The tragedy of the Guerry's wells designates the massacre of 36 Jews during the summer of 1944 in Savigny-en-Septaine in France. It is located at 47°02′07″N02°31′26″E / 47.03528°N 2.52389°E . [1]
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The tragedy of the Guerry's wells designates the massacre of 36 Jews during the summer of 1944 in Savigny-en-Septaine in France. It is located at 47°02′07″N02°31′26″E / 47.03528°N 2.52389°E . [1]
On July 21, 1944, men from the French milice led by Joseph Lécussan, and the Gestapo arrested 70 Jewish refugees.[ where? ] Most of them were from Alsace-Lorraine, but had managed to hide in Saint-Amand-Montrond and its surroundings since autumn of 1939. They lived there for five years in relative safety. On a farm, 36 persons were thrown in three different wells along with some stones in order to crush them alive. The victims were men and women aged from 16 to 85. [2]
Only one man, Charles Krameisen, [3] managed to survive and to crawl back alive from the well. After the Liberation, his testimony allowed the site of the massacre and the bodies of the victims to be found, on October 18, 1944.
The event can be seen as an example among hundreds which bear witness to the atrocity of the Jewish genocide undertaken by the Nazis in France with the help of French militias. [4] [5]
One of those responsible for the massacre was Pierre Paoli, a French agent of the SD of Bourges, acting under the orders of Friedrich Merdsche; he was condemned to death and executed in 1946. [6]
In 1992, a monument to commemorate the atrocity was made by Georges Jeanclos, who himself had hidden for one year in a forest to escape the Gestapo. His uncle Pierre Jeankelowitsch (number 18) and aunt Fanny Jeankelowitsch (number 29 on the list) were amongst the victims of the tragedy of Guerry. [7]
In 2013, tributes to the victims were held with a commemoration. [8] [9]
On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France was destroyed when 643 civilians, including non-combatant men, women, and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company as collective punishment for Resistance activity in the area including the capture and subsequent execution of a close friend of Waffen-SS Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, who an informant incorrectly claimed had been burned alive in front of an audience. Kämpfe was a commander in the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich.
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The Sétif and Guelma massacre was a series of attacks by French colonial authorities and pied-noir European settler militias on Algerian civilians in 1945 around the market town of Sétif, west of Constantine, in French Algeria. In response to French police firing on demonstrators at a protest on 8 May 1945, native Algerians rioted in the town. Others attacked French settlers (colons) in the surrounding countryside, resulting in 102 deaths. The French colonial authorities and European settlers retaliated by killing an estimated 6,000 to 45,000 Muslims in the region.
Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet was a French historian who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 1969.
Events from the year 1944 in France.
Pierre Marie Jeanne Alexandre Thérèse Guiraud better known as Alexandre Guiraud was a French poet, dramatic author and novelist.
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Couvonges is a commune in the Meuse department in Grand Est in north-eastern France.
The Carlingue were French auxiliaries who worked for the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst and Geheime Feldpolizei during the German occupation of France in the Second World War.
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Pierre-Marie Paoli, also known as Lamote, was a French agent in the Gestapo. The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe.
Claude Rodier was a physicist, teacher and staff sergeant in the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR), part of the French Resistance in Auvergne, France.
Madeleine Michelis was a French teacher and a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War.
SS Panzergrenadier Brigade 51 was a short-lived Waffen-SS unit formed in June 1944 from SS Kampfgruppen 3. Although designated as panzergrenadier the unit was only equipped with wheeled vehicles. The SS Main Office ordered it redesignated as the 27th SS Panzer Division on 10 August, but this was strictly notional. It played a minor role in the Battle of France before it was merged into the 38th SS Panzergrenadier-Regiment of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen on 8 August.
Yvette Henriette Lévy is a French educator and survivor of the Holocaust. In July 1944, she was arrested by the Gestapo and was eventually sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. She survived and now educates youths about her experiences. Lévy is a Commander of the National Order of Merit and Officer of the Legion of Honour.
Christian Biet was a French professor of theatrical studies. His main work focused on the aesthetics of theatre.
Georges Jeanclos was a French sculptor, and ceramic artist working mostly with terracotta, but also bronze. He is known for his sculptures of human figures made of and covered with thin sheets of clay, some bearing Hebrew letters.
Convoy n° 77 of July 31, 1944 was the last large convoy of Jews deported from the Drancy internment camp to the Bobigny train station for the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Elise-Claire Dubost, better known as Clara Knecht or sometimes Klara Knecht, was a French Alsatian secretary and translator, employed during World War II at the Gestapo headquarters in Tours during the German occupation in France. She is known to have carried out cruel and sadistic interrogations using torture on behalf of the Gestapo.