Excavations to find the remains of around thirty German soldiers executed by resistance fighters in June 1944 should begin on Wednesday afternoon after the discovery of a possible grave near Meymac in the north of Corrèze.
On June 12, 1944, a group of 46 German soldiers and a French woman suspected of collaboration were executed on a wooded hill in this Corrèze town by a local group of Francs-tireurs et partisans, of communist allegiance, according to the testimony of one of its members, Edmond Réveil, 98 years old today.
First secret excavations in 1967
In mid-July, the prefecture announced that a soil analysis campaign had identified a possible “pit”. The new research must make it possible “to exhume the bodies of these German soldiers forgotten for eighty years in this place” and “to return them both to Germany but above all, perhaps, to their families”, explained the mayor of Meymac Philippe Brugère.
This operation, carried out under the aegis of the National Office for Veterans and War Victims (ONACVG), – with the technical support of the VDK, the German organization in charge of the maintenance of German war graves, should last until 27 august.
The first excavations took place secretly in 1967 to try to find the bodies of these 46 Wehrmacht soldiers taken prisoner by the Resistance in Corrèze on June 7 and 8, 1944 and executed shortly after the massacres committed by the SS Das Reich Division in Tulle. on June 9 (99 civilians hanged) and in Oradour-sur Glane (Haute-Vienne) on June 10 (643 inhabitants machine-gunned and burned in barns and the village church). Eleven bodies were then exhumed.