About Oradour-sur-Glane
The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane is one of the most haunting atrocities committed by Nazi forces in Western Europe during World War II. On 10 June 1944, just four days after D-Day, a unit of the German Waffen-SS 2nd Panzer Division Das Reich entered the quiet French village of Oradour-sur-Glane and murdered 642 civilians, including 247 women and 205 children
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 642 civilians, including non-combatant men, women, and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. The execution was retribution in the form of collective punishment for Resistance activity in the area, including the capture and subsequent execution of Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, the 3rd Battalion commander of 4th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment, and a close friend of the 1st battalion commander of the same regiment, Waffen-SS Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, who an informant incorrectly claimed had been burned alive in front of an audience. Both of them were battalion commanders in the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich.
The Germans murdered everyone they found in the village at the time, as well as people brought in from the surrounding area. The death toll includes people who were merely passing by in the village at the time of the SS company's arrival. Men were brought into barns and sheds where they were shot in the legs and doused with petroleum before the barns were set on fire. Women and children were herded into a church that was set on fire; those who tried to escape through the windows were machine gunned. Extensive looting took place.
All in all, 642 people are recorded to have been murdered. The death toll includes 17 Spanish citizens, 8 Italians (a woman with 7 of her 9 children), and 3 Poles.
The village was never rebuilt. A completely new village was built nearby after the war. President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of the old village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.
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