The operation to remove the 17 from the meadow at St Julien de Crempse, near Bergerac, to a German war cemetery near the Atlantic coast, marked a victory for Emile Guet, 82, a former Resistance fighter who was ashamed of the actions of his comrades.

The killings, which were carried out in reprisal for the murder of villagers by the occupying Nazis, had outraged M Guet because his unit had promised the soldiers safety, as prisoners of war, when it captured them in August 1944.

M Guet, who led the convoy that took the Germans to their prison camp, had campaigned since the 1980s to persuade the authorities to recognise the French massacre.

“It gives me great satisfaction to have kept the word of my commanding officer and given these soldiers a tomb,” M Guet said as excavators removed the remains from the unmarked burial spot of the men, who belonged to a Wehrmacht signals unit. They will be reburied on November 16, Germany’s Remembrance Day.

The story began when a German punishment battalion marched into St Julien in early September 1944 and rounded up all the men in the village. Seventeen, aged from 18 to 80, were taken out to a field, ordered to dig their graves, and shot dead in reprisal for the deaths of Germans attacked by the Maquis.

A month later a Resistance group seized 17 Germans who had been captured by M Guet’s unit and killed them in the same field. M Guet and his men were shocked. “You don’t shoot down an unarmed person,” he said.

A memorial marks the massacre of the local men, but there is not a word about the German deaths.

For years, the council resisted M Guet’s demands that the massacre at least be acknowledged. “I hit a blank wall. The people felt guilty about what happened among them and didn’t want to stir bad memories,” he said.

Finally, in 1997, the newly elected mayor, Yves Blondit, opened an investigation into the subject. Watching the exhumation yesterday, he said: “This is a relief for our residents. They are happy that these people are finding a worthy tomb and the village is recovering its peace of mind.”

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