The Death of Oradour

The inns were crowded, and nearly every farmhouse had guests in the little French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges. A special distribution of tobacco rations had brought many farmers in to town. Children, evacuated from Nice and Bordeaux, sat down to the midday meal with weekending parents and relatives. At the Hotel Milord (Leon Milord, Prop.), lamb stew, a specialty of the house, was being served with a light, dry wine. There was excitement in the air and a buzz of conversation around the tables that sunny Saturday in 1944: just four days earlier the Allies had landed in Normandy.

Luncheon was ending when a German military convoy drove into Oradour. A few curious Frenchmen left the tables to watch the helmeted soldiers dismount. Two yellow and green camouflaged tanks took up a position in front of the 15th century church of Oradour. Then old Jean Depierrefiche, the town blacksmith who was also the town crier, went through the streets calling on all inhabitants to assemble at the market place with their identification papers. The German soldiers began roughly turning people out of their houses. "Get up to the square," some of them shouted in French. The sick came in their pajamas. Marcelin Thomas, the town baker, appeared, stripped to the waist and still covered with flour, while Cure Jacques Lorich strode along hatless. Mothers came pushing baby carriages. In less than 20 minutes, the populace was assembled, about a third of them children. Only then did the French notice that these were no ordinary Germans.

Choose Thirty. They were, in fact, a company of the SS division Das Reich, commanded by 55 Major Otto Dickmann. Through an interpreter Major Dickmann now called for the mayor of Oradour.

"Monsieur le Maire, will you kindly designate 30 hostages?"

"Thirty hostages? Why, Major?"

"We have a report that arms are cached in Oradour."

"It is false."

"Nevertheless, we have the report. Please point out 30 hostages."

"I cannot designate any hostages. I can only offer myself and, if necessary, members of my own family."

The mayor spoke the truth: there were no arms hidden in Oradour. But the SS herded the men into six large barns on the outskirts of Oradour and drove the women & children into the church. A large smoke bomb was exploded inside the church and, as the women & children panicked, the SS men mowed them down with machine guns. The explosion of the smoke bomb was the signal for the soldiers stationed outside the barns to fire point blank into the massed groups of men. The soldiers then walked in among the fallen bodies, firing with their pistols on any that seemed alive. They piled hay and bedding over the bodies and burned them. Systematically they set fire to every house in Oradour. Mounting their trucks and tanks, they moved on toward Normandy.

Place of Agony. So that no one shall forget Oradour, the remains of the little French town have been left exactly as they were the morning after the massacre. The ruins wind around the hill, making a jagged silhouette against the sky. Chickens peck at the damp grass, but there is no other life and, except for the burbling River Glane, it is utterly silent. Houses gape everywhere, empty save for a few fire-blackened skeletons of beds, bicycles, stoves, the remains of a sewing machine, a charred pot and kettle hanging over a roofless hearth. Outside the church, a rusty iron cross supports a silvered, half-lifesize figure of Christ. Beneath one of the glassless windows, a sign proclaims: "Madame Rouffanche, only escapee from the church, escaped through this window." A little farther, the market place stretches bleak and bare. Notices on the burned-down barns read: "Place of agony . . . Be respectful." By final count, 245 women, 207 children and 190 men died in these ruins. Last week in Bordeaux, slow-moving French bureaucracy got around to trying the murderers of Oradour: 21 former members of the Das Reich division--all who could be rounded up of the 150 who had taken part in the massacre. When Judge Marcel Nussy Saint-Saens, in scarlet gown and white jabot, asked a woman with a young child to leave the courtroom, the woman replied: "Mr. President, I believe my child has the right to see the executioners of her father and grandfather." Eight-year-old Paule Tessaud was born six months after the death of Oradour.

What was the reason for the senseless massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane? Not far away, there is another small town named Oradour-sur-Vayres, where, in 1944, French resistance fighters did, in fact, hide arms. Did SS Major Dickmann mistake Oradour-sur-Glane for Oradour-sur-Vayres? No one will probably ever know. Dickmann was killed in Normandy a few days later, and his murder division--except for the glum handful on trial last week--was among those smashed in the Allied advance.

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