Oradour-sur-Glane

Yes! I remember. Das Reich SS panzer div. They were on their way north to take us on in Normandy.. They had originally been based near Limoges.
The utter evil of those that took part is almost beyond comprehension. I do not know if there is a life after death...If there is? I just hope that those that committed those terrible crimes..... will have to listen to screams of women and little children as they were burned alive. For eternity!
Sapper

 

good day sapper,ww2 veteran,yesterday 04:52pm.#2 re:prosecutors charge 88-year-old man over 1944 nazi massacre.just to say I agree with you.regards bernard85.

 

One of the issues here in France for many years was that some of the SS troops responsable were from Alsace, and recuited as ethnic Germans, a few politicians here in the 1980s hoped it would all go away .

 

There was quite a number of young Alsatians serving in the Das Fuhrer Regiment of the Das Reich Division and were involved in the happenings at Oradour.

Nobody paid the supreme penalty for their actions as a result the trial at Bordeaux in 1953.As regards the future of the Alsatians.CDG's policy for the sake of French unity,was to disregard the young men of Alsace, pressed service in the colours of Nazi Germany.

At the heights above Obernai is the national memorial to those Alsatians,over 200.000 who were pressed into German military service......by 1944,the class of 1928 were being called up for service.

The man the French really wanted to face justice was Lammerding who was sentenced to death at Bordeaux in absentia......yet the British rejected the French plea for extradition of Lammerding from the British Zone of Germany......he survived and died in his bed after being successful in business.

The path of the Das Reich Division up to Normandy from their divisional base at Montauban is well marked by the memorials, recording their excesses to the innocent and the irregular alike.

 

9 December 2014

Nazi Oradour massacre: German court throws out case

A court in the German city of Cologne has said there is not enough evidence to try an 89-year-old man accused over an infamous Nazi massacre of civilians in France.
SS troops murdered 642 people in the central village of Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30391649

 

I think that there has only been one man brought to trial, late post war from the happenings at Oradour.That was Heinz Barth an SS junior officer who was arrested in the GDR in July 1981.He was one of those who were not traced for the 1953 Bordeaux trial and was sentenced to death in absentia.His trial came after living in the GDR since the war end,his past undetected.During his trial in June 1983 at 62 years of age, he frequently broke down. His military service ended when he lost a leg in Normandy.

Barth had a track record of being involved in atrocities against civilians and admitted to have taken part in the murderous behaviour at Lidice in the wake of the Heydrich assassination where he participated in three execution squads and was standing guard for a fourth....92 Czechs were shot.He described the shooting of 20 males of Oradour using a machine pistol where others used machine guns and rifles."I aimed 12 to 15 shots at their chests...I could not imagine that anybody survived such massive fire".

He went on to say his company received orders to round up all the inhabitants of Oradour and shoot them.The small French village was to be burned with the corpses.He also said that he could not remember ordering the execution of an elderly villager in his sickbed,but did not rule out the possibility."I cannot exclude this"Barth said when asked about the invalid during the questioning."Our orders were not to spare anybody"

Sobbing when the summing up of evidence took place,Barth said ",I am ashamed that,as a young man,I took part in these operations and actions in occupied countries and hope that such things cannot happen again"

The prosecutor had asked for life imprisonment and in East Germany,the supreme penalty could have been imposed but while the verdict was expected on 7 June 1983,I cannot recollect the detail.

As ever these people gave the usual excuse...following orders and the consequences of not,Barth declaring"If I had not followed instructions.I would have been put before a courts martial". This excuse was dismissed at the war criminal trials by the Nuremburg Tribunal stressing that there was no evidence that such disciplinary action had ever taken place for the refusal to carry out illegal actions.

 

He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1983, released in 1997 and died in 2007, aged 86

 

Thanks for that ... he lived to an old age to tell his tale unlike the umpteen millions of civilians that fell as victims of a political ideology

 

I am not quite sure where to ask this question, but the Holocaust section seems an appropriate place. We are approaching the anniversary of the massacre that took place at the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane on Saturday 10th June 1944. On that day, members of the Der Führer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division Das Reich entered the village, rounded up the inhabitants and killed 642 men, women and children. It is unclear why this atrocity took place - one explanation being that the Germans had destroyed the wrong Oradour (there were two of them in the vicinity, and the "other one" was a centre of Resistance activity). I am surprised that Oradour-sur-Glane does not seem to have been mentioned on this site, but perhaps someone can answer a simple question. Accounts of the massacre refer to a single tramcar arriving in the doomed village on a test run in the late afternoon, and an "engineer" being shot by the SS (although the driver was allowed to take the tram back to Limoges). Does this mean that the trams were running throughout the day? If not, surely that would have acted as a warning that the Germans were planning something nasty?

 

Never heard of the Tram story.

I'm going from memory but the same unit executed 90 odd men a few days earlier in Tulle by hanging them from the shop balconies around the town square, 96 men IIRC. This was a reprisal for a German officer from the unit being killed in his AFV by the resistance. I believe a few days later in Oradour a similar incident took place and two of three Germans were killed so they decided to up the stakes a little and wipe the whole village out rather than just a few of them.

 

I used the search box several times, with various spellings of Oradour/Orador/Oradour-sur-Glane, but was unable to find the previous threads - which is most odd because there has clearly been considerable interest in the subject. My question about the trams is nevertheless still valid; one source suggested that the trams were running as normal, which cannot have been the case. It appears that the service was suspended until about 16.00 when the "test tram" arrived. Another tram arrived later in the evening, this one being full of people (including some inhabitants of Oradour), but the Germans did not harm them. Perhaps they had, by that time, been ordered to stop the killing?

 

I have seen that extract, but it does not explain if the tram service had been running throughout the day - the implication being that there had been no service until the arrival of the "test tram". It should have been clear, to those running the tramway in Limoges, that something very bad was happening in Oradour, so why did they left people travel (perhaps to their deaths) on the evening service. Could there have been collaboration between the Milice and the Germans?

 

THE horror came without warning and lasted just hours. By the time it was over, more than 640 people were dead and a small French village four hours southwest of Paris lay in flames.

It was a typical Saturday in Oradour-sur-Glane when soldiers from the German 2nd SS Panzer Division arrived outside the village on June 10, 1944. Days earlier, Allied troops had landed on the beaches of Normandy four hours to the north in a massive invasion that was a major turning point in World War II.

Read more

http://www.news.com.au/travel/world-travel/europe/oradoursurglane-the-ghost-town-frozen-in-time/news-story/d306c43d83b98a3ccbe65b039441739f

 

Definitely somewhere worth visiting!

 

On 10 June, Diekmann's battalion sealed off Oradour-sur-Glane and ordered everyone within to assemble in the village square to have their identity papers examined. This included six non-residents who happened to be bicycling through the village when the SS unit arrived. The women and children were locked in the church, and the village was looted. The men were led to six barns and sheds, where machine guns were already in place.

According to a survivor's account, the SS men then began shooting, aiming for their legs. When victims were unable to move, the SS men covered them with fuel and set the barns on fire. Only six men managed to escape. One of them was later seen walking down a road and was shot dead. In all, 190 Frenchmen died.

The SS men next proceeded to the church and placed an incendiary device beside it. When it was ignited, women and children tried to escape through the doors and windows, only to be met with machine-gun fire. 247 women and 205 children died in the attack. The only survivor was 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche. She escaped through a rear sacristywindow, followed by a young woman and child.[3] All three were shot, two of them fatally. Rouffanche crawled to some pea bushes and remained hidden overnight until she was found and rescued the next morning. About twenty villagers had fled Oradour-sur-Glane as soon as the SS unit had appeared. That night, the village was partially razed.

Several days later, the survivors were allowed to bury the 642 dead inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane who had been killed in just a few hours. Adolf Diekmann said the atrocity was in retaliation for the partisan activity in nearby Tulle and the kidnapping of an SS commander, Helmut Kämpfe.


Oradour-sur-Glane massacre - Wikipedia

 

CL1 - who can add to that?
Why can't we learn?