Illustration of the Chemin des Dames, in the Aisne.
-
Vincent Loison / SIPA
In the Aisne, an amateur historian found the tunnel where nearly 200 German soldiers were buried during a World War I battle.
The French and German authorities are reluctant to carry out searches to try to find the bodies.
To put the pressure on, the son of the amateur historian himself carried out excavations which have been reported and are the subject of a judicial investigation.
Should we go and exhume the bodies of some 180 German soldiers from the First World War in the heart of an underground passage in the Aisne?
The question arises with a little more urgency for the authorities, since the affair has been in the media.
We take a look back at a discovery that is capital for history, which suddenly became an act of delinquency.
To understand, you have to go back to the 14-18 War and the tragic episode of the Chemin des Dames, in the Aisne.
In April 1917, a vast French offensive turned into a fiasco.
Military losses on both sides amount to nearly half a million men.
German soldiers trapped
At the start of the fighting, part of a German reserve regiment found itself stuck in an unfinished tunnel, serving as shelter under a hill, near Craonne.
The shelling caused the main entrance to collapse.
The Winterberg tunnel turns into a tomb for the trapped soldiers.
Their memory will fade over time.
Until 2010, when a local history enthusiast, Alain Malinowski, found traces of this tunnel in the archives of the German general staff.
He identifies the possible entries on the ground, in the forest of Craonne, and transmits the results of his research to the authorities.
It was in the summer of 2018 that the VDK (body which deals with German military cemeteries), the French National Veterans Office and the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs (Drac) began to build a common strategy around this resuscitated place of memory.
More than 150 victims identified
Should we initiate searches to find the bodies?
Or install a monument on the site with the name of the missing?
In Germany, where the affair is causing a stir, historians have already identified more than 150 victims, without however publicly revealing the names because the subject is sensitive.
The question that torments the authorities is the cost of such an exhumation operation.
"The tunnel is 250 m long and 3.50 m wide with some ramifications and its opening, with the reinforcement of the entrance, would require three or four days of work", estimates a specialist interviewed by
20 Minutes
.
Tired of waiting for a decision, the son of Alain Malinowki decides, in January 2020, to carry out himself the start of searches to put pressure on the authorities.
In all illegality since the intentional search for the bodies of missing soldiers has been banned in France since 1935. The operation was nevertheless publicized in November.
"If you do not launch this project, it will never be done because there is so much protocol", he admits in front of the cameras of TF1, in November 2020.
"It gives ideas to looters"
The answer is scathing.
The Drac proceeds to a report to the prosecutor, the search not having been the subject of a prior authorization.
According to our information, an investigation has been opened.
The Malinowski family, to whom we owe this incredible discovery, is now treated as an outcast.
Especially since, according to our information, new wild excavations were carried out on the site, in particular at the beginning of March.
“This is the perverse effect of media coverage, underlines a source close to the matter.
It gives ideas to looters, while discussions around an archaeological research project were progressing rather well on the subject.
"
In August, a radar survey to find out the topology of the terrain was carried out by the German authorities.
It is now a question of sending a robot equipped with a camera inside the tunnel by digging a well from the side of the hill.
Objective: to explore the state of conservation of the place before any human intervention.
"These are already archaeological objects"
"The ground is made up of sand with a chalk ceiling, but sand is not a very good conservation environment", assures Yves Desfossés, archaeologist and co-author of a column in
Le Monde
on the need not to proceed with a simple exhumation.
“To be content with simply re-burying these bodies, which may not all be able to be identified and which probably no longer have any immediate kinship, […] would consist in burying with them the historical and scientific knowledge that they contain.
These are already archaeological objects, which must be treated as such.
The operation would make it possible to reconstruct a beautiful slice of life for German soldiers, ”he explains.
It remains to find the funding.
In 2009, archaeological excavations made it possible to find 250 bodies of Australian and British soldiers - and to identify more than 150 thanks to DNA - in mass graves in Fromelles, in the North.
The operation cost the Australian government five million euros.
Culture
Underground investigation into the WWI battle tank fiasco
Lille
Why soldiers from the 14-18 war may never have graves
Picardy
Archeology
Memory
History
Tunnel
German
Society
First World War