Maillé massacre
episode of mass murder in France
The Maillé Massacre refers to the murder on 25 August 1944 of 124 of the 500 residents of the commune of Maillé in the department of the Indre-et-Loire. Following an ambush a few days before and in reprisals against activities of the French Resistance, Second Lieutenant Gustav Schlüter and his men organized the massacre and burnt the village. Forty-eight children were among the dead. The SS unit believed to be responsible for the massacre is the SS-Feldersatzbataillon 17 of 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen (Lieb, 2007). In contrast to Oradour-sur-Glane, the village was rebuilt after the war to its pre-war state.
Mass killings
On the evening of August 24, 1944, skirmishes between the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) and German troops took place near a farm in the commune of Maillé. Gustave Schlüter, commander of the German control post at Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine, mobilized his men and two train-mounted artillery pieces.
The next morning, Maillé was closed off by German forces. One artillery piece was destroyed by the attacking RAF. The first farms were then set on fire and their residents killed. At about noon, the SS entered the village and the systematic killing began.
“Maillé massacre” enters the record as episode of mass murder in France. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Maillé, massacre and episode can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q324215. Authority coordinates are 47.054, 0.582. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1944 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maillé massacre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.