I wonder if you have seen the BBC series ‘World at War’? I remember watching it as a child, when it first came out in the mid-1970s. The series starts and ends with film of a village which lies in ruins, with houses, churches, shops, and schools destroyed. That village was Oradour-sur-Glane in France.
The village of Oradour-sur-Glane was taken over by an SS regiment in the early afternoon of Saturday 10 June 1944, four days after the successful Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day. My father landed at Sword Beach in Normandy on 7 June 1944, D-day plus one. Three days later yet another atrocity by the SS demonstrated only too clearly why he was there.
The SS regiment was on its way north to meet the Allied invasion, while shortly before 10 June, the Maquis or French Resistance had been active in the Limousin area. The Maquis had killed a leading member of the SS. Consequently, the SS were out for revenge, but they deliberately chose Oradour-sur-Glane, because it was well known that there was no resistance there. They simply wanted to make an example of a French village in the area. They could do what they liked…
The SS group that entered Oradour-sur-Glane that warm summer day in 1944 went on to be responsible for the heinous crimes committed there. In a National Museums (USA) article of 2018 Sarah Farmer wrote of their leader:
“Der Führer regiment, a branch of the 2nd SS Panzer Division das Reich. Das Reich was under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer (Major General) Heinz Bernhard Lammerding.”
The regiment rounded up almost the entire population of the village, only a few being able to escape. The residents of the village were told that the SS only wanted to check their papers and then they would be on their way. Oradour-sur-Glane was a village which had little contact with the Germans or the war throughout the occupation since 1940, and most of the residents were not concerned or suspicious of the actions of the SS.
They began to become a little bit more suspicious when they were split up between men in one group and the women and children in another. By mid-afternoon the men would be taken off to be shot, while the women and children were taken off to the church where they were locked in as the church was set fire to. One woman was able to climb out of a window and escape.
At the time Oradour-sur-Glane had a tram connection with the nearby city of Limoges. When a tram appeared in the late afternoon carrying people who had been to Limoges for work, the SS told the tram driver to take his tram back to Limoges.
The Oradour Timeline chronicles:
At approx. 19.00
“The scheduled tram from Limoges arrived and was stopped outside the village. All passengers were made to get off and the tram sent back to Limoges. After an anxious wait the passengers were let go and told to make their own way home, but not to enter Oradour.”
In all, some 642 villagers in Oradour-sur-Glane were murdered that dreadful afternoon, while in the early evening the buildings were bunt down. A community that had existed for hundreds of years, had ceased to exist in a matter of a few hours. It was also a refugee village including refugees from Spain who had come in 1939, to escape the Civil War.
After the War, ‘Free French’ leader and future President, Charles de Gaulle proclaimed that the village should be kept just as it was – in ruins. A modern village was built next to the ruins of the old.
Visiting Oradour-sur-Glane
The day before my visit to Oradour, I went to La Musée de Resistance in Limoges. It was an excellent and very informative start to the process of immersing myself in the time of the Second World War in the Limousin region of France. One particularly poignant section included the wording of a letter written by a female member of the Resistance to her daughter the day before her execution on 10th May 1944, telling her daughter that from the next day she would be no more, but that she loved her daughter, “beaucoup, beaucoup”.
The next day I made my way on a bus, through a countryside of gently rolling hills and wooded glades. It was a beautiful morning when I visited Oradour, probably not that different to the morning of 10th June 1944. I got there early and there was something very moving about walking through the ruins of what at that early time was a silent village. Later, I noticed that I could hear the church bells, just as you would have done in the old village and like at Auschwitz, you could hear the cars outside, but here was a world of its own, a little world of remembrance.
There were signs on the ruins of various buildings telling visitors what the buildings had been; this included the café-boulangerie, a number of schools, a dentist, a hotel and restaurant, a garage; the kind of places you would expect to see in any village. I tried to imagine the lives of the people who were here, ‘the day the soldiers came.’
There were also signs with maps and the words ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ on them. I couldn’t help but think that if you come to Oradour then you truly realise what those words mean. The old tramlines and wires still there, and I was conscious that each ruined house represents a person or family.
The way into the village was through a tunnel under the road. On either side of the tunnel there were photos of some of those massacred, and a woman’s voice reading out their names, and ages when they died. It seemed clear that the aim was to show the people behind the number; there was a gallery of faces of people who had been killed at Oradour. People like you and me. Two of the victims whose photos were in the gallery were just two months old when murdered.
In the Tomb of the Martyrs, there were the names of all the victims of the massacre and their ages. I looked for a 15-year-old, who would have been the same age as my mother on 10 June 1944 and found Andrée, who also had a 12-year-old brother Jean killed in the massacre.
In the museum, it was noted that fewer than 10% of the bodies of those killed could be identified afterwards; such terrible forebodings of Srebrenica and Bosnia. There were posters of exhibitions that had been at the centre, including events about Rwanda and Bosnia. Lidice, in what is now the Czech Republic had a seen a similar fate to Oradour exactly two years earlier, on 10th June 1942, and is also mentioned in the museum. Lidice however, was rebuilt, partly with money raised by County Durham miners.
Comment
If anybody wants to see a future run by right-wing populists, who gain power by spewing hatred and stirring up division, then they can go to Oradour, see the ruins, and learn its dreadful story. They might also see the huge crowds that there were there by lunchtime on the day I visited and reflect that Oradour has been remembered, and good people will always remember what the destructive people do. It is thought that about 300,000 people visit the village every year. And in the meantime, the new village of Oradour-sur-Glane stands as a symbol of rebirth and a reminder that humanity and goodness will always survive and spring forth again, once the destroyers are gone.
“Those tattered shreds of twisted walls that now give no protection; those electricity lines which no longer have a purpose; those tramlines leading nowhere; those signs of long forsaken shops, make Oradour-sur-Glane a melancholic place. What connections can there be between these desolate ruins and a village full of life? None, save the murderous insanity of man.”
Robert Hebras, survivor of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, 10 June 1944
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