The Oradour-sur-Glane massacre

On Saturday 10 June 1944, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, a Waffen-SS unit surrounded the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute-Vienne department, some 20 kilometres north-west of Limoges, early in the afternoon. The inhabitants and chance visitors were herded on to the fairground. The men were divided among six barns, garages and sheds and machine-gunned, and the buildings were then set on fire. The women and children were locked in the church, which the soldiers set alight; those who tried to escape through the doors and windows were cut down by machine-gun fire. By evening the village was in flames. In January 1947 a French civil court at Rochechouart drew up a list of 642 victims; in 2019 historians identified a 643rd victim, and that is the figure the local Memorial Centre gives today. It was the largest massacre of civilians committed by the Germans in France during the war.

The perpetrators were soldiers of the 3rd Company, I Battalion, 4th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment Der Führer, part of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. The battalion was commanded by SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann. The day before, the same division had hanged 99 men in Tulle.

The Das Reich division on the road north

The Das Reich division, one of the oldest armoured formations of the Waffen-SS, had come out of heavy fighting on the Eastern Front – after the winter and spring battles of 1943 only remnants were left of it. At the beginning of 1944 it was moved to southern France, to the area around Montauban north of Toulouse, to be rebuilt and filled up with recruits. It was commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Heinz Lammerding, who had taken it over in January 1944 and earlier, during the fighting in the Soviet Union, had ordered villages destroyed as “reprisal measures”. There is much to suggest that he owed his post to his close relations with Heinrich Himmler (this is the view, among others, of the British historian Max Hastings). According to French researchers, in May the division numbered some 18,500 men against an establishment of 21,000; among the recruits were young Alsatians, forcibly conscripted into the German armed forces after the de facto annexation of Alsace in 1940.

In the spring of 1944 the German command in the West intensified its struggle against the French Resistance. The so-called Sperrle order of 3 February 1944, issued by the deputy Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, required attacks by “terrorists” to be answered with immediate fire and laid the blame for the deaths of innocent civilians solely on the partisans; the area of an attack was to be surrounded and searched. As early as May the Das Reich division carried out sweeps in the Lot and Tarn-et-Garonne departments in which civilians were killed and deported. On news of the invasion in Normandy the French underground – in line with the appeals from London and Algiers – began sabotaging railways and telephone lines and mounting open actions. In the Limousin, where the communist Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) were strong, the maquis attacked the German garrison in Tulle on 7 June and briefly took the town.

On 7 and 8 June the division received contradictory orders: on the one hand it was to move to Normandy, on the other to “clean up” the Tulle–Limoges area. The columns set off northwards from the Montauban area. When the division’s leading units retook Tulle on the evening of 8 June, the Germans found the bodies of soldiers of the garrison who had been killed. The next day, 9 June, on the orders of SS officers, 99 men selected from among the detained inhabitants were hanged from lamp posts and balconies, and 149 others were deported to Germany; according to French findings, 101 of them died in the camps, mainly in Dachau.

On the evening of 9 June, on a road near Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, east of Limoges, partisans from Georges Guingouin’s FTP units captured SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, commander of the III Battalion of the Der Führer regiment and a friend of Diekmann’s. According to historians drawing on the accounts of members of the maquis, Kämpfe was killed the following day. His disappearance caused a stir in the regiment – and, in the light of testimony later given by the regiment’s officers, became one of the reasons why Diekmann looked for a place to take revenge.

The village on the Glane

Oradour-sur-Glane was a quiet market town on the little River Glane. In 1936 the commune had 1,574 inhabitants, about 330 of them in the bourg itself – the compact cluster of houses around the church, the fairground and the main street. A suburban tramway ran here from Limoges; on Saturdays townspeople came out to buy food, which was scarce in occupied France. During the war refugees arrived: Spanish Republicans who had ended up in France after their defeat in the Civil War, families expelled by the Germans from Lorraine in 1940, people from the north of the country and from the coast. Italians and a few people from Poland also lived in the village.

There was neither a partisan unit nor an arms dump in the village itself. The maquis operated in the woods a few kilometres away, and the inhabitants knew it, but French historians – above all Jean-Jacques Fouché, author of the most comprehensive study of the crime – stress that Oradour was neither a centre of the Resistance nor the scene of any action against the Germans. 10 June was a Saturday: lessons and medical examinations were under way in the schools, children from outlying hamlets were in the village, and many people from the surrounding area had come in on foot or by tram, because meat and tobacco rations were being distributed that day.

The afternoon of 10 June

On the morning of 10 June Diekmann, whose battalion was stationed at Saint-Junien, reported to the regimental commander, SS-Standartenführer Sylvester Stadler, that according to information from two members of the collaborationist Milice a German officer – possibly Kämpfe – was being held in the area. The information apparently concerned another village, Oradour-sur-Vayres; why Oradour-sur-Glane became the target has never been fully explained. In the early afternoon some 120–150 men of the 3rd Company under SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto Kahn set out with a dozen or so lorries and half-tracks. According to witnesses, before they left one of the platoon commanders, SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Barth, announced that “it’s going to get hot”.

At about 1.45 p.m. the first vehicles entered the village across the bridge over the Glane; the cordon was already closing. The soldiers searched the houses and brought everyone out to the fairground, including the sick, the elderly and the schoolchildren. Anyone who tried to flee or could not walk was killed on the spot. At his trial in 1983 Barth admitted that he had ordered an elderly man who could not make it to the square to be shot. By about 2.45 p.m. the round-up was complete. An Alsatian from the company translated Diekmann’s words: the SS knew of a hidden store of arms and ammunition, and everyone was to remain where they were until the search was over. According to survivors’ accounts, the officer demanded that the acting mayor, the doctor Paul Desourteaux, appointed by the Vichy authorities, name thirty hostages. Desourteaux refused, declared that the inhabitants knew of no arms dump, and vouched for them.

The women and children were led away to the church. The men, about 190 of them, were split into groups and locked in six buildings: the Laudy, Milord and Bouchoule barns, the Desourteaux and Poutaraud garages and the Denis wine store. Machine guns were set up in front of them. At about 4 p.m., on an agreed signal, fire was opened at all the sites simultaneously. Years later Barth testified: “I gave the order: fire! and everyone shot. I myself killed about twelve or fifteen.” The soldiers finished off the wounded, covered the bodies with straw and wood and set the buildings on fire; the flames engulfed many people who were still alive.

At the same time a chest with fuses sticking out of it was carried into the church. According to the testimony of Marguerite Rouffanche, the explosion filled the nave with thick, choking smoke. The women and children rushed to the doors and windows, where machine-gun fire and grenades awaited them. Then straw and wood were thrown into the church and it was set on fire. According to accepted findings, 247 women and 205 children died there – the youngest were a few weeks old. Meanwhile the soldiers who were not shooting looted the houses: money, jewellery, bicycles, food, cattle. Then they set fire to the whole village. People who happened to be passing through Oradour on foot or by vehicle were killed too – cyclists, inhabitants of nearby hamlets, a tramway employee who got off a trial tram by the bridge over the Glane at 3.40 p.m. The passengers of the evening tram from Limoges were stopped outside the village and released a few hours later. Part of the company spent the night in the village. On 11 June the soldiers removed remains from the church and buried them in pits – as one of them later testified, partly to prevent the victims from being identified.

The survivors

Five men escaped alive from the shootings, all from the Laudy barn: Marcel Darthout, Robert Hébras, Mathieu Borie, Clément Broussaudier and Yvon Roby. Darthout and Borie testified that the first burst was aimed at the legs, after which the soldiers finished off those who moved. Wounded and pinned under bodies, they managed to crawl out through a gap in the wall of the burning building and hide until nightfall; a sixth escapee was shot by a sentry. Eighteen-year-old Hébras, who lost his mother and two sisters in the church, spent the rest of his life telling the story of the crime – in schools, in Germany and in Austria, in the cause of reconciliation. He died in February 2023, the last living witness of the shootings.

One person survived the church: 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche. Her husband and son died among the men, and her two daughters and seven-month-old grandson in the church. As she testified in 1944, she hid in the smoke behind the altar, climbed on a stool to a high window and jumped out from a height of about three metres. A young woman with a baby tried to follow her; the Germans spotted them and shot them. Rouffanche, hit by five bullets, lay until the following day among the rows of peas in the garden behind the church. Her account, repeated in November 1944 and in 1953 before the court in Bordeaux, is the only testimony from inside the church.

Others survived by slipping away just as the company was surrounding the village, or by staying in hiding: eight-year-old Roger Godfrin, son of a family expelled from Lorraine, ran from the school into the woods and was the only pupil to survive – his parents and siblings were killed. A few people waited it out in bushes, in gardens and in a tomb under construction in the cemetery. In the evening and during the night inhabitants of the outlying hamlets and people who had gone to Limoges in the morning returned to the village; they found smouldering ruins. Over the following days, with German permission, French officials, rescuers and the Bishop of Limoges, Louis Rastouil (on 13 June, together with the regional prefect), entered the village; the recovery of remains began, but only 52 bodies could be identified well enough to issue individual death certificates.

Why Oradour?

The crime is often presented as a German response to the activities of the local Resistance. That view needs refining. It is true that two themes recurred in the SS justifications: the abduction of Kämpfe and the alleged presence of partisans in Oradour. On the evening of 9 June the Sipo and SD post in Limoges, perhaps on the strength of denunciations by members of the Milice, named Oradour as the seat of a maquis headquarters. On the morning of 10 June SS-Obersturmführer Karl Gerlach, an officer captured by partisans in the area the day before, returned to the Germans and is said to have reported that he had been driven through a village full of armed men. At the conference at Saint-Junien, as Fouché established, there was talk of the missing officer and of taking several dozen hostages.

None of these claims, however, withstood scrutiny: in Oradour there were no maquis, no weapons and no abducted officer, and Kämpfe had been captured dozens of kilometres away, on the other side of Limoges. Fouché and other historians believe that the SS constructed its justification after the event, and that the action itself was meant to set an example – of the kind the division knew from the Eastern Front – that would terrorise the population and cut the Resistance off from its base of support at a moment when the division had to move quickly to the front in Normandy. This view is supported by the testimony of Bishop Rastouil: had a German soldier really been killed in Oradour, General Walter Gleiniger, the German commandant in Limoges, would not have apologised to him for the crime, and the bishop himself would have been arrested for his letter of protest of 14 June. The account of a former Der Führer officer, Otto Weidinger, who after the war presented Oradour as a partisan base and ammunition dump, is classed by French historians as negationist literature.

The phrase “a response to the activities of the Resistance” thus captures the logic followed by the perpetrators but not the situation of the inhabitants: the victims were not partisans but ordinary people – farmers, craftsmen, refugees, women and children – and the crime was a collective reprisal against a village that had no connection with the underground’s activities. The number of victims is given variously. The 1947 judgment of the court at Rochechouart established 642 deaths; years later, in 2019, the Spanish researcher David Ferrer Revull identified one more victim, Ramona Domínguez Gil, which is why the official memorial site now speaks of 643 dead. Among the victims were some 40 people from Lorraine, a dozen or so Spaniards, an Italian family and three Poles; according to the first list compiled by Franck Delage in 1945 (covering 635 victims identified by name), some 170 of the victims were children under 15.

After the crime

News of Oradour quickly spread through the region. Bishop Rastouil and the regional prefect protested; the Vichy government, although its report repeated the SS version about the abducted officer, sent a note to the German Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden citing Marguerite Rouffanche’s account. According to post-war accounts, the regimental commander Stadler demanded court-martial proceedings against Diekmann, and Lammerding is said to have agreed. Nothing came of it: the division was already fighting in Normandy, where Diekmann was killed on 29 June 1944. Kahn survived the war and never stood trial.

France turned the ruined village into a testimony. On 5 March 1945 General Charles de Gaulle came to Oradour and called it a symbol of what had befallen the whole homeland. As early as January 1945 the government had decided that the ruins would be preserved as the Germans had left them – with the burnt-out church, the wrecks of cars and the sewing machines in the houses – and a new village was built a few hundred metres away. A memorial containing the victims’ ashes was erected in the cemetery.

The Bordeaux trial and the “malgré-nous”

The trial took place only in 1953, before a military tribunal in Bordeaux. Lammerding, sentenced to death there in absentia in 1951 for the crime in Tulle, was living in the British occupation zone of Germany and later in the Federal Republic, and was never extradited. In the dock sat 21 privates and NCOs, fourteen of them Alsatians – thirteen of whom had been forcibly conscripted into the Waffen-SS as so-called malgré-nous (“against our will”); in Alsace and Moselle there were some 130,000 such conscripts. A law of 1948, passed after President Vincent Auriol’s visit to Oradour, introduced the collective responsibility of members of organisations declared criminal at Nuremberg, including the SS; this gave rise in Alsace to the conviction that its sons were being tried merely for belonging to a unit into which they had been conscripted.

The verdict was delivered on the night of 12/13 February 1953. The only Alsatian who had volunteered for the SS, Sergeant Georges René Boos, and a German NCO, Lenz, were sentenced to death; the other Germans received 10 to 12 years’ hard labour (one was acquitted), and the forcibly conscripted Alsatians 5 to 12 years’ hard labour or imprisonment. Alsace protested by ringing its church bells in alarm; the Limousin considered the sentences too lenient. On 18 February the National Assembly (by 319 votes to 211), and the next day the Council of the Republic, passed an amnesty for the forcibly conscripted; the law of 20 February 1953 freed them almost at once. In protest Oradour returned to the state the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre awarded to the commune, and the association of victims’ families refused to transfer the ashes of the dead to the mausoleum built by the state. The death sentences were commuted, and by 1958 all the convicted men were free.

The only officer from Oradour to be tried was Heinz Barth. He had been hiding in East Germany; arrested in 1981 after a Stasi investigation, he was tried in East Berlin and on 7 June 1983 sentenced to life imprisonment, also for taking part in executions of Czechs in 1942. He was released in 1997 and died in 2007.

Its place in the history of the war

Oradour was the bloodiest, but not the only, such act on the Das Reich division’s road north and at a time when the Germans in France, Italy and the Balkans were answering growing resistance with mass reprisals – as in Rome at the Ardeatine Caves in March 1944 and at Kalavryta in Greece in December 1943. On the same day, 10 June, soldiers of the SS Polizei Division massacred the inhabitants of the Greek village of Distomo. The crime did not stop the French underground, and the Das Reich division – harried on the way by the maquis and Allied aircraft – went into action in the Battle of Normandy in the second half of June.

In France’s memory the ruins of Oradour became the place where successive presidents spoke of the war, the occupation and reconciliation: in 1999 Jacques Chirac opened the Memorial Centre beside them, and on 4 September 2013 François Hollande and the German President Joachim Gauck walked through the ruins together with Robert Hébras. At the same time the question of the Alsatian malgré-nous remained for decades a painful rift between the Limousin and Alsace – a reminder that occupation and annexation had left victims even among men put into German uniforms on the side of the perpetrators.