Forty-seven soldiers were shot dead and secretly buried shortly after D-Day, a veteran says. The story was hidden for decades.
Shortly after D-Day during World War II, French resistance fighters took 47 captured German soldiers to a small wooded area in southwest-central France. In the scorching heat, they forced the soldiers to dig their own graves, shot them dead one by one and buried the bodies, covering the remains with quicklime, according to a witness.
The story of the mass execution was concealed from the public for decades, a stain on the heralded resistance movement, until the last-surviving witness broke his silence to a few people — and then revealed it to a global audience in interviews published in recent days.
“We were ashamed,” the witness, Edmond Réveil, who is now 98 and was part of the resistance group, told the French newspaper La Vie Corrézienne. “We knew that we should not kill prisoners.”