On a sunny day in June 1944, a rogue SS unit carried out one of the worst atrocities of World War II when they razed the little town of Oradour-sur-Glane, France, to the ground, killing 642 people.

 

Then

On the 9th of June, 1944, a meeting took place at St Junien in the Haute Vienne, France, that was to prove as fateful to the inhabitants of the nearby town of Oradour-sur-Glane as Wannsee was to the Jews.

Reprisals were needed: partisan activity had destroyed a bridge and killed two German soldiers, and a Waffen SS officer had reportedly been kidnapped nearby.

The job was given to a unit of the Waffen SS from the ‘Das Reich’ panzer division; heavily blooded on the plains of Russia, they were now hurrying northwards in response to the D-Day landings.

By 2 o clock on the sunny Saturday afternoon of 10th June, they had surrounded Oradour-sur-Glane and corralled all the men into the square on the pretense of wanting to check identity documents.  Women and children were locked in the church.

The men were then separated into 6 groups and taken to 6 different barns. On a signal at 4 pm, their guards opened fire, aiming at the legs so they could not move and finishing the job with revolvers. 197 men died. Only 5 escaped of whom one is still alive today.

Incendiary devices were then exploded in the church, backed up by shooting. Two women, one with a baby, managed to climb out of the central window behind the high altar but the mother and baby were shot when the child’s crying alerted the troops. The other woman managed to hide until she was found by rescuers next day; her daughter had been shot in the church beside her. 240 women and 205 children died, making a total for the atrocity of 642 people.

Attempts were made to cover and burn the bodies; in the end only about 52 were identifiable. The town was ransacked and all the buildings set alight, bar a smart house with a good wine cellar near the post office used as a bivouac that night. That too was burnt the next morning.

And that is pretty much where the story of the village ends. Even the Germans were somewhat taken aback by the slaughter with the division’s commander saying it exceeded requirements (I think he has suggested some 30 men be shot in reprisals!) and Rommel moved to protest.

SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Adolf  Diekmann who was in charge of the unit and gave the orders on the day escaped investigation as he later died conveniently in Normandy when he ventured out without his helmet and was hit by shrapnel.

Most of the troops involved also died there and those that didn’t ended up in Eastern Germany which would not extradite them for war crimes. Relatively few were ever bought before a war crimes tribunal and only one served a lengthy jail term. The last in the 1980’s faced the prospect of being tried by a juvenile court as he was only 19 at the time of Oradour, but the case collapsed due to lack of evidence which isn’t very surprising as most of the potential witnesses had been shot.

After

Immediately after the liberation of France, the town was declared a historic monument, to be left untouched as a reminder of the barbarism of the Nazi regime and as a memorial to the dead.  A new town was built beyond the ruins.

The Centre of Remembrance opened in 1999, a rusty modernist block, which also contains a museum detailing the rise of the Nazis, the events of Oradour, right through to peace in our modern times. This costs €7.80 to visit but the village is free. There is also a small but well stocked bookshop.

A 70 year commemoration – is it really so recently – produced a rather poignant  display of photos of the victims. The aim is to put a face to every name though scattered blank squares show the difficulty of this. The people who stare out range from bonny babies to young brides, village lotharios to stern faced old women: a not always pretty but undoubtedly representative microcosm of French rural life in the 1940’s.

Ironically many Alsatian refugees died at the hands of a unit which apparently had a lot of conscripts from that area. Spanish and Jews were also caught in the trap. Surely none deserved to die in such a manner.

Today

So wander the ruins of Oradour, walk on the pavements where their feet once stepped, pause outside the cafes and listen carefully for an echo of long lost voices. People had a life here, visited the hairdresser, chatted at the butchers, caught the tram and went to school.

And died.

Visualize if you dare the scene in the church, see the melted bell and the World War I memorial scarred by bullets. 2 children died in the confessional which still stands against the wall.

The square is quiet in the afternoon sun, the roofless houses and a burnt out car mute testimony to the long ago events. The inclination is to say long forgotten but that is the whole point of Oradour, that one must remember, however painful, in the hope that people can learn from history and it will never happen again.

Finally there was one last survivor, a schoolchild who avoided the roundup altogether. Already a refugee, his mother had impressed on him the need to run if he ever saw any Germans coming. Sometimes things can be seen more clearly through the eyes of a child.

Exchange Rate: £1 = €1.12 (August 2018)