If German soldiers were captured by the French partisans back then, their lives were a coin toss. 50-50. It all depended on who caught you and how angry the local people were.
Let me tell you a story about what happened to some comrades. It was a secret for nearly eighty years but recently an old French resistance fighter named Edmond Reveil spoke about it before he died. He was 98 years old when he finally confessed.
In June 1944 his small guerrilla group captured 47 German Soldiers in the forest.
But those French fighters had a very big problem. They were just a tiny group hiding in the woods, always running from the German army. They had no prison, almost no food and if even one German soldier escaped, he would tell the others where the French were hiding. So the French commander made a terrible decision for the captured German soldiers. He ordered them all to be shot terrifyingly.
German comrades had to dig their own graves in the dirt. Reveil said he remembers the young German boys looking at photos of their families and wives one last time before the guns fired.
They did this because of survival and hate. Some German units had just burned down nearby French villages and killed many innocent civilians. And the German army the Wehrmacht, already had orders to shoot any French partisan they caught immediately. So nobody was playing by the rules anymore.
If a German soldier was lucky, he was captured by the Americans or the British. Then he was safe in a real camp. But if you were unlucky the French kept you after the war. They made German Soldiers do the most dangerous work, like digging up active landmines from the beaches with their bare hands. Many did not survive that also and died.
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