In June 1944, this now silent village in the heart of France was buzzing with life. All that changed one sunny afternoon when the SS arrived. In just a few hours, almost every man, woman, and child was killed, and every home burned to the ground.
Today those ruins, untouched for almost 80 years, stand as a powerful memorial to one of the most horrific days of the Second World war. In this video, we will use eyewitness testimony along with the latest technology to digitally reconstruct that village and tell the story of what happened on the day the soldiers came to Oradour-Sur-Glane By the time the first allied boots touched down on the beaches of Normandy that June, the German Army was already in serious trouble. Dominated by both sea and air, they attempted to hold the western allies at bay with a scattering of second grade static coastal units and only limited reserves.
That limited firepower made well-armed and highly mobile units like the SS Das Reich Panzer Division of the very first importance. Based here in the south of France, it had been rebuilding when it got orders to head at full speed to Normandy. Lying unsuspecting along that route of advance was the village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
Oradour itself was in 1944 a rather unremarkable rural village. Picturesque, quiet and vibrant in its unassuming way, it had a population of some 1300 in the years before the war, a number which had been added to by refugees from the annexed Alsasce-Lorraine region on the French/German border, others fleeing Franco’s Spain and even several families of French Jewish refugees who found safety in the town’s tranquillity. When exploring these shattered remains today, it is hard to imagine the community that once thrived here – but with the help of hundreds of period photos and aerial imagery, we can recreate the town exactly as it was.
So let’s wind the clock back and virtually walk down the streets of Oradour as they looked in the summer of 1944. Following the main tram line which ran to the city of Limoges, we see Avril’s Hotel on the left of the road, and opposite that Monsieur Denis’ popular wine store. As we pass village homes and continue down the street, we approach Mr Beauchole’s workshop on the left-hand side of the road, outside which stood the distinctive village fuel pump.
Beyond that, a left-hand turn opens out to reveal the pharmacy on the opposite corner and the village green or fairground in the distance. Turning back right and following the main the road as it bends to the left, and setback slightly on the right hand-side is the Girls School, where Headteacher Madame Binet taught 106 of the village children. Two doors down was Monsieur Desourteaux’s vehicle garage, then the Butcher and Monsieur Compain, the baker’s shop on the left and right respectively.
A little further down Rue Desourteaux and passing through the main residential section or Oradour, a small road turned left after the Laudy family home, beyond which, also on the left, lay the Laudy’s barn. Further up that street was Oradour’s old cemetery and the ever-important village well. Turning back right as the main street widens, we come to the last few buildings in the village, including Madame Milord’s café, home and attached barn, all off to our right-hand side.
One more left-hand turn can be seen which led to the small school for the refugee children from Alsasce-Lorraine and, facing us with its back to the trees lining the river Glane, was Monsieur Bouchoule’s barn. Finally, turning right and rising up, we see the impressive 13th Century St Martin’s church with its distinctive spire – the centrepiece of life in the village. Leaving Oradour in relative peace, let’s reposition 150 miles to the south.
It was in this area by June that the infamous Das Reich, a Waffen-SS Panzer Division with a well-deserved reputation for brutality, found themselves. Whilst here, a number of new men joined their depleted ranks, including many French-speaking Alsatians, who had been conscripted into the division. The Das Reich was made up something like this.
At full-strength totalling around 19,000 men, the main fighting formations were the 2nd SS Panzer Regiment, 3rd Panzergrenadier ‘Deutschland’ Regiment, the 4th Panzergrenadier ‘Der Führer’ Regiment and various smaller specialist units. Looking closer at The ‘Der Führer’ Regiment, commanded by SS-Obersturmbannführer Sylvestre Stadler, it was composed of three battalions. Commanding the 1st Battalion was SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, a 29-year-old die-hard Nazi.
Having joined the party in 1933, he had been badly wounded in France in 1940, and had later seen service on the Eastern Front. Under Diekmann’s command were four infantry companies, including Hauptsturmfuhrer Otto Khan’s third company. It was they who would earn infamy at Oradour.
So let’s first understand why the Das Reich needed to get to Normandy in such a hurry. By 7th June, the allies were rapidly consolidating all five beachheads in Normandy and were landing tens of thousands of men and vehicles per day. Every hour that passed made the job of repelling the invasion that much harder for the Germans.
And so, on 7th June, General Heinz Lammerding, commanding the Das Reich, had received orders to move his division north without delay, to join the fight. The obvious journey to make, especially for the Division’s armoured units was by rail – With a fair wind, the Das Reich could cover the 450 miles and be in action in as little as three days, and, but for an unlikely heroine in the form of a 16-year-old girl and her school friends, things in Normandy may have been very different… Working as part of the Special Operations Executive’s Pimento network, they accessed Montauban railyard In the middle of the night in April 1944 armed with an abrasive compound and seized the axel bearings on more than 90 flatcars designated to transport the Das Reich – An act which doubtless saved many allied lives in Normandy. So, with rail travel, no longer an option, the focus switched to the roads.
This itself would be problematic – Armour was mechanically unreliable, and a 450-mile journey by road would not only cause a huge delay, but major attrition to vehicles, especially tanks – But road it had to be, and so at 8am on 8th June the leading elements of the 1400 vehicle convoy set out from Montauban. It wasn’t long before they encountered trouble. The French resistance, buoyed by news of the landings in Normandy, harassed the Das Reich every step of the way.
At the town of Cahors, the Das Reich split into two, with the Der Führer Regiment leading the westernmost column and most of the Division’s armour taking that to the east. Resistance ambushes at Groléjac, Carsac and Rufillac, although unable to stop the Das Reich, all inflicted losses and serious delay. By the 9th June the journey had become a nightmare and an order was issued to “break the spirit of the population by making examples”.
That same day, troops of the Das Reich’s reconnaissance battalion in the right column entered the town of Tulle where the German garrison was under attack from a strong force of French resistance – with their heavy weaponry, they shattered the lightly armed Maquis, rounded up all male residents and subsequently hanged 99 men throughout the streets of the town, only stopping when the supply of rope had been exhausted. Worse was to come. Two important incidents took place on 9th June which are key to understanding what was to follow.
First, a German officer named Karl Gerlach, whilst searching for billets ahead of his approaching troops in the left column, was captured by the resistance near the town of Neiul. He would escape a few hours later, though his driver wasn’t so fortunate. Gerlach later reported, and this is a major point of contention, that during his captivity he was briefly held in Oradour-sur-Glane.
Secondly, upon returning to his headquarters in Limoges, Der Führer Regiment’s 3rd Battalion commander, Helmut Kampfe was also ambushed and captured by the resistance group George Guingouin near the village of Sauviat-sur-Vige. It is likely, though not certain, that the information provided by the escaped Karl Gerlach, along with news of the capture of Kampfe, a personal friend of Adolf Diekmann, and vague reports by collaborators of a captured officer being held in a nearby village, all set to the backdrop of frustration and delay, led Diekmann, to set out with his 3rd Company in the direction of Oradour-sur-Glane. For the residents of Oradour the 10th June began just like any other day.
Despite being a Saturday, the local schools still opened for the village children, Monsieur Compain’s bakery was busy as usual, as was Mme Milord’s café. The first the inhabitants of knew of the unfolding events was the sound of an approaching convoy at around 1:45pm. Residents stopped and watched in the streets as several vehicles passed right through the village, before coming to a stop, with men exiting and fanning out on either side.
In all, a little under 200 heavily armed SS troops descended on Oradour and within a short time all roads in and out had been blocked. Emerging from his home, Mayor Desourteaux, a retired Doctor, and father of the current Doctor, approached a vehicle at the fairground, standing next to which, apparently organizing affairs, was an SS officer, Diekmann. Speaking through an interpreter, Diekmann informed the mayor an identity check would be performed, and that all inhabitants were to immediately assemble on the village fairground, in this area.
One of the few surviving witness accounts of this moment recalled that Diekmann now told the mayor that he had been ordered to take 30 hostages against the safe return of Kampfe, who had probably already been executed about 7 miles away, though it was not known at the time. What followed was a systematic door-to-door search, with inhabitants told to leave their homes and assemble on the fairground. Some residents, perhaps as many as 30, fearing something more sinister, did manage to escape, concealing themselves in various outbuildings and gardens or by fleeing through the nearby fields.
By now, all semblance of a normal day in Oradour was gone. The children had been taken from their classes, patrons of the local restaurant left their meals half-eaten, the doctor was stopped as he returned to the village and forced to leave his car to join the others, and even six cyclists who happened to be passing through Oradour were swept up and led to the village green. All this time, various German vehicles were arriving, depositing yet more civilians from outlying farms and buildings into the group, which by now numbered somewhere around 650.
By about 3pm, the assembly was complete. Further fear was sewn when the men, that is anyone appearing to be over the age of about 14, began to be separated from the women and children. Perhaps more ominously, the story the SS were telling now began to change.
No longer was this an identity check. In fact, no papers were examined, but instead it was announced that the village would be searched for weapons, and that the various groups would be held securely until the search was complete. The first to leave were the women and children, more than 400 all told, ranging in age from two months to 91.
They were walked under guard to the village church. In the fairground, only the men remained, sitting in three lines, facing the north wall. About 3:30pm, they began to be roughly separated into 6 groups, before also being ushered off under armed guard.
The relative quiet, was from time to time now broken by the sound of gunshots, as the SS, searching homes for stragglers, shot the infirm in their beds and anyone found hiding. One young man who initially avoided detection was seven-year-old Roger Godfrin, who had decided not to join his fellow students but to run and hide in the woods behind the cemetery. Unable to convince his young sisters to join him, he went alone.
As he left his school classroom via a rear window, he was spotted by a group of soldiers in a half-track, who opened fire. Playing dead for as much as an hour, he would eventually make his escape. Those locations chosen for the men to be held were scattered throughout the village: MrDesorteaux’s garage, The Denis’ family wine cellar, Mr Beaulieu’s workshop and the Laudy, Milord and Bouchoule barns.
As the groups of fathers, sons, brothers and friends marched silently towards these buildings, perhaps for the first time, the real intent of the SS became clear. Joseph Bergmann, a native German speaker, and part of the largest group of around 60 en-route to the Laudy barn, remarked to young Robert Hebras “look out, they are going to kill us”, likely having overheard a conversation between soldiers. He wasn’t wrong.
Back at the church, the women and children waited nervously, unsure of what was going on. Madame Marguerite Rouffranche, who was present with her two daughters, described what happened next… Crammed inside the church, we waited in growing anxiety to see what would happen. Around 4.
00 p. m. a few soldiers, around 20 years of age, brought into the nave a large box, from which hung strings, which trailed to the ground.
When they were lit, the device suddenly exploded with a loud bang and gave off a thick, black, suffocating smoke. Women and children, half-choking and screaming in terror, rushed to those parts of the church where the air was still breathable. It was, thus, that the door to the sacristy was broken down under the irresistible pressure of a terrified crowd.
I followed them and sat down on a step. My daughter joined me. The Germans saw that people had escaped into the room and cold-bloodedly shot down everyone who was hiding there.
My daughter was killed where she stood by a shot fired from outside. I owe my life to closing my eyes and faining death. Firing burst out in the church, and then straw, firewood, and chairs were thrown onto the bodies lying on the flagstones.
I had escaped the slaughter unwounded and took advantage of a cloud of smoke to hide behind the altar. In that part of the church there were three windows. I went to the middle one, the biggest, and with the aid of the stool used to light the candles, tried to reach it.
I don't know how, but my strength was multiplied. I heaved myself up and threw myself out of the opening that was offered to me by the already shattered window. I fell about 10 feet.
When I looked up, I saw that I had been followed by a woman, who was holding out her baby to me from the window. She fell down next to me, but the Germans alerted by the child's cries fired at us. The woman and the child were killed.
It seems that the explosion in the church, which killed the SS man who set it off, and the horrific scenes that followed acted as a signal to the other troops guarding the groups of men around the town. Moments later, Oradour echoed again with the buzz of machine guns. In Madame Laudy’s barn, Marcel Darthout witnessed events… After a few minutes, we heard an explosion followed by shooting, and then we heard an order, ‘fire’.
It was like hell, two machine guns opened fire, it was terrible. The smell of gunpowder, the screaming. The first burst hit me twice in the legs and I fell.
As I did, so I was hit twice more in the thigh. I was one of the first to fall, and the others fell over me. It was those friends who saved me.
Suddenly, everything stopped, not a noise. The Germans were talking to each other quietly. When I started to move, they came over next to us.
I remember hearing the noise of a rifle being cocked and then a shot – the coup de grâce. It was terrible. As I started to move from under the pile of bodies, my shoulder must have been sticking out when suddenly I felt a foot next to me, and then I heard the same rifle cocking noise.
Then he shot. I thought that it was for me, but no, it was for my friend Joseph, the hairdresser, who died on top of me. Shot four times and badly burned when the barn was doused in petrol and set alight, Marcel eventually escaped along with four others by hiding in an adjoining barn and then a stone rabbit hutch.
Everyone else fell victim to either the bullets or the flames. It was a scene of horror repeated in five other locations across the village as the SS watched on. Then the looting began.
From about 6pm, the SS systematically travelled through the village, searching for valuables, alcohol, and anything of interest before setting light to each property. Then, their destruction complete, mounted their vehicles and disappeared down the same road they had travelled less than 8 hours before. In their wake they left 643 dead men, women and children, and the once proud village of Oradour-Sur-Glane, visible for miles around, blazed well into the night.
As the sun rose on the morning of 11th June, the scale of atrocities became clear. Several escaped inhabitants, having hidden in terror all night long, slowly emerged from their hiding places and began to interact with frantic parents who had come from nearby villages when their children had failed to return from school the previous day. At 6am, the Dupic house, where a small rearguard of SS troops had passed the night, was set alight and the final soldiers departed.
It was then that residents could finally return and begin to walk through the ashes of Oradour. One of the first to visit the church was MrHyvernaud, in search of his eight and ten-year-old boys, finding the younger, Marcel, almost immediately… He lay on his side and was half-burned … but I did not find my older boy. Behind the altar, crowded together, lay at least twenty small children who had sought to find protection there.
This cover did not help them much. They were all smothered by smoke or burned to death. But there is one thing that I must say, and that is; all honour to the mothers of Oradour.
Not a single adult hid behind the altar. They left this last place of refuge to the children. Others made the same awful discoveries – where a family member had been away from the village for one reason or another, they returned to find their parents, spouse, siblings and children had all perished, often without trace – it was a scene repeated for days.
One of the very last to be found at Oradour, and the only survivor of more than 400 to die at the church, was Madame Rouffranche. Shot five times and close to death, she was heard calling from the vegetable patch where she had lay for more than 48 hours. Hospitalised for a year, her physical wounds eventually healed, her psychological ones never would.
Clearly aware of how their actions would be received, some of the perpetrators returned to Oradour over the next few days and half-hearted attempts were made to bury the dead and hide the scale of the atrocities, but the job was too big and eventually abandoned. It was not until a few days later when French aid workers arrived that the identification process could begin. It was a huge task and next to impossible – of the 643 killed, only 52 would ever be identified.
The fallout from the massacre at Oradour was immediate, even within the German military itself. When word spread of what had happened, senior officers demanded explanations of the horrific excesses. Official complaints and protests were made by the Vichy Government, Stadler, the Commander of the Der Führer Regiment, who had apparently only issued orders for hostages to be taken, even Field Marshal Erwin Rommel became involved and internal court-martial proceedings were launched against Adolf Diekmann, who was generally held to have personally exceeded his orders in perpetrating the massacre.
The internal military scrutiny did not last long – within weeks Adolf Diekmann and many of the perpetrators were dead, killed in action in Normandy and the enquiry was quietly closed. Eventually, in 1953, a trial was held in Bordeaux for 21 of the surviving SS men, 14 of whom hailed from Alsace. 20 were convicted for their part, with two receiving the death sentence.
But as so often happened in a Europe desperate to forget the horrors of the war, every single conviction was reduced, and by 1958 all had been released. Further individual trials were later conducted, including that of Heinz Barth, a platoon commander in Otto Kahn’s 3rd Company, who became the only officer convicted in relation to the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. He served a total of 14 years.
Today the controversy of who ordered the massacre and where the blame lies continue, all that can be said with certainty is that none of those responsible paid anything like the price they should have. So, what became of Oradour? The shattered village was never rebuilt.
Instead, a new village was created after the war, slightly further north of that which had once been the surviving resident's homes. Instead, just months after the end of the war, President Charles de Gaulle designated Oradour a ‘Village Martyr’, a martyred village, and declared that the ruins should be preserved as a reminder of the sacrifice that one community made in 1944. Even today, the ruins of Oradour can be visited and the lives of those lost here imagined.
For many, the real power of Oradour is not found in the scale of the site, but in its personal nature, in those everyday items which are so impactful. The sewing machines that stand silent, the bicycles still propped against walls, the cars that don’t move, the village well that remains untouched, and the pram, with neither mother nor child. Not far away lies the town cemetery where the victims are buried.
Here, headstones commemorate entire families lost in a moment. Amongst them are some of the most haunting reminders, those memorials showing the faces of both young and old, who lost their lives that day. Maybe today the preservation of Oradour-Sur-Glane stands for more than just this one village.
The tragic truth is that what happened here is far from unique. At the same time, and on the same continent, there were hundreds of other Oradours, towns and villages in central and Eastern Europe, which were destroyed by multiple combatant nations, communities whose memory today is lost to the passage of time. But perhaps the most powerful message to end this story is a simple one.
It can be found on a stone at the entrance to the destroyed village of Oradour, simply inscribed with the words ‘Souviens-Toi’, Remember. This was a difficult video to make, but one which we felt was important to do, and hope that you found worthwhile. We want to add a special thanks to our friends at Clear Breeze whose work in recreating Oradour in exceptional detail was a vital part to telling this story.
Thanks for taking the time to watch this video, and if you would like to see more, or support us in our work to share more of this kind of history, please check out our Patreon at the link below. That’s all this time, thanks for joining us, and we will see you again soon.
