Oradure-sur-Glane
| Scott and I visited Oradour-sur-Glane in
April 2010 on our way to Limoges Airport. We had researched
the tragic events that led to the massacre but nothing
prepared us for the sheer horror that presented itself. We ended up walking through the ruins, hardly talking to each other as each devastating subject appeared before us. When we left we agreed that the experience had left us both feeling deeply saddened and mentally depressed over the fact that human beings can be so evil towards innocent people. There are many videos available on the Net about this atrocity but perhaps, just two explain it fully. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxkodma3p-M Recently (2023) another video was released. You can find it here: NOTE: The links to the visit can be found at the bottom of this page but you are strongly advised to read the story before viewing the pictures. |
The Official Story of Oradour-sur-Glane
| Around 2 p.m. on 10 June 1944, four days
after the Allied invasion of Normandy, approximately 150
Waffen-SS soldiers entered the tranquil village of
Oradour-sur-Glane in the Limosin region of south central
France. For no apparent reason, Hitler's elite troops
destroyed every building in this peaceful village and
brutally murdered a total of 642 innocent men, women and
children, an unexplained tragedy which has gone down in
history as one of the worst war crimes committed by the
German army in World War II. On that beautiful Summer day, the defenceless inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane were rudely dragged out of their homes, including the sick and the elderly, and ordered to assemble on the Fairgrounds on the pretext of checking their identity papers. After all had been assembled, they were forced to wait in suspense with machine guns pointed at them. Then the women were separated from the men and marched a short distance to the small Catholic Church, carrying infants in their arms or pushing them in baby carriages. The men were then ordered to line up in three rows and face a wall that bordered on the Fairgrounds. A short time later, they were randomly divided into groups and herded into six buildings: barns, garages, a smithy, and a wine storehouse. Around 4 p.m., a loud explosion was heard which was interpreted by the men to be a signal for the SS soldiers to begin firing their machine guns. Most of the men were wounded in the legs and then burned alive when every building in the village was set on fire at around 5 p.m. By some miracle, 6 of the men managed to escape from one of the burning barns and 5 of them survived. They testified in court about this completely unjustified German barbarity against blameless French civilians. The Oradour church only had a seating capacity of 350 persons, but 245 frightened women and 207 sobbing children were forced inside at gunpoint while the men were still sitting on the grass of the Fairgrounds, awaiting their fate. The women and children were locked inside the church while the SS soldiers systematically looted all the homes in this prosperous farming village. Then around 4 p.m. a couple of SS soldiers carried a gas bomb inside this holy place and set it off, filling the church with a cloud of noxious black smoke. Their intention had been to asphyxiate the women and children in the House of God, but their plan failed. As the women and children pressed against the doors, trying to escape and struggling to breathe, SS soldiers then entered the crowded, smoke-filled church and fired hundreds of shots at the hapless victims, while other SS men stood outside ready to machine-gun anyone who attempted to escape. The soldiers fired low inside the church in order to hit the small children. Babies in their prams were blown up by hand grenades, filled with gas, that were tossed into the church. Then brushwood and straw was carried into the stone church and piled on top of the writhing bodies of those that were not yet dead. The church was then set on fire, burning alive the women and babies who had only been wounded by the shots and the grenades. The clamour coming from the church could be heard for a distance of two kilometres, according the Bishop's office report. The fire inside the church was so intense that the flames leaped up into the bell tower; the bronze church bells melted from the heat of the flames and fell down onto the floor of the church. One SS soldier was accidentally killed by falling debris when the roof of the church steeple collapsed. Only one woman, a 47-year-old grandmother, escaped from the church. Taking advantage of a cloud of smoke, she hid behind the main altar where she found a ladder that had been left there for the purpose of lighting the candles on the altar. Madame Marguerite Rouffanche, the lone survivor of the massacre in the church, managed to escape by using the ladder to climb up to a broken window behind the altar, then leaping out of the window, which was 9 feet from the ground. Although hit by machine gun fire and wounded 4 times in the legs and once in the shoulder, she was able to crawl to the garden behind the presbytery where she hid among the rows of peas until she was rescued, 24 hours later, at 5 p.m. the next day, and taken to the hospital in Limoges where she was admitted under an assumed name. It took a full year for her to recover from her wounds. In 1953, she testified before a French military tribunal in Bordeaux about the massacre of the women and children in the church. The Trial From January to February 1953 a total of 21 men were tried by the French courts at Bordeaux for their part in the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, they were all members of the Der Führer regiment of Das Reich Division who had survived the war. None of them were officers; the highest rank was that of Sergeant. Of the 21 men, 14 of them came from the French province of Alsace, which had been taken over by the Germans following the French surrender in 1940. In the eyes of the Germans, these men had been German, in the eyes of the French; they were close to being traitors. Members of the Resistance said that they should have refused to take part in the massacre, that they should have helped their fellow countrymen escape and that they were even more guilty than the Germans. The lawyers defending the Alsatians said that with one exception they had been conscripted into the SS, that they had no choice but to obey and if they had refused they would have been shot. What made the trial unusual is that 13 of the Alsatians had been at liberty before the trial started, one of them had in fact become a police inspector since the end of the war. Another had won the Croix de Guerre, France's highest military medal for valour after the end of the war, whilst fighting with the French army in Indo-China (present day Vietnam). The German defendants had been in prisoner-of-war camps since the end of the war in 1945. The people of the province of Alsace wanted all the men freed at once whilst the people living in the Oradour area wanted them all executed at once. Obviously not everyone was going to like the verdicts when they were announced. The trial took place in an atmosphere of bad temper within France and at the end, just two of the defendants were sentenced to death, the rest to prison for between 8 to 12 years. The verdicts produced an uproar in all parts of France, some thought they were much to lenient, others that they were much too harsh. Protests and demonstrations were held in the province of Alsace to assist in gaining the release of their men folk. In the event all 21 men were released quite soon after the trial had ended.
All the defendants, both German and Alsatian, immediately lodged appeals, except for Graff who had already served most of his sentence whilst awaiting trial. The Alsatian newspapers had delayed their publication, so as to carry full reports of the sentences and lengthy comments on them. The papers were eagerly awaited in the province and their contents caused an immediate reaction. War memorials were hung with black drapes, thousands marched in protest, flags hung at half-mast and bells slowly tolled in mourning. Posters went up all over the province declaring, "we do not accept the verdicts" and "all Alsace declares solidarity with her thirteen sons". War veterans prepared to return their medals to the Government, local councils met in emergency session to declare support for the malgré-nous. Boos was excluded from this support as he was viewed primarily as a traitor, having volunteered for the SS, even though he was technically a German at the time. General de Gaulle said, "What Frenchman will not understand the enraged grief of Alsace?" He went on to speak of the province being, "brutally annexed by the enemy after the capitulation of Vichy." His concern was that after 6 years of war the French nation should not now permit, "the infliction of a bitter injury to national unity." René Plevin, the minister for national defence indicated that the government would support a bill to grant amnesty to all those forcibly incorporated into the German army. This went some way to calming Alsatian unrest. On Thursday 19th February the French National Assembly passed a new bill granting amnesty to all malgré-nous for all crimes committed as a result of their forcible incorporation into the German army. This bill was passed by 319 votes to 211 with 83 abstentions, the large number of abstentions indicating that this was a difficult issue for the consciences of the Representatives. With the passing of the amnesty, all the protests in Alsace stopped and the province returned to normal literally overnight. However in the Limusin things were viewed very differently. On Friday 20th and Saturday 21st February representatives from the ANFM returned the Croix de Guerre and other awards granted to the memory of Oradour. They said that the town would no longer welcome official visits from state representatives. In a show of anger, they put up plaques listing the names of all the Deputies who had voted for the amnesty at the entrance to the ruins (where they remained until 1966.) In Germany itself there was unease at the sentences being passed on their nationals and a feeling that if the French were being pardoned, then so should the Germans. After all the German SS soldiers on trial had also been conscripted into the army and they were just as young (some under 18) at the time of Oradour as the French. Even Lenz who had been judged the most harshly was not a volunteer for the SS. The German newspaper, Die Welt (The World) asked, "Were the Germans acting less under orders, less under pressure and force than their Alsatian colleagues? Were they different persons?" Three days after the amnesty bill was passed on Sunday 22nd February, the thirteen Alsatians (including Graff, but not Boos) were released from custody at 3:30 AM. They returned to Alsace that afternoon to be received with joy both by their families and the province as a whole. The people of the Limosin were devastated, the ANFM said to President Auriol, "Our dead are being held in scorn and jeered at. Oradour has been sacrificed a second time. Oradour the symbol of barbarity will henceforth be also the symbol of the unpunished crime." Soon after, the majority of the Germans were freed, as they had already completed most of their sentences whilst waiting for the trial to begin. The two men condemned to death, Lenz and Boos were eventually pardoned and all 21 men who had stood trial in 1953 were free by 1958. |