European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

We need to talk to young people, guide them for the future, show them the importance of being brotherly.

I don’t answer all questions. When they ask me how many Germans I killed I won’t answer.

I don’t think it is interesting.

During war there is one essential rule:

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.