On 10 June, 1944, four days after the landing of the Allied armies in Normandy, while the attention of the world was focussed on the progress of the greatest battle in history, an appalling crime was committed by the SS, hundreds of kilometres away in central France. Though not unique in the history of that army of ruthless killers, it shocked the world when, after the liberation of France, the full extent of what had happened was revealed. A detachment of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, known as Das Reich, on their way from the south to the battlefield, sacked the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges. They killed 642 men, women and children and destroyed every building by fire.
The members of the detachment, composed of Germans and Alsatians, mostly between the ages of 17 and 25, descended on the village on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The people were discussing the news of the Normandy invasion with the hope of early liberation from the German occupation. A number of refugees and weekend visitors had swelled the population. The village had no record of maquis activity and there had been no action in the immediate vicinity for which a reprisal might have been feared. In fact, the people were quite unconscious of what was about to happen.
This is a revised and enlarged version of my book Oradour – Village of the Dead, published in 1979. It is the result of further research and careful consideration of all the reports and opinions on the massacre. New material includes the trial of the only officer, among those involved in the raid, to be captured. This was in 1983. He had returned to his home in East Germany after the war, without changing his name, and despite an extensive search for war criminals, had been overlooked until nearly forty years later.
Another important addition concerns the actions of the Das Reich Division during their march. They had received orders to travel to the Normandy battlefield, crushing all resistance en route. They were frequently ambushed and attacked by maquisards, under orders from London, and lost both men and material, so that they were bloodied and revengeful when they arrived at Limoges. This has to be borne in mind when considering the reasons for the massacre.
Battle hardened men of Der Führer Regiment, 2 SS Panzer Division Das Reich in action on the eastern front. In June 1944 they were unleashed against French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane.
Other new material includes the mysterious fate of General Gleiniger, the German officer in charge of the Limoges district, and the arrest and imprisonment of the Bishop of Limoges. There are also additional reports by survivors and details of the salvage work and the vain efforts to interest the Vichy government.
The feelings of the young soldiers as they killed and burned the people – particular1y the women and children in the church – are almost impossible to realise. So many of them vanished after the war and the few who were tried at Bordeaux in 1953 gave contradictory accounts and seemed unmoved by what they had done. When they had finished with Oradour, the soldiers moved off to their billets in another village, drinking looted liquor and singing. Did the SS always manage to wipe out of their minds the atrocities they committed? Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, wrote in his memoirs,
‘When the spectacle was too shocking I could not return home immediately to my family. I either mounted a horse and galloped the horrid images out of my mind or, at night, I went to the stables and found peace among my dear horses.’
After which he returned to his pleasant house outside the wire. The effect of the Oradour slaughter on the minds of the survivors and the bereaved – particularly the parents who lost all their children – can only be imagined.
Many of the bereaved received psychiatric treatment. But what can have been their attitude to religion, when the hundreds of women, locked in the church with the children, prayed fervently for their menfolk without realising that they themselves were to be slaughtered in an appalling fashion in the sanctuary of the house of God? Did such an utter failure of mass prayer have no effect on the religious belief of the bereaved?
In the film Le Vieux Fusil which deals with a similar SS massacre a man who lost his family is seen entering the church and, on finding it littered with bodies, smashes the figurines and other emblems of the Christian Faith. I wonder if the bereaved of Oradour were tempted to do the same to the emblems in their church which had not already been shattered by the soldiers.
One of the men who survived the fusillade in a barn said, when interviewed fifty years later, that the ‘Boches’ were the guilty ones and he bore no ill feelings against the present generation in Germany. However, as an afterthought, he added that he would not like to meet a German in Oradour.
One of the mysteries that remain unsolved is why a party of soldiers went to the ruins on 12 June, with orders to make a token burial of the dead. They dug trenches in several places and threw in as many bodies as they would hold. One of the accused at the Bordeaux trial, an Alsatian, said he was one of the burial party but could give no reason for this strange action.
Someone in the division may have had a strong enough feeling of guilt to create a rearguard for the purpose, while the rest of the division continued their journey northwards. On the other hand, the ‘token burial’ may have been carried out by members of the 19th Regiment of SS Police stationed in Limoges, acting on the orders of a Das Reich officer.
Captain Kahn, one of the leaders of the raid, is said to have ordered the killing of a woman who tried to save herself by appealing to him in German, because he ‘wanted no witnesses’ of what he and his men were doing. But surely he must have realised that the full extent of the atrocity would inevitably be known, whatever form of cover-up he might employ? The Limoges Gestapo sought the survivors, apparently to stifle their testimony. Fortunately, with the help of the Resistance, none of these shocked, frightened people were traced.
One thing worth pointing out is that the SS were not always responsible for the atrocities attributed to them. The German Army (Wehrmacht) and some of the maquisards could be equally ruthless.
An exhibition of some of the atrocities committed by the Army in the Second World War was staged in several cities in Germany and Austria fifty years after the end of the war. It provoked protests by army veterans, and Neo-Nazis, particularly in Munich, the birthplace of the regime.
I have used the British Army equivalent of the SS ranks which, I believe, makes easier reading (e.g. sturmbannführer – major).
The forces of the Resistance had many different titles. They were variously known as Maquis, Partisans, Franc-Tireurs, AS, FTP, FFI, MUR, etc, and I have only used their titles when it was clear who was involved in a certain action. Otherwise I have simply called them maquis, maquisards or members of the Resistance.
I have used the word mairie instead of town hall as most of the villages had a mairie and it would be inappropriate to call it a village hall.
PHILIP BECK, Saint Malo, February 2004.