Talk:Oradour-sur-Glane

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I deleted the following paragraph: While Oradour-sur-Glane was an insolated incident on the West front, such barbarities were much more common in the East, where the Soviet Union heroically battled the Nazis. In 186 Belarus villages the Nazis burned every villager alive, including women and children; 9,200 Belarus villages and 209 cities were destroyed, the 186 burned villages were never re-established after war. The Khatyn Memorial commemorates the tragic fate of the burned villages. Terms such as "heroically" are highly POV, and this paragraph reads as if it's an attempt to downgrade the incident. Let each "massacre" stand on its own merits. RickK 20:40, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)

I am putting the paragraph back. If you want to edit it, feel free, but removing it completely is wrong, in my opinion. The context is very relevant here. And yes, the paragraph is an attempt to downgrade the incident, because that would be the proper context for the event the article describes. As it was, the article was POV, because it implied that the events at Oradour-sur-Glane were special by omitting the facts about Belarus. The word "heroically", on the other hand, is not POV, it's a fact (though I understand what you meant). Information about the context is not provided anywhere else in the article, so that paragraph is needed. And your last sentence is in bad taste, by the way. Paranoid 23:28, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I strongly disagree. There have been thousands of "massacres" through the years, and the events in Belarus, while tragic, were no more tragic than any other massacre. Why are you singling out what happened in one place in one time, instead of listing all the other massacres that happened throughout history? I will revert. RickK 23:33, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)
Well, the events in Belarus are directly related - they happened during the WW2, they were done by Nazi/SS and they involved wholesale murders of villagers and destruction of villages. It's not me who is singling out something, it's you - you imply that Oradour-sur-Glane was special, but I am saying that it was "no more tragic than any other massacre". This is like writing about a particular Jew being killed by Nazis as something extraordinary, concealing the fact that it was a part of the Holocaust. I am not denying OSG was important, I am just saying that proper context is important too. Paranoid 10:04, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I've listed the article on Wikipedia:Requests for comment. RickK 23:33, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)
(saw this on RFC) I agree with Rick that we don't need to be comparing various massacres merits. I also though, enjoy having context. How about something like While Oradour-sur-Glane was an insolated incident on the West front, such barbarities were much more common in the East, where the Soviet Union battled the Nazis. Examples include.....
Put it at the end of the entry, as almost a "further reading" type of thing? Lyellin 09:47, Aug 11, 2004 (UTC)

Who in the SS decided about the mass executions? Lammerding? The SS was a huge organization. Andries 00:32, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The context would be nice, but the disputed addition was overly freighted with POV and could use some sources to back up its claims. It's not POV for the article to imply that Oradour-sur-Glane is special; the implication is just that it's special enough to warrant an encyclopedia article. The article doesn't denigrate massacres in Belarus or elsewhere on the eastern front. I would suggest that if the context is so important to include in Wikipedia, start by writing articles about the massacres in the East that are as well-researched as this one. --Michael Snow 21:54, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I agree with RickK and Michael Snow. These events might be important, too, but they just don't belong into this article. regards, High on a tree 00:06, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Or see Sant'Anna di Stazzema. If Paranoid insists on linking to another SS village massacre to prove that Oradour was not unique, we should rather take this example, because there is an existing article about it. But I still think we shouldn't link to a particular incident.

By the way and for what it's worth, it should perhaps be noted that the Khatyn memorial is somewhat controversial because of the Katyn massacre - to cite an article from the CIA website (The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field): Meanwhile, the Soviets obliterated references to Katyn on maps and in official reference works. Then, in 1969, Moscow did something strange that many believe was further calculated to confuse the issue further: it chose a small village named Khatyn as the cite for Belorussia's national war memorial. There was no apparent reason for the selection. Khatyn was one of 9,200 Belorussian villages the Germans had destroyed and one of more than a hundred where they had killed civilians in retaliation for partisan attacks. In Latin transliteration, however, Katyn and Khatyn look and sound alike, though they are spelled and pronounced quite differently in Russian and Belorussian.

regards, High on a tree 04:38, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] German POV on Oradour

I would like to explain something about this diff (which I recently added):

To an extent it was difficult to "come out of the closet" with even this limited account of what I know about these issues. That's because my grand-uncle may have been a Waffen-SS officer, BUT he also was the old man who kindly gave us these cherries from his orchard. My grandfather may for a time have worked in der Fuehrer's headquarters as a Wehrmacht officer, BUT he also was my role model granddaddy who (despite having lost his right arm in the war) taught me how to swim and drove us around in his Mercedes car. My great-grandmother may have been a fervent and early Nazi supporter and Nazi party member, BUT she also was this loving old lady who would welcome, look after and nurture an otherwise troubled kid (myself).

And then there's the aspect that it's quite problematic to add the German perspective, in that it undoubtedly will be perceived by some as an attempt to "justify" these war crimes. Some will take massive exception to even suggesting that there was a German perspective and that the Germans who committed these war crimes were anything but pure, personified evil. And what's worse, I really can't blame very much anyone arguing thus — these horrific acts were (and still are) just too appalling. People will feel that what I have to say besmirches the memory of the victims and tries to cast blame on the French Resistance — when I really don't want to do anything of the sort. It's not easy to tell the whole story. But maybe it needs to be told?

As regards to my said edit to the article, I have no doubt that it will be edited away at by angry and indignant contributors and that it possibly will ultimately get deleted. It appears that this is already starting. A cleanup notice has already been posted to the article.

Leaving the German POV in there will probably take more than a few people having the article on their watchlist. I can't do that alone and I actually don't DARE to defend the edit in question very much. — That's because it's a very controversial matter and I am not free from (German collective) guilt so I probably would prefer to tread lightly (my urge to apologize on behalf of my family is much greater than any urge to lunge into an edit war over this).

Ropers 18:25, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Rather than outline your master plan to keep your grandfather's POV the foremost element in this article, how about finding a reputable, citable, source that supports it? Or how about whittling it down to a concise statement, one that is not longer than the description of the act it seeks to justify? All criminals believe their acts to be justified: that's unremarkable. Your kindly old grandpa's justification is an irrational assertion that it is proper to punish someone for the actions of someone else, and your wording is extraordinarily sympathetic to the argument. I would particularly be interested in any quotations you have in which Nazis deem all the children of Oradour-sur-Glane terrorists, or any quotations which suggest that the word "terrorism" is used here because it would have been preferred by Nazis -- rather than to make a modern-day political point. - Nunh-huh 01:20, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why has a cleanup notice been added to this page? The page seems quite well written to me. Adding the German PoV in no way justifies Nazi attrocities at Oradour-sur-Glane. It simply shows that people who may have decent motivations can do very bad things. It's far too easy to assume that only Nazis could perform such acts. This is a very important lesson for us all to learn. Bill 19:00, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

To bring attention to it so it can be cleaned up. Please don't claim the article ever said that "only Nazis could perform such acts". It's not true. Nunh-huh - 01:26, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I didn't claim the article ever said that. I said that, "It's far too easy to assume that only Nazis could perform such acts". Please do not attribute to me things I didn't say. Bill 17:24, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
And I didn't claim you said it, I asked you not to say it. Since you certainly seemed to suggest it. - Nunh-huh 17:27, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of most of the Nazi POV section

Please note: I've trimmed down the Nazi apologia section, by removing the following text: -- The Anome 01:27, Oct 29, 2004 (UTC)

Removed text:

Nazi Waffen-SS soldiers felt that the law and overall justice was on their side and that the fate of the free world was in their hands. They saw their actions as part of a worldwide struggle against an insidious faith-based and racial enemy — ie. "world Jewry"; according to Nazi ideology an assumed worldwide Jewish conspiracy was ultimately behind almost every opposition to Nazi superiority. They felt that if they had to do some very dirty work to get the job done then so be it and they were willing to make such moral sacrifices in "defence" of their country, which they loved very much (the old "archenemy" France had been seen as a threat to Germany). They often argued that there would be scores of lives saved for every presumed or actual "terrorist" (ie. Resistance fighter) they killed. They also saw little fault in brutally murdering supposed "terrorist sympathisers". The Nazis believed that by keeping the initiative and staying on the offense with big fell swoops such as the massacre at Oradour, they could shock members of the Resistance into ceasing their "terrorist" activities and cause them to loose support among the wider civilian populace. By being ready to deliberately kill civilians who just happened to live in a town suspected of housing Resistance fighters, they thus intended to make it too dangerous for awed and frightened civilians to support or even be close to the "terrorists", leading to the latter getting ostracised. Today it is very widely accepted that such Nazi reasoning and judgement was extremely flawed, morally wrong and reprehensible, as was their general ideology.

End quote.

Reading the above, I think that it was wrong to dismiss it simply as 'Nazi Apologia', 'Nazi POV' or as an attempt to somehow partially justify this atrocity. After reading it through several times, I think that it is part of a 'mental exercise' - an attempt to understand how otherwise-'normal' men could do such a thing, by temporarily 'remote seeing' the atrocity from the other angle - through the eyes of a fanatical totally-indoctrinated SS zealot. Although it is over-long, I think that we have 'thrown the baby out with the bath water' here. It also misses one point: The men who carried out this atrocity believed that they were the founding force of a thousand-year reich. In other words: at the time they committed this crime, they had no idea that they would ever in their lifetimes be called upon to defend or explain their actions to anybody. There have been famous experiments conducted where otherwise 'normal' human beings can be pursuaded (or deluded) into seemingly inflicting uncharacteristic cruelty on others when they have been duped into believing that 'black is white', or that the 'wrong' that they are doing is actually 'right'.
Having said that, I don't think that the above should be reinserted, because it is outside the scope of the article. In fact I would go on to delete whole swathes of the article itself. I think that with highly-controversial subjects such this, Auschwitz, Dresden etc. it is best to simply stick rigidly to the physical facts of what actually happened, their chronology and nothing else, with no interpretation or opinion. Like a Policeman's statement in court.
There can be no possible excuse for such an act, and when emotions run so deep, any attempt to put the act into historical context will be taken by some as 'apologia'. But it would be interesting (given a 60 year gap) to now try to 'understand the unforgivable' elsewhere, using this atrocity (and the removed text above) as part of the 'setup scenario' for the exercise.
What I personally want to know is how you could possibly assemble a group of 200 soldiers, and successfully order them to carry out such an act as this, especially on women and children. True, we are talking about members of the SS, so there were probably a larger percentage of brutal homicidal maniacs present than there would be in a random sample of 'Fritz public' plucked from German streets, but surely there must have even been SS men present who thought that this was really 'not why they joined-up', especially as they committed this act upon people whom they had not been indoctrinated to think of as 'Untermensch'. ChrisRed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment This might explain a few things about how they managed to get that many people to do such terrbile things...

[edit] Attempted re-write of controversial section

I've now attempted to do an NPOV re-write of the now cut-down controversial section, and slightly expanded it. Please revise as needed. -- The Anome 01:36, Oct 29, 2004 (UTC)

  • While this is now very much improved, there's still the problem that we explicitly give one POV (killing a village of men, women, and children is a brilliant tactical strategy that saves valuable German lives, which are the ones that really count) without explicitly giving the other (the lives of French children are at least as valuable as those of Nazi soldiers, and soldiers killing unarmed civilian children is a bad thing.) - Nunh-huh 18:41, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • I've tried to edit a little (brutal, but deliberate German policy). But I do see Nunh-huh's point. I think much of the problem lies in this sentence: "They believed that there would be scores of German lives saved for every presumed or actual "terrorist" (ie. Resistance fighter) they killed, and saw little fault in brutally murdering supposed 'terrorist sympathisers'". The problem is that the German troops conducting the massacre can't really have thought that all the men, women, and children they killed at Oradour were part of the Resistance. And the sentence may obliquely suggest this. It probably needs to be reworked, but I'm not sure how to do it. The main point that needs to be made is that the Germans viewed the Resistance as terrorists. It's important not to lose sight of this, as it informs other analagous historical situations. Bill 19:30, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Yes, the comparison is probably being made because someone wants to use it as an analogy. History is often distorted to make political points, and it's often effective. In any case, the denotations and connotations of the word "terrorist" has changed between 1944 and 2004. The fact (if it is one) that Germans preferentially called the French Resistance "terrorists" is certainly not the "main point that needs to be made" in an article on Oradour-sur-Glane. - Nunh-huh 19:55, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • "That Germans [considered] the French Resistance "terrorists" is the main point of the paragraph. Certainly not the article. Ta ta. Bill 20:09, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Well, that certainly makes more sense. But we have no references that state they did so consider them, or that it was anymore than an incidental characterization (I presume the word we are talking about here is actually "Terroristin", and would point out that the only explicit references that have been evoked (Mein Kampf parts I & II) certainly don't say anything about how the French Resistance were "terrorists", having been published by 1926, before the Resistance existed, or had any need to exist. The Nazis' point presumably being that "terrorists" waged unfair war, a point which will be accepted by those who wish to have the rules of war defined by Nazis. - Nunh-huh 20:22, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
SS soldiers were further angered by finding atrocities commited by some resistants; in particular a German ambulance in which all the wounded had been killed and the driver and assistance tied into the cab before te vehicle was set on fire.

Do we have references for this? This sounds like some kind of made-up excuse. ("Yes, we massacred an entire village, but it's because we were told than one of our ambulances had been ambushed"). If nobody can point to any source for this, it should be removed. David.Monniaux 09:53, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I was under the impression that the Das Reich division that committed the reprisal in Oradour placed the explosives in the church - there was no known resistance movement in Oradour. There was also no fire-fight, the townsfolk were segregated into men and women/children, the men ushered into barns where they were eventually shot with machine guns and then set on fire, and the church was barricaded and blown up using explosives and grenades. For a source, refer to various publications, such as Robert Hebras' account (survivor of the massacre), and Max Hasting's Das Reich. Bryn Buck 12.27, March 28, 2006 (UTC)

You are correct. Without any reference to the material in this article, it seems like it was entirely made up. This account is much different than multiple accounts that I have read about this event.

Is there a reason why that opening section has been let stand? It comes off as a bizarre apologia for the Germans (going on at some length about how awful the Resistance was, without mention that civilian reprisals were standard German tactics), while portraying the death of the village as a tragic accident that was really the maquis's fault, instead of the deliberate torching by the German that it was. I'm reluctant to leap into editing an article without knowing the community-keepers, but it's awfully disgusting as is. -- tavella 5/22/06.

  • Looks a lot better now. -- tavella

[edit] Pictures

A couple of days ago I was amazed there were no pictures of Oradour-sur-Glane in this article. I searched around on Wikimedia, and I could not find any there either! Therefore I have now uploaded 19 of my own photographs to Wikimedia, and inserted a selection of them to this article. I hope they are to your satisfactions. They were taken during a visit on June 11 2004. If you are interested in seeing more of them, check out my dedicated gallery in Wikimedia: Wikimedia:Oradour-sur-Glane.

Regards, Dennis Nilsson. Dna-Dennis 14:27, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Proposed correction and addition

I would like to suggest one correction and one addition to this article,

1) This article still gives the name of the Sturmbannführer as Otto Diekmann. However, his true name seems to have been Adolf Diekmann. His name is given as such in the German wikipedia article “Oradour”, and this information is confirmed by the website http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Oradour-sur-Glane/OldPhotos/SSofficers.html, saying that “In most books, his name is given as Otto Dickmann, but SS records show that his name was Adolf Diekmann.“ Also http://www.oradour.info/general/faqlist.htm says that “I have seen his name spelt as, 'Diekmann', 'Dickmann' and 'Dieckmann', however the correct spelling from his SS records is, 'Diekmann' and his first name was, 'Adolf', not, 'Otto', as appears in many publications“. Even a photo of the grave of Adolf Diekmann is available at http://www.oradour.info/images/diekman4.htm so this information is very likely to be correct. I suggest a corresponding correction in this article.

2) In its present form, this article withholds one important piece of information which can also be found in the German wikipedia and can be translated as, “Obersturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann had the order of the Regimentskommandeur to make the mayor of this place [Oradour] give him the names of 30 persons who could serve as hostages, in order to exchange them for his friend, Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, who had been captured by the Résistance shortly before. However, Adolf Diekmann gave the order to burn down the village and to kill all people without exception.’’

This means that Adolf Diekmann by far exceeded his orders when he ordered the massacre, and that’s what this article just does not mention in its present form. Besides, this article also hides the fact that even some of the Nazis themselves had tried to prosecute Diekmann, as can be read as well in the German wikipedia,

“Diekmann’s superior, Standartenführer Stadler, initiated judicial investigations to be carried out agaist him, and also Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, the German commander in Limoges, general Gleiniger, and the government of Vichy protested against the massacre. However, Diekmann did not have to face any consequences because he was killed in action few days later at the front of the invasion. Also a big part of the third company, who had committed the massacre, was annihilated few days later. Besides, Hitler forbad to take legal proceedings.“

I suggest that also this information is added. The German wikipedia is the second-largest after the English and is worked on by a very active and critical community who would not allow for dubious information to remain, and the quoted sentences have never been contested for more than a year.

Besides, the case of the wrong first name of Obersturmbannführer Diekmann shows how much serious work could still be done with this English article. -- Consputus

This should be sourced. Such military order and subsequent proceedings would have been archived. 193.132.242.1 09:46, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WPMILHIST Assessment

A very nice article, for length and detail. But I wonder, as the article is titled "Oradour-sur-Glane" and not "Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre" or the like, if there is anything else worthwhile to be said about the village. When was it founded? Was this event in any way related to larger more significant events? Did the village feature in any earlier historical events? Did any of its inhabitants feature in earlier events? (If not, then not, and that's fine. But if yes, then it should probably be included.) LordAmeth 18:16, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This article is about the village

The article about the massacre should be Oradour-sur-Glane massacre (redirect now). --84.234.60.154 (talk) 16:37, 4 April 2008 (UTC)