75 years ago today (June 10, 1944) the Germans carried out
the Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre in France. German Waffen-SS soldiers surrounded
the village at midday. The village population had almost doubled to about 650
people, swelled by refugees from other parts of France.
Summary:
The soldiers rounded up the entire population and
concentrated them on the market square. They separated the villagers by gender.
The Germans took the 197 men to several barns on the edge of town and locked
them in. They then locked up 240 women and 205 children in the village church
(pictured.) Then the Germans set fire to the barns and threw grenades through
the windows of the church, shooting those who sought to escape the flames.
After 642 inhabitants were dead, the Waffen-SS looted the
empty dwellings and then burned the village to the ground and withdrew from the
smoking ruins. Only seven villagers survived the massacre: six men and a woman,
all of them severely injured. About fifteen other inhabitants of the village
were able to escape the Germans before the massacre started or evade the
roundup by hiding.
Background:
In February 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division "Das
Reich" was stationed in the Southern French town of Valence-d'Agen ,north
of Toulouse, waiting to be resupplied with new equipment and fresh troops.
Following the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the division was ordered
north to help stop the Allied advance. One of its units was the 4th SS Panzer
Grenadier Regiment ("Der Führer"). Its staff included regimental
commander SS-Standartenführer Sylvester Stadler, SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf
Diekmann commanding the 1st Battalion and SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Weidinger,
Stadler's designated successor who was with the regiment for familiarisation.
Command passed to Weidinger on 14 June.
Early on the morning of 10 June 1944, Diekmann informed
Weidinger that he had been approached by two members of the Milice, a
collaborator paramilitary force of the Vichy Regime. They claimed that a
Waffen-SS officer was being held prisoner by the Resistance in Oradour-sur-Vayres,
a nearby village. The captured officer was claimed to be SS-Sturmbannführer
Helmut Kämpfe, commander of the 2nd SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion (also
part of "Das Reich" division). He may have been captured by the
Maquis du Limousin the day before.
The Massacre:
On 10 June, Diekmann's battalion sealed off Oradour-sur-Glane
and ordered everyone within to assemble in the village square to have their
identity papers examined. This included six non-residents who happened to be
bicycling through the town when the SS unit arrived. The women and children
were locked in the church, and the village was looted. The men were led to six
barns and sheds, where machine guns were already in place.
According to a survivor's account, the SS men then began
shooting, aiming for their legs. When victims were unable to move, the SS men
covered them with fuel and set the barns on fire. Only six men managed to
escape. One of them was later seen walking down a road and was shot dead. In
all, 190 Frenchmen died.
The SS men next proceeded to the church and placed an
incendiary device beside it. When it was ignited, women and children tried to
escape through the doors and windows, only to be met with machine-gun fire. 247
women and 205 children died in the attack. The only survivor was 47-year-old
Marguerite Rouffanche. She escaped through a rear sacristy window, followed by
a young woman and child. All three were shot, two of them fatally. Rouffanche
crawled to some pea bushes and remained hidden overnight until she was found
and rescued the next morning. About twenty villagers had fled Oradour-sur-Glane
as soon as the SS unit had appeared. That night, the village was partially
razed.
Several days later, the survivors were allowed to bury the
642 dead inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane who had been killed in just a few
hours. Adolf Diekmann said the atrocity was in retaliation for the partisan
activity in nearby Tulle and the kidnapping of an SS commander, Helmut Kämpfe.
German Wartime Response:
Protests at Diekmann's unilateral action followed, both from
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, General Gleiniger, German commander in Limoges, and
the Vichy government. Even SS-Standartenführer Stadler felt Diekmann had far
exceeded his orders and began an investigation. However, Diekmann was killed in
action shortly afterwards during the Battle of Normandy, and many of the third
company, which had conducted the massacre, were also killed in action. The
investigation was then suspended.
Post War:
On 12 January 1953, a military tribunal in Bordeaux heard the
charges against the surviving 65 of the 200 or so SS men who had been involved.
Only 21 of them were present, as many were in East Germany, which would not
permit their extradition. Seven of those charged were German citizens, but 14
were Alsatians, French nationals whose home region had been annexed by Germany
in 1940. All but one of the Alsatians claimed to have been forced to join the
Waffen-SS. Such forced conscripts from Alsace and Lorraine called themselves
the malgré-nous, meaning "against our will".
On 11 February, 20 defendants were found guilty. Continuing
uproar in Alsace (including demands for autonomy) pressed the French parliament
to pass an amnesty law for all the malgré-nous on 19 February. The convicted
Alsatian former SS men were released shortly afterwards, which caused bitter
protests in the Limousin region.
By 1958, all of the German defendants had also been released.
General Heinz Lammerding of the Das Reich division, who had given the orders
for retaliation against the Resistance, died in 1971, following a successful
entrepreneurial career. At the time of the trial, he lived in Düsseldorf, in
the former British occupation zone of West Germany, and the French government
never obtained his extradition from West Germany.
The last trial of a Waffen-SS member who had been involved
took place in 1983. Former SS-Obersturmführer Heinz Barth was tracked down in
East Germany. Barth had participated in the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre as a
platoon leader in the "Der Führer" regiment, commanding 45 SS men. He
was one of several charged with giving orders to shoot 20 men in a garage.
Barth was sentenced to life imprisonment by the First Senate of the City Court
of Berlin. He was released from prison in the reunified Germany in 1997 and
died in August 2007.
On 8 January 2014, Werner Christukat, an 88-year-old former
member of the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of the "Der Führer" SS
regiment was charged, by the state court in Cologne, with 25 charges of murder
and hundreds of counts of accessory to murder in connection with the massacre
in Oradour-sur-Glane. The suspect, who was identified only as Werner C., had
until 31 March 2014 to respond to the charges. If the case went to trial, it
could have possibly been held in a juvenile court because the suspect was only
19 at the time it occurred. According to his attorney, Rainer Pohlen, the
suspect acknowledged being at the village but denied being involved in any
killings. On 9 December 2014, the court dropped the case, citing a lack of any
witness statements or reliable documentary evidence able to disprove the
suspect's contention that he was not a part of the massacre.
Memorial:
After the war, General Charles de Gaulle decided the village
should never be rebuilt, but would remain a memorial to the cruelty of the Nazi
occupation.
The new village of Oradour-sur-Glane (population 2,375 in
2012), northwest of the site of the massacre, was built after the war. The
ruins of the original village remain as a memorial to the dead and to represent
similar sites and events.
In 1999 French President Jacques Chirac dedicated a memorial
museum, the Centre de la mémoire d'Oradour, near the entrance to the Village
Martyr ("martyred village"). Its museum includes items recovered from
the burned-out buildings: watches stopped at the time their owners were burned
alive, glasses melted from the intense heat, and various personal items.
On 6 June 2004, at the commemorative ceremony of the Normandy
invasion in Caen, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder pledged that Germany would
not forget the Nazi atrocities and specifically mentioned Oradour-sur-Glane.
On 4 September 2013, German President Joachim Gauck and
French President François Hollande visited the ghost village of
Oradour-sur-Glane. A joint news conference broadcast by the two leaders
followed their tour of the site. This was the first time a German President had
come to the site of one of the biggest World War II massacres on French soil.
On 28 April 2017, Emmanuel Macron, independent Presidential
candidate, visited Oradour-sur-Glane and met with the only remaining survivor
of the massacre, Robert Hébras.
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