Sarkozy Honours Victims Of Forgotten WW2 Massacre

Sarkozy, the first French president to take part in a commemoration at Maille, said he was righting a historic wrong.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid homage on Monday to 124 civilians, mostly women and children, killed by German soldiers in the western French village of Maille during the Second World War.

The massacre on Aug. 25, 1944 had been long overshadowed in the national memory by another atrocity weeks earlier at Oradour sur Glane, where Waffen SS troops killed 642 civilians.

The Maille massacre may also have been overlooked because it coincided with the liberation of Paris from German occupation.

Sarkozy, the first French president to take part in a commemoration at Maille, said he was righting a historic wrong.

"It is by remembering events like the ones that occurred here that our children will know that we must never compromise with totalitarianism," Sarkozy said in a speech to hundreds of survivors, relatives of victims and local officials.

He drew a parallel with France's military presence in Afghanistan, the subject of intense debate since 10 French soldiers were killed in an Aug. 19 ambush by Taliban fighters.

"I am thinking of the sacrifice of our 10 young soldiers against these barbaric, medieval terrorists that we are fighting in Afghanistan," Sarkozy said.

German forces went through Maille killing every civilian they found, before destroying the village by artillery fire. Maille lost about a quarter of its population.

The carnage is thought to have been an act of revenge after members of the French Resistance skirmished with German troops in the area in the preceding days.

Unlike Oradour sur Glane, which has been left in ruins since the massacre there to serve as a memorial, Maille was entirely rebuilt after the war.

"We have always been forgotten. We have not lived like other people," said Serge Martin, 74, president of an association for the commemoration of the Maille killings. He lost a brother and two sisters, including a six-month-old baby.

According to websites run by survivors' groups or relatives of victims, one German officer was convicted in absentia in 1952 by a French court for his role in the killings, but he was never arrested and died in Germany in 1965.

A German prosecutor from Dortmund launched an investigation in 2005 into what happened at Maille. If any of the culprits were found, they could in theory still be brought to trial as German law sets no time limit for prosecuting war criminals.