Oradour massacre

Oradour massacre. On 10 June 1944, the third company of the first battalion of the Der Führer regiment, attached to the 2nd SS Panzer Division—a lorried infantry unit—made a detour to Oradour-sur-Glane, a farming village 24 km. (15 mi.) west-north-west of Limoges, on their way from Montauban in south-west France to the Normandy beachhead. They collected all the women and children in the church, and all the men in five barns, interrogated the men briefly, and then set all six buildings on fire, shooting down those who tried to flee. A very few escaped and a very few more had slipped into the fields alongside the village as the Germans arrived. The Germans then looted and burned down the houses, and withdrew, leaving 642 corpses. They lost one officer, killed by a stone that fell off the burning church.

They had found no arms (beyond shotguns), nor any sign of resistance activity, in the village, which had hitherto lain completely outside the military course of the war. No certain motive has ever been established. Revenge has been conjectured, for a popular officer in the division had been abducted by a party from the maquis the day before; so has trouble over the division's gold reserve, looted in its turn from occupied banks. The officer in charge on the spot, Captain Kahn, was killed in action in Normandy. Long afterwards, several of his underlings—most of them Alsatian conscripts, and so again French citizens by the time they were traced—were put on trial without severe results.

The catastrophe, though unique in France, was not unexampled further east. See also atrocities.

M. R. D. Foot

Bibliography

Kruuse, J. , Madness at Oradour (London, 1969).