FRANCE: The Death of Oradour

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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 (Léon 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 Curé 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.