Letters to the Editor
LORD RUSSELL AND THE GERMANS SIR,—In his article Lord Russell and the Germans ' Mr. Healey makes a frivolously inaccurate statement which calls for immediate and emphatic protest. He says: ' We learnt last year that most of the butchers of Oradour were themselves Frenchmen.'
I write from memory but I think Mr. Healey will find that the facts arc as follows. The SS unit which carried out the massacre at Oradour, included, like many SS units, a minority of Alsatian conscripts drafted into its ranks, because desertion from an SS unit was much harder than from an ordinary unit. It also included one Alsatian who was a volunteer. The French military authorities succeeded in identifying about 50 former members of this unit including the one Alsatian volunteer and thirteen Alsatian con- scripts. All other members of the unit were German. All fourteen Alsatians appeared on trial. Seven Germans appeared, including no officer and only one senior NCO, who did not indeed appear to have had, any ,serious responsibility in the crime. The majority of the Alsatians were boys of eighteen, who did not know the nature of the action in which they were involved until it had reached its abominable climax. If any one of them had disobeyed orders he would have been imme- diately shot. Only one of them had any, and that an indirect, part in the deliberate murder of the women and children. This is rather a different picture to that of a unit with a French majority carrying out the
infamy at Oradour 1 In fact the great majority of the Germans in that SS unit are still tolerated members of the German nation. None of the surviving German officers thought it necessary to stand beside the men he had commanded in the massacre.
Apart from the more general injustice of Mr. Healey's allegation, it may perhaps he observed that it is a sufficient hardship for Alsatians to be a frontier people mobilised now by France, the nation to which they have long, in their majority, given their adherence, and now by Germany against France, without also being the subject of such cruelly irres- ponsible remarks.—Yours faithfully, 1 Barton Close, Cambridge
DARSIE 0111.1E
[Mr. Healey writes: ' Mr. Gillie's letter would have been better addressed to the French authorities whose conduct of the Oradour trial so enraged opinion in Alsace. But the excuse he offers for the Alsatian soldiers implicated was pleaded with equal validity for the Germans. No State allows its soldiers the right to disobey orders on grounds of conscience; yet in most cases it was only by exercising this right on pain of death that German soldiers could avoid criminal acts. It is not for those who have never faced such a test to cast the first stone —still less to charge a nation as a whole with moral guilt. That was the point of my remarks which Mr. Gillie's letter only under- lines.'—Editor, Spectator.]
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