Remember Oradour

Sixty years ago this month one of the most heinous crimes against humanity took place in a sleepy little village in the Limousin called Oradour-sur-Glane. Here on the 10th June 1944, 642 men, women and children were put to death by a Nazi SS Panzer division on its way north to Normandy to bolster the German defences after the D-Day landings. There have been many reasons put forward as to why this massacre took place, the madness of war, of soldiers merely following orders, reprisals for murdered comrades, but there is no justification for the actions taken by those men on that fateful day. There was no glory in this for a once proud and honourable nation.

So what were the events that let up to this tragic day? By June 1944 many Germans believed that the war was already lost. Five short years before Hitler had avenged the humiliation of Versailles, when he walked into Poland unopposed. The years of shame which followed the defeat of WW1 were now swept aside by a renewed nationalistic pride and Germany believed itself invincible. For a short time in the early years of the war it seemed that this was indeed the case. We can only speculate what would have happened if Hitler had decided NOT to “deal with the Russians” as he put it, until much later, thereby removing the necessity of fighting the war on two fronts. History records that the Russian front exceeded in magnitude and horror the worst of the WW1 battles for France. Out of this brutality and carnage in the spring of 1944 came the ‘Das Reich’, the 2nd SS Panzer division. Ordered to leave the mud and blood of Russia to reinforce France against possible Allied invasion, to leave behind the two thirds of their original number who had died in the horror that was Stalingrad and entrain for a move across Europe that would lead them to Oradour-sur-Glane and Normandy. So in May 1944, the Das Reich division found themselves billeted in Montauban in the Tarn et Garonne under the command of General Hienz Lammerding. Here they were reinforced with young boys, the pride of the Hitler youth who had come straight from the training camps of Germany.

In France, Frenchmen from almost every region saw it as their duty to resist the occupation of their land in any way that they could. Members from F section of the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E. was created from various British intelligence agencies, MI6 included), were parachuted into France to try and organise the different resistance groups. The problems these brave men and women faced seemed almost insurmountable. Among these groups of réseau or Armée Secrète (AS) were the Maquis: (After Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain signed the armistice in 1940 the Gestapo began hunting down communists and socialists. Most of them went into hiding. The obvious place to go was in the forests of the unoccupied zones. Escaped soldiers from the French Army also fled to these forests. These men and women gradually formed themselves into units based on political beliefs and geographical area. Eventually these people joined together to form the Maquis), the Francs-Tireurs Partisans (the FTP resistance group was formed following the invasion of Soviet Russia by the German Army in 1941. The group mainly comprised of members of the French Communist Party and eventually became the military wing of the National Front. The FTP operated in both occupied and unoccupied France. It was organized as a pyramid, based on triangles of three members. This proved to be a flexible and relatively secure structure). There were also thousands of young men over the age of 19 who were on the run from the German forced labour program, which shipped thousands of young men to German and their deaths. The different groups did not co-ordinate, pool intelligence or even speak to each other and the whole resistance movement was shrouded in suspicion and mistrust.

But life in occupied France was not all conflict and oppression. There have been many reported cases of kindness and friendship between the occupying forces and their charges at that time. Many German officers and soldiers did much to aid the hardships that were suffered by the people they were billeted with and much was done to bolster their meager food rations. There were many German officers who paid for their accommodation even though their hosts would have found it impossible to refuse to accommodate them. There were also many broken hearts among the Mademoiselles, when the troops left the occupied areas. So life went on during those dark days and the French people came to tolerate their invaders, but all that was about to change as history moved toward the D-Day landings and June 1944.

On the evening of 5th June 1944 as hundreds of French men and women sat around their crystal sets listening to the BBC’s ‘French Service’ broadcasting their regular ‘messages personnels’, the first ships of the Allied invasion fleet came in sight of the Normandy beaches. Hundreds of résitants in the Limousin, Dordogne and Corrèze rallied at their prearranged assembly points and took up their arms in preparation for the struggle ahead. Because of the mistrust the Allies had for the resistant groups in Europe, much dis-information was passed on to them. For instance, it was a common belief in France that thousands of allied troupes would be parachuted into Southern France at the same time as the allied landings on the Normandy beaches, thereby trapping the Germans in a pincer movement. Many brave Frenchmen lost their lives because of this belief. On the 8th June the Das Reich division finally received orders to move out of their largers in and around Montauban to the train stations at Périgueux and Brive where they would entrain for the long journey north. The maquis and bomber command had done their work well destroying much of the railway lines across the Dordogne and Limousin making it impossible for the Germans to travel by train. The only option left to them was the long hard slog by road. Historians have commented that this one act alone may have shortened the war by many months.

There have been many theories put forward for the events that followed, the truth may never be known as most of the protagonists are now dead. Frustrated and angered by the men and women of the resistance, harried and ambushed at almost every turn in the road, the Das Reich division divided, one half moving west into the Dordogne, whilst the other moved north towards Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane, their orders - to route out and destroy resistance elements as they found them. And so on the 9th June 1944 the 1st battalion ‘Der Führer’ regiment of the Das Reich division under the command of Major Otto Dickmann found themselves billeted in St.Junien some 20 miles from Limoges. Major Dickmann had already experienced fighting the résistants, most notably a handful of poor souls who tried to hold the bridge at Groslejac in the Dordogne on the 8th June with an assortment of shotguns, until the Allied paratroopers arrived! They delayed the column of half tracks and light artillery for twenty minutes. A close personal friend of Major Dickmann, a cavalier character named Major Kampfe, had been captured by résistants some 15 miles from Limoges. Word came that there was heavy resistance activity in the town of Oradour and that Major Kampfe had been taken there. The ‘Der Führer’ regiment was ordered to deal with it in the ‘strongest possible terms’. At 1.30pm on 10th June 1944 Dickmann with the 3rd company Der Führer’ regiment commanded by Hauptsturmführer Kahn, a party of some 120 men in a convoy of two half tracks, eight trucks and a motor cycle set out eastwards towards Oradour-sur-Glane.

Fate conspired to ensure that the town was packed with people who would not normally have been there on that Saturday afternoon. Children from the three schools were in town for a medical examination, weekend fisherman from Limoges, farmers in from the fields. The horrors of that day are well documented, most notably in “The Tragedy” by Robert Hébras one of the survivors and I will not dwell on them here. The town was surrounded and everyone was herded to the ‘fair-ground’ a square in the centre of the town. From here the women and children were taken to the church, the men to three barns within the town. Almost simultaneously they were fired upon by heavy machine guns; straw was then piled over the bodies and set on fire. The rest of the village was systematically burned to the ground. Of the 642 people in the village that day one woman and five men escaped from the slaughter.

Today, sixty years on, the village remains as it was left that fateful day in 1944 as a monument to man’s inhumanity to man. There are some who would say that 60 years is enough time to mourn, that now we should bury the dead and move on. To those I say go there, walk among the rubble that was Oradour-sur-Glane, see the museum with its pitiful remnants, then tell those six poor souls who have lived with it all their lives to bury the dead and weep no more.

Article by Ken Austin