Elérika Leroy and Gaëtan Bosse, historians of the “Haute-Garonne Résistante” Remembrance Trails, at the Departmental Museum of Resistance and Deportation and Jean-Pierre Blanc, honorary mayor of Marsoulas, regional delegate of the Midi-Pyrénées Resistance Medalists, Departmental Council of the Resistance offered a remarkable conference on the unknown massacre of June 10, 1944 in Marsoulas.
The bloody trace left by the 2nd SS Das Reich Division, the most fanatical elite division of the Nazis, goes from the Russian front to Ukraine and Yugoslavia, where massacres, fires and “the Holocaust by bullets” follow one another until the most famous for its massacres, that of Ouradour sur Glane.
Decimated on the Russian front, it was sent to the south of France to recover and incorporate new troops, including Alsatians. The main maquis in the spring of 1944 were that of Cazères, Armée Secrète and that of Betchat, FTPF. Reports of numerous actions and sabotages go back to Toulouse, which decides to send the 2nd division, Gestapo agents and militiamen to take the “terrorists” of Betchat.
Some will go through Marsoulas. In this village, one hundred and fifty inhabitants, for more than half farmers, craftsmen and workers. When the German column arrived, many hid in the surrounding woods. Following a misunderstanding on the number of German forces, the unfortunate shooting of a young guerrilla will trigger the reprisals which will make thirty-two victims, including women and children, a three-month-old baby and five-year-old twins. Results of the continuation of the expedition in the Pyrenees: fifty-five dead in Comminges, seventy in the Hautes-Pyrénées and at Saint-Lys-Bonrepos, twenty-one dead, a hundred and forty-six in all in this repressive action .
The Bordeaux trial opened in 1953 to judge those responsible for these massacres and that of Oradour. They are executors who will in fact be tried and sentenced to terms of up to fifteen years of hard labor and will be granted amnesty in February 1953 because of Franco-German reconciliation.
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