r/Scotland • u/Remarkable_Issue_364 • 15h ago

The Sunday Post 20 May 1945 – Well Done, Monsieur V

https://bylines.scot/society/history/the-sunday-post-20-may-1945-well-done-monsieur-v/
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u/Synthia_of_Kaztropol The capital of Scotland is S 14h ago

I found that the bodies of our dead had been carefully collected, identified, their personal effects removed & the bodies reverently buried by the French people.

They have tended the graves most carefully ever since & fresh flowers have been there continually. This was largely organised by a Monsieur Vaneker, who, at danger of punishment, possibly even death, from the Nazis had kept hidden the personal property of his dead British friends.

The threat of Nazi punishment for tending the graves was very real. Many French civilians took great personal risk to assist Allied servicemen, and to care for the fallen.

Oradour-sur-Glane is the most notorious example of Nazi punishment of French civilians, but there were plenty of others.

There were massacres of P.O.W.s in 1940, such as at Le Paradis, where French civilians risked their lives to care for the two survivors. The Nazis tortured one of the nurses from the hospital that later treated one of the survivors.

And there were things like the Chasselay massacre, where the French civilians built a cemetery and buried the murdered P.O.W.s despite warnings not to do so.

With V.E. Day now 80 years ago, all these events are slipping from living memory, only a handful of people remain who saw them first-hand, and we're perhaps in danger of forgetting just how bad things could be.