As he was taken from the truck by his Nazi guards and led, naked, into the woods from which his seven fellow SAS men had not returned, Private Edwin Weaver had turned to his German guard and spoken four words.

At his subsequent war crimes trial SS-Unterscharführer Georg Zahringer, who had driven the men to the site of their murders, told the court what Pte Weaver’s last words had been.

“We were good men.”

Zahringer said at his trial that Pte Weaver had been made to stand near the edge of an open grave, from where he could see the naked dead bodies of his comrades. “He was not trembling,” Zahringer said. “He was shot through the back of the head and fell on to the bodies of the others.”

Over the weekend of July 27 and 28, 2019, family members of the men gathered at the two sites of the mass graves that, over time, had been reclaimed by the forest, to mark the unveiling of new memorials to their relatives.