Oradour-sur-Glane

On June 10, 1944, a Nazi SS Division (Das Reich) surrounded the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France then ordered everyone in the town, 652 persons, to assemble in the town square.

Once there, they were told by the Nazi commandant they were suspected of hiding explosives and as a result there would be a search and a check of identity papers. The entire population was then locked up, the men in barns, women and children in the church.

The Nazis then set fire to the entire village and began shooting the villagers with machine guns, then set the barns and the church on fire, burning the men, women and children alive, and shooting anyone who survived. A total of 642 townspeople -- 245 women, 207 children, and 190 men were massacred.

Three days after the massacre, a Catholic Bishop found the charred bodies of fifteen children in a heap behind the burned out altar inside the church.

The village of Oradour-sur-Glane was never rebuilt, forever standing as a silent monument to Nazi atrocities.

 

You know, I read these stories I had not previously heard of, and none of it surprises me. It still sickens me, but it doesn't surprise me. What really saddens me even more is the knowledge that our own country is not immune to this kind of savagery. Look what we did to the Native Americans here. And we called them savage.

 

OMG how sick cant belive they would do that

 

A little more detail on this subject.

On their 450 mile drive from the south of France to the Normandy invasion area, the 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ (15,000 men aboard 1,400 vehicles, including 209 tanks) under the command of SS General Lammerding, arrived at Limoges, a town famous for its porcelain. In the small town of St. Junien (30 kilometres from Limoges) the ‘Der Fuhrer Regiment’ was regrouping. Following many encounters with the local marquis in which two German soldiers were killed, a unit of the regiment arrived at ORADOUR (believed to be a hotbed of maquis activity) in a convoy of trucks and halftracks.At about 2 PM on this Saturday afternoon the 120 man SS unit surrounded the village ordering all inhabitants to parade in the market place for an identity check. Women and children were separated from the menfolk and herded into the local church. The men were herded in groups into six carefully chosen local garages and barns and shot. Their bodies were then covered with straw and set on fire. The 452 women and children in the church were then suffocated by smoke grenades lobbed in through the windows and sharpnel grenades that were thrown down the nave while machine-guns raked the interior. The church was then set on fire.
Incredibly, one woman, Mme Marguerite Rouffanche, escaped by jumping through a window, she was the only witness to the carnage in the church. (Mme Rouffanche died, aged 91, in March, 1988) Unspeakable atrocities were committed throughout the village, but some men managed to escape. The commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the SS Regiment at ORADOUR was thirty-two year old SS Sturmbannfuhrer Adolf Diekmann, a survivor of the Russian Front. He was later killed in the Normandy battle area on June 30 when hit in the head by shrapnel. Many members of the “Das Reich” reacted with surprising venom against the officer who ordered the massacre and a court martial was established but Diekmann died before the trial took place. The world heard of this massacre eight years later when some of those responsible were brought to trial. In 1953, French Military Court at Bordeaux established that 642 people (245 women, 207 children and 190 men) had perished. Twenty-one other members of his company (including fourteen Frenchmen from Alsace-Lorraine who had been conscripted into the SS) were sentenced to death but later their sentences were commuted to terms of imprisonment. All were released by 1959. SS General Lammerding died peacefully at his home at Bad Toltz in Germany on January 13, 1971, of cancer. A close friend of Diekmann was Major Helmut Kampfe, commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion of the Der Fuhrer Regiment. He was kidnapped and executed by the FTP (Communists) the day before the massacre. His kidnapping was not the only reason for the events at Oradour. Gold, looted by the Nazis, and then stolen by the Maquis, was rumoured to be hidden in the village, why else the indiscriminate destruction?

Today, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane stands in ruins, just as the SS left it.
It is preserved as a monument to the dead and so it remains today, a very sad place.


The burned-out shell of the local doctor's car still sits where it was parked on June 10, 1944, in the centre of Oradour-sur-Glane.

Oradour Church main site for the killing of the women and children.

Oradour-sur-Glane, 1944.​

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