Oradour-sur-Glane |
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One of the many tragedies of WWII was the destruction of the small Limousin town of Oradour-sur-Glane, in the Haute-Vienne department of France, on Saturday the 10th of June 1944. The attack was carried out by soldiers of the Der Führer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division Das Reich. On that day, they killed a total of 642 men, women and children without giving any reasons for their actions and to this day there is no universally accepted explanation for the massacre. It is likely that it was the action of a renegade group of SS soldiers, trained to give no mercy, who were looking for a way to get back at the French for the activities of the Resistance. It mattered not to these trained and experienced killers that no resistance activity had been officially traced to Oradour-sur-Glane. In the massacre, townspeople were rounded up and separated into groups, with women and children gathered in the town's church and the men in nearby barns. When the killing began, it seems that the SS soldiers deliberately tried to disable the townspeople with machine gun fire without killing them. They then set fire to the structures so that those left alive would be burned to death. The SS then proceeded to round up the rest of the town's inhabitants and kill them in cruel ways, such as burning a disabled man in his bed and placing an infant in a bakery oven. The town has been preserved as it was after the massacre, as a reminder of the atrocity of war, hopefully to serve as a lesson to future generations. Visiting Oradour-sur-Glane is a very powerful and disconcerting experience. Last edited March 2, 2006 |
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