Around 2 p.m. on 10 June 1944,
four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy,
approximately 150 Waffen-SS soldiers entered the
tranquil village of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Limosin
region of south central France. For no apparent
reason, Hitler's elite troops destroyed every
building in this peaceful village and brutally
murdered a total of 642 innocent men, women and
children, an unexplained tragedy which has gone down
in history as one of the worst war crimes committed
by the German army in World War II.
On that beautiful Summer day, the defenceless
inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane were rudely dragged
out of their homes, including the sick and the
elderly, and ordered to assemble on the Fairgrounds
on the pretext of checking their identity papers.
After all had been assembled, they were forced to
wait in suspense with machine guns pointed at them.
Then the women were separated from the men and
marched a short distance to the small Catholic
Church, carrying infants in their arms or pushing
them in baby carriages.
The men were then ordered to line up in three rows
and face a wall that bordered on the Fairgrounds. A
short time later, they were randomly divided into
groups and herded into six buildings: barns,
garages, a smithy, and a wine storehouse. Around 4
p.m., a loud explosion was heard which was
interpreted by the men to be a signal for the SS
soldiers to begin firing their machine guns. Most of
the men were wounded in the legs and then burned
alive when every building in the village was set on
fire at around 5 p.m. By some miracle, 6 of the men
managed to escape from one of the burning barns and
5 of them survived. They testified in court about
this completely unjustified German barbarity against
blameless French civilians.
The Oradour church only had a seating capacity of
350 persons, but 245 frightened women and 207
sobbing children were forced inside at gunpoint
while the men were still sitting on the grass of the
Fairgrounds, awaiting their fate. The women and
children were locked inside the church while the SS
soldiers systematically looted all the homes in this
prosperous farming village. Then around 4 p.m. a
couple of SS soldiers carried a gas bomb inside this
holy place and set it off, filling the church with a
cloud of noxious black smoke. Their intention had
been to asphyxiate the women and children in the
House of God, but their plan failed.
As the women and children pressed against the doors,
trying to escape and struggling to breathe, SS
soldiers then entered the crowded, smoke-filled
church and fired hundreds of shots at the hapless
victims, while other SS men stood outside ready to
machine-gun anyone who attempted to escape. The
soldiers fired low inside the church in order to hit
the small children. Babies in their prams were blown
up by hand grenades, filled with gas, that were
tossed into the church. Then brushwood and straw was
carried into the stone church and piled on top of
the writhing bodies of those that were not yet dead.
The church was then set on fire, burning alive the
women and babies who had only been wounded by the
shots and the grenades. The clamour coming from the
church could be heard for a distance of two
kilometres, according the Bishop's office report.
The fire inside the church was so intense that the
flames leaped up into the bell tower; the bronze
church bells melted from the heat of the flames and
fell down onto the floor of the church. One SS
soldier was accidentally killed by falling debris
when the roof of the church steeple collapsed.
Only one woman, a 47-year-old grandmother, escaped
from the church. Taking advantage of a cloud of
smoke, she hid behind the main altar where she found
a ladder that had been left there for the purpose of
lighting the candles on the altar. Madame Marguerite
Rouffanche, the lone survivor of the massacre in the
church, managed to escape by using the ladder to
climb up to a broken window behind the altar, then
leaping out of the window, which was 9 feet from the
ground. Although hit by machine gun fire and wounded
4 times in the legs and once in the shoulder, she
was able to crawl to the garden behind the
presbytery where she hid among the rows of peas
until she was rescued, 24 hours later, at 5 p.m. the
next day, and taken to the hospital in Limoges where
she was admitted under an assumed name. It took a
full year for her to recover from her wounds. In
1953, she testified before a French military
tribunal in Bordeaux about the massacre of the women
and children in the church.
The Trial
From January to February 1953 a total of 21 men were
tried by the French courts at Bordeaux for their
part in the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, they were
all members of the Der Führer regiment of Das Reich
Division who had survived the war. None of them were
officers; the highest rank was that of Sergeant. Of
the 21 men, 14 of them came from the French province
of Alsace, which had been taken over by the Germans
following the French surrender in 1940. In the eyes
of the Germans, these men had been German, in the
eyes of the French; they were close to being
traitors. Members of the Resistance said that they
should have refused to take part in the massacre,
that they should have helped their fellow countrymen
escape and that they were even more guilty than the
Germans. The lawyers defending the Alsatians said
that with one exception they had been conscripted
into the SS, that they had no choice but to obey and
if they had refused they would have been shot.
What made the trial unusual is that 13 of the
Alsatians had been at liberty before the trial
started, one of them had in fact become a police
inspector since the end of the war. Another had won
the Croix de Guerre, France's highest military medal
for valour after the end of the war, whilst fighting
with the French army in Indo-China (present day
Vietnam). The German defendants had been in
prisoner-of-war camps since the end of the war in
1945.
The people of the province of Alsace wanted all the
men freed at once whilst the people living in the
Oradour area wanted them all executed at once.
Obviously not everyone was going to like the
verdicts when they were announced.
The trial took place in an atmosphere of bad temper
within France and at the end, just two of the
defendants were sentenced to death, the rest to
prison for between 8 to 12 years. The verdicts
produced an uproar in all parts of France, some
thought they were much to lenient, others that they
were much too harsh. Protests and demonstrations
were held in the province of Alsace to assist in
gaining the release of their men folk. In the event
all 21 men were released quite soon after the trial
had ended.
The immediate aftermath
The verdicts produced a storm of protest in both
Alsace and the Limosin, the former thought they were
too harsh, the latter, too lenient. The rest of
France seemed to divide its opinion along political
lines, generally the left (especially the
communists) thought the sentences too light, the
right too severe.
All the defendants,
both German and Alsatian, immediately lodged
appeals, except for Graff who had already served
most of his sentence whilst awaiting trial.
The Alsatian
newspapers had delayed their publication, so as to
carry full reports of the sentences and lengthy
comments on them. The papers were eagerly awaited in
the province and their contents caused an immediate
reaction. War memorials were hung with black drapes,
thousands marched in protest, flags hung at
half-mast and bells slowly tolled in mourning.
Posters went up all
over the province declaring, "we do not accept the
verdicts" and "all Alsace declares solidarity with
her thirteen sons". War veterans prepared to return
their medals to the Government, local councils met
in emergency session to declare support for the
malgré-nous. Boos was excluded from this support as
he was viewed primarily as a traitor, having
volunteered for the SS, even though he was
technically a German at the time.
General de Gaulle
said, "What Frenchman will not understand the
enraged grief of Alsace?" He went on to speak of the
province being, "brutally annexed by the enemy after
the capitulation of Vichy." His concern was that
after 6 years of war the French nation should not
now permit, "the infliction of a bitter injury to
national unity." René Plevin, the minister for
national defence indicated that the government would
support a bill to grant amnesty to all those
forcibly incorporated into the German army. This
went some way to calming Alsatian unrest.
On Thursday 19th
February the French National Assembly passed a new
bill granting amnesty to all malgré-nous for all
crimes committed as a result of their forcible
incorporation into the German army. This bill was
passed by 319 votes to 211 with 83 abstentions, the
large number of abstentions indicating that this was
a difficult issue for the consciences of the
Representatives.
With the passing of
the amnesty, all the protests in Alsace stopped and
the province returned to normal literally overnight.
However in the Limusin things were viewed very
differently. On Friday 20th and Saturday 21st
February representatives from the ANFM returned the
Croix de Guerre and other awards granted to the
memory of Oradour. They said that the town would no
longer welcome official visits from state
representatives. In a show of anger, they put up
plaques listing the names of all the Deputies who
had voted for the amnesty at the entrance to the
ruins (where they remained until 1966.)
In Germany itself
there was unease at the sentences being passed on
their nationals and a feeling that if the French
were being pardoned, then so should the Germans.
After all the German SS soldiers on trial had also
been conscripted into the army and they were just as
young (some under 18) at the time of Oradour as the
French. Even Lenz who had been judged the most
harshly was not a volunteer for the SS. The German
newspaper, Die Welt (The World) asked, "Were the
Germans acting less under orders, less under
pressure and force than their Alsatian colleagues?
Were they different persons?"
Three days after the
amnesty bill was passed on Sunday 22nd February, the
thirteen Alsatians (including Graff, but not Boos)
were released from custody at 3:30 AM. They returned
to Alsace that afternoon to be received with joy
both by their families and the province as a whole.
The people of the
Limosin were devastated, the ANFM said to President
Auriol, "Our dead are being held in scorn and jeered
at. Oradour has been sacrificed a second time.
Oradour the symbol of barbarity will henceforth be
also the symbol of the unpunished crime."
Soon after, the
majority of the Germans were freed, as they had
already completed most of their sentences whilst
waiting for the trial to begin.
The two men condemned
to death, Lenz and Boos were eventually pardoned and
all 21 men who had stood trial in 1953 were free by
1958.
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