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After having remained silent for 79 years, it was during a meeting with the National Association of Veterans that Edmond Réveil revealed his secret: the execution of some forty German soldiers from the Wehrmacht and a Gestapo woman in June 44, by resistance fighters in Corrèze.
At 98, Edmond Réveil, a former resistance fighter, decided to speak out while he could still do so. In June 1944, aged 18, he witnessed the execution of German soldiers taken prisoner by his group of maquisards. “The world needs to know what happened. It’s a historical truth”he said. “The event is not glorious, because we do not have the right to kill prisoners”he adds.
Buried in a mass grave
The execution was ordered by the resistance fighters, while the German army was carrying out massacres in the region at Tulle (Corrèze) and Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne). “They gave the order to kill them, and the captain in command was crying when he told them. He spoke to them one by one, because he was Alsatian, he spoke German very well”, remembers Edmond Réveil. A mass grave was dug in the forest. German soldiers were hastily buried there. The Office of Veterans has announced the launch of research in the forest in order to offer a burial to the soldiers.
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