Can the end justify the means even when those means are wholly evil? Leaving aside moral, philosophical, and theological quibbles, can one look at wholesale murder from the perspective of getting something done and call it wrong simply on the basis of logic?
Yes, you can. Take the actions of a German SS armored division who, in order to cow rebellious French civilians en route to Normandy in June 1944, committed two massacres and numerous atrocities to gain a clear road to the front line.
This they did, proving in an immediate way the efficacy of terror as a tool of war, but also the limitations of same, for reasons explained by Max Hastings in this 1981 account of the division’s bloody march.
Of course, after it was all over, and the victorious Allies were left to ponder the public hanging of 99 males at Tulle and 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane, those brought to face justice explained they had just been following orders. Indeed they were.
On June 8, 1944, as French Resistance fighters, or maquis, harassed German forces moving along roads toward the Allied landings at Normandy, a communique went out from the German high command:
In those areas partly infested, it is necessary to use intimidatory measures against the inhabitants. It is necessary to break the spirit of the population by making examples. It is essential to deprive them of all will to assist the maquis and meet their needs…
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| “Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came… They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead.” The classic 1973 BBC-TV documentary "The World At War" opens with these chilling words and images of Oradour-sur-Glane (above) as it stands today, in ruins. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oradour-sur-Glane-Streets-1290.jpg |
Prior to this, German forces in France had targeted Resistance guerrillas and drew a distinction with the general French population, many of whom were truly neutral or even loyal to the collaborationist Vichy government. That all changed with D-Day. Stakes got higher.
Add to this situation the 2nd SS Panzer Division, known by the name “Das Reich,” battle-tested and -hardened on the Eastern Front where prisoners and civilians alike were customarily slaughtered. The stage was set for wholesale atrocity.
Hastings’s tone is painfully neutral, presenting the facts in a dispassionate way and leaving judgment to the reader.
Occasionally this leads to some strange commentary: “The young leaders of the SS had been educated and trained to believe that only one principle mattered – the interests of Germany as they themselves and their commanders saw fit to interpret them. They did not spurn morality or justice or process of law – they were simply forgotten or unknown concepts to them.”
Back in logic class, they called that “distinction without a difference.”
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| German troops take cover from air attack. In the case of the 2nd SS Panzer, roadside attacks came not only from the sky, but the ground as well, as they journeyed 450 miles from Montauban to Normandy. Image from https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/delaying-das-reich.html?chrome=1 |
Researching the book less than 40 years after, Hastings interviewed several members of the 2nd SS Panzer, access for whom he thanks David Irving in his Acknowledgments. That is a big red flag for anyone who knows of Irving’s later work as a Holocaust denier, but Das Reich is no whitewash.
Hastings in fact largely dismisses out of hand post-hoc justifications given for the massacres of Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane, blaming German officers and men enraged on sight by civilians along the roadsides. Hastings memorably describes how one Das Reich convoy rolled into a French town just before Tulle with a dead maquisard mounted on a hood. They wanted to send a clear message, and did.
“I felt outraged that we had been diverted from the battle in Normandy to deal with this nonsense,” noted Major Heinrich Wulf, whose 2nd SS Panzer reconnaissance battalion was first to arrive at Tulle.
Tulle had just been liberated by elements of the FTP, or Francs Tireurs et Partisans, a confederation of communist-aligned Resistance fighters who did most of the fighting in the days before and just after D-Day. The other main Resistance group, armée secrete, or AS, was aligned with the Free French led by Charles de Gaulle. No less committed to liberation, AS was also concerned, Hastings writes, about coordinating with Operation Overlord as well as avoiding civilian reprisals. They limited their attacks during and just after D-Day to sabotaging rail lines and roadways.
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| French Resistance forces greet British liberators at the village of Quillebeuf, August 1944. Their zeal often undercut their effectiveness. Hastings writes: "Very few résistants understood fire discipline – wasting
ammunition is a chronic vice of guerrillas." Image from https://historyofyesterday.com/the-french-resistance-during-world-war-ii-78061d27f081 |
Tulle was quickly recaptured by the 2nd SS Panzer, who were already racking up quite a body count. While surviving FTP fighters withdrew, the Germans ordered all men of the town between 16 and 60 to assemble in the city center. Then 120 of them were selected to be lynched from lamp posts as an example to the rest of the town.
Hastings writes:
The essential difficulty facing the Germans was that among all the men in the courtyard, only two were indeed maquisards. Among all the remainder, there was not even a shred of evidence to implicate them as accomplices of the FTP.
It didn’t matter, of course. The Germans would later claim the killings were justified by the murders of some 40 German prisoners in Tulle before the panzers came, but Hastings makes clear most of the German deaths came during combat, not after.
In contrast to Oradour-sur-Glane, the Tulle massacre was almost civilized. Those executed were given Last Rites and a chance to say good-bye to loved ones, while church and civil leaders were allowed to make pleas for mercy. Eventually after 99 were killed, the executions were halted. The rest were either let go or shipped off to Dachau, a concentration camp, where 101 more died.
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| According to Hastings, an SS officer sketched this depiction of Tulle civilians being hung on lampposts and balconies. After this, Resistance attacks on other German-held communities ground down. "Painful though it may be for humanitarians to accept, a policy of
unlimited repression can be formidably effective," Hastings observes. Image from https://www.oradour.info/images/tulle/tulle06.htm |
General Heinz Lammerding, commander of the 2nd SS Panzer, would later deny responsibility or even knowledge of events at Tulle, though it was certainly in keeping with his words in the days leading up to it:
“Without determined and ruthless action the situation in this area will develop until a threat exists whose proportions have not yet been recognized.”
Supplying that threat was the business at hand at Tulle, and even more clearly at Oradour-sur-Glane.
At Oradour-sur-Glane, the motive was personal. A senior officer of the 2nd SS Panzer, Helmut Kämpfe, had rashly driven off ahead of his troops and got captured by partisans. According to Hastings, when word of Kämpfe’s death by elements of the FTP located near Oradour-sur-Glane got to his friend, battalion commander Adolf Dickmann (or “Diekmann,” as Wikipedia has it), a decision was made to punish the town’s inhabitants, either for what they knew or were suspected of knowing.
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| A class of schoolboys in Oradour-sur-Glane. Every one of them would meet their death on June 10, 1944. "The SS heaped straw and chairs upon the bodies of the dead and wounded, fired it, and finally departed," Hastings writes. Image from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/a-class-of-boys-from-the-school-in-oradour-france?parent=en%2F11405 |
The book is very vague on actual motive, with Hastings indicating that Kämpfe’s fate was not known at the time, or indeed as of Das Reich’s publication. Reading up on the massacre on Wikipedia indicates Dickmann indeed found his friend’s body, left in a burned ambulance. [How this got connected to Oradour-sur-Glane is not explained in what I read.]
Hastings actually floats a theory that the town may have been confused with another Oradour, or else was traduced by collaborationist French police for some malicious purpose. He notes Oradour-sur-Glane was no FTP hotbed but fairly neutral territory, with Vichy elements that included the parish priest. “Insofar as life in France in June 1944 could anywhere be declared to be normal, in Oradour it was so,” he writes.
But Oradour-sur-Glane had what Dickmann wanted: defenseless victims. In a matter of hours, people found in and around the small village were herded into groups. Many were shot on the streets, while women and children were herded into a church to be burnt to death.
Hastings pieces together survivor accounts in describing the scene:
As the roar of gunfire echoed ceaselessly through the coach house, the air filled with choking brick dust, fragments from the ricochets, and wounded men’s screams for their wives, mothers and children.
The 2nd SS lingered long enough to shoot most of the wounded and those playing dead, then moved on, without further trouble from the Resistance. Only a handful escaped. The lesson had been learned.
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| How the massacre went down. According to Hastings, the killing began around 3 that afternoon and was well over by nightfall. After the murdering was done, the 2nd SS Panzer looted the village's bicycles for their journey to the front. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre |
But here is where the sting would come for the German war machine, and perhaps a bit of light shed in the direction of history’s arc bending upward: All the time the Das Reich division spent on burning and slaughtering the helpless was time they were delayed from opposing the Allied forces in Normandy. Hastings explains:
Perhaps the greatest contribution that Resistance made to D-Day was now to goad the Germans into deploying against the maquis forces out of all proportion to the real threat that they represented.
Beyond a general vagueness in structure, Das Reich has flaws. Much of the book is taken up by the actions of British intelligence officers and SAS troops who worked to hold up the 2nd SS Armored but played no role in the events at Tulle or Oradour-sur-Glane. There are a lot of episodes and personalities described at length which falls far afield of both the massacres and the German unit which perpetuated them.
I just wanted to know more about why the Das Reich
did what it did, and how its survivors (Dickmann died weeks later at Normandy
while facing a possible court-martial) explained their actions. Hastings’s fact-first
agenda is understandable, but I found the way he writes about it rather distrait
and a mite bit cold, even if the result is commendably dispassionate.
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