CHAPTER 8
It is obvious from the mechanical way in which the raid was carried out that the SS were well briefed about the village which they had never seen before. The information provided by the militiamen is believed to have included the use of an ordnance map.
Towards noon, 120 men of the third company, which had a complement of 180, were told to prepare for action in the afternoon. The militiamen were told they could return to Limoges. One wonders how they felt when they heard how their information had been used. Eight trucks, two armoured tracked vehicles (Schutzpanzerwagen) and a motor-cycle were lined up. Armament included four heavy machine-guns, twenty-four light machine-guns and fifteen machine pistols.
The third company were specialists in explosives and incendiary devices. They took what was needed to destroy a large number of houses and asphyxiate people grouped in a large building. The company included many Alsatians who, with the other men, probably did not realise they were to kill far more people than they had ever done before, including hundreds of women and children. As they took their places in the vehicles, they were given a hint that the action was going to be something special. A junior officer, Lieutenant Heinz Barth, passed among them remarking, ‘Now you’re going to see the blood flow,’ and adding, ‘Now we’ll see what the Alsatians can do.’
The convoy set out at 1.30 p.m. Oradour was only about nine and a half kilometres away (about six miles), but they did not take the direct route. They travelled east on the road that runs parallel to the River Vienne, passing through Saint-Victurnien, then swung north to join the Limoges road shortly before Oradour. This was evidently a tactical move to facilitate the rapid surrounding of the village. The direct route from Saint-Junien enters Oradour halfway up the main street. The convoy would be entering at the southern end.
A halt was called en route and Diekmann, who had been travelling in a commandeered Citröen deux chevaux with his adjutant and an Alsatian driver, ordered the officers and NCOs to gather round. They were given a final briefing. It is possible that they were then told they could tell the men no one was to be spared. He may have spoken of a search for Kämpfe and for arms caches but did not expect results.The whole place was to be razed as an impressive lesson to the maquis and their sympathisers. He is believed to have spoken to Stadler on his radio before moving off. He probably told him he was about to enter Oradour. He may also have told him that he planned to execute hostages and burn the village, but it’s unlikely that he said he was going to kill every living soul, including hundreds of women and children.
Some facts are known. Kahn who supervised the slaughter, constantly hustled the soldiers to ‘get on with it’. There was some taunting of the Alsatians who may soon have realised that they were involved in an action that was larger and more merciless than anything previous. Liquor was widely looted but the killers did not have time to fortify themselves during the operation. They imbibed afterwards and went singing on their way to Nieul. Motivated by blind obedience to orders and fear of the consequences should they show any hesitancy in carrying out the butchery, the men must have worked like automatons, squeezing triggers, changing magazines, hurling grenades and starting fires with petrol they had stolen in Saint-Junien.
Yet it is difficult to imagine the state of mind of the men, particularly if Alsatians were involved, who were ordered to kill the women and children in the church. Were they completely unmoved by the screams and pitiful pleadings ? Did none of them hesitate when they were ordered to fling grenades among the babies in their prams? Hundreds of rounds must have been fired in the church. The salvage team found the floor littered with empty cases, particularly near the main entrance.
Even more ghastly is the thought of men clambering over the bleeding bodies of the women and children to spread straw and faggots, topped by chairs.
Marguerite Rouffanche said she heard screams when the flames started to spread. Some of the victims were still alive. The killers may have realised this when they prepared the pyre but it seems that no effort was made to locate the sufferers and finish them off with pistol shots as they had done with the men. The last cries may have come from the forty-one babies in a side chapel who had been protected for a while by their sturdy prams.
Major (Sturmbahnführer) Adolf Diekmann who conceived and organised the massacre. His superiors described him as an ‘open, honest and decent man’.
According to Lieutenant Barth, the only officer of the raiding party to be tried, Diekmann told the officers that Oradour must be razed to the ground, as a punitive measure and to deter the Resistance from further activity. He did not mention a search for Kämpfe. Towards the end, it seemed as if the officers realised they were doing something so vile that they were afraid to leave a single witness and killed people who might have been spared. The Gestapo’s search for survivors was further evidence of the bid to hush things up.
Before summarising the apparent motives for the massacre, it is worth considering what other people have said.
German General von Brodowski, commanding the Clermont-Ferrand region, was said to have been carrying a diary when he was arrested on 26 October 1944. This was his entry for 11 June, 1944:
‘In the course of an action on the 10th, Oradour and its environs ( 31 kms south-west of Limoges) was reduced to ashes.’
The entry for 14 June reads:
‘Regarding Oradour – 30 kms south-west of Limoges – a French version has been received. Six hundred people perished. An untersturmführer of the SS amoured division Das Reich had been taken prisoner at Nieul (8 kms north-west of Limoges) and transported to Oradour. He managed to escape. The body of a paymaster class one, bearing traces of handcuffs, was subsequently found. The whole of the male population of Oradour has been shot. The women and children took refuge in the church. The church caught fire. Explosives had been stored in the church. The women and children perished.’
There is some doubt about the authenticity of the report, but if it is true von Brodowski was apparently referring to Gerlach’s capture and escape. The reference to Oradour being south-west of Limoges supports the popular theory that the ‘wrong Oradour’ was attacked. Oradour-sur-Vayres lies south-west of’ Limoges and was reputed to be a centre of maquis activity.
Raymond Carter, in his book Le Scandale d’Oradour, supports the ‘wrong Oradour’ theory. He quotes a former resistance leader who, he says, told him that the maquis attacked a section of Das Reich Division near Oradour-sur-Vayres as a reprisal for atrocities committed by the SS elsewhere. There were many casualties on both sides. In revenge, the SS decided to wipe out the village and sent an execution squad to the wrong place.
The killers knew exactly where they were going and why and were helped by people who were well acquainted with the region. They were pressed for time, being considerably delayed in their movement to the Normandy battlefield, and knew Oradour would be an easy target. They felt it would be a dramatic warning to the Resistance not to carry out further attacks of the kind they had already experienced.
A French historian, not a local man, told the author the real reason for the massacre, which had been hushed up, was that two German motor-cyclists had been found dead, horribly mutilated, in a ditch near Oradour. There is no confirmation of this. Kleist, the Gestapo officer, is reported to have told his associates that hostages were to be taken in Oradour and shot as a reprisal for a ‘terrorist’ attack on an SS vehicle. The twelve soldiers in it had been taken to Oradour where they were all hanged except an officer who escaped. (The Gerlach story again?)
Two authoratitive books on the history of the Waffen SS give the same reason for the massacre. George H Stein, in his book The Waffen SS, Hitler’s Elite Guard at War (Oxford University Press 1966) says ‘As elements of the division (Das Reich) passed near the village of Oradour-sur-Glane a French resistance sniper shot and killed an officer.’ While in the book Uniforms, Organisation and History of the Waffen SS by R J Bender and H P Taylor (published by Bender) we find: ‘As the division passed near the village of Oradour-sur-Glane a French sniper shot and killed a captain.’
It is highly unlikely that anyone would fire at an SS convoy near a village knowing that the consequences could be devastating.
An official explanation in Crimes Ennemis en France (Archives du Service de Recherche des Crimes de Guerre) states that an SS deserter said his unit had been ambushed by the maquis about fifteen kilometres from Oradour-sur-Glane. Four soldiers were wounded and Diekmann, who was leading them, decided that the next village they came to should suffer reprisals. Who was this deserter, when did he desert and what became of him?
M Chaintron, a former prefect of Haute-Vienne, the department in which Oradaour is situated, writes in a preface to Oradour-sur-Glane, Vision Epouvante, published by the Association des Familles des Martyrs d’Oradour-sur-Glane, that the object of the slaughter was to terrorise people in the region by a frightful example, with a view to discouraging them from supporting the liberation movement launched by the Resistance, and to illustrate beyond doubt that the Germans were still all-powerful.
This is true. It was the main reason for Lammerding’s approval of the raid.
An extrodinary theory in a book entitled Oradour, Massacre and Aftermath by Robin Mackness, published in 1988, has provoked anger among the survivors and relatives of the dead because it implies that the people had taken gold bars looted by the SS, which became the reason for the raid.
The basis for this is the account by a man called Raoul, who claimed he was the sole survivor of an ambush by a small group of maquisards in a lane about three kilometres from Oradour the night before. They had attacked a convoy carrying a quantity of gold bars which had been looted by Lammerding, Diekmann and Kämpfe. Raoul claimed that the gold was carried in a truck with other loot and there were armoured vehicles in the convoy, all of which were put out of action with grenades and every German except one was killed. Six young maquisards were also claimed to have been killed.
Raoul said he had buried the gold, which was in thirty boxes, in the early morning and recovered it years later.
Apparently, the German who escaped had told the SS in Limoges about the ambush. Diekmann had a stormy meeting with Lammerding who blamed him for sending the convoy along a minor road with only light protection. They assumed that the gold had been taken to the nearest village, Oradour, and Diekmann had taken the indirect route to the village in the hope of finding some of it among the wreckage of the convoy.
The story is far fetched for the following reasons:
(1) If there had been such an ambush surely it would not have been undisclosed for so long? The destruction of an important German convoy by a small band of maquisards would have been acclaimed by the Resistance and recorded in the Limoges archives. Nothing was said about it during and after the war and no other publication has mentioned it. (The Daily Mail sent a journalist to Oradour to investigate, and their two page centre spread was headed ‘THE AMBUSH THAT NEVER WAS’.)
(2) It is inconceivable that one man could have buried thirty boxes of gold (the heaviest metal) in daylight, unaided and surrounded by wrecked vehicles when the area was swarming with Germans and farm personnel who would have been on their way to work in that area. And who cleared up the debris and dealt with the dead? There is no record of such salvage.
(3) The noise of the fighting would certainly have been heard in and around Oradour and the people would have kept their children at home instead of sending them to school.
(4) From all accounts the people were happily contemplating liberation and no one, it seems, had any foreboding. They would have been uneasy and alert had such an incident taken place in their locality.
Diekmann’s personal account of the raid was:
‘On 10/6 at 13.30 hours the 1st Battalion of the SS DF (Der Führer) surrounded Oradour. After a search the village was burnt. Munitions were found in almost every house. On 11/6 two companies marched to Nieul-le-Chateau. The terrorists had evacuated the locality during the night. Total casualties: 548 enemy dead, one of our men wounded.’
Major (Sturmbannführer) Otto Weidinger.
Major Weidinger, in his history of the Der Führer Regiment, said Diekmann reported to Colonel Stadler, his commanding officer, when he returned to the regimental headquarters in Limoges. He said his men had met with resistance in Oradour but had not found Kämpfe. However, they had come across the bodies of a number of murdered German soldiers during the search and had discovered several arms caches. He said all the men who could be identified as ‘terrorists’ had been shot. The women and children had been locked in the church which had ammunition in its steeple. This exploded when flames from the burning houses spread to the church and the women and children, who had been put there for their own safety, perished in the blaze. Stadler doubted Diekmann’s story and was deeply shocked when he had the full account of the massacre. He told Diekmann he would be court-martialled and accused him of ‘sullying the regiment’s name for ever’.
Lammerding approved the killing of the men but saw the killing of the women and children in the church was a crime. He said he would arrange a court martial as soon as circumstances allowed.
It is possible that Diekmann was surprised and humiliated by the dressing down he received from his superiors. The article in Siegrunen said he was ‘wracked with guilt over the death of the women and children’ and vowed he would die in battle. To achieve this, he went into action near Falaise without his helmet and a shell splinter entered his skull. Certainly he did die in this manner but it is highly unlikely that he purposely shed his helmet.
Adolf Diekmann as a Second Lieutenant (Unterstürmführer).
The SS Major-General Kurt Meyer, first German war criminal to be condemned to death, (the sentence was later commuted) said Oradour was the only crime committed by the SS, and that it was the action of a single man. He was scheduled to go before a court-martial but died ‘a hero’s death’ before he could he tried.
Lammerding, in a letter to the Bordeaux tribunal in 1953, said Diekmann had ‘exceeded his orders.’ Oddly, Diekmann was allowed to retain his command of the 1st Battalion of the Der Führer Regiment. Although he will go down in history as the man responsible for the massacre, Deikmann’s records reveal that his superiors had a high opinion of him. Stadler assessed his character as open, honest and decent, reliable at all times, respected and popular. If this is true, how on earth did he become so debased as to order the killing of 642 people and the destruction of their homes?
The son of a school teacher, Diekmann was born in 1914. He joined the SS in 1933 and in 1936 was a member of an SS Signals Battalion who sent him to an SS officers’ school at Bad Tölz in 1937. He became an officer cadet and subsequently an upper cadet officer, joining in September 1938 the Germania Regiment which occupied the Sudetenland.
He was appointed an Unterstürmführer (second lieutenant) that year. As a platoon leader he distinguished himself when war broke out and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class in November 1939 for his service in Poland. In 1940 he married a doctor named Hedwig Meinde who bore him a son (Ranier Adolf) in March 1942. In May 1940 he was wounded at Saint-Venant in northern France, a bullet passing through a lung. Shortly after his return to duty he received the Iron Cross lst Class. In 1942 as a Hauptsturmführer (captain) he was an instructor in tank warfare. Like his friend Kämpfe, he served in Russia before joining the reformed Das Reich Division. In April 1944 he became a Sturmbahnführer (major) and took charge of the 1st Batallion of the Der Führer Regiment. Although his record claims that he had ‘above average intelligence’ he allowed a ruthless vengeance to take charge of himself when he learnt of Kämpfe’s capture. Stadler described him as a ‘perfect SS man’, which meant he had achieved the standard of heartless brutality instilled in him by his training. It came to excessive heights at Oradour. Did he really ‘come to Earth’ again after the massacre and suffer repentance for what he had done? It is questionable.
The motive for the massacre and associated actions may now be summarised:
(l) The SS were frustrated and furious over their many clashes with the Resistance during their drive to the north and needed a spectacular show of their power and their determination to stand no more delays.
(2) Kämpfe’s disappearance was the last straw and they resolved to fulfill their aim without further delay.
(3) It seems likely that the story of some person or persons currying favour with the SS by relating the rumour of a German officer being held captive in Oradour is true. The party of French militia and Gestapo who travelled from Limoges to Saint-Junien could not be the informers. Their job was to provide knowledge of the locality which might help Diekmann in the raid he had already planned.
(4) Diekmann may have heard that Oradour-sur-Vayres was a centre of maquis activity and, being loath to have another clash with them, chose to vent his wrath on Oradour-sur-Glane which he believed would be an easy target. Besides Oradour-sur-Vayres was about 20 kilometres south of Saint-Junien and he did not want to go back that way.
(5) Diekmann’s fury over the loss of Kämpfe verged on insanity. He was not convinced that Kämpfe was held in Oradour, in fact, he doubted if he was still alive but he used his rescue plan to get Stadler’s approval. He had Gerlach’s account of his passage through an ‘armed’ Oradour to support his case.
(6) It is hard to believe that he told the entire assembly of officers and militia at the Hôtel de la Gare that he had decided to kill the whole population, including the women and children, although his decision to employ men who were experts in explosives and the preparation of gas bombs to hit people crowded in a limited space (the church) must have been suspicious.
(7) The SS creed of obedience to orders which turned them into automatons would prevent any of the other officers from criticising any aspect of the plan. Perhaps Diekmann withheld his final ‘kill them all’ order until the column’s halt on the Limoges road when he radioed Stadler to say he was about to enter Oradour, without mentioning his mad desire for revenge.
(8) Diekmann set up a command post in a farmhouse nearby, leaving the immediate operation of the slaughter in the hands of Kahn, CO of the third company whose men were involved. They were ordered to ‘get on with it’ as soon as he had given the signal.
The deterrent effect of the massacre seems to have been achieved. A Resistance leader is said to have paid a secret visit to the smoking ruins and was so impressed that he advised other leaders not to try to take control of any more towns or villages. A long-planned attack on Limoges by combined maquis was called off. The news of what had happened spread widely, in spite of the ban on press coverage. People were terrified that any stand by maquis in their communities could lead to a similar massacre and thereafter there were a few minor clashes but nothing big. One was near Bellac where a party of FTP attacked a stationary German truck not realising that it was part of an SS convoy standing nearby. They came under a hail of bullets and five of them were killed.
Lammerding, commander of Das Reich, claimed that Diekmann had exceeded his orders at Oradour. However, he allowed him to retain his command.
When the Das Reich eventually reached Normandy and went into action it was still a formidable fighting force in spite of their losses en route. They had suffered far fewer casualties than the maquisards. However, in the fighting against the Allied forces they lost about 960 men.
Was the Resistance in any way involved in the Oradour story, apart from the capture of Kämpfe and Gerlach? Colonel Rousselier, the commander of the 12th Military Region of the FFI in Limoges, said,
‘There was no engagement of any sort in the Oradour-sur-Glane area. We had no camp, no arms cache, and no explosives anywhere near the village.’
However, a Limoges correspondent, who was in the city at the time, wrote to the author,
‘There were maquis with arms around Oradour. A friend of mine was two kilometres from the village with his group of communist partisans.’
It is possible that there were uncoordinated groups in several parts of the area. This correspondent said there were more than a thousand maquisards in the vicinity of Oradour at that time and if they had united under a common leader they might have attempted to rescue some of the people. But it is doubtful whether any number of lightly-armed partisans would be prepared to face l20 fully-armed and experienced soldiers with the reputation that Das Reich had achieved in its march northwards.
It is unlikely that there was ever any association with the Resistance in Oradour. A plaque fixed to the ruins of the home of the mayor, Doctor Jean Desourteaux and his son Doctor Jacques Desourteaux has been contributed by the Association Amicale des Medecins du Maquis et de la Résistance. If there were arms in the village, no real effort was made to find them. In fact, Lieutenant Barth, at his trial in 1983, said the search lasted only five minutes.
But even if Oradour was a Resistance centre and there had been a number of’ arms caches, this could never be regarded by civilised people as justification for the slaughter of 642 men, women and children and the destruction of their homes.
