On the horizon line are the Massif du Sancy and the Plomb du Cantal. Further north is the Millevaches plateau, as far as the eye can see. In the meadow just ahead, a large German army truck, a military tent erected and decorated with French and Federal Republic flags. Gendarmes guard the access to the Douglas pine forest which begins there. Restricted zone.
Two mini-diggers began to dig meticulously under the gaze of Marine Meucci, archaeo-anthropologist at the National Office for Combatants and War Victims (ONAC), and Thomas Schock, expert from the VDK, a German association responsible for finding, everywhere in the world, the bodies of soldiers who disappeared during conflicts. In all, 18 people will work here, until August 27 or 28, in search of 36 remains: 35 bodies of German soldiers and one of a French prisoner.
We are on the heights of Meymac, in Corrèze, where the services of the prefecture led, on this afternoon of Wednesday August 16, with a special bus, about forty national and international journalists, for the opening of the excavations of a site where some forty German prisoners were shot and buried on June 12, 1944, as told M The magazine of the WorldAugust 5.
Forgotten from the collective memory, this fact of war was consecutive to the 99 hanged of Tulle, to the 160 deportees of this city, to the 643 men, women and children burned alive in the church of Oradour-sur-Glane, to the quarantine of young Franc Tireurs Partisans (FTP) killed in Ussel… in the wake of the sinister SS Das Reich division. He reappeared at the end of 2019, during the traditional assembly of Meymac veterans. In telling it, Edmond Réveil, 95, the last witness to these events, a member of the FTP, wanted to free himself from a weight that he was now alone to carry.
The story went back to the director of the ONAC of Tulle, Xavier Kompa, who investigated this affair in connection with the VDK. A period of Covid-19 and further checks, a geo-radar survey campaign was launched this spring. A perimeter of 50 m by 25 m delimited and about forty felled trees.
“A bundle of clues”
A first campaign of excavations took place at the end of the 1960s and made it possible to exhume the remains of 11 soldiers then buried in the German cemetery of Verneuil, in the Charentes. The VDK report of the time is not very eloquent but indicates in its conclusion: “the mayor advised us not to continue”…
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