We shouldn't make light of this town's misfortune... 642 townsfolk were slaughtered... 193 of them being children. This was the largest massacre committed by SS German troops in France in World War II... by a division short on officers... on 10th June 1944... just days following D-day landings at Normandy. But poor old Oradour-sur-Glane was not the intended target at all... it just had the misfortune to have a name sounding similar to the real target.
Here is the story as verified by an investigation of the massacre in 1953. Early on the morning of 10 June 1944, the SS command was told by troops in the Vichy Regime's support troops that an SS officer was being held by the Resistance in Oradour-sur-Vayres, a nearby village.
Immediately, an error-prone SS commander ordered his battalion to seal off Oradour-sur-Glane... a township having nothing to do with the capture of the SS commander... and miles away from the town listed in the battle orders... Oradour-sur-Vayres. This mistake could be put down to "who cares?" type of mistake... the battalion had just returned from the eastern front where massacaring of Russian villages was a daily event. The mistake may have meant little to the SS commander... but the townsfolk of Oradour-sur-Glane were none too pleased.
Our relaxed SS commander had one more surprise up his sleeve... his battle orders were to capture the mayor and demand that he deliver to the commander 30 citizens to act as hostages pending release of the captured SS commander. Clearly, these orders were impractical... who was the mayor... how long would be take to round up the hostages... why wouldn't he organise a raid by resistance fighters? The priority was to get the troops positioned to block progress of the Russians and the D-day Allied troops. Just kill the lot of them... just like when retreating from Russia... they'd get the message clearly enough.
The commander ordered all the townspeople... and anyone who happened to be in or near the town... to assemble in the village square, ostensibly to have their identity papers examined. The clean sweep managed to apprehended six people who did not live there but had the misfortune to be riding their bikes through the village when the Germans arrived.
All the women and children were locked in the church while the village was looted. Meanwhile, the men were led to six barns and sheds where machine guns were already in place.
According to the account of a survivor, the soldiers began shooting at them, aiming for their legs so that they would die slowly. Once the victims were no longer able to move, the soldiers covered the bodies with fuel and set the barns on fire. Only six men escaped; one of them was later seen walking down a road heading for the cemetery and was shot dead. In all, 190 men perished.
The soldiers proceeded to the church and placed an incendiary device there. After it was ignited, women and children tried to escape through the doors and windows of the church, but they were met with machine-gun fire. A total of 247 women and 193 children died in the carnage. A group of about twenty villagers had fled Oradour-sur-Glane as soon as the soldiers had appeared. That night, the village was partially razed. Burned out cars and buildings still litter the remains of the original village.
Many of the soldiers participating in the massacre met their own deaths just weeks later in action against advancing Allied troop. Trials have bought to justice the surviving SS commanders responsible for the massacre... the last trial against a former Waffen-SS member taking place in 1983... who was in charge of 45 soldiers. He was one of several war criminals charged with giving orders to shoot 20 men in a garage. Barth was sentenced to life imprisonment, released from prison in the reunified Germany in 1997, and died in August 2007.
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.
We found walking through the abandoned town an eerie experience. The street-scape was authentic 1944... the town felt as if it had been evacuated quickly... the grim episode shows how heartless humans can be when conditioned through years living in a cruel culture.
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