[bd476]

The New York Times

CHAPTER ONE

Martyred Village

Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane

By SARAH FARMER

University of California Press


...These 120 soldiers were members of the Der Fuerhrer regiment of the Waffen SS tank division Das Reich, which had been sent toward Limoges a few days before to fight the Resistance. As soldiers went from house to house, the Germans sent the town crier...to call the population to assemble in the central marketplace.

...

The SS soldiers moved quickly through town, hunting people out of their houses... driving them toward the market square.

...

At about three o'clock, the soldiers separated the women and children from the crowd, herded them to the church, and shut them in.

...

While the men stood in the barn... an SS solider set up a machine gun on a tripod. Other soldiers stood guard... Then, from outside, came the sound of a detonation: the signal to fire... bullets mowed down the Frenchmen.

...

The Germans then covered the bodies with straw, kindling, and phosphorous and set fire to the building. The six who survived had been standing near the front of the group; they were protected by the bodies that fell on them.

...

While the Germans were killing the men of Oradour, the women had been locked in the church...two soldiers came in and placed a large chest on the altar... retreated, laying out a long fuse, which they lit before shutting the door...the chest exploded, releasing clouds of suffocating smoke... blowing out some of the church windows... the soldiers opened the door and sprayed the group with gunfire. They piled flammable material on some of the bodies, set a bonfire with the church pews, and abandoned the building.

...

On the morning of 11 June, all that remained of Oradour was a smoldering mass of burnt farms, shops, and houses..642 people had died.

Martyred Village

Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane

[bd476]

Always remember. Never again.

[true_blue_texican]

Wow! I need to get this book.

[Experiment 6-2-6]

The World At War Series had footage on this village..

Amazing that Europeans feel the Islamofascists are different somehow...

[eleni121]

Not interested in a crummy scuzzie Commie site. Why did you post from this site?

[bd476]

Oradour-Souviens-Toi.com

Translated from French:

Oradour on Glane was destroyed during the second world war, on June 10, 1944. This village of the Limousin was the theatre of a systematic execution on behalf of Waffen S.S., making 642 victims officially. Oradour-on-Glane chart, one afternoon of June was striped, four days after the unloading in Normandy. Preserved in a state of ruin, this phantom village remains the witness of an odious crime…

Located at a score of kilometers in the western north of Limoges, the place is seizing. The whole village was preserved, the rails of the tram are still in place. Many carcasses of cars still resist rust, just like some domestic objects remained in the houses.

Several feelings clash at the time of the visit. One traverses a pilot place, a material proof of a massacre. However the ruins of Oradour still release, the charm of a village of the years 1940, a village of the countryside limousine. The provision of the buildings, frontages still debouts, recalls us what was this village, and one can then think the environment which there could be.

For the 61st birthday, this site was altered, enriched. Almost all the images can be increased, and the documents are more numerous. It wants to be to be richest possible. This site with for goal to maintain the memory the place and the massacre. Oradour-remember is a currency,…, never again, and yet…

Benjamin Corbeau, Architect

Oradour-Souviens-Toi.com

[rmlew]

Very sad.
However for the communists to portray themselves as "liberators" of France is pathetic. The French Communists had crippled France's war effort, especially during the fall on 1939. At munitions factories and railroads there were strikes.
While France probabaly still would have lost these were TRAITORS who should have been hanged.

[DieHard the Hunter]

Vive la résistance! Et vive la France libre!

"...They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."

-Laurence Binyon, "For the Fallen"

The Free French fought the Nazis bravely and well, long after the Vichy government had betrayed them. Heroes all. God rest all the martyrs of Oradour-sur-Glane.

*DieHard the Hunter*

[bd476]

Church: Site of Execution of Women and Children

View of church taken in September 1944

A view of the Church taken in September 1944. The smoke blackening of the building can be seen, especially around the windows. With the passage of time much of this smoke damage has been washed off by weather action. Note the largely intact, but collapsed roof in the foreground which has come from an adjacent building (it is not a part of the church). Compare this view with that of June 1998.

A point to consider is that, if the church steeple was used to store explosives, as claimed by some people, why is it still standing relatively undamaged? It is obvious that the roof of both steeple and church have gone in the fire, but according to one of the SS reports, "The flames (from adjacent houses) had sprung over to the church, which was burned out to the accompaniment of violent explosions" (Tulle and Oradour, a Franco-German tragedy by Otto Weidinger). Quite how flames could 'spring over', to a stone built church from a stone built house and set it alight has not been explained.



OradourInfo