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Oradour-sur-Glane |
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Oradour-sur-Glane
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| Administration | |
|---|---|
| Country | France |
| Region | Limousin |
| Department | Haute-Vienne |
| Arrondissement | Rochechouart |
| Canton | Saint-Junien-Est |
| Intercommunality | Vienne Glane |
| Mayor | Raymond Frugier (2008–2014) |
| Statistics | |
| Elevation | 227–312 m (745–1,024 ft) (avg. 285 m/935 ft) |
| Land area1 | 38.16 km2 (14.73 sq mi) |
| Population2 | 2,205 (2007) |
| - Density | 58 /km2 (150 /sq mi) |
| INSEE/Postal code | 87110/ 87520 |
| 1 French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) and river estuaries. | |
| 2 Population without double counting: residents of multiple communes (e.g., students and military personnel) only counted once. | |
Oradour-sur-Glane (Occitan: Orador de Glana) is a commune in the Haute-Vienne department in the Limousin region in west-central France.
The original village was destroyed on 10 June 1944, when 642 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site and the original has been maintained as a memorial.
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In February 1944, 2nd SS Panzer Division ("Das Reich") was stationed in the Southern French town of Valence-d'Agen,[1] north of Toulouse, waiting to be resupplied with new equipment and freshly trained troops. After the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the division was ordered to make its way across the country to stop the Allied advance. One of the division's units was the 4th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment ("Der Führer"). Its staff included Standartenführer Sylvester Stadler as regimental commander, Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann as commander of the regiment's 1st Battalion and Sturmbannführer Otto Weidinger, who was designated Stadler's successor as regimental commander and was with the regiment for familiarisation purposes. Command of "Der Führer" passed from Stadler to Weidinger on 14 June.[2]
Early on the morning of 10 June 1944, Diekmann informed Weidinger at regimental headquarters that he had been approached by two members of the Milice, the French secret police that collaborated with the German Gestapo, who claimed that a Waffen SS officer was being held by the Resistance in Oradour-sur-Vayres, a nearby village. The captured German was alleged to be Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, commander of the 2nd SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion (another unit of the "Das Reich" division), who may have been captured by the Maquis the day before.
On 10 June, Diekmann's battalion sealed off the town of Oradour-sur-Glane, having confused it with nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres and 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. In addition to the residents of the village, the SS also 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-gun nests 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 more slowly. Once the victims were no longer able to move, the soldiers covered their 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 205 children died in the carnage. Only two women and one child survived; one was 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche. She slid out by a rear sacristy window, followed by a young woman and child;[3] the Germans' attention was aroused and the three were shot. Marguerite Rouffanche was wounded and her companions were killed. She crawled to some pea bushes behind the church, where she remained hidden overnight until she was rescued the following morning. Another group of about twenty villagers had fled Oradour-sur-Glane as soon as the soldiers had appeared. That night, the village was partially razed.
A few days later, survivors were allowed to bury the dead. No less than 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane had been murdered in a matter of hours. Adolf Diekmann claimed that the episode was a just retaliation for partisan activity in nearby Tulle and the kidnapping of Helmut Kämpfe.
On 12 January 1953, a military tribunal in Bordeaux heard the case against the surviving 65 of the approximately 200 German soldiers who had been involved. Only 21 of them were present. (Many were living in East Germany, which would not allow them to be extradited.) Seven of them were Germans, but 14 were Alsatians, French nationals of German ethnicity who had been regarded by the Nazis as members of the "Reich". All but one of them claimed to have been drafted into the Waffen-SS against his will, the so-called malgré-nous (a term which means "in spite of us").
The trial caused a huge protest in Alsace, forcing the French authorities to split the tribunal into two separate proceedings, according to the nationality of the defendants. On 11 February, 20 defendants were found guilty. Continuing uproar (including calls for autonomy) in Alsace pressed the French parliament to pass an amnesty law for all malgré-nous on 19 February, and the convicted Alsatians were released shortly afterwards. This, in turn, caused bitter protests in the Limousin region.
By 1958, all of the German defendants had been released as well. General Heinz Lammerding of the Das Reich division, who had given the orders for the measures against the Resistance, died in 1971 after a successful entrepreneurial career. At the time of the trial, he lived in Düsseldorf, which was located inside the British occupation zone of West Germany, and the French government never obtained his extradition from the British authorities.[4]
The last trial against a former Waffen-SS member took place in 1983. Shortly before, former SS-Obersturmführer Heinz Barth had been tracked down in the German Democratic Republic GDR. Barth had participated in the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre as a platoon leader in the "Der Führer" regiment, in charge of 45 soldiers. He was one of several war criminals charged with having given 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 he died in August 2007.
After the war, General Charles de Gaulle decided that the village would never be rebuilt. Instead, it would remain a memorial to the cruelty of the Nazi occupation. 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").
The new village of Oradour-sur-Glane, (with a 2006 population of 2,188), was built after the war, at the northwest of the site of the massacre, where ruined remnants of the former village still stand as a memorial to the dead and a representative of similar sites and events. 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 and money.
Upon entering Oradour-sur-Glane, Sturmbannführer Diekmann had received orders from his regimental commander, Standartenführer Stadler, to only have the mayor of the town name thirty people who could serve as hostages in exchange for Sturmbannführer Kämpfe; however, Diekmann instead ordered the population exterminated and the village burned to the ground.
Protests followed from Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel; General Gleiniger, German commander in Limoges; and the Vichy government. Standartenführer Stadler felt Diekmann had far exceeded his orders and began a judicial investigation. Diekmann, 29 years-old, was killed in action shortly afterward during the Battle of Normandy, and a large number of the third company, which had committed the massacre, were themselves killed in action within a few days, and the investigation was suspended.
The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane involved men, women and children, some as young as one week, and some as old as ninety. Oradour-sur-Glane was not the only collective punishment reprisal action committed by the Waffen SS: other well-documented examples include the French towns of Tulle, Ascq, Maillé, Robert-Espagne, and Clermont-en-Argonne; the Soviet village of Kortelisy (in what is now Ukraine); Lithuanian village of Pirčiupiai; the Czechoslovakian villages of Ležáky and Lidice (in what is now the Czech Republic); the Greek towns of Kalavryta and Distomo; the Dutch town of Putten; Serbian towns of Kragujevac and Kraljevo; Norwegian village of Telavåg; and the Italian villages of Sant'Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto. Furthermore, the Waffen SS executed hostages (random or selected in suspect groups) throughout France as a deterrent to resistance.
| 1806 | 1820 | 1876 | 1901 | 1911 | 1921 | 1936 | 1946 | 1954 | 1962 | 1968 | 1975 | 1982 | 1990 | 1999 | 2006 | 2008 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,222 | 1,585 | 1,903 | 1,966 | 2,019 | 1,789 | 1,574 | 1,145 | 1,450 | 1,540 | 1,671 | 1,759 | 1,941 | 1,998 | 2,024 | 2,118 | 2,222 |
The tragic story of Oradour-sur-Glane was featured in 1974 in the acclaimed British documentary television series, The World at War, which was narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. The first and final episodes (1 and 26), entitled "A New Germany" and "Remember" respectively, show helicopter views of the destroyed village, interspersed with pictures of the victims that appear on their graves.
Episodes 1 and 26 both started with the words:
Down this road, on a summer day in 1944. . . The soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community which had lived for a thousand years. . . was dead. This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road . . . and they were driven. . . into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then. . . they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead, in battle. They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial. Its martyrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China, in a World at War...
And at the end of episode 26, while another aerial shot of the village ruins plus photos of various massacre victims were being shown to the accompaniment of dramatic and moving music, which is taken from the St Nicholas Mass by Haydn, Olivier said:
At the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, the day the soldiers came, they killed more than six hundred men, women . . . and children. Remember.
This is also referenced in the new 2010 series, World War II WWII in Color with new color technologies in episode, "OVERLORD" that aired on January 7, 2010.
A feature film Oradour was released in September 2011 in France
The poet Gillian Clarke, National Poet for Wales commemorates the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in two poems from her 2009 collection A Recipe for Water,[6] 'Oradour-sur-Glane' and 'Singer'.
In The Streets video, "The Escapist," Mike Skinner is briefly seen walking through the destroyed village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
A photo of a wrecked car in the village (used in this article) became the basis for the cover of Russian album "Tochka opory" (Точка Опоры) of the group "Skafandr" and Vasya V. from group "Kirpichi".[7]
