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they had already forgotten about the war. For me, coming from Russia, it was a revelation. For the first time I thought – “Oh yes, this is going to go . . . We can lose . . .” ’
    Langangke found most of the French railway officials almost unctuously friendly and hospitable, complaining bitterly about the damage being done to the nation’s transport system by Allied bombing, which was indeed provoking passionate hostility to theAllies in many great cities of France. But in the house where he was billeted with an elderly aristocratic lady, her nephew sometimes called to talk. One evening this man said to Langangke: ‘You poor devils made a big mistake when you joined the Waffen SS, you’re going to be the first to catch it when the time comes.’ The man offered to smuggle him to Algeria. Langangke said: ‘What would you do in my place?’ The Frenchman remained silent. Langangke never saw him again.
    The Das Reich’s training programme was lamentably behind schedule, yet all that spring it was continually interrupted in order that units could take part in sweeps and punitive operations against the French Resistance. Week by week, around the huge area in which the division was encamped in its fifty barracks and lagers, the campaign of sniping, roadblocking and sabotage intensified. For a vast fighting machine such as an armoured division, the terrorists represented no substantial threat. But they obliged every unit to put its quarters under guard, every man to carry a weapon at all times, every ration truck to travel with an escort. Otto Pohl became so exasperated by the need to keep a four-man picket on the house in which he was billeted that he moved into quarters in the centre of Caussade with his men, Sadi Schneid’s anti-tank platoon found themselves the subject of a furious unit investigation one morning when it was learned that a stock of mines had been stolen from their store. Even Karl Kreutz’s gunners were periodically diverted from training to sweep stretches of the countryside where there were reports of arms being parachuted to maquisards . Sometimes they found odd containers in the woods or fields, but more often than not the operation was in vain.
    In the month of May 1944, according to Albert Stuckler, the division lost some twenty men and a hundred vehicles to terrorists. A soldier was shot with his wife who was visiting him in their hotel room in a village near Caussade. An NCO coming out of a cafe in Figeac was killed by a burst of Sten gun fire. Any vehicle travelling alone was liable to ambush.
    In those last weeks before D-Day, the 2nd SS Panzer Division made the price of Resistance very clear to the surrounding countryside. Reprisals were on a scale modest enough compared with Russia, but thus seemed savage enough at the time. On 2 May, one of the tank battalions was training near the small town of Montpezat-de-Quercy when an SS patrol was fired upon a mile to the south-west. The SS swept through Montpezat, setting fire to several houses, looting extensively and assaulting several civilians who seemed slow to acquiesce. On 11 May men of the Der Führer Panzergrenadiers conducted a series of sweeps in the Lot. Twenty-four people, including four women, were seized for deportation in St Céré, forty from Bagnac. In Cardaillac, two women were shot, of whom one died. In Lauze, fifty-year-old Mme Moncoutre and her twenty-year-old daughter Berthe were shot among their sheep. Orniac was comprehensively looted. On 1 June, a tank unit moving north of Caylus machine-gunned six civilians in Limonge, one at Cadrieu and two at Frontenac. On 2 June, after a maquis attack in the countryside, twenty-nine farms were burned, along with the entire village of Terrou, whose 290 inhabitants became refugees. On 3 June, after an SS truck was attacked near Figeac, two men of twenty-two and seventy-four were shot on the spot, and six men and a woman from nearby Viazac were taken out and shot. The most massive action