Page 208 - Bugle Autumn 2014

So it was that we came to the village below Chateau d’Audrieu. For it was here that, in the late afternoon of June 8th 1944, the SS troops under Meyer’s command interrogated and then murdered their captives.
At d’Audrieu, the DLI Padre Kenneth Crawford led us in a special service of dedication during which the new bronze plaque commemorating Evan Hayton and William Barlow was unveiled. It now joins a plaque listing the names of Canadian soldiers from the Winnipeg Rifles who were murdered during this same period of fighting.
Kurt Meyer was a born survivor. With remnants of his force he escaped from the Falaise pocket, but was eventually captured by French partisans. Handed over to the Canadians he faced 5 charges for war crimes and the killing of 48 prisoners. His initial death sentence was commuted to
life imprisonment and after a few years in a Canadian jail he was transferred to a British military prison in Germany in 1951 and released in December 1954.
Kurt Meyer’s campaign record shows
him as a brave and dedicated soldier. But he was a fanatic and devoid of chivalry.
For the record also shows that he is
held responsible for the murder of all the inhabitants and the destruction of their village near Kharkov; and he was complicit in the cold blooded murder of Canadian and British prisoners on 7th and 8th June 1944.
Yet when he died in December 1961 on
Durham Fire Service and the children of Lingeveres at the new DLI Memorial. The children sang our National Anthem in English
his 51st birthday a report noted that “fifteen thousand people attended Kurt Meyer’s funeral in Hagen. A cushion-bearer bore his medals.”
No one carried Evan Hayton’s and William Barlow’s medals to their graves; no bugles sounded; no throng of admirers was in attendance; and no eulogies were spoken
on their behalf. But God had caught them even before they fell.
The memory of Evan Hayton and William Barlow will live on and a permanent record of their place in our history now stands at d’Audrieu in France.
Grenville Holland
DLI WW veteran Peter Downey and his daughter on Gold Beach