The mass grave in Villeneuve-Loubet, full details

[Jean-Loup]

Exit hole. Also note the small wire for incerting camo.

[Jean-Loup]

I find the damage to this helmet very impressive, and was shoked when I first saw it.

[Jean-Loup]

This is body n******176;11. Nothing notable exept that he is still wearing his helmet. No wounds were discovered.

[Jean-Loup]

This is body n******176;9. A jack knife was found on his hip, but other then that, nothing was found: no wounds or objects. The skull is broken in the picture, but that was done by us working, not by something that occured during the war.

[Jean-Loup]

This is body n°6. He was lying on his back, with his legs spread appart. He was still wearing his helmet, his belt (with nothing attached to it, maybe he was a crewmember of an artillery piece), and his dog tag. His head is to the right of the photo, and his legs to the left. His belt is clearly visible.

[Jean-Loup]

This is n°6's dog tag. (Although it was still readable, it turned out that the WASt was not able to decode it, so this man remains unidentified)

[Jean-Loup]

N******176;6 was killed by multiple schrapnel wounds: a small fragment went through his helmet, and this large fragment was found in the area of his abdomen (I forgot to put a scale in the pic: the fragment is only about 4 or 5 cm long.)

[Jean-Loup]

This is the helmet of n°6. Note the shrapnel entry. The helmet also has a large dent on the front. This is interesting as a local civilian remembered seeing a german soldier who had a dent on the front of his helmet after a piece of flak landed on it during an air raid. Maybe this was the same man, as dented german helmets are pretty rare.

[Jean-Loup]

Once we had removed almost all the bones, we passed the metal detector at the bottom of the grave. We were amazed to find this ring, that came up, still on the finger. Unfortunatly, the conditions of the discovery made it impossible to know who the ring belonged to. Nothing was written inside it.

[Jean-Loup]

Discovery of the ring.

[Jean-Loup]

This spent and badly damaged 30 cal bullet was also only found after removal of the bones, in the area of body 7 (or possibly 8; or maybe we had moved the bullet from somewhere else without noticing...). No wounds were found on either of them, but this bullet must have killed one of the two.
It is suprising to think that this little bent and corroded piece of metal killed a young man 62 years ago.

The reason it was impossible to find the cause of death of several bodies is because they would have been wounded in the torax, or abdomen: this would only leave traces on the ribs at best. Since the bones were in very bad condition and fragile, and we were forced to work fast, no damage to any ribs could be properly found or identified. Luckily, in several cases, equipments were also damaged, and so a cause of death could be found anyways.

[Jean-Loup]

The same bullet from an other angle. The lead core has gone completely. Usualy, 30cal bullets are too powerfull to stay in the body, unless fired from a long distance, or if they hit a major bone, or ricochayed before impact.

[Jean-Loup]

This small and unimportant looking wallet was also found in the areas of bodies 7 and 8. When the wallet dried, it cracked open revealing several french coins, and a crucifix. Very sad.

[Jean-Loup]

As I stated before, only one body was still wearing his shoes. But, an extra pair of shoes was also found simply thrown in the grave. Somebody had taken them off a body, but then changed his mind about keeping them. I strongly suspected the shoes must have been battle damaged, and on cleaning them, I found that they indeed both appear to have shrapnel holes in them. It is very hard to see anything on the pics, but I put probes through the holes to show where they are.

Here is a story about shoes, as told by a local civilian who was a teenager at the time:
"There were lots of killed Germans. They were already starting to decompose. Then a good old timer told me: "Holy sh!t, theres one over there, look at the boots he has!" He must have been an officer, he had boots. So he said: "Too bad, I am going to take his boots". I said: "Are you crazy, cant you see he is dead?"? There were wasps who were taking pieces of meat of the bodies, they were all swollen, their belts were pressing into their stomachs. It was in august and extremely hot. He went there to pull off the boots: the leg came off, everything came! And it stank! So we ran away, we said: "Do what you want, take them, but we arent staying here!". And in the end, he left them there."<O></O>

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[Jean-Loup]

Here are all the buttons found in the grave. We missed about 40% of them it looks like (or maybe some men were buried without their uniforms), even though we carefully put all of them in a bag, and used the metal detector to inspect the grave and our dirt pile.
Note that the upper square of 32 tunic buttons have S hooks at the back. The lower square of 50 buttons do not. (some S hooks broke off as they are very fragile)