Lauragais Blog

Who were the two dead soldiers?

11/1/2020

The Château de Garrevaques lies in the Lauragais, south-west France, and one day the owner shared a memory from her childhood, something that had happened a few years after the end of the second world war.

‘When I was old enough to run around in the grounds of the château my grandmother used to tell me never to play in one particular corner of the garden. A pair of iron crosses marked the graves of two German soldiers. When I was twelve or thirteen, the German army came and took them away.’

Marie-Christine Combes is the sixteenth generation of the same family to reside in the château, and this was one of many stories I had heard from her and her mother about the period when the Wehrmacht commandeered their home. I had often wondered about the identity of these soldiers, and no one seemed quite sure of their unit. Some sources said the troops occupying Garrevaques were from the eleventh panzer division, while others claimed they belonged to the infamous second panzer division, also known as Das Reich, and blamed for the atrocity at Oradour-sur-Glane. I had often speculated that this confusion was caused by the French way of abbreviating ordinal numbers: IIeme (deuxième - second) and 11eme (onzième - eleventh) are easy to confuse unless you spot that one uses Roman numerals and the other Arabic.

When I was researching the German Occupation for my book, I felt duty-bound to investigate more thoroughly. Garrevaques and my home lie in the Tarn, and the obvious place to start was in the departmental archives in Albi. But first, I went online to consult the list of dossiers which had not been digitised. From its title, 506 W 230 sounded promising: ‘German soldiers killed and buried in the department. Inquest: instructions and replies from the mayors (November-December 1944).’

The archives of the Tarn are run on strict and rather old-fashioned lines. Once you become an authorised user, you must fill in a form with the references of the dossiers you want to consult and you must hand in your request at the desk at 09.30 sharp, or subsequently at 45-minute intervals, again on the dot. And then you wait. Don’t even think of going to the desk with a request at 09.46 or 11.33!

I handed in my form, and while I waited, I wondered how many pages would be in the dossier. There are 323 communes in the Tarn, each with a mayor. If German soldiers were buried in all of them, I could be sifting through a lot of paperwork. Eventually I was called to the desk and handed a bundle of papers secured in a dogeared cardboard folder. I opened it up. Fortunately, there were only a couple of dozen pages so presumably the soldiers in Marie-Christine’s park had been an exception. The paper was fragile, the type of paper that is produced after five years of enemy occupation and world war.

I leafed through the sheets, still unconvinced I would find what I wanted. But then it appeared, an A5 scrap of paper, handwritten, signed by the mayor of Garrevaques and addressed to the Prefect of the Tarn. Someone had annotated the paper with the French translations of the date of birth, date of death and rank of each of the two men. And on the next page in the dossier the Prefect’s office had typed up the details, saving me the trouble of deciphering the mayor’s handwriting. In the interests of brevity, I shall give only the English translation of what was on the two pieces of paper.

TK de Dinatru 61, Sergeant Hilmar Büchner, born 18/2/1917, died 19/8/1944.
FEB 119, Lance-Corporal Alvis Gatuska, born 9/6/1913, died 19/8/1944.

This date of their deaths tied in with what I had read elsewhere. On 19 August, members of an unidentified Resistance group machine-gunned a German vehicle and killed two of its occupants on the road between Garrevaques and Revel. The wreck was towed back to the Château de Garrevaques, and the two casualties were buried in the park by their comrades.

I was still none the wiser on the question of second or eleventh, but after further research, I discovered that ‘TK de Dinatru 61’ was a supply troop division forming part of the eleventh panzers, and ‘FEB 119’ was an artillery regiment, again part of the eleventh panzers. I also learned that the eleventh panzer division had fought for two-and-a-half years on the Eastern Front and was nearly wiped out in early 1944 at the Battle of the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket. The demoralised survivors were sent to south-west France and the division was rebuilt, mainly with reserve troops.

After the shooting of Sergeant Büchner and Lance-Corporal Gatuska, the villagers feared reprisals, but fortunately the Germans had more pressing business to occupy them. Four days earlier, the Allies had begun landing 50,000 troops on the coast near Marseilles and on 20 August the eleventh panzer division left Garrevaques and headed east to meet the Allies in the Rhône valley.

Château de Garrevaques.
The occupying troops turned this salon into their dining room and replaced the mirror with a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

If you want to know how they tried to blow up the château as they left, or read stories about their operations against the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire, you will find them in ‘Lauragais: Steeped in History, Soaked in Blood’, or if you visit the château’s hotel-restaurant, you may be lucky enough to hear some of these tales from Marie-Christine herself.

Why do Sergeant Büchner and Lance-Corporal Gatuska no longer lie in the park? Between 1958 and 1961, nearly 20,000 German soldiers were disinterred all across southern France and reburied together in the cemetery at Dagneux near Lyon. Most of them were killed after the Allied landings of August 1944.

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