This version, repeated by many authors, is challenged by Bruno Kartheuser who finds the story inconsistent and implausible. Kartheuser first points out that the decisive intervention that is attributed to Father Jean Espinasse is not confirmed by any witness, though several hundred people were gathered in the courtyard of the factory at that time; this intervention is not mentioned in the declaration made in 1948 by the president of the special delegation from Tulle, Colonel Bouty, that attributed the interventions and rescues to the director of the Brandt facility Factory at la Marque, Henry Vogel, Deputy Director of Weapons Manufacture in Tulle, Laborie, and Chief Engineer of Roads and Bridges, Lajugie. Nor does Trouillé attribute the saving of the three men to the Father, "Vogel debated splendidly with the SS officers to free some of his workers condemned to this torture […]. In this way, he earned four pardons and allowed the Deputy Director of the weapons factory, Laborie, to claim and remove these men; Lajugie, Chief Engineer in the region further argued exhaustively to save an engineer in his service but his efforts were in vain". The "decisive intervention" of Espinasse is also not mentioned in the citation for the award of the Médaille d'argent from the French Red Cross to the Father in 1945 which was awarded on the basis of his priestly merits and his material assistance he had given to those executed. Finally, for Kartheuser, given the strict hierarchy in place in the SS, it is not possible that Schmald could have made the decision to stop the executions because they had been ordered by General Lammerding (who said after the war that it was on his order that the hangings were stopped before the predetermined 120 victims), that the hangings were supervised by Kowatsch and that one of the superiors of Schmald in the SD (either Korten or Butsch) were present at the time.