6 June 1944. Under the code name Operation “Overlord,” US, British,
and Canadian troops cross the English Channel and begin landing on the Normandy coast in France.
This operation will become known as “D-Day” and is the largest amphibious invasion in history,
deploying more than 160,000 Allied troops on air, land, and sea. 50,000 vehicles, some 5,000 naval
craft and more than 11,500 aircraft support the initial invasion. Following the Normandy Landings,
the French resistance movement intensifies efforts to disrupt German communications and supply lines.
German military commanders, particularly those who have seen service on the eastern front and
experienced the extraordinary brutality of anti-partisan measures there, radicalize
and intensify responses to real and perceived resistance activity. One such commander, who
for his atrocities will be burned alive by members of the French Resistance, is Helmut Kämpfe.
Helmut Kämpfe, the son of a printer, was born on the 31 July 1909 in Jena
then part of the German Empire. He trained to be a typographer like his father but
after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, he became a Lieutenant in the German Army.
One year earlier at the Lausanne Conference of 1932, Germany, Britain, and France had agreed
to the formal suspension of reparations payments imposed on the defeated countries after World War
I. Thus, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the financial provisions
of the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed harsh penalties on Germans, had already been revised.
Hitler was determined to overturn the remaining military and territorial provisions of the treaty
and include ethnic Germans in the Reich as a step toward the creation of a German empire in Europe.
The German armed forces engaged in secret rearmament even before the Nazi takeover of
power. Thereafter, the Nazis supported rearmament and rapidly expanded arms production. Military
conscription was reintroduced on March 16, 1935, in open violation of the Treaty of Versailles. At
the same time, Hitler announced the expansion of the German army to more than 500,000 men.
After a prolonged period of intense propaganda inside Austria, German troops entered the country
on March 12, 1938, receiving the enthusiastic support of most of the population. Austria was
incorporated into Germany on the following day. In April, this German annexation was
retroactively approved in a plebiscite that was manipulated to indicate that about 99 percent of
the Austrian people wanted the union with Germany. Neither Jews nor Romani people
were permitted to vote in the plebiscite and this union became known as the "Anschluss".
The failure of the British and the French to take action against Adolf
Hitler for violating the Versailles Treaty emboldened him toward further aggression.
In 1938, Hitler threatened to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland,
a border area of Czechoslovakia containing an ethnic German majority, was surrendered
to Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany held a conference in Munich
in Germany, on September 29-30, 1938, in which they agreed to the German annexation of the
Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler. Czechoslovakia, which was not a
party to the Munich negotiations, agreed under significant pressure from Britain and France.
On March 15, 1939, Hitler violated the Munich agreement and moved against the
Czechoslovak state. The Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia were proclaimed a
German protectorate and were occupied by German forces. Slovakia became an independent state,
closely allied with Germany. Hungary, which had annexed territory in southern Slovakia after the
Munich conference, seized the Transcarpathian Ukraine. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.
Little more than a week later, on March 23, 1939, German troops suddenly occupied Memel. Lithuania
was unable to prevent this occupation. Hitler also raised territorial demands
on Poland in the spring of 1939, demanding the annexation of the Free City of Danzig to Germany
and extraterritorial access for Germany through the so-called Polish Corridor to East Prussia.
Convinced that Hitler would not negotiate in good faith,
Britain and France guaranteed the integrity of Polish territory against German aggression which
became reality on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland,
triggering World War 2. The same year Helmut Kämpfe was transferred to the Waffen-SS,
which was the military branch of the SS, with which he took part in the Polish Campaign.
The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands started
on the 10th of May 1940 and became known as the Battle of France. Paris,
the French capital, fell to the Germans on June 14, 1940.
For his successes during the Battle of France, Kämpfe was promoted to
SS-Obersturmführer at the end of January 1941.
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union,
began on Sunday the 22nd of June 1941. After initial great successes by the
German troops, the advance came to a standstill in October and November
1941 due to the onset of the muddy period. Hitler tried to conquer Leningrad which failed,
and the following siege lasted 872 days from the 8th of September 1941 until the 27th of
January 1944. The blockade became one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history,
and it was possibly the costliest siege of all time due to the number of casualties which
were suffered throughout its duration. As a result, the Wehrmacht – the German
Armed Forces - lacked the strength to take Moscow and a protracted war was imminent.
In Russia, Kämpfe commanded the 3rd Battalion, 4th SS-Panzergrenadier Der Führer Regiment,
the Das Reich Division's reconnaissance group. Kämpfe received the Knights Cross of the Iron
Cross for bravery and exemplary leadership during the Zhytomyr –Berdichev Offensive
in the winter of 1943-44 which the Red Army began in order to defeat the opposing German
4th Panzer Army of Army Group South and advance to the Southern Bug river while preventing new
attempts by the enemy to recapture Kiev. After an opening attack across a 300 kilometer front,
Soviet troops advanced from 80 to 200 km and nearly liberated all of the Kiev
and Zhytomyr regions, along with the regions of the Vinnytsa and Rivne.
In spring 1944, Kämpfe’s Das Reich Division had been withdrawn from Russia and sent to
the south of France for refitting in preparation for the anticipated
Allied invasion of occupied Europe. While in southern France, Kämpfe was ordered to
begin operations against the Maquis that were rural guerillas who - according to
German intelligence reports - were active in the southern uplands of central France.
On June 9, 1944, 3 days after the Normandy landings, SS-Major General Heinz Bernhard
Lammerding issued orders for the division to “break the spirit of the population by
making examples” and “cleanse” the area around Clermont-Ferrand of partisans. That same day,
members of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, which was commanded by Kämpfe,
had displayed what “cleansing” of partisans would mean. In retaliation for killing 15 Germans,
soldiers of Das Reich hanged 99 male inhabitants of the village Tulle.
The same day Helmut Kämpfe, then holding the rank of Sturmbannführer,
was captured by a group led by a Sergeant Jean Canou from Colonel Georges Guingouin's Brigade,
which was a militant Communist group in the Maquis du Limousin which was one of
the largest Maquis groups of French resistance fighters fighting for the liberation of France.
Canou handed Kämpfe over to the Colonel Georges Guingouin who, in response to the Tulle massacre,
ordered Kämpfe’s execution on the following day. Though the exact circumstances remain unclear,
according to a French informant, the 34-year-old Kämpfe and captured Wehrmacht soldiers were burned
alive in a captured German military ambulance in front of an audience.
When the SS Division discovered that Kämpfe, a married man with three children,
had been kidnapped, SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, Kämpfe’s personal friend,
led his troops on a brutal search of the surrounding area. Two local men were shot
dead by SS men under Diekmann's command and when Diekmann eventually reached the outskirts of the
village Oradour-sur-Glane, he found Kämpfe's handcuffed burned body inside a German field
ambulance with the remains of other German soldiers. After seeing his friend's fate,
the enraged Diekmann ordered his men to raze the village and kill the inhabitants.
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.
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. 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.
Diekmann was never tried for the massacre as he was killed by shrapnel to his head from an
artillery shell while fighting in Normandy on 29 June 1944.
Helmut Kämpfes' remains were initially buried anonymously in the village of
Breuilaufa. However, according to the German War Graves Commission,
the remains were transferred to the military cemetery in French Berneuil in 1963.
There were no tears shed for Helmut Kämpfe.
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