Germany, Poland investigate massacres

(Vatican Radio) A court in Germany has charged an elderly man with involvement in slaughtering hundreds of villagers in France during the Second World War, including in a church. The announcement came while in neighboring Poland new evidence emerged about the massacre of tens of thousands of Polish officers.


In Germany, the state court of the city of Cologne said an 88-year-old former member of an SS-armored division will face 25 counts of murder for his involvement in attacking the French village of Oradour-Sur-Glane.


The man, who was only identified as Werner C. , was part of a unit that killed as many as 642 villagers in 1944. Prosecutors say he allegedly murdered 25 people himself and may have helped others kill several hundred men, women and children.


CHURCH ATTACKED
Most of the male villagers were gunned down while the women and children were burned alive inside a church — one of the Nazi war crimes atrocities on French soil, experts say.


The killings took place four days after the D-Day landings that eventually led to the Nazis’ defeat; they were in reprisal for the kidnapping of a single German soldier by the local French Resistance.

The case was the result of the poster campaign in Germany last year, launched by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which encouraged Germans to come forward if they suspected older citizens had links to Nazi crimes.

Meanwhile, a German court in another city dropped the case against a 92-year-old former SS member charged with killing a Dutch resistance fighter during the Second World War.

POLISH MASSACRE
News of the trial came while American researcher Krystyna Piorkowska in neighboring Poland said she found the testimony of former American prisoner of war Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr.

It provides new evidence of Soviet responsibility for the 1940 massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest and other places in what was then the Soviet Union.


The Soviet Red Army had taken the Polish officers prisoner after invading eastern Poland in September 1939.

Van Vliet told an interrogating U.S. officer that he saw the exhumation of some 3,500 corpses in tailor-made, little-worn Polish uniforms. He said they were all killed with a shot to the back of the head.

For decades, Moscow had blamed the Nazis for the massacre, but then in 1990 admitted that Stalin had ordered it.

Listen to the report by Stefan Bos: