In the French department of Corrèze, research revives the painful memory of the Second World War. Following the revelations of a former maquisard, the French authorities wish to exhume the bodies of German soldiers executed at the Liberation in order to hand them over to Germany.
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The story begins in 2019. A 98-year-old former resistance fighter confides a secret of which he has become the sole holder. At the Liberation in 1944, his group of maquisards from Meymac, in Corrèze, killed 46 German soldiers and a woman accused of collaboration. The bodies were buried in mass graves.
These confessions were not made public at the time, but they triggered investigations. And since last June, an area of three square kilometers, designated by the former resistance fighter, has been the subject of research. They revealed a change in the density of the floors and the presence of metal objects in a small area where the bodies are buried.
This Wednesday, their exhumation will begin. They should then be transported to Marseilles to be examined there, before being returned to Germany in order to be buried with dignity. According to two veterans associations, this event was already known. It was indeed reported in some local history books.
Excavations of another mass grave nearby, carried out by the German services in 1967, had already made it possible to exhume eleven bodies, now buried in a German military cemetery located in Charente-Maritime.
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