On the 10th June 1944, days after the Normandy Landings with the Allies beginning to push
the German Army back, a German SS officer was brutally executed in a village north of
a French ghost-town.
Helmuth Kampfe was a man who was executed in a huge public spectacle in a terrifying
and brutal manner, and he was a victim of the French Resistance.
Days later the SS would order brutal reprisals against the French people, and an SS commander
would find Kampfe’s charred remains and would then order the village nearby to be
raised to the ground, and with this hundreds of civilians were killed by the SS in horrific
ways.
The death of Helmuth Kampfe showed the disdain that the French had towards the SS and those
members of the German Army who had put them through such a tough occupation.
Over the following months more fighting would take place and eventually the country would
be liberated with the allies and the Free French Forces pushing back the Germans.
But within the fierce fighting of Normady, Kampfe was taken into an ambulance which was
then torched.
Join us today as we look at the horrific death of the SS Commander Burned Alive and as always
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Helmuth Kampfe was born in Thüringen in Germany in 1909, and he had a normal upbringing and
trained to become an apprentice typographer.
It would not be the most interesting job for a young man, but then when Hitler seized power
inside of Germany, Kampfe then sought more from his country and he wanted to find other
work.
He took up arms becoming part of the German Heer who were the land forces of the German
Army.
This was forced in 1935, and it brought back the German Army, Air Force and Navy that had
been banned for some time following the end of the First World War.
The Treaty of Versailles had placed severe restrictions on the German military, but it
was clear that Hitler was now building up his army for a significant event across Europe
and many would have seen that he was preparing for a world war in Europe, the second within
25 years.
At the time only the Reichswehr was allowed, and this was a small defensive force comprising
of 100,000 soldiers but Hitler wanted a huge army.
He began to enrol all boys into the Hitler Youth and these were trained as soldiers,
and would in the Second World War play an important role towards the end of the conflict
when things got desperate for Hitler.
The Heer became known as the Wehrmacht, and the land forces during the Second World War
would be involved in huge invasions of countries such as Poland, France and towards the East
in the Balkan States before they invaded the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa.
Helmuth Kampfe then continued to be promoted within the army and he was then in 1939 transferred
to become a member of the SS, the army’s unit of the SS.
He would continue to rise throughout various promotions in the Waffen-SS and he was there
on the Eastern Front in the thick of many different battles.
He commanded the 3rd Battalion of the Das Reichs’ Division Reconaiisaance Group, of
the 4th Panzer grenadier Der Fuhrer Regiment.
He was considered by military generals as a skilled leader and a very brave soldier,
and he was awarded the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross.
He was given this for his actions during the cold winter of 1943 in the Soviet Union, and
he was also given the close combat clasp in gold, one of only a few hundred to recieve
this.
He could have gone higher and become a General, however things were going wrong for the Germans
during Operation Barbarossa.
The campaign initially had many successes as the army rampaged across the land, and
they would be followed by the Einsatzgruppe who massacred thousands of civilians.
But following the Battle of Stalingrad, the war was turning against the Germans with the
loss of the sixth army.
In Spring 1944, the Das Reich Division had been sent to the Western Front from the Eastern
Front, and Kampfe went with his division.
The Germans knew that there would be some form of landing that took place in Europe,
and they knew that the Allies were beginning to consider an invasion of France to try and
retake large amounts of Europe.
Whole units of soldiers were removed from the Eastern Front and were sent to northern
France where Hitler believed was most likely for an allied invasion.
He would be right in this thinking when D-Day was launched on the 6th June 1944, but Helmuth
Kampfe had been given a number of roles by the military high command to carry out with
his soldiers.
In the southern uplands in central France, he was asked to carry out attacks on the Maquis,
a group of guerrilla fighters of the French Resistance who were a constant thorn in the
side of the Germans.
The Maquis were mostly working class young men who avoided conscription and they went
into the mountains and the woods and created resistance factions.
They also organised themselves well, and most of them were in the mountains of Brittany
and in the south of France, and they would use guerrilla tactics to disrupt German soldiers.
They were involved in helping Jews and allied airmen escape the Germans, and they could
spot the Germans who were looking for them for their high positions.
They did manage to intimidate their enemies, but they didn’t fight in large scale battles,
and they spread their soldiers out in different areas.
They would use whatever weapons they could get their hands on, including weapons like
the Sten sent from Britain.
They did help the Allied invasion of Normandy, and they helped to delay German forces to
the north of France, and Kampfe’s men would be held up.
Kampfe had been sent to deal with them with his soldiers, but it did not go very well.
Following D-Day, Kamfe was taken prisoner 4kms east of Saint Leonard De Noblat by a
group of resistance fighters led by Jean Canou.
He would never have expected what would have happened to him, and his treatment was incredibly
barbaric.
Canou then handed Kampfe over to Colonel George Guingouin, a French communist militant who
was senior in the Maquis.
He then was held within this group, and it was Guingouin’s men who carried out Kampfe’s
execution.
Helmuth Kampfe was the highest ranking officer to ever be captured by the French Resistance,
and when he was captured the German soldiers and his detachment of men were sent to go
and rescue him as they realised he’d been abducted by the enemy and was in grave danger.
But the resistance had no plans to ransom him or ever allow him to return to the Germans,
and they planned a huge public execution of a man who they deemed to have been a war criminal.
The resistance decided that Helmuth Kampfe was to be burned alive on the 10th June 1944,
4 days after D-Day.
A huge search was launched for him, and the Germans shot dead two resistance members near
to where he had disappeared, and they realised that the Germans would fight back with vengeance
to recapture Kampfe.
Kampfe was taken by the resistance to a village north of Oradour-Sur-Glane, and a huge crowd
had been rallied and gathered by the resistance.
He was paraded in front of the crowd, and the execution of a high ranking SS man was
cheered by the crowd.
Many would have expected him to be shot by a firing squad, but this was not an execution
that the crowd would forget.
It’s believed that Kampfe along with a number of other captured soldiers were thrown into
the back of a captured German field ambulance which had been left abandoned nearby.
These men were all locked inside of the ambulance, and then a member of the resistance then set
this on fire, and the soldiers were trying desperately to get out, but they couldn’t.
Of course with this, Helmuth Kampfe was killed being burned alive, and then after his execution
his remains were then taken to Oradour-Sur-Glane, and when they got here, they would be discovered
by the Nazis.
SS Sturmbannfuhrer Adolf Diekmann discovered the remains of his former friend Kampfe, and
he found the body handcuffed inside of the German field ambulance along with other German
soldiers near to the village.
After seeing the brutality, he then ordered the village nearby to be raised to the ground
and every civilian who was in the village was ordered to be killed.
The SS men began to shoot anyone they came across, and the men were taken to six barns
and a shed, and the women were then locked into a church.
The village was then heavily looted, and the men in the barn were then machine gunned in
the legs and were unable to walk.
Their barn was then set on fire, with 190 frenchmen dying in this specific attack.
The same horrors would occur in the church, as the women and children inside of this were
locked in.
The SS then placed in incendiary bomb next to it, and when it went off the church went
up in flames.
Anyone who tried to escape by jumping through the windows were shot by the SS.
In this attack 247 women and 205 children died in the church, and there was only one
survivor.
For the execution of Helmuth Kampfe, 643 civilians were slaughtered.
Helmuth Kampfe was the most senior member of the SS to have been captured and executed
by the French Resistance during the Second World War.
The commander and friend of Kampfe’s who carried out the massacre and reprisals was
charged over the killing, but all charges against him were dropped when he himself was
killed in fighting in Normandy.
The episode regarding Kampfe’s execution and the reprisals were brutal and horrific,
but he was a man whose men had been involved in war crimes themselves.
He was a very decorated soldier, and was one who could have been made a general as the
war went on, but locked inside of a German Field Ambulance he would meet the brutal wrath
of the French Resistance who would deal with Kampfe in a harrowing manner.
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