Voices from the Dark Years Read Online Free Page B

banked the proceeds. Charged initially with twenty-seven murders, of which he admitted nineteen, he eventually confessed to having killed sixty-three people in this way and was found guilty on 132 of 135 indictments. Sentenced to death, he called across the courtroom to his wife, ‘Avenge me!’ He was guillotined on 25 May 1946. 6
    Louis Petitjean was arrested by his colleagues in February 1944 for helping refugees and escaping Allied aircrew and other Resistance activities. He was unable to obtain his release until May 1945, even though the superior officer who had him arrested was himself sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour after the Liberation. Reinstated in the RG, Petitjean lost fifteen months’ seniority and pension rights for the time spent in jail. 7
    Police-Gestapo co-operation , according to an interview Knochen gave to Historia magazine in 1972, was crucial after the Wehrmacht’s refusal to round up Jews because the task would otherwise have been impossible. Around 30,000 police worked directly for the German security organisations: in Marseille, 1,000 French supported a German staff of fifty; in St-Étienne there were 344 French for only ten Germans.
    Pierre Pucheu was displaced by Laval’s return to power in April 1942 and slipped through Spain to North Africa, hoping to change sides. Arrested in Casablanca on 11 August 1943, he was condemned to death by a military court and shot near Algiers on 20 March 1944.
    Louis Renault surrendered himself in ill health to a judge on 23 September 1944 and was jailed at Fresnes. Beaten up during the night of 4 October by communist detainees, he died in hospital on 24 October 1944 from head injuries. In 1945 de Gaulle nationalised the Renault company. Not until 1967 were the family shareholders compensated. In contrast, the company Sainrapt et Brice was permitted to keep as legitimate earnings profits of 360 million francs from construction contracts for the Wehrmacht. 8
    Heinz Röthke , who had declared that even a baby born in Drancy must be gassed in Auschwitz because it was a ‘future terrorist’, died peacefully in 1968 in Wolfsburg, where he had a legal practice.
    SS Division Das Reich: Of the hangings in Tulle, in which they participated , SS officer Wulf and Sargeant Hoff had ‘no recollection’ at their trial in July 1951. Sentenced to ten years and life respectively, they were freed the following year. Lieutenantt Schmald, who had made the selection of those to hang, was shot by the Maquis in August 1944, muttering, ‘Ich hatte Befehl’ (‘I was ordered to do it’). 9
    The killers of Oradour were tried – some of them – by the Haut Tribunal Permanent des Forces Armées sitting in Bordeaux from 13 January to 12 March 1953. Strangely, General Lammerding was not extradited to give evidence, although known to be practising as a civil engineer in the British Zone of Germany. Forty-three men were condemned to death in absentia, most of them having been killed during the subsequent fighting in Normandy. In the dock were seven Germans and fourteen Alsatians – one volunteer and thirteen conscripts. Whether for political reasons – Alsace had been German in 1944 but was part of France in 1953 – or for diplomatic reasons with the Cold War at its height, or because of a need to cover up the alleged Maquis atrocities, the sentences were not exemplary. The senior German accused was sentenced to death; four others were given forced labour of ten to twelve years; one was acquitted. The Alsatian volunteer was also sentenced to death; nine of the conscripts were given five to twelve years’ hard labour; the other four received five to eight years’ hard labour.
    In the Limousin, the sentences were considered outrageously inadequate, yet in Alsace there was public indignation that the malgré-nous conscripts should be sentenced at all for obeying German orders, no matter what they had done. Since the accused had spent eight years in custody, the Alsatian