Nazi barbarism. On June 10, 1944 atrocious events took place in Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges: the largest massacre of civilians perpetrated by the Nazis in France.
Indeed, it is a whole village of Limousin which is destroyed - there are only ruins left - and 642 people who are obnoxiously dead on June 10, 1944, a few days after the Allied landings in Normandy. Women, children, men of all ages. Only a few people escaped the killing - among them Yvon Roby, Robert Hébras, Jean-Marcel Darthout, Mathieu Borie, Armand Senon, Paul Doutre. The testimonies of the survivors allow us to reconstruct the scenario of this atrocious tragedy, which forever marks the collective memory.
More than eight years after the tragedy will open before the permanent military tribunal of Bordeaux the debates of the trial of the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane. But on the dock there will be no principal, only executors: seven German soldiers and fourteen Alsatians. Young people at the time of the events.
Read also: On January 12, 1953, the trial for the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, symbol of Nazi barbarism, opened
In 1949, the day of the commemoration of the assassination of its population, the martyred town received the cross of the Legion of Honor during a national ceremony. On this occasion, Le Figaro chose to publish the story of its collaborator Jean-Marie Garraud. On that fateful day in June 1944, he was seven kilometers from the scene. The next day he went there.
Article published in Le Figaro on June 7, 1949.
The tragedy of Oradour
This day of June 10, 1944 is beautiful in Limousin. The meadows are heavy with fodder, the fields promising a good harvest. In addition, the news of the recent Allied landing in Normandy brings hope.
Interior of the church of Oradour-sur-Glane, where the women and children were locked up, before the SS set it on fire on June 10, 1944. Rue des Archives / Rue des Archives / Tallandier
Rarely have there been so many people in Oradour-sur-Glane, a large town in the Rochechouart district. The region is rich and peaceful. Children from Nice, Avignon, Montpellier and Bordeaux have just been evacuated there, who have found many young people from Lorraine there.
The Oradour inns are famous. Residents of Limoges, walkers came to spend the weekend in the countryside and get supplies. In addition there is distribution of meat and tobacco on this day; also many farmers from the surroundings came down to the village .
At the Avril hotel and at the Milord hotel we have just served lunch. Residents arrived the same morning: a lady and her three children fleeing the bombardments of the Paris region, a household from Bordeaux; others left at 10 am: a newlywed couple. At the tables d'hôte, we talk, we joke.
Two young teacher trainees, aged twenty, left the dining room of the Hotel Milord around 1 p.m. One, Mlle Conty, accompanies her colleague detached to a neighboring village to the entrance of the village and then goes to her school. They were never to see each other again .
The arrival of the SS
It is 2.15 p.m. when a convoy of German trucks arriving by road from Limoges stops in the lower part of the village. The soldiers - about two hundred - are all young, helmets and wearing large camouflage jackets speckled with green and yellow.
Plan of the village of Oradour - appeared in Le Figaro of June 7, 1949: in black the church, the barns and the garage, where the population was killed by the SS on June 10, 1944. In dotted lines, the route accomplished, during that the village was burning, by survivors. At the top the provisional village and the chapel built near the ruins. Le Figaro
Three trucks and two caterpillars break away from the convoy and roam the main street. Immediately the village is in turmoil. Is it a convoy looking for its way or a place of cantonment? We think so first, since no combat between the maquis and the Germans took place in the vicinity of Oradour.
An SS officer enters the town hall, and shortly after the city drum, Mr. Deplerrefiche walks through the streets, reading an order urging residents to assemble in the Place du Champ-de-Foire for identity verification .
Immediately the SS, submachine gun in hand, spread through the village, knocking on the doors of houses and gesture to the villagers to go quickly to the place of assembly. The brutalities are already beginning: Madame Binet, headmistress of the school, ill, is forced to get up and leave her house in her pajamas. A paralytic old man is pulled from his bed and carried in his arms to the fairground , where the other inhabitants flock.
However, some are hiding: Mr. Senon, who had his leg broken during a football game, is hiding in a small room; M. Doutre finds refuge in a vault in the cemetery ; M. Desourteaux crawls in a garden; M. Besson slips under the ivy of a wall.
Little Lorrain
The young Roger Godfrin and another survivor, the shoemaker Machefer, during the Oradour-sur-Glane trial at the Bordeaux military court, January 13, 1953. AGIP / Rue des Archives / AGIP
In all three schools, the class started when the Germans arrived. They order teachers and children to follow them. At the boys' school, the head of the SS detachment declared to the director, Mr. Rousseau, that a skirmish in the maquis was feared and that the children had to be taken to church to ensure their safety.
The SS are very calm. Some laugh. Children are not afraid. Alone, a little Lorrainer. Roger Godfrin, aged nine, said to one of his comrades: "They are Germans ... They are going to hurt us!" He slips towards the window and taking advantage of a moment of inattention from the soldiers, he jumps into a garden and hides behind a bed. When the procession of children leaves school, Roger Godfrin runs away to the neighboring woods. Its small size allows it to escape the sentries.
He was the only child who escaped the Oradour massacre .
In the countryside, around the village, German chenillettes patrol; trucks pick up residents of neighboring hamlets. In Bordes, Brégères and Puygaillard. They bring them to the fairground. Some trying to flee across fields are shot dead.
They pile straw, cart sides, ladders and bundles on us and set them on fire.
Yvon Roby, a survivorAt 3 pm the gathering of the population is over. The Germans form two groups: on the one hand, women and children; on the other, men. The first group is then led to the church by ten SS. The men were forced to sit on the edge of the sidewalk. A German interpreter says: “We are going to search for weapons depots. (There was none in Oradour.) To facilitate operations, we will assemble you in the barns . ”
At 3.30 p.m. the men left for the Landy, Milord, Desourteaux, Denis, Bouchoule barns and the Beaulieu garage. Everything is going in order. No sign of nervousness among the Germans.
The survivors of the massacre
In the Landy barn, about forty men are gathered. Among them, five young people: MM. Roby, Hebras, Borie, Darthout and Broussaudier, who alone escaped the massacre. Their testimony, which we gathered a few days later, enabled us to reconstruct the facts exactly.
The SS ask men to take out the two carts that are in the Landy barn. At the entrance of the building four soldiers install machine guns. Not finding the site of their weapons clean enough, they have it swept by one of the prisoners.
Bodies of victims after the massacre, on June 10, 1944, of the villagers of Oradour-sur-Glane, in Haute-Vienne. Rue des Archives / © Rue des Archives / RDA
“They are watching us,” Mr. Roby told us. They are barely twenty years old. They laugh among themselves and distribute sugar cubes that they bite into. We wait, worried, massed against the wall of the barn. Five minutes pass. In a neighboring house a German turns on the radio. Suddenly a gunshot sounds as a signal. The SS, shouting, bend over their weapons and shoot . I drop to my stomach. Bodies cover me. ”
After the machine-gun fire, the SS, marching on the bodies, fire point blank, with revolvers on those who stir . "Then they pile up on us," said Mr. Roby, "straw, cart sides, ladders, bundles and set them on fire." The same scene must have taken place in each barn.
Amidst flames and smoke. Mr. Roby frees himself and crawls to the back of the barn. He found the other four survivors there, including Darthout shot four times in the legs. A hole in the wall allows them to gain a neighboring attic. They are hiding in the hay. But an SS arrives. Mr. Roby hears him walking a yard away from him. The sound of a match is cracked and the fire is set in the hay. The SS moves away: the young people jump from the flaming attic, and, terrified, hide in a hutch. But fire wins everywhere. Then, risking everything for everything, the young people, crawling and dragging their wounded comrade, leave the buildings. The whole village is on fire now. The smoke masks the fugitives. The latter, passing alongside groups of SS whom they hear shouting orders, manage to reach the fields behind the cemetery. They are saved.
At church
Only one woman survived the heinous massacre that took place in the church, Mme Rouffanche. Women and children are gathered in the sanctuary, the doors of which are guarded. Around 4 p.m., two SS men brought a bulky box into the central aisle, from which protruded white cords. One of them lights these cords with a lighter and hurries out of the church. Immediately an explosion occurs and a thick black smoke is released. Women and children, half asphyxiated, scream in fear. From the door the SS began to fire.
Marguerite Rouffanche, the only witness to the massacre of women and children which took place in the church during the Oradour-sur-Glane tragedy in June 1944. Rue des Archives / Rue des Archives / Tallandier
Mme Rouffanche, who has seen her daughter killed by a bullet next to her, slips behind the high altar. Using a stepladder, she reached a broken window and rushed outside from a height of three meters. A young woman tries to follow her, hugging her baby. She jumps in turn, but the Germans, alerted by the cries, shoot. The woman and the child are killed. Mme Rouffanche, wounded by several bullets, has the strength to drag herself towards a field of peas whose oars conceal her. She was not found until the next day at 5 p.m., by farmers, after the SS had left, and reported what had happened .
The Oradour massacre claimed more than seven hundred victims, including nearly four hundred women and children. It was accomplished methodically and with ignoble and disconcerting coolness by a battalion of the SS regiment "Der Führer" belonging to the panzer division "Das Reich". These SS were all very young. They camped around Limoges for a few days, emptying the cellars and stealing hens and rabbits. They didn't even have remorse for their crime.
The most heinous crime of this war.
By Jean-Marie Garraud.
The men who survived the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, perpetrated by the Nazis on June 10, 1944, in the village of Limousin: in the foreground the young schoolboy Roger Godfrin. Rue des Archives / Rue des Archives / Tallandier
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