In the paper La Croix, today, I read of a memorial day held in Maillé, a village of Indre-et-Loire, where on 25 August 1944 many inhabitants were shot.
The memorial day was partly due to a German association or two or three, who were willing to hear about misdeeds committed by their own three quarters of a century ago.
In the same paper, there was an article on Yury A. Dmitriev, who, having held fast to memories of Stalinist atrocities at Sandarmokh and Krasny Bor rather than pretend they were perpetrated by Germans or even Finns during the Winter War or Continuation War, got accused of pedopornography.
Here is how 5.VIII.2016 is described by the wikipedia:
Sandarmokh has drawn visitors from many countries, including Ukraine since many leading members of the country's Executed Renaissance were shot there. It remains a focal point for the many national diasporas represented in Karelia itself.[31] Since 1998, an annual Day of Remembrance has been held at Sandarmokh on 5 August, the date when the NKVD in Moscow issued instructions to its regional bodies to begin the Great Terror.[32] For many years the event had official support and recognition.
On 5 August 2016 the Day of Remembrance at Sandarmokh was marked, as always, with speeches and a gathering of those who had come from Karelia and beyond to attend the event. The event was opened by Yury Dmitriev and Irina Flige,[33] the director of the Memorial Research and Information Centre in St Petersburg, who had found Sandarmokh, with Dmitriev and her late husband Veniamin Ioffe (ru: Иофе, Вениямин Викторович) in early July 1997.[34]
For the first time, Dmitriev and Flige noted, not a single official was present, whether from the local, republican or federal authorities. No Orthodox priests were in attendance and, another first, there was no solemn religious procession led by the cross. This was an opportunity, suggested Dmitriev and Flige, for people to say just what they thought. They invited anyone present to address the gathering on the sole condition that he or she introduce him or herself before speaking. The speeches that day were recorded and the resulting 28-minute film was posted on the Internet.[35]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yury_A._Dmitriev
Starting in 2016, there were attempts to revise this account of the shootings at Sandarmokh, and claim that among the dead were Soviet POWs shot by the invading Finns in 1941-1944. There were newspaper articles and TV broadcasts in Russia; there was also a publication in the Finnish press.
The motivation behind this claim and the supposed new evidence were both challenged. In a lengthy and detailed investigation, Russian journalist Anna Yarovaya examined the evidence and interviewed historians and those who had found the site. She talked to Finnish historians of the Second World War; Irina Flige of the Memorial Society and Sergei Kashtanov, head of the district administration where the killing fields were found. She also interviewed Sergei Verigin, one of the Russian historians putting forward the new hypothesis. Russian newspapers and television had talked of "thousands" of POWs being shot by the Finns and buried at Sandarmokh: speaking on the record to Yarovaya, Verigin was more cautious and spoke of dozens and hundreds.[27]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandarmokh
By contrast, in Maillé, a woman who was on that day a girl having her ninth birthday tells of her memories, and a German who listens assures he came for solidarity, not for curiosity. She was well chosen for speaking up, because she lost 19 members of her family. German prosecutors can still sue those who committed these things, though Gustav Schlüter, the commander, already died peacefully in his home in 1965.
One more point : Maillé had 500 inhabitants up to the killing of 124. While the village was very marked by the event, the massacre was by far not the greatest under the Second World War. Even so, Germans still feel responsible, even guilty. Sandarmokh is a mass grave with 9000 dead.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Moses
4.IX.2019
Footnotes to Yuri A. Dmitriev article:
Notes 31, 34 both go to a Dmitriev site, but different pages:
https://dmitrievaffair.com/2018/02/16/dead-or-living-were-one-and-the-same-nation/
https://dmitrievaffair.com/2018/02/14/we-must-be-able-to-find-something/
32 https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/node/2975
33 http://old.memo.ru/d/2656.html
35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTOrfeABOmk
Footnote to Sandarmokh article:
Note 27 Anna Yarovaya, "Rewriting Sandarmokh", The Russian Reader, 27 December 2017; original published by 7x7 - Horizontal Russia news website, 13 December 2017.
I did not link to the article on Maillé massacre, but that is because the memorial day was held this weekend and therefore has not yet made it to the wikipedia. Here it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillé_massacre
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