Pictured: A French memorial to the atrocity. It says, ‘In memory of Nazism’s victims — June 9, 1944 — 99 hostages were hanged on balconies and lampposts by the SS division Das Reich and one hundred forty‐nine were deported to death camps; one hundred one did not survive. Do not forget.’

Quoting Vincent dePaul Lupiano’s Massacre at Oradour‐sur‐Glane: Nazi Gold and the Murder of an Entire French Town by SS Division Das Reich, chapter 6:

The officers and most SS men from Das Reich were angry and frustrated as they moved out. They felt affronted and irritated for several reasons: They heard General Eisenhower’s earlier broadcast demanding full combat status for the résistants in arms. This was infuriating. They were not soldiers, they were a gaggle of bandits, terrorists who did not engage by the rules of warfare, and now Eisenhower had lifted them to the same shelf as soldiers.

So tenuous was the German Empire’s hold on Corrèze that an SS Panzer Aufklärungsabteilung, Wulf’s reconnaissance detachment, part of an Abteilung (battalion‐sized unit attached to Das Reich), had to lurch to the rescue of fellow SS troopers because of an annoying group of rag‐tag bandits. The Aufklärungsabteilung was the eyes and ears of Das Reich, their parent division. Now they had to stick their armored nose out, perhaps get bloodied, and make a dash to rescue their fellow Waffen‐SS troopers in the Tulle garrison from a band of half‐armed terrorists.

All felt this was not a division’s work and was below the dignity of the élite Das Reich and their acclaimed past. A squandering of men and equipment resources for a small cause, and more than likely, men would be killed. A specially trained squad should have undertaken this task, and Das Reich should be fighting at Normandy now in a struggle to defend Führer and Fatherland. But none of the men knew what they would see once they crossed the streets of Tulle. They had no idea how angered they would be once they saw the carnage inflicted by the terrorists.

[…]

Wulf already had a plan of attack in mind: approach from three points and seal off the entire town—and if innocent civilians were killed or wounded, so be it—and this was following Lammerding’s expressed orders stating that “the area was to be secured with all inhabitants and that any house used by the Résistance or its supporters, regardless of its owner, be burned to the ground. For every German wounded or killed, we will kill ten terrorists.”

Lammerding also emphasized that the main goal was separating the Résistance fighters from the rest of the French citizens and setting the public against them. However, it did not work out that way for the [Axis].

Sound familiar at all?

Although the local Résistance scored a victory against the Axis before June 8, it would not hold off our oppressors for long:

All night, 8–9 June, the SS patrolled the town, ensuring that it was sealed. […] At 10 a.m., while punishment for the “atrocities” was still being pondered, some three thousand bewildered Frenchmen of every age stood about in suffocating heat in the courtyard of the arms factory under the muzzles of fidgety troops and SS‐Schütze (SS Rifleman/stormtrooper) Sadi Schneid, an SS platoon leader. He ordered the town fire engine and crew to drive slowly through Tulle reading a proclamation.

As this antiquated machine moved slowly, the engine’s ringing bell drew the attention of the townspeople. The fire chief—who was in tears, according to Scheid—read aloud a brief [Axis] announcement in French:

Because of the indescribable murder of forty German soldiers by communist maquisards, the German authorities have decided that three Frenchmen will pay for each German killed, as an example to all France.

[…]

The executioners were chosen from among the Pioneer company. This turned out to be a challenge. Not many men wanted to hang people from lampposts; they felt it dishonorable for soldiers in the SS. They had to be reminded what these maquisards, these communists, had done to their fellow soldiers.

At around four that afternoon, detailed arrangements for the hangings began.

Then Schneid and twenty of his fellow Waffen‐SS men took to the street at the lower end of Tulle, close to the courtyard of the Giat arms factory—to better control the lives inside.

This was when the cruel tragedy unfolded that day in Tulle.

Before the hangings commenced, Schmald said, “We were almost all Rhine Catholics. We would very much have liked a priest to comfort us.” As soon as it became known that many of the four hundred prisoners would die by hanging, Herr Brenner, the German director of the factory, intervened. Some in the courtyard, he said, were key workers, almost irreplaceable. Could they not be excluded?

Twenty‐seven were released. Brenner said that now the difficulty was that two men in the courtyard were maquisards. Perplexed but persevering, Schmald arbitrarily chose fifty victims and asked Abbé Espinasse to address them. The priest said, “My friends, you are going to appear before God. There are Catholics among you, believers. Now is the time for commending your souls to the Father who will receive you. Make an act of contrition for all your sins, and I will give you absolution.”

The overall operation was led by SS‐Sturmbannführer Aurel Kowatsch, thirty, a large man, a former policeman before joining the SS. Witnesses claimed that Kowatsch taunted the condemned before their executions.

A squad of young Vichyite chantiers de la jeunesse was recruited to assist in the hangings. The Organisation des Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française (CJF) was a French paramilitary institution active from 1940 to 1944. Today at Tulle, they gathered ladders and ropes for the execution because the SS found that the cables on the SS vehicles were too heavy for the purpose.

The hangings themselves were carried out by a pioneer NCO from Saar, Germany, Staff Sergeant (SS‐Oberscharführer or Senior Squad Leader) Otto Hoff, thirty, who, later in the war, would be awarded the German Cross in Gold and was now attached to the 4. Regiment of Das Reich. “Because our wounded were so well‐treated,” Hoff told Prefect Trouillé, “we shall be merciful and not burn the town.”

The captives were walked to the first lamppost in the street—a hangman’s noose was already hanging, fastidiously and excitedly knotted by the SS and the enthusiastic chantiers de la jeunesse. Leaning against the lamppost, two ladders that the victims would be ordered to climb.

The prisoners did not need any explanation; they knew what this was about, that they were facing their deaths in an appalling manner of execution.

Each captive was escorted to a noose hanging from a lamppost. Since there were not enough lamp posts, ropes were hung from balconies.

After a while, looking down the street, lamppost after lamppost after lamppost and balcony after balcony after balcony had a body hanging, swaying, dead or about to be dead in the clammy air. Some of the SS laughed as they worked, but others found it disturbing and unacceptable. As the lampposts filled along the street and the nooses were knotted, the prisoners tentatively mounted the ladders until they reached the top.

Hoff adjusted the noose around their necks. Then he pushed the man off the ladder. With a kick from other SS boots at each of the lampposts, all the ladders were shoved away—in military unison. Most died instantly. Some twitched and spun, flailing their arms and legs. This irritated the SS, and they would run up to the victim and splatter him with a burst of machine gun fire.

Then, a moment of drama: one of the prisoners broke away, dashed for the bridge, and leaped on the rocky bed. An NCO emptied his Schmeisser, and the Frenchmen’s body drifted in the water until it was caught at the foot of the bridge, where it floated for some time.

One prisoner’s rope snapped, and he fell heavily onto the road, his neck broken. One of the [anticommunists] watched him twist and shake for an endless time, trying to breathe as he gazed into the man’s eyes, pondering for whatever reason. Then he shot him.

And so, it went. A routine was established.

It was a scene from Hades: a cloudy, humid, gray sky, bodies hanging and swaying and twisting down a mournful town of whimpering, crying, beseeching victims.

A few prisoners sobbed as they waited. Some went submissively, others screaming.

Others twisted and convulsed futilely for several minutes, striving for the last minutes of life. Occasionally, this would irritate [an anticommunist], and he would give the victim a shot from his Luger, a coup de grâce.

Some of the chantiers de la jeunesse found this amusing and twisted the hanging bodies or swung them back and forth. Some, half‐hanging and half‐standing on the ladders, broke off and ended their lives themselves.

The hangings began around 4 p.m. At 7, Schneid was ordered to the arms factory courtyard, take a count and report if there were more to come because “there would not be enough rope to continue.” He glanced over the three hundred remaining, terrified, and condemned. Ninety‐nine, by 7 p.m., had been hanged. The [Axis] decided that [that] was enough [for now].

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Requiescant in pace.