D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [88]
Schimpf was given the remnants of the 352nd Infanterie-Division which had escaped from the Omaha front. He wanted to push forward into the forest along with the reconnaissance battalion of the 17th SS Panzergrenadiers, but his corps commander, Generalleutnant Meindl, refused. He told Schimpf to organize a front, but it was no more than ‘a mere line of combat outposts’, with his flak battalion as the only anti-tank defence. In fact, the order to hold back had come from Seventh Army headquarters, which felt that Schimpf had ‘insufficient forces’ and that they were ‘poorly trained for attacks’. The strength of the division ‘rested in defence’. But Schimpf was still convinced that ‘if the Americans at that time had launched an energetic attack from the Forêt de Cerisy, Saint-Lô would have fallen’.
General Mahlmann’s 353rd Infanterie-Division had even less motorized transport. His most mobile units were two battalions on bicycles designated the Radfahrbeweglichemarschgruppe (the Mobile Bicycle March Group). The rest of the division, following on foot, was delayed by Resistance attacks which inflicted a number of casualties, including a severely wounded company commander. The Germans also suffered from Allied air attacks, forcing them to hide in barns and orchards during daylight hours. Another divisional commander described these approach marches as a ‘nocturnal game of hide-and-seek’. The journey, which cost the 353rd a tenth of its strength, took them eleven days.
Most notorious of all movements to the Normandy front was that of the 2nd SS Panzer-Division Das Reich. Its commander, SS-Brigadeführer Heinz Lammerding, had been chief of staff to the infamous Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who would soon be brought in to destroy the Warsaw uprising. The Das Reich Division revelled in its brutality. It had taken part in Partisanenkrieg in the Soviet Union and the mass murder of Jews with Einsatzgruppe B in the region around Minsk. When they moved from the eastern front to the area of Toulouse in April, its officers saw no reason why they should behave any differently. On 21 May, in the Lot, they had massacred fifteen people, including several women, as reprisals for some shots fired at one of their detachments. On the same day, all the males in another village were deported to Germany.
Inspired by Allied messages and de Gaulle’s broadcast, the over-hasty rising of the Resistance in many parts of France alarmed all German commanders, not just the SS. Many saw it as ‘the initiation of a Communist revolution’. There was an element of truth in this view. On 7 June, the Communist-led FTP took over Tulle, the departmental capital of Corrèze, and inflicted 122 casualties on the Germans, shooting a number of their prisoners and mutilating some corpses of the forty dead. Nothing could have been better calculated to provoke a violent reaction from the Waffen-SS.
On 8 June, the Das Reich began its long journey north from Montauban. Some of its units reached Tulle the following day. They hanged ninety-nine citizens of the town from trees in the streets. Another 200 were deported to Germany. On 10 June, the 3rd Company of the division’s Führer Regiment surrounded the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, fourteen miles north-east of Limoges. Its officers and soldiers shot the male inhabitants and herded the women and children into the church, which they set on fire. The village also was burned to the ground. Altogether, 642 people died in this massacre. Some of the victims were not even locals, but refugee children from Paris and passengers from a train halted nearby. None of them were members of the Resistance.
The SS had even chosen the wrong Oradour. The company commander, whose death they were avenging, had in fact been killed in Oradour-sur-Vayres,