The excavations had started a few weeks ago. A soil analysis campaign by georadar carried out at the end of June in Meymac (Corrèze) to find the remains of German soldiers shot by the Resistance in 1944 made it possible to identify a possible “pit”, according to the prefecture of the department.
“The results of this soil analysis campaign seem convincing. On one of the two sites investigated, a change in the density of the soil was observed in a rectangular area 45 meters long by 10 meters wide, which could correspond to a pit, “said the authorities in a press release released on Wednesday.
“Excavations are now necessary to verify whether or not this area contains the remains sought,” adds the prefecture. These should be carried out during the second half of August by archaeologists and specialists commissioned by the National Office for Veterans and War Victims (ONACVG), with the technical support of the VDK, the German organization responsible for maintenance of German war graves.
On June 12, 1944, 46 German soldiers and a French woman suspected of collaboration were executed on a wooded hill in Meymac by a local group of Francs-tireurs et partisans, of communist allegiance, according to the testimony of one of its members, Edmond Réveil, 98 years old today.
The first secret excavations took place in 1967 to try to find the bodies of these Wehrmacht soldiers taken prisoner by the Resistance in Corrèze on June 7 and 8, 1944 and executed shortly after the massacres committed by the SS Das Reich Division in Tulle on June 9 (99 civilians hanged) and in Oradour-sur Glane (Haute-Vienne) on June 10 (643 inhabitants machine-gunned and burned in the barns and the village church). Eleven bodies were then exhumed. The new searches were launched in an area indicated by the former resistant Edmond Réveil and another witness who had attended, as a child, the excavations carried out in 1967.
