Massacre in Oradour-sur-Glan

In February 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” was stationed in the city of Valens d'Aden north of Toulouse, awaiting the arrival of fresh reinforcements and new equipment. In connection with the landing of the Allies in Normandy, the division was ordered to go north to help stop the advance of the enemy. The division included the 4th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment under the command of SS Standartenfuhrer Sylvester Stadler (regimental commander) and SS Sturmbannfuhren Adolf Dickmann (headed the first battalion), as well as Otto Weidinger (appointed Stadler's successor, who was at that time for familiarization) . On June 14th, command passed to Weidinger.

Early in the morning of June 10, 1944, Dickman told Weidinger that two police officers had come to him (a paramilitary unit of the Vichy regime ). They stated that the resistance was holding an officer of the SS Troops in the nearby village of Oradour-sur-Wires. It was reportedly the SS Sturmbannführer Helmut Kempfe , commander of the 2nd Tank Reconnaissance Battalion (also part of the Das Reich division). He could have been captured by the Limousin poppies the day before. Stadler ordered Dickman to force the mayor to choose thirty hostages to exchange them at Kempf.

On June 10, Dykman’s battalion surrounded Oradour-sur-Glanne with a tight ring: all residents and those who accidentally ended up in the city and its environs were ordered to gather in the village square to check ID cards. The SS men also arrested six people who did not live in the village, but were just riding bicycles past the village when an SS detachment arrived there.

Women and children were closed in the church, the village was plundered. Men were divorced from barns and barns, machine guns were installed in advance on the ground.

According to the stories of the survivors, the SS men opened fire by shooting at the feet of the unfortunate. When the victims could no longer move, the Nazis doused them with fuel and set fire to the barns. Only six managed to escape. One of the runaways was subsequently noticed walking along the road and shot. A total of 190 French men died.

Then the SS men went to the church and installed an incendiary device there. When it worked, women and children tried to escape through windows and doors, but ran into machine-gun fire. A total of 247 women and 205 children died. Only 47-year-old Marguerite Rufans was lucky to survive. She managed to jump out of the back window of the sacristy, followed by a young woman and a child. All three were shot and two killed on the spot. Rufans crawled to the thickets of peas and hid in them all night. The next morning she was found and saved. About twenty residents fled the village as the SS detachment approached. That night the village was partially destroyed.

A few days later, survivors were allowed to bury 642 killed villagers who were killed in just a few hours. Adolf Dickman said that the massacre was responsible for the actions of the partisans in nearby Tulle and the abduction of Helmut Kempf.

Raymond Murphy, a 20-year-old pilot of the B-17 bomber shot down over Avor in late April 1944, witnessed the effects of the massacre. He was hid by the French from the Resistance movement. On August 6, he sailed to England and, during interrogation on August 7, he outlined several versions of the report. The final version of August 15 contained a hand-written statement:

Three weeks ago, during a 4-hour cycling trip, I watched the Herbo farm (leader of the resistance Camille Herbo), where 500 men, women and children were killed by the Germans. I saw a crucified child.

Murphy's report became public in 2011 at the request of his grandson, a lawyer in the National Security Department of the US Department of Justice under the Freedom of Information Act . According to the conclusion of the American journalist Shane Harris, Murphy’s statement is true, and the city not mentioned in Murphy’s report is most likely Oradour-sur-Glan.

Dickman’s actions provoked protests from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and General Glenig ( German Walter Gleiniger ), the German commander in Limoges and in the Vichy administration . Even the Standartenfuhrer SS Stadler believed that Dickman went far beyond the orders given to him and began a legal investigation. However, the 29-year-old Dickman died in battle shortly after landing in Normandy, as did most of his third company. The investigation was soon suspended.

On January 12, 1953, a military court in Bordeaux heard charges against 65 (out of two hundred) surviving SS men participating in the rally. Only 21 of them appeared before the court, since the majority lived in the GDR, which refused to be extradited. The seven accused were German citizens, but 14 were Alsatians (Alsace was annexed by Germany in 1940). All Alsatians except one stated that they were forcibly drafted into the SS Army. Such recruits from Alsace and Lorraine called themselves malgré-nous , which means “Against our will” in translation.

On February 11, the court pleaded guilty to 20 defendants. The ongoing riots in Alsace (their participants also demanded autonomy) forced the French parliament on February 19 to pass an amnesty law. Convicted SS men from Alsace were soon released. However, this caused sharp protests in the Limousin area.

In 1958, all German defendants were also released. General Heinz Lammerding from the Das Reich division, who ordered the retaliation of the Resistance, was not tried, he was a successful entrepreneur and died in 1971. By the time of the trial, he was living in Dusseldorf in the British occupation zone of West Germany, the French government did not succeed in extraditing him.

The last trial of members of the SS troops participating in the rally took place in 1983. A Berlin city court sentenced former SS Obersturm Fuhrer Heinz Barth to life imprisonment. Bart participated in the action as a platoon commander of the regiment "Der Führer" (under his command there were 45 people). He was charged with several charges that he ordered the execution of 20 men in a garage. Bart was hunted down in the GDR. He was released in 1997 after the reunification of Germany for health reasons and passed away in August 2007.

On January 8, 2014, 88-year-old Werner Cristikat, a former member of the 3rd company of the 1st battalion of the SS regiment "Der Führer", was charged by the state court in Cologne with 25 murders and hundreds of complicity in the killings in connection with the massacre in Oradur-sur Glane. The suspect was identified only on March 31, 2014. If he appeared in court, it could be a juvenile court, since the suspect was only 19 years old at the time of the crime. According to his lawyer, Rainer Rohlen, the suspect confirmed that he was in the village, but denied involvement in any killings. On December 9, 2014, the court suspended the case due to a lack of witness testimony or reliable documentary evidence that could refute the suspect’s allegations of non-participation in the killings.

After the war, French President General de Gaulle decided that the village should never be restored, it should remain a monument to the brutality of the Nazi occupation.

The new village of Oradour-sur-Glan (population 2375 people by 2012) to the north-west of the site of the massacre was built after the war. The ruins of the original village remain a monument to the fallen and represent similar monuments and events.

In 1999, French President Jacques Chirac opened the memorial museum "Center of the memory of Oradour" near the entrance to the Village of Martyrs. The museum contains things found in burnt houses, watches that stopped at the time when their owners were burned alive, glasses melted from the heat of the fire and various personal items.

On June 6, 2004, at the commemoration ceremony of the Normandy landing in Caen, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder vowed that Germany would not forget the brutality of the Nazis and made special mention of Oradour-sur-Glan.

On September 4, 2013, German President Joachim Gauck and French President Francois Hollande visited the dead village of Oradour-sur-Glan, followed by a general press conference of the two leaders. For the first time , the German president visited the site of one of the bloodiest massacres of World War II in France.

• The story of the destroyed village was the preface of the film " Peace in the war ."
• The tragedy became the basis of the plot of the feature film Robert Enrico's “ Old Gun ” (1975).
• In Victor Mikhailov’s novel “In a closed circle”, events in the village are one of the plot-forming episodes.
• The poem "Oradour" by Jean Tardieu , dedicated to Paul Eluard .
• Roman I.G. Erenburg "The Storm"

• Oradour-sur-Glan // Olonkho - Panino. - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1955. - P. 128. - ( Great Soviet Encyclopedia : [in 51 vols.] / Ch. Ed. B. A. Vvedensky ; 1949-1958, vol. 31).
• Farmer, Sarah. Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. University of California Press, 2000.
• Fouché, Jean-Jacques. Massacre At Oradour: France, 1944; Coming To Grips With Terror , Northern Illinois University Press, 2004.
• INSEE
• Penaud, Guy. La Das Reich 2e SS Panzer Division (Parcours de la division en France, 560 pp), Éditions de La Lauze / Périgueux. ISBN 2-912032-76-8
• Hastings, Max (1982) Das Reich: March of the Second SS Panzer Division Through France Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 0-03-057059-X
• Hastings, Max (1991) Das Reich: Resistance and the March of the Second SS Panzer Division Through France, June 1944 Michael Joseph Ltd. ISBN 0-7181-2074-4

• Study of 1944 reprisals at Oradour-sur-Glane (with picture gallery containing lists of casualties)
• Oradour-sur-glane memorial center
• Full list of casualties