Saint-Genis-Laval massacre

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Fort de Côte-Lorette, 2011
Memorial at the site of the massacre, 2011

During the massacre of Saint-Genis-Laval on August 20, 1944, the Gestapo transported around 120 men and women from the Lyon Montluc prison to Saint-Genis-Laval , where they were taken by the German occupiers near the abandoned Fort de Côte-Lorette Shot in a sentry box with the help of the Milice française .

One witness reported: "In the end, the bodies were five feet high, and every now and then the Germans stepped on the bodies of their victims to silence those who were still moaning."

The house was then set on fire. The majority of the victims were members of the Resistance .

Pierre-Marie Gerlier , Archbishop of Lyon, was prompted to protest against the German occupation forces by the massacre. In response , Yves Farge , who was appointed Commissaire de la République for the region by Charles de Gaulle in April 1944 , had 84 German Resistance prisoners executed and, by threatening further executions, succeeded in surrendering the Montluc prison, saving 800 prisoners from being murdered there .

The Gestapo in Lyon was under the orders of Klaus Barbie . In 1954, Barbie was sentenced to death in absentia by a French court. However, Barbie was protected from prosecution by the US and German authorities as well as by his country of residence, Bolivia . Barbie was only extradited to France on February 4, 1983, where she was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in 1991 in Lyon prison.

Web links

Commons : Saint-Genis-Laval Massacre  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Montluc Prison Memorial. In: cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr. Archived from the original on October 8, 2014 ; accessed on March 16, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Commémoration du 20 août 1944 au fort de Côte Lorette. Retrieved March 16, 2020 (French).
  3. ^ A b Heinz Höhne: The butcher of Lyon . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1987 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Florent Deligia: Il ya 70 ans: la prison de Montluc libérée avant Lyon. In: lyoncapitale.fr. August 24, 2014, accessed July 15, 2017 (French).
  5. ↑ On the trail of the resistance in Lyon. In: cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr. Retrieved March 16, 2020 .
  6. ↑ An old Nazi and the German secret services: The Klaus Barbie secret files. In: taz.de . January 31, 2012, accessed March 16, 2020 .
  7. ^ Peter Hammerschmidt: Barbie, Klaus. In: Lexicon of Political Criminal Trials . Kurt Groenewold , Alexander Ignor , Arnd Koch (Eds.), July 2017, accessed on March 16, 2020 .

Coordinates: 45 ° 41 '54.6 "  N , 4 ° 47' 2.2"  E