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FRENCH HISTORY

France starts search for executed German WWII soldiers

A search began in France on Tuesday for the remains of dozens of German soldiers said to have been executed by French Resistance fighters during World War II.

France starts search for executed German WWII soldiers
Police officers walk past the presumed site where the remains of 47 German soldiers and a French woman accused of collaboration, executed in June 1944 by the local resistance, in Meymac western France. Photo by PASCAL LACHENAUD / AFP

Coming 79 years after the alleged killings, the search was sparked by statements from a 98-year-old former resistance fighter, Edmond Reveil, who has gone public with the allegation in recent years.

Reveil was part of a commando that he said took 46 German soldiers they had captured, as well as a French woman suspected of collaborating with the Nazi occupiers, to a wooded hillside on June 12th, 1944, and shot them dead.

The reason for the killings, in the southwestern Corrèze region, was that the members of the local resistance group, made up of around 30 militia and communist partisans, were too few to guard the prisoners, Reveil told AFP.

“If we had let the Germans go, they would have destroyed Meymac,” the nearby town, he said.

He had previously told the local newspaper La Vie Correzienne: “We felt ashamed, but did we have a choice?”

The handful of people who knew about the incident mostly kept quiet over the decades, though historians told AFP that it was sometimes mentioned in private.

A dig was even started in the 1960s to shed light on the affair, but was quickly stopped, “perhaps because of pressure”, said Meymac’s mayor Philippe Brugere, who added that he had been unable to find any record of that search in the town archives.

A fresh investigation was launched when Reveil began to talk publicly about the incident in 2019, and started giving media interviews.

Brugere called the search for the truth “honourable”, saying it was necessary for people to “look at history with honesty”.

But the resistance veteran association Maquis de Corrèze deplored the “media buzz” sparked by the revelations, which it said could become a “pretext for sullying the memory of the Resistance”.

Reveil, who has not given his reasons for speaking out after so many years, said he recalled each of the German soldiers “taking out his wallet to look at a family picture before dying”.

After the killings the shooters were “told not to talk about this”, he said. “It was a war crime,” he added.

But local historian Herve Dupuy said a better term for the executions was “a fact of war”, given that the German occupiers did not treat the French resistance fighters as combatants under the Geneva Convention, but as “terrorists”.

France capitulated to Germany in June 1940 and was governed as Vichy France, a German client state, until 1942, when the country was taken over completely.

The French Resistance, formed by groups of various political leanings, continued to fight against German forces and the Vichy collaboration.

The movement led a guerrilla war against Germans and supplied the Allies with intelligence, crucially ahead of the Normandy landings in June 1944.

Its precise impact on the outcome of the war is still the subject of debate among historians, as is the extent of French collaboration with Nazi Germany.

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FRENCH HISTORY

WWII vet to marry in French town after D-Day commemorations

Hundred-year-old World War II veteran Harold Terens will marry his 96-year-old fiancee Saturday in the French town of Carentan-les-Marais, just days after being honoured on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings that took place a few kilometres away.

WWII vet to marry in French town after D-Day commemorations

Terens’s 11:00 am (0900 GMT) wedding to Jeanne Swerlin will be followed by a celebration “with his loved ones, in a small group”, said Sarah Pasquier, the town hall’s representative for D-Day commemorations.

“We are very honoured that Mr. Terens has chosen to get married here, in Carentan, where in June 1944 the meeting of Allied troops from the landings at Utah and Omaha beaches took place,” Mayor Jean-Pierre Lhonneur told AFP.

“We will offer him champagne, of course, but also a gift to thank him for having participated in the liberation of France.”

After the ceremony, “depending on his possible fatigue”, Terens may join in a parade of veterans in the centre of Carentan during the afternoon, according to Pasquier.

A liberation ball will be also be held in the evening as part of the D-Day commemorations, she said, with attendees “invited to dress in the 1940s theme, and solders from the nearby American base welcome”.

“But Mr. Terens and his wife may be to tired to join,” she added.

READ ALSO: VIDEO: British D-Day paratroopers face post-Brexit checks in Normandy field

Terens, who lives with Swerlin in Boca Raton, Florida, was awarded the French Legion of Honour by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019.

After the war Terens married his first wife, Thelma, with whom he spent 70 years and raised three children until her death in 2018.

In 2021, a friend introduced him to Swerlin, a charismatic woman who had also been widowed, and the two have been inseparable practically ever since.

“She lights up my life, she makes everything beautiful,” Terens told AFP in an interview last month in Florida. “She makes life worth living.”

In the same interview, Swerlin said her fiancee was “an unbelievable guy”.

“He’s handsome — and he’s a good kisser.”

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