That night, the village was partially razed. About twenty villagers had fled Oradour-sur-Glane as soon as the SS unit had appeared. Rouffanche crawled to some pea bushes and remained hidden overnight until she was found and rescued the next morning. All three were shot, two of them fatally. She escaped through a rear sacristy window, followed by a young woman and child. The only survivor was 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche. 247 women and 205 children died in the attack. When it was ignited, women and children tried to escape through the doors and windows, only to be met with machine-gun fire. The SS men next proceeded to the church and placed an incendiary device beside it. In all, 190 Frenchmen died.īurning of women and children in the church One of them was later seen walking down a road and was shot dead. When victims were unable to move, the SS men covered them with fuel and set the barns on fire. The men were led to six barns and sheds, where machine guns were already in place.Īccording to a survivor's account, the SS men then began shooting, aiming for their legs. The women and children were locked in the church, and the village was looted. This included six non-residents who happened to be bicycling through the village when the SS unit arrived. 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. Sequence of events during the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre on 10 June 1944 He may have been captured by the Maquis du Limousin the day before. The captured officer was claimed to be SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, commander of the 2nd SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion (also part of the Das Reich division). They claimed that a Waffen-SS officer was being held prisoner by the French Resistance in Oradour-sur-Vayres, a nearby village. Įarly on the morning of 10 June 1944, Diekmann informed Weidinger that he had been approached by two members of the Milice, a paramilitary force of the Vichy Regime. Its staff included regimental commander SS- Standartenführer Sylvester Stadler, SS- Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann commanding the 1st Battalion and SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Weidinger, Stadler's designated successor who was with the regiment for familiarisation. One of its units was the 4th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment " Der Führer". Following the Normandy landings in June 1944, the division was ordered north to help stop the Allied advance. In February 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich was stationed in the Southern French town of Valence-d'Agen, north of Toulouse, waiting to be resupplied with new equipment and fresh troops. President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of the old village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.Īdolf Diekmann, commander of the 4th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment A new village was built from scratch nearby after the war. He was 18 years old at the time of the massacre. The last living survivor, Robert Hébras, known for his activism for reconciliation between France, Germany, and Austria, died on 11 February 2023, aged 97. The death toll includes 17 Spanish citizens, 8 Italians, and 3 Poles. Īll in all, 643 individuals are recorded to have been murdered. Women and children were herded into a church that was set on fire those who tried to escape through the windows were machine gunned. Men were brought into barns and sheds where they were shot in the legs and doused with gasoline before the barns were set on fire. The death toll includes people who were merely passing by in the village at the time of the SS company's arrival. The Germans essentially murdered all people they found in the village at the time, as well as people brought in from surroundings. On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France was destroyed when 643 civilians, including non-combatant men, women, and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company as collective punishment for resistance activity in the area. Class=notpageimage| Location of Oradour-sur-Glane in France
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