1945: Gen. Charles Delestraint
April 19th, 2009 Headsman
On this date in 1945, French general and Resistance figure Charles Delestraint was hastily disposed of, ten days before the liberation of Dachau.
Delestraint, who also spent the First World War as a POW, was among those who noticed the hidebound military dogmas of the past needed updating.
With de Gaulle, Delestraint was a forceful advocate in the interwar period for mechanized warfare.
He didn’t get far enough, certainly not as far as the soon-to-be-vaunted Wehrmacht.
In 1940, just months after retirement, Delestraint was recalled to lead a mechanized division against the Germans, which of course turned out to be a spectacular triumph of tank warfare … for the Germans. While the French distributed armor units throughout their forces, the Germans massed them at a schwerpunkt aiming to break through the French line and speedily conquer in the rear.
Delestraint later remarked of the doctrinal difference,
We had 3,000 tanks and so did the Germans. We used them in a thousand packs of three, the Germans in three packs of a thousand.
Recruited subsequently into the French Resistance and thence betrayed, Delestraint enjoined the hospitality of many concentration camps and the tender mercies of one of their more infamous torturers.
Uncertainty remains over exactly how the Germans killed Delestraint, or even why the Dachau commandants wanted to finish off him in particular, although he was a primo catch in the anti-Resistance operation. The body was immediately cremated, camp records of the execution order disappeared if they ever existed, and eyewitness testimony at variance.
But dying in Dachau for the French Resistance? By any standard, that’s a passport to hero status, as attested by any number of Rue General Charles Delestraints to be found in his native land.
On this day..
- 1418: The hostages of the Armagnac siege of Senlis - 2020
- 1800: William M'Ilnea, true to the cause - 2019
- 1246: Brandur Kolbeinsson, Age of the Sturlungs beheading - 2018
- 1374: Tile von Damm, Braunschweig mayor - 2017
- 1012: St. Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury - 2016
- 1779: James Hackman, sandwich wrecker - 2015
- 1791: Emanuel the runaway slave - 2014
- 1928: Charles Birger, bootlegger - 2013
- 1662: John Barkstead, Miles Corbet, and John Okey, renditioned regicides - 2012
- 1996: John Martin Scripps, British serial killer - 2011
- 1314: Tour de Nesle Affair adulterers - 2010
- 1995: Richard Snell - did he go out with a bang? - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Concentration Camps,Death Penalty,Execution,France,Germany,History,No Formal Charge,Occupation and Colonialism,Shot,Soldiers,Summary Executions,Torture,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1945, april 19, charles de gaulle, charles delestraint, dachau, fall of france, french resistance, klaus barbie, military history, military theory, quotes, world war ii
The article that you linked to with the words “Uncertainty remains” is about the possibility that it was not the Germans who killed Delestraint, but the French prisoners. You apparently have such a strong preconceived notion that the Germans killed Delestraint that you missed the point of the article – that it was the Communist prisoners at Dachau who killed Delestraint because they wanted a Communist government in France after the war, so they had to get rid of the non-Communist leader of the French, General Delestraint.