Discovering WW1 tunnel of death hidden in France for a century

Discovering WW1 tunnel of death hidden in France for a century

Not since the 1970s has there been such an important discovery from the Great War in France. In woods on a ridge not far from the city of Reims, the bodies of more than 270 German soldiers have lain for more than a century - after they died the most agonising deaths imaginable.
Forgotten in the confusion of war, their exact location was till now a mystery - one which the French and German authorities were in no hurry to elucidate. But thanks to the work of a father-and-son team of local historians, the entrance to the Winterberg tunnel on the Chemin des Dames battlefront has been found.

Some of the 270 soldiers whose lives were lost in the Winterberg tunnel have now been identified
The urgent question is what to do next. Should the bodies be brought up quickly and buried in a German war cemetery? Should there be a full-scale archaeological dig so we can learn more about the conduct of the war and the lives of the men who fought it?
Should there be a memorial, or a museum?


The two governments are still deliberating, but time presses. Because if the tunnel's location is in theory still a secret, it is a secret that has been badly kept.

When I visited the spot a few days ago, it was to discover that bounty-hunters had been the night before. A three-metre deep hole had been dug near the entrance, and a collection of wartime artefacts - axes, spades and pit-props as well as unexploded shells - left in a heap.

The Winterberg tunnel lies deeper than the three metres dug by looters at the site
We also found a human ulna - the fore-arm bone.
The looters had not managed to break into the tunnel - that lies even deeper down - and what they found are bits and pieces thrown up in the shell explosion that sealed it off.

Some of the debris uncovered by looters at the site
But no-one doubts they will be back, because whoever gets into the Winterberg tunnel first will find a treasure trove.



In the spring of 1917 the French launched a doomed offensive to retake the hills that lie in a west-east line a few miles to the north of the river Aisne. The Germans had held the crest along the Chemin des Dames for more than two years, and they had a complex system of underground defences.
Near the village of Craonne, the Winterberg tunnel ran for 300m from the north side of the crest - invisible to the French - and came out to supply the first line of German trenches on the south-facing slope.

A German wartime map shows the tunnel just outside Craonne
On 4 May 1917 the French launched an artillery bombardment targeting the two ends of the tunnel, sending up an observation balloon to get a sight on the north-facing slope.
For once their accuracy was formidable. A shell fired from a naval gun hit the entrance, triggering more explosions from ammunition that was stored there and sending a cloud of acrid fumes into the shaft. Another shell sealed the exit.
Inside, the men from the 10th and 11th companies of the 111th Reserve Regiment were trapped. Over the next six days, as oxygen ran out, they either suffocated or took their own lives. Some asked comrades to kill them.



By a fluke of physiology, three men survived long enough to be brought out by rescuers, just a day before the crest was abandoned to the French. One of them, Karl Fisser, left an account for the regimental history:
"Everyone was calling for water, but it was in vain. Death laughed at its harvest and Death stood guard on the barricade, so nobody could escape. Some raved about rescue, others for water. One comrade lay on the ground next to me and croaked with a breaking voice for someone to load his pistol for him."
When the French took the ridge, the scene outside would have been of untold chaos and destruction. Digging into the tunnel would hardly have been a priority, so they left it. The Germans retook the Chemin des Dames in a later push, but at that point they had no time either to search for remains.

By the end of the war no-one could say for sure where the Winterberg tunnel had actually been. They weren't French bodies inside, so it was decided to let them lie - as countless other bodies still lie unfound along the Western Front.
The woods grew back and the shell-holes became mere undulations in ground. Today the spot is popular with dog-walkers.
But a local man called Alain Malinowski could not get the tunnel out of his head. It was out there somewhere on the ridge.
Working on the Paris metro in the 1990s, he travelled daily to the capital and used his spare time to visit military archives in the Château de Vincennes. For 15 years he accumulated descriptions, maps and prisoner interrogations - but to no avail. The landscape had been too badly disfigured by bombardment to make any meaningful comparison.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Video footage In 2017, Reza Aslan visited a cannibalistic Hindu group as part of a TV show. The group gave him human brain to eat, covered his face with cremated remains

Image
Video footage In 2017, Reza Aslan visited a cannibalistic Hindu group as part of a TV show. The group gave him human brain to eat, covered his face with cremated remains, and made him wear headgear decorated with human teeth.  One of the members of the group even threatened to cut off his head.  Aslan later posted on social media saying: “Want to know what a dead guy’s brain tastes like? Charcoal. It was burnt to a crisp!” The Aghori sect, which Aslan visited, is a fringe group within Hinduism. They are known for their extreme rituals, which include residing in cremation grounds, meditating naked, and even consuming human flesh as part of their spiritual practices. The Aghori are often feared and misunderstood, even within India, due to their unconventional and shocking practices. The episode featuring the Aghori was part of Aslan's CNN series, "Believers," which aimed to explore the world's most fascinating faith-based groups. However, the ep...
Read more

This is the last image of Uruguayan Flight 571, before it crashed in The Andes on October 13, 1972. 27 out of 45 people survived the initial crash

Image
This is the last image of Uruguayan Flight 571, before it crashed in The Andes on October 13, 1972. 27 out of 45 people survived the initial crash. Survivors were eventually forced to cannibalize the dead to stay alive. Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 , flight of an airplane charted by a Uruguayan amateur rugby team that crashed in the Andes Mountains in Argentina on October 13, 1972, the wreckage of which was not located for more than two months. 16 people were rescued 72 days later. Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 , flight of an airplane charted by a Uruguayan amateur rugby team that crashed in the Andes Mountains in Argentina on October 13, 1972, the wreckage of which was not located for more than two months. Of the 45 people aboard the plane, only 16 survived the ordeal. The incident garnered international attention, especially after it was revealed that the survivors had resorted to canni...
Read more

In 2018, 6-month-old Jaxon Hunter died in 2018 at a daycare after a 10-year-old girl allegedly dropped him.

Image
In 2018, 6-month-old Jaxon Hunter died in 2018 at a daycare after a 10-year-old girl allegedly dropped him.  The girl told authorities she panicked after dropping Jaxon, and then she began stomping on his head when he began to cry. Initially, the girl faced charges of first-degree intentional homicide, as per the guidelines for individuals aged 10 or older, and was placed in a secure detention center.  Subsequently, the case was transferred from adult court to juvenile court and results of future rulings were not made public. The mother of the accused girl came forward in defense of her daughter, stating that the incident was an accident. She expressed her belief in her daughter's innocence and stated that the incident was not intentional. WATCH THE SADDEST VIDEO HERE The accused girl was held in an adult unit at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. This raised concerns about the treatment of juvenile offenders in the just...
Read more

Popular posts from this blog

German women were r*ped by all armies at the end of the second world war. From the archive, 17 June 1955:

Image
  German women were r*ped by all armies at the end of the second world war. From the archive, 17 June 1955: Two years after the end of the war Berlin still smelled of death. Each street contained dozens of ruins and every ruin, especially after rain had fallen and there was still a dampness in the air, retained the same sickly smell. It may have been, as some Germans honestly believed, corpses buried beneath them, or it may have been the state of the drains. It may simply have been the projection of a short but stormy past into the greyness of that particularly uninviting present. Here are some images containing Graphic content visual material that is considered disturbing, offensive, or inappropriate. images from Execution of torturers and violence. 
Read more

An unauthorized photo of Stalin: the moment he was informed that the Germans were about to take Kiev, 1941

Image
 An unauthorized photo of Stalin: the moment he was informed that the Germans were about to take Kiev, 1941 An unauthorized photo of Stalin inside of the Kremlin shows the very moment he was informed that the German armies had advanced in Kyiv (August 1941). What you see here is a man who up until a few weeks before had absolute confidence in Plan A, and who now has no Plan B. The picture was taken by Komsomolskaya Pravda’s editor-in-chief. The photographer secretly defied orders to destroy it as it was deemed not to show Stalin in a positive light. Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union, was the greatest military operation of World War II. It deployed thousands of aircraft, tanks, artillery guns, and more than six million soldiers. Furthermore, it brought two of probably the most totalitarian regimes in history against one another. However, in the first few weeks of the operation, it didn’t look like the clash of two giants. The German a...
Read more

Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim, 48, was stoned to death by militants from the Hizb Al-Islam group in Afgoye, district Somalia, in 2009

Image
Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim, 48, was stoned to death by militants from the Hizb Al-Islam group in Afgoye, district Somalia, in 2009 Stoning is a form of execution by torture where the individual who throws the deadly stone cannot be identified. In some countries, those sentenced to stoning, or “lapidation” as it is also called, are buried in a hole and covered with soil (men up to their waists; women to a line above their breasts), according to Article 102 of the Islamic Penal Code. A selected group then executes the alleged adulterers using rocks and sticks. Those able to escape the hole during stoning can be freed, according to Islamic law, a feat that is much more difficult for women than for men because so much more of their body is covered during lapidation. Stoning is considered a form of community justice and has its fair share of critics both among human rights groups and Islamic clerics. In Somalia, a 48-year old man was buried up to his waist and stoned...
Read more