It was Aug. 25, 1944, and France was celebrating the liberation of Paris from the Nazis. But for one small village in the Loire valley, the date conjures up memories not of joy, but of horror.
Retreating Nazi troops massacred 124 of Maille’s 500 residents on that day 64 years ago, then razed the town, possibly in retaliation for Resistance action in the region, local archives indicate.
Forty-four children were among the victims. The youngest was just four months old.
The massacre has long been overshadowed by the triumph that day in Paris. Now, a German investigation is drawing new attention to the forgotten chapter of history.
Dortmund prosecutor Ulrich Maass began a three-day visit to Maille on Tuesday to interview survivors and dig through archives as part of a probe into the killings.
“I am ashamed about what the Germans did here, and I apologize,” Maass told reporters and townspeople in Maille.
Mauricette Garnier, who was nine at the time of the atrocity, recalled that when residents heard gunfire that day, many initially thought it was part of the celebrations as news traveled from Paris about the liberation. Nazi troops killed her mother and two brothers that day.
“I saw them slit the throat of my 20-month old brother, and kill my mother at close range,” she said. “I will never forgive. This inquiry comes much too late.”
A Nazi officer, Gustav Schlueter, was convicted in absentia for his role in the killings by a military court in Bordeaux in 1952.
Maass, who has been investigating the case since 2004, said Schlueter died at his home in Germany in 1965. Other soldiers’ roles remain unclear.
Philippe Varin, the prosecutor in the nearby city of Tours, said Maass and a police superintendent from Stuttgart would have help from French police as they try to identify Nazi units and any individuals with a role in the massacre.
He called Maass’ arrival an “exceptional event” and said it was “the first time a German judicial delegation has come on French soil to carry out investigations into war crimes.”
Any suspects in the Maille case could be charged with murder — the only World War II-era crime on which the statute of limitations has not elapsed in Germany.
Townspeople have long said retaliation was the motive for the attack, and Maass said that was his main hypothesis. Claude Daumin, who was 10 at the time, said the event that triggered the massacre was the killing of an SS officer and his driver by Resistance fighters.
“For 64 years, everybody knows what happened — these were reprisals,” he said. “And they are saying so only now. It doesn’t do any good.”
The massacre in Maille was the second-worst atrocity in occupied France, after the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, which killed 642 men, women and children. The killings there came only four days after the D-Day landings in Normandy.
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