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BOOK SUMMARY

In an enthralling new historical novel from national bestselling author Kate Quinn, two women --- a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947 --- are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.

1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, the "Queen of Spies," who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads.

DISCUSION QUESTIONS

1. Female friendship is a constant theme throughout THE ALICE NETWORK. Charlie St. Clair and Eve Gardiner begin as antagonists, whereas Eve and Louise de Bettignies (Lili) are friends from the start. How does each friendship grow and change over the course of events?

2. The young Eve introduced in 1915 is very different from the older Eve seen through Charlie’s eyes in 1947. How and when did you see the young Eve begin to change into her older self? What was the catalyst of those changes?

3. Lili tells Eve, “To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring.” Did the realities of spy work surprise you, compared to the more glamorous version presented by Hollywood? How do you think you would have fared working for the historical Alice Network?

4. René Bordelon is denigrated by his peers as a war profiteer and an informer. He sees himself as a practical businessman, pointing out that he is not to blame for making money off the invaders, or for tragedies like Oradour-sur- Glane that happened on German orders. Did you see him as a villain or an opportunist? Do you think he earned his final fate?

5. Eve loves Captain Cameron and hates René Bordelon --- but her relationship with René is longer, darker and more complex. How is her hatred for him complicated by intimacy? How does his realization of Eve’s true identity change him? How do you think they continued to think and feel about each other during their 30 years’ separation, and how did that affect their eventual climax?

6. Finn Kilgore and Captain Cameron are parallels for each other: both Scotsmen and ex-soldiers with war wounds and prison terms in their pasts, acting as support systems for the women they love who go into danger. How are the two men different as well as alike? How does Finn succeed where Cameron fails?

7. The disappearance of Charlie’s cousin Rose Fournier provides the story’s driving search. Did her eventual fate surprise you? Had you ever heard of Oradour-sur- Glane? How did Rose’s fate change the goal of the search? 8. Everyone in THE ALICE NETWORK suffers some form of emotional damage from war: Charlie’s depression after losing her marine brother to suicide, Eve’s torture- induced nightmares, Finn’s concentration-camp memories and resulting anger issues, Cameron’s guilt over losing his recruits. How do they each cope with their war wounds? How do they help each other heal? How is PTSD handled in Eve’s day as compared to Charlie’s day --- and as compared to now?

9. Charlie dreads the stigma of being a “bad girl” pregnant out of wedlock, and Eve fears shame and dismissal as a horizontale if it is learned she slept with a source for information. Discuss the sexual double standards each woman faced. How have our sexual standards for women changed since 1915 and 1947?

10. Charlie decides to keep her baby, and Eve decides to have an abortion. Why did each woman make the choice she did?

11. Charlie argues that René should be brought to legal justice, and Eve argues for vigilante justice. Who do you think is right? How did it affect the ending? How do you think the outcome will bind Eve and Charlie and Finn in the future, since they cannot share their adventure with anyone else?

12. “There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women. The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions...even in evil.” The theme of the fleurs du mal carries from Lili to Eve. How does Eve pass it on to Charlie? When do you see Charlie becoming a fleur du mal in her own right? How has knowing Eve changed Charlie’s life, and vice versa?

AUTHOR INFO

Kate Quinn is a native of southern California. She attended Boston University, where she earned a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Classical Voice. A lifelong history buff, she has written three novels set in ancient Rome: Mistress of Rome, Daughters of Rome, and Empress of the Seven Hills.

Ms. Quin made the jump from ancient Rome to Renaissance Italy for her fourth and fifth novels, The Serpent and the Pearl and The Lion and the Rose, detailing the early years of the Borgia clan. She turned to the 20th century with The Alice Network and The Huntress. All have been translated into multiple languages. She was also a contributor to Ribbons of Scarlet: A Novel of the French Revolution’s Women.

The author has succumbed to the blogging bug and keeps a blog filled with trivia, pet peeves, and interesting facts about historical fiction. She and her husband now live in San Diego with two rescue dogs. Among her interests are opera, action movies, cooking, and baseball.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

June 06, 2017 Today, I have the pleasure to interview bestselling author, Kate Quinn. She is best known for The Empress of Rome Saga and The Borgia Chronicles. Her latest novel, The Alice Network, focuses on a WWI spy network made up of women. In this interview we discuss these unsung heroines, who risked their lives in WWI. Mrs. Quinn also gives us a hint about what she is working on next. I hope this interview will give you some insight into the history of The Alice Network. I have given a very good review of this book, and I hope you will take the opportunity to read it. Thank you, Mrs. Quinn!

What drew you to take a break from Ancient Rome and write about women in WW? I love ancient Rome, and I'd love to write more books about it someday, but I've never been a one-era writer. I've always had ideas for books in a wide array of historical periods, from ancient Rome clear through to World War I. When I saw the huge recent boom in popularity for 20th century war fiction, it made sense to revisit some of those old plot ideas, and see if anything grabbed my imagination. It certainly did!

It was fascinating that these women did not passively spend their time in WWI. They took a vital and dangerous role in the war effort. Why do you think their story is largely forgotten? In their day, women like Louise de Bettignies and were heroines, lionized and medalled and written about. A generation of girls grew up knowing their stories, and some were motivated by those stories to join the SOE and become spies themselves in the next world war. But such women--Pearl Witherington, Nancy Wake, others like them--eclipsed the female spies who came before them, just as World War I itself tends to be eclipsed in the national memory by World War II. Also, plain old sexism played a certain role in gradually forgetting women like Louise. During wartime women have always stepped into male-dominated fields--but after the war is over, they are asked to step back again. In my research I saw a palpable unease with the idea that women had been asked to participate in such a dishonorable business as spying. Far easier to laud the women who contributed to the war effort in more traditionally feminine roles like nursing.

The story of Mata Hari fascinates us today. However, why we do not hear more about these other female spies like Louise de Bettignies? Mata Hari became famous not because of her spy work, which is dubious, but because she was a beauty and an exotic dancer with some sexy photographs. She became more famous than her counterparts less because of what she did, than because "sexy female spy" is more of a draw than just "female spy." And I'm afraid the Madonna-whore double standard was alive and well in the intelligence business at the time; women in espionage were either cast as saintly patriots who worked for their country without ever compromising their virtue (Louise de Bettignies, Edith Cavell; both portrayed in propaganda as fragile paragons of martyred femininity) or they were sultry untrustworthy harlots who wormed secrets out of men with sex (Mata Hari, portrayed in propaganda as a devious sexpot). And since sex sells, Mata Hari is the one who ends up the most famous-- or notorious.

Are there any other women you found fascinating that deserves some recognition for their efforts? So many! Marthe Cnockaert, to whom the Germans awarded an Iron Cross for her work nursing German soldiers, never realizing she was spying on them at the same time. Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Russian female sniper in World War II who racked up 309 kills and met Eleanor Roosevelt. Elsie Inglis, a doctor in WWI who founded hospitals in France and Serbia, stayed with her patients when Germans took over her Serbian unit, and when threatened to sign a certificate stating that she had been well treated, looked the German commander in the eye and said "Make me.”

Was the research difficult to find unclassified material on The Alice Network? Not really. World War I is now more than 100 years in our past, so a lot of material is no longer under wraps. And there were some excellent first hand sources: Louise de Bettignies' surviving female lieutenant Leonie van Houtte (known in my book under her code name of Violette) went on in real life to marry a journalist after the war, and he wrote a memoir about her experiences as a spy. So I had first hand accounts for a good many of the scenes I had to dramatize!

Were there some facts that surprised about female spies? It's not a glamorous job. Movies might make you think spying is all couture gowns and cocktail parties and thrilling action, but the reality was boredom and danger; keeping your head down and trying not to be noticed as you gathered and passed intelligence. Spying took a particularly grueling kind of courage: not just nerving yourself up for one dangerous act, but setting yourself to do it over and over and over again, for months and possibly years as you tried to survive in a war zone.

What were the challenges for working for the Alice Network? If you were caught spying, you could be arrested, tried, sentenced to life in prison, or to death by firing squad--being a woman was no protection from the death penalty, as the executions of English nurse Edith Cavell and French spy Gabrielle Petit can testify. Even aside from the dangers of espionage, network spies faced the ordinary privations of life in a war zone. Shortage of food and fuel was dire in occupied France; French homes could be inspected at any time and anything from kitchen curtains to food stores requisitioned. Assault and rape were hovering threats, and curfews and restrictions made daily life miserable--even your clocks were turned to German time to remind you who was boss.

With the dangers these brave women faced, how do you think being a part of the Alice Network affected their lives after the war? Do you think they were stressed as much as a male combat soldier? PTSD has existed as long as there have been wars, whether there was an acknowledged name for it or not. Spies might have faced a different kind of combat from the kind soldiers faced in the trenches, but their fight was surely still wearing on the nerves. I'm sure the women of the Alice Network had their own struggles when they returned to ordinary civilian life--I attempted to show that with my heroine Eve, who in the years after the war struggles visibly with alcoholism, nightmares, and flash-backs.

Ultimately, what would you like for the readers to take from The Alice Network? These women defied every rule they were born under, and fought for their countries with extraordinary courage, intelligence, and toughness. They deserved to be remembered--and emulated!

What are you working on now? Will you revisit WWI? I'd like to revisit WWI someday, but at the moment I'm working on another dual timeline story focused more around World War II. Tentatively titled "Darkroom," [The Huntress]it involves a hunt for Nazi war criminals in post-war America, and the incredible true story of the female Russian bomber pilots known as the Night Witches...

http://www.historywomanperspective.com/2017/06/interview-with-kate-quinn.html

RESISTANCE TO THE FIRST GERMAN OCCUPATION

Louise de Bettignies, the Alice Network and Léon Trulin

The word "resistant" was a Second World War term and not used during the Great War, instead the older term "spy" was applied to any person rebelling against the occupying forces in the years 1914–1918.

For the most part the Allies were looking for specific information about the German Army and this led them to recruiting agents in the occupied zones who would be in a position to gather and transmit such intelligence. Folkestone was chosen for an Allied intelligence bureau under the command of a British officer, Major Cecil Aylmer-Cameron. The Folkestone Bureau received information from the French and Belgian intelligence agencies; however it was not until March 1918, when General Foch was named supreme commander of the Allied Army, that it became solely responsible for coordinating Allied intelligence. Most of the communication between the occupied territories and the areas under Allied control took the form of messages carried by pigeon, their interception at various times during the war causing the destruction of several networks. The Folkestone Bureau supervised two spy rings outside the United Kingdom, one in Rotterdam, in the neutral Netherlands, and the other in the French town of Montreuil-sur- Mer, close to the front.

It was in Saint-Omer, until 1916 the British Army's headquarters under General French, that the intelligence service first contacted a young woman from the department of : Louise de Bettignies. Since the beginning of the occupation she had been distributing letters from people in German-controlled to their compatriots in free France. Louise de Bettignies was born in Saint-Amand-les-Eaux in 1880 to an aristocratic family which had fallen on hard times. After completing her studies at she found work as a governess to several wealthy families in various European countries. She was a modern young Frenchwoman who spoke English, German and Italian fluently and could get by in Russian, Czech and Spanish. In the first few months of the war she left Lille, her home until the German Army took over the town, and came to Saint-Omer as a refugee where she helped care for the wounded. France's intelligence agency, the Deuxième Bureau, was the first to approach her but she eventually decided to join the British Intelligence Service and left for England where she underwent intensive training in using codes, drawing plans, gathering information and sending messages. She also adopted the pseudonym Alice Dubois.

Louise de Bettignies was subsequently smuggled into where she was given a cover job in a Dutch cereal company in the town of Flushing. Her mission was to identify troop movements in the region of Lille, the German Army's principal logistics hub on that part of the Western Front. By the spring of 1915 the "Alice Network" involved eighty men and women of all social classes. They watched trains, identified the positions of gun batteries, munitions depots and the dwellings of officers, and helped evacuate Allied soldiers to the Netherlands. The network was aided by a Belgian national called De Geyter, the owner of a chemical factory in Mouscron, who forged their documents. Couriers were used to convey the gathered information as quickly as possible to the Netherlands. The eighty-strong personnel of the Alice Network were based in and around the towns of Lille, and . Most of them worked for the railways and the postal service, but candidates could be people who travelled for a living or were used to keeping secrets, such as doctors and priests. In the spring of 1915 she enlisted the help of Marie-Léonie Vanhoutte, code-named "Charlotte Lameron", who by the summer had helped her expand the network's activity to the region around the towns of , Valenciennes and Saint-Quentin.

From the outset of hostilities the German Army meted out brutal punishments to anyone involved in intelligence activities and by the end of the war, in the department of Nord alone, twenty-one people had been executed and many more had been given prison terms and sentenced to forced labour.

One of the most celebrated victims of the occupier's wrath was a young student by the name of Léon Trulin who had set up a small intelligence network called Léon 143 to pass information to the Alice Network. He was executed on 8 November 1915 in front of Lille's citadel, at the age of eighteen. Born in the Belgian town of Ath on 2 June 1899, Léon Trulin moved to La Madeleine-lez-Lille with his family in 1902. In the first weeks of the Great War, just after the German invasion of France, Trulin escaped to England where he tried to enlist in the Belgian Army but was refused because of his age. He then approached the British and they suggested he return to the occupied territories to set up an intelligence organization, which he did. Trulin developed the organization over the first few months of 1915, with the help of a group of young men––Raymond Derain (18), Marcel Gotti (15), André Herman (18), Marcel Lemaire (17) and Lucien Deswaf (18)–– and carried the documents himself to the Netherlands. It was on one such run that he was arrested, in the night of 3 October 1915 near Antwerp, his wallet containing several reports, photographs and plans relating to German military installations. He was sentenced to death for spying in September 1919. Léon Trulin was posthumously awarded the British War Medal and on 30 January 1920 he was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.

Crossing the Belgian-Dutch border every week to send her reports to the British, Louise de Bettignies eventually came to the attention of the German counter- intelligence service which successfully trapped her on 20 October 1915 in Froyennes, near . Held at Saint-Gilles Prison in , Bettignies was sentenced to death on 19 March 1916; however at the time of her sentencing an international campaign was in full swing to protest against the execution, also in Brussels, of the British nurse Edith Cavell and the Belgian resistant Gabrielle Petit. Bending to the pressure the governor of Belgium, General von Bissing, reduced her sentence to forced labour for life and on 21 April 1916 she was sent to Sieburg Prison. But her fame and reputation were rapidly growing in France and Great Britain and, on the eve of her transfer to Sieburg, General Joffre commended her actions in an official dispatch of the French Army.

She was held in dreadful conditions, which worsened after she was discovered inciting her co-detainees to stop working for their captors, and she soon fell ill with pleurisy. She was subsequently transferred to Sainte-Marie Hospital in Cologne where she died on 27 September 1918 for want of proper medical care. Her body was transported to Lille in March 1920 and given a state funeral. Her final burial place was in her native town of Saint-Amand-les-Eaux. The wooden cross used by the Germans to mark her first grave in Cologne has been on display in the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette since 1994.

Various monuments in Lille commemorate the "resistants" of the Great War: - statue of Louise de Bettignies, boulevard Carnot, - statue of Léon Trulin, on the street which bears his name, close to Lille Opera, - monument to the executed leaders of the Lille Resistance, at the entrance to the esplanade of the citadel.

Yves LE MANER, Director of La Coupole, History and Remembrance Centre of Northern France http://www.remembrancetrails-northernfrance.com/history/the-department- of-nord-and-the-coal-basin-under-german-occupation/resistance-to-the-first- german-occupation.html

ORADOUR-SUR-GLANE

Oradour-sur-Glane was a small farming village of around 350 inhabitants, located near Clermont-Ferrand, some 15 miles west-north-west of Limoges. During World War II, it was located in the German-occupied zone of France. On June 10, 1944, troops of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division (armored division), Das Reich, massacred 642 people, almost the entire population, and then destroyed the village. After the war, Oradour-sur-Glane rivaled Lidice as an iconic symbol of German crimes against civilians in occupied Europe.

German occupation authorities in France

During World War II, German occupation authorities in France reacted with increasing brutality to organized attacks on German soldiers, headquarters, and property by the resistance movement, more commonly known as the maquis or Résistance. The German military killed hostages and incarcerated in concentration camps real or perceived supporters or sympathizers of the resistance movement. In general, German anti-partisan measures in France never attained the level of violence or the numbers of civilian deaths as those implemented in eastern and southeastern Europe, especially in Serbia, Greece, and the Soviet Union. Before but especially following the Allied landings on the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944, the French resistance movement intensified efforts to disrupt German communications and supply lines. German military commanders, particularly those who had seen service on the eastern front and whose response to partisan activity had been conditioned by the extraordinary brutality of anti-partisan measures there, radicalized and intensified responses to real and perceived resistance activity.

On June 8, 1944, two days after the Allied landing, the German Army Commander-in-Chief for the West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, issued orders to “crush” the resistance “with swift and ruthless initiative,” and express the “expectation that the major operation against the gangs [i.e., partisans] in Southern France will be carried out with the greatest severity and without leniency.” General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the Military Commander in France, ordered the redeployment of a number of units stationed throughout France to reinforce the Normandy front and to crush partisan activity behind the German lines. Among the units redeployed to Normandy was the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division Das Reich, which had arrived as a reserve unit in the southern French town of Montauban in January 1944.

Das Reich had seen two years of combat duty, including numerous anti-partisan actions on the Eastern Front, before its transfer to France. Its commander, SS- Major General Heinz Bernhard Lammerding, had served from July 1943 to January 1944 as the chief of staff for SS-General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, whom Himmler had appointed to command and coordinate anti-partisan operations behind German lines in the occupied Soviet Union. In this capacity, Lammerding had ordered several retaliation actions against Soviet civilians for real or perceived partisan activities or “sympathies.” Such operations involved the murder of tens of thousands of civilians, many of whom had had nothing to do with the partisans, and the torching of dozens of villages.

As the 2nd SS Division redeployed to Normandy, French resistance fighters harassed it. On June 9, 1944, Lammerding issued orders for the division to “cleanse” the area around Clermont-Ferrand of partisans. That same day, members of the division had displayed what “cleansing” of partisans would mean. In retaliation for an attack, soldiers of Das Reich hanged 99 male inhabitants of the village Tulle, near Limoges.

The next day, June 10, 1944, soldiers of the 3rd Company, 1st Battalion, 4th SS- Panzergrenadier Regiment (motorized infantry) Der Führer, a subordinate unit of the 2nd SS Panzer Division since April 1944, advanced to the village of Oradour- sur-Glane. Led by the commander of the 1st Battalion, SS Major Adolf Diekmann, the Waffen-SS troops surrounded the village at midday. At that point in time, the village population had almost doubled to about 650 people, swelled by refugees, including some Jewish refugees, from other parts of France.

Massacre and destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane

A class of boys from the school in Oradour: A class of boys from the school in Oradour. All of the people pictured here were killed by the SS during the June 10, 1944, massacre. Oradour-sur-Glane, France, photograph taken between 1940 and June 1944. The SS soldiers rounded up the entire population and concentrated them on the market square. Thereafter they separated the villagers by gender. Members of the 1st and 2nd platoons took the 197 men to several barns on the edge of town and locked them in. The 3rd platoon locked up 240 women and 205 children in the village church. Then the SS men set fire to the barns and threw grenades through the windows of the church, shooting those who sought to escape the flames. After 642 inhabitants, including seven Jewish refugees, were dead, the company looted the empty dwellings and then burned the village to the ground. At about 8:00 p.m. on the evening of June 10, the SS men withdrew from the smoking ruins. Only seven villagers survived the massacre: six men and a woman, all of them more or less severely injured. About fifteen other inhabitants of the village were able to escape the Germans before the massacre started or evade the roundup by hiding.

Ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane: The ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane, destroyed by the SS on June 10, 1944. Oradour-sur-Glane, France, photograph taken in September 1944.

After the massacre The Oradour-sur-Glane massacre received significant contemporaneous attention, requiring the German Army command to search for an explanation and the officers of the Das Reich to find one.

On the evening of June 10, after the troops left Oradour-sur-Glane, Diekmann gathered his officers and non-commissioned officers and ordered them not to speak about the killings. He told them that, if asked, they should say that insurgents attacked the division in the village and the villagers were killed during the firefight. The German Army High Command then offered this explanation to the State Secretary in the Vichy Ministry of Defense, General Eugène Bridoux, after Vichy diplomats had sent a formal protest note that contained an accurate account of the events of June 10. The German explanation stated that:

• The men of the village died during the fight • The fight had been initiated from the village • The women and children had taken refuge inside the church and died as the result of an explosion from an nearby insurgent ammunition supply dump that ignited the inside of the church.

To quell increasing public outrage and to try to keep the Vichy government from going over to the Allies, the German Army Commander-in-Chief in the West ordered a criminal investigation of the massacre. Since the SS was under a different jurisdiction than the German army, SS judge Major Detlef Okrent conducted the investigation, in which he relied significantly on the testimony of SS Captain Otto Kahn. Okrent stayed the proceeding in January 1945, concluding that “military concerns justified the retaliation.

Postwar After the war, the massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane also received a great deal of attention. In 1946, the French government declared the site to be a national memorial site and mandated its conservation. The French prosecution team presented documentation of the killings at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946. Why Diekmann and his superiors chose Oradour-sur-Glane and who gave the order to kill the inhabitants remains disputed. Neither the International Military Tribunal nor the French authorities at proceedings in Bordeaux in 1953 produced conclusive evidence either linking Oradour-sur-Glane with the French resistance or determining who ordered the massacre. When authorities in the Democratic German Republic prosecuted Heinz Barth, an NCO who participated in the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, in 1981, they too could not reach a conclusive answer to these questions.

The evidence presented at the trials and in West German investigations of officers of Das Reich generated a number of theories as to why the SS targeted Oradour- sur-Glane. The most common explanation is that Lammerding and Diekmann received intelligence from SS Major Karl Gerlach (whom insurgents had kidnapped, but who had escaped) that the villagers were assisting the resistance. A variation of this theory is that French collaborators misled the Germans, perhaps deliberately, into believing that French insurgents were holding another kidnapped German officer, SS Major Helmut Kämpfe, in Oradour-sur-Glane, and that they planned to kill him. This explanation is based on flimsy evidence and flawed logic, for there is no indication that the Germans searched Oradour-sur- Glane for Kämpfe. Nor did the soldiers of Das Reich continue the search after the massacre, either in Oradour-sur-Glane or anywhere else. Moreover, survivors stated that one of the German officers, later identified as SS Captain Otto Kahn, never mentioned Kämpfe, but did inform the villagers that the homes would be searched for weapons and ammunition.

Other explanations seem even less convincing. There is no indication that the Germans ever received intelligence that Oradour was the site of an insurgent headquarters, as SS Major Otto Weidigner, an officer of Das Reich who had not been involved in the massacre, claimed after the war. There is no information in the German military records that insurgents attacked German troops near Oradour. A war diary entry for the Military Commander in France for June 14 generated the theory that the troops of the 2nd Waffen SS Panzer Division had confused Oradour-sur-Glane with Oradour-sur-Vayres, a village about 15 miles to the southeast. This theory is undermined by the absence of any reference to an insurgent attack on the Germans near Oradour-sur-Vayres during this time period. For all the attention the killings have received, few of the SS men responsible for the massacre ever stood trial. Diekmann fell in combat three weeks after the massacre. German authorities refused to extradite Lammerding to France even though he was convicted and sentenced to death in absentia by the court in Bordeaux in 1953. German lawyers claimed that the German constitution prohibited the extradition of German citizens. The state prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt reopened the Lammerding case in 1961, but stayed the proceedings on grounds of insufficient evidence in 1964. Lammerding died in West in 1971.

In 1953, a French military court in Bordeaux prosecuted 21 former members of the 2nd SS Division for crimes committed at Oradour-sur-Glane and Tulle. Fourteen of the defendants were ethnic Germans from Alsace. The court convicted 20 of the defendants; it sentenced two to death and the rest to prison terms between five and 20 years. Amnesties and pardons, however, freed all of the convicts, including the two sentenced to death, within five years of the trial.

In 1981, authorities in the German Democratic Republic arrested and prosecuted Heinz Barth, a former SS Sergeant and platoon commander whose soldiers were among those who shot the men of Oradour-sur-Glane. An East Berlin court sentenced Barth to life in prison. Released in 1997, Barth died in 2007 at the age of 86.

Photograph of the Machefer family in Oradour The Machefer family in Oradour. All of the people pictured here, except for the father, were killed by the SS during the June 10, 1944, massacre. Oradour-sur-Glane, France, October 1943.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/oradour-sur-glane