June is a month of commemorations in France. It began with D-Day ceremonies, re-enactments and parades on and near the Normandy beaches where the Allies made their first landings on June 6, 1944.
This year, June 18th marked the 75th anniversary of General de Gaulle’s call to the French nation. On that date in 1940, in a recording studio at the BBC in London, he dared predict a French victory over the Nazis only one day after Marshal Pétain, vice premier of France at the time, called for an armistice with Germany and accepted French defeat.
On that same date 200 years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte lost the battle of Waterloo, an event that is commemorated, though certainly not celebrated, in France. Instead, it is the man himself who is everywhere in the news, celebrated as general, emperor, reformer, brilliant strategist, but also presented as a tyrant who terrorized Europe.
Those are the big events and there is probably not a Frenchman alive who has not heard of Napoleon or de Gaulle.
Few, however, remember the Tulle murders, 99 hangings that took place on the afternoon of June 9, 1944. I myself had never heard of this event until, as for the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp I wrote about last month, I saw a commemorative ceremony on the evening news.
On June 9th, President François Hollande went to Tulle to pay homage to the 99 men hanged because, on June 8, 1944, they briefly but successfully chased German occupation forces from their city. On the day following the attack, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich arrived on the scene to brutally retaliate.
Tulle is a small city located in southwest France. In 1944, its population was about 16,000. Today, it is closer to 12,000. The town sits in a valley surrounded by mountains, and through its center flows the Corrèze River. If the name is familiar to readers, it may be because of the lightweight netting used to produce bridal veils and ballerina’s tutus named after the town where it is still made.
In 1944, French resistance fighters affiliated with the French Communist Party were active in the city and the region. The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich had been sent there in part to regroup after heavy losses on the Eastern Front, in part to wipe out resistance fighters, known as “maquisards” in French because they are associated with the “maquis,” an isolated area thick with brush, difficult to penetrate.
As the Allies landed in Normandy, German forces in southwest France were busy perpetrating the same measures of terror they had used against local populations in the East. Their mission was to encircle and destroy resistance fighters, suspected sympathizers and any civilians who got in their way.
On June 10, 1944, one day after the hangings in Tulle, a detachment of the 2nd SS Panzer Division destroyed an entire village on the outskirts of Limoges, another city of southwest France. Throughout all the years of the war, inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane had almost never come in contact with German soldiers and the village was not known for harboring resistance fighters. Yet all the men were gunned down, and the women and children were set on fire in the village church, 642 in all.
In Tulle, the Germans sought to destroy the Resistance. In the successful attack against occupation forces lead by the FTP (Franc Tireurs et Partisans, civilian soldiers and partisans), 40 German soldiers were killed.
The following day, posters put up throughout Tulle announced, “Forty German soldiers were abominably killed by members of a Communist group. For its members and those who helped them, there can only be one punishment: death by hanging. Forty German soldiers were killed; 120 fighters or their accomplices will be hanged and their bodies thrown into the river.”
On the day leading up to the hangings, thousands of men were assembled and a selection process began. Local French officials were later accused of turning over resistant fighters to the Germans, but the final selection was made by the Germans themselves.
At about four in the afternoon on June 9th the hangings began. The men were lead by groups of ten to a main street of Tulle, where a waiting noose was hanging from each tree, street lamp, and balcony. German soldiers volunteered to be the hangmen of the 99 men killed that afternoon. Other soldiers looked on, seated at the terrace of a café where they drank fine French wine and listened to music on a phonograph.
For some reason, at the end of the day of June 9, 1944, only 99 of the 120 men had been hanged. German soldiers boasted they were used to this kind of killing; they had hanged thousands in Russia. But in France, where the guillotine was used for the last time in 1977 and the death penalty abolished in 1981, hanging was not part of the justice system and its use inflicted on victims a symbolic exclusion from the community.
On the day of the hangings, except for the sound of a phonograph, all was silence. This atmosphere of terror and death made me think of other hangings, those that took place in the Schuylkill and Carbon County jails in 1877. I am referring to the Molly Maguires.
I had always imagined those executions taking place in winter beneath a cold, gray sky heavy with snow. When I opened The Kingdom of Coal by Dennis L. Miller and Richard E. Sharpless, one of my favorite books about the coal region, to search for the date, I discovered those ten men went to the gallows on the first day of summer, June 21, 1877.
In the year and a half that followed, ten more Irishmen were hanged. Though there are still debate and controversy about the activities and the goals of the Molly Maguires, few would dispute the unfairness of the trials that lead to these men’s deaths.
In June rosebushes are heavy with blooms and in Paris, the air has the delicious scent of linden flowers. It is a lovely time of year. Yet it is also a month where history calls us to vigilance as it recalls the destructive powers of hatred and war.
