On June 7, 1944, after heavy fighting, French Resistance fighters seized the town of Tulle, in the central Corrèze department of France. But on the evening of June 8, they had to retreat before the tanks of the SS Das Reich division, which, in retaliation, hanged 99 inhabitants and deported 149 (101 of whom did not return from the camps). The Resistance fighters took their Wehrmacht prisoners with them in their retreat.
After several days of wandering, 46 prisoners (and one French woman accused of collaboration) were executed outside of the village of Meymac and buried in mass graves. The story was well-known then, but forgotten with time – until a former Resistance fighter, Edmond Réveil, codename Papillon, revealed at a reunion of former Resistance fighters in 2019 that he was present during this tragic episode. Réveil, now an old man and the last survivor, couldn't see himself dying with this secret. "The families of these guys have a right to know what became of them," he explained.
The case was not made public until 2023. France's National Office for Veterans and Victims of War (ONACVG) and Germany's Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK), which is responsible for recovering the bodies of soldiers who died on the battlefield, decided to begin excavations in August to exhume the remains. Previously, in the 1960s, the VDK had discreetly unearthed 11 bodies in the area, which were buried with dignity in the German military cemetery at Berneuil. But in those post-war years, when the wounds were still raw, the VDK's excavations were abruptly halted in the face of hostility from former Resistance fighters.
New searches began in the summer of 2023, but turned up nothing, apart from a few remnants of ammunition. Work is planned to resume as soon as new elements make it possible to better locate the graves – the landscape has been changed much since 1944, because of reforestation. Réveil's confession was not all for nothing, though, as revealed in an article published in the local newspaper La Montagne on October 27. In Germany, a 58-year-old woman, Birgit Mertens, got wind of the story when the German press picked it up. She is the granddaughter of a soldier from the 8th Battalion of the Wehrmacht's 95th Security Regiment, Johannes Niewels, who was 39 at the time and stationed at Tulle. His wife Agatha waited for the rest of her life for his return, until she died in 1966, without ever finding out what had become of her husband.
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