We are April 2, 1963, the site is going well along the canal between the Eblé bridge and the cities of the Moselle path. New arches are under construction to allow the junction between Metz and the A31 motorway. Suddenly, two meters underground, the blade of the scraper cuts through what appear to be two mass graves. The workers see the bones, give the alert, the site freezes. The police have been notified.
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On each side of the wide trench are the bones. The bodies were thrown on top of each other. We can distinguish quicklime, thrown on the corpses to hasten annihilation and prevent their identification. Further on, the earth was pushed over the pile of bodies. Here and there appear ribs, a pelvis, femurs next to an almost complete skull.
The relative proximity of the Woippy camp where many deportees and prisoners passed until 1944, the railroad not far from there, the loneliness of the place at the time, far from any habitation, suggest to experts that these mass graves barely twenty years old.
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Buttons of Soviet army uniforms discovered at the scene confirm this thesis. The bodies of Russian prisoners executed at the end of the last war have been found.
A former deportee from Woippy camp, aged 62, was called to the scene. He remembers. On September 28, 1944, the American troops were located a few kilometers from Metz. You can hear from miles away the shootings of the fighting raging on the Gravelotte side. That evening, the German guards of a working “kommando” located not far from the current crossroads of the Thionville road gathered around 120 Russian prisoners of war, explaining to them that they were leaving for a camp in Germany. However, the railway lines were cut, the stations bombarded by the Allied air force, and road transport reserved for military convoys.
No one has ever seen the Russian prisoners again. This camp was commanded by Commander Gridlig who, after the war, was executed as a war criminal.
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