Decoration brings storm

Press, 2 June 1984, Page 11

Decoration brings storm

NZPA-AP Paris One of the last living generals of Hitler’s notorious Waffen SS was quietly honoured more than a week ago in a small town in Normandy. By yesterday, the event was widely known—and roundly condemned. Heinz Harmel, commander of the World War II German 10th SS “Frundsberg” Panzer division, was decorated on May 22 with the gold medal of Bayeux by the Deputy Mayor, Bernard Roquet; whose father was an underground resistance fighter against the German occupiers. The official said he viewed the gesture—less than two weeks before the fortieth anniversary of the Normandy landing—as a symbol of French-German reconciliation.

Bayeux, on the northern coast of Normandy, was the first French city to be liberated by the Allies. “We must not return to the past,” Mr Roquet said at the time of the presentation, affirming his wish for “reconciliation and peace.” By yesterday, as criticism sharpened, he denied any knowledge that Harmel had been a member of the SS and said the news “surprised” him. “I gave a medal to a group of former German soldiers without knowing it

was the former SS. If it could be changed, I wouldn’t do it again,” he said. Communist officials of towns in the Bayeux region called the act an “indecent, gesture” and protested in front of the town hall. Yves Jouffa, president of the French League of the Rights of Man, said the gesture was “scandalous” and “makes Nazism banal.” The prestigious “Le Monde” newspaper said it carried “the mark of blood.” Harmel, aged 78, whose

division was stationed in Poland before being moved shortly after D-Day to fight British and Canadian forces in Normandy, denied any connection with the deeds attributed to SS troops. “I have nothing to do with SS who guarded the concentration camps,” he said in a French radio interview. “If I had committed the least war crime, if I had the least bit of blood on my hands, there would certainly have been questions about it during the Nuremburg trials.”