European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

If I don’t shoot first, he will shoot me. He didn’t do anything to me and I didn’t do anything to him.

I don’t know him. He has a family; I have a family as well. Why then, do we kill each other?

Why? Because the ones that decide on war are not the ones that fight it.

Liberation; Exchange of prisoners

Nanterre was liberated on the following day, August 21st, 1944.

The German officers all left for Mont Valérien, the only place they felt safe.

The Liberation Committee was installed.

Mont Valérien is a fort from the time before the Paris Commune.

There the resistance fighters were shot. Each time the resistance attacked the German troops.

General Stüplinen ordered for every killed German, one hundred resistance fighters should be executed.

We identified 1015 corpses of people who had been shot between 1941 and 1944.

It was an execution place.

The Germans couldn’t move anymore, as all the streets leading there were barricaded by the resistance.

Some Germans were in the Paris water works. They had intended to blow up the water basins, but they were caught.

So there was a prisoner exchange between those Germans

and the last prisoners the Germans had taken, and had no nerve to shoot.

That is how we found out exactly what had happened to Louis Meunier.

Back to the Nazis in Mont Valérien: They refused to give themselves up to the resistance.

One of them said they would only give themselves up to the regular army.

Our commander went to see Colonel Rémy from the Leclerc Division,