistance. The Milice was generally considered more dangerous than the Gestapo, as its members had a similar enthusiasm for torture but were natives with local knowledge.

The two miliciens told Diekmann that they had heard that Kämpfe was being held by a band of maquisards near a village called Oradour-sur-Vayres, twenty-five miles to the west. The maquisards, they said, planned to execute him and burn his body publicly.

Diekmann roared out of Limoges with two half-tracks, eight trucks, and 120 SS soldiers, leading the way in a commandeered Citroën 2CV. The convoy drove to Oradour-sur-Glane, fourteen miles to the northwest. It isn’t clear why they went to the wrong village; it might have been simple confusion about the name. In any case, there is no evidence that Kämpfe was held by maquisards associated with either Oradour.

Oradour-sur-Glane was a pleasant little market town nestled among farms in the Haute-Vienne. Ordinarily it was home to about 330 people, but on this sunny Saturday its population was twice that, swollen by refugees—some Spaniards, some Jews, some city dwellers seeking a haven from bombers—and by local farmers making a weekend visit to buy supplies and collect their tobacco ration. Many were just finishing lunch when the Germans arrived, a little after 2:00 P.M.

Oradour-sur-Glane was such a placid backwater that even in 1944 it had a town crier. Diekmann gave orders for him to proceed through the streets, beating his drum, and summon everyone to the Champ de Foire, a little fairground at the center of the village, to have their identity papers checked. A few people fled, but nearly all complied. They had done nothing wrong, after all, and the village had no strategic value for the Germans.

The SS soldiers trained MG 42s on the crowd—machine guns with such a high rate of fire that they were nicknamed “Hitler’s buzz saw,” as the ear could not distinguish individual shots when they were fired. The soldiers separated the men from the women and children.

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