The German War Graves Commission has discovered evidence of a mass grave with dozens of Wehrmacht soldiers shot by the French resistance in southern France.
The Wehrmacht, founded in 1935, was the name of the German army during the Nazi period.
Ground investigations launched at the end of June revealed conspicuous suspected sites positioned side-by-side, the commission announced on Wednesday in Kassel.
A former French resistance fighter broke his silence about the mass shooting of 47 prisoners of war in World War II and thus set the investigations rolling. Excavation work is now scheduled to begin in the second half of August.
The Germans were shot in June 1944 - after a Waffen SS massacre of the population in Tulle as well as the extermination of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, a war crime that became a symbol of Nazi barbarism in France.
The Waffen SS was the military branch of the notorious SS division of Nazi Germany's paramilitary forces.
It was already known that Germans and a French woman accused of collaboration were shot in a forest near Meymac in central France. However, all those involved had remained silent about the circumstances throughout their lives. The last surviving witness recently broke his silence at the age of 98.
According to the report, the human remains of those shot are said to rest in two mass graves. One with 11 bodies was already located in 1967, but it was kept quiet. The search for the second grave was helped by the testimony of a man who, as a schoolchild, had observed the exhumation of the 11 dead.
