Oradour-sur-Glane France

Legendary

The city remains unchanged from the day the German army massacred its 642 inhabitants and destroyed the village.

Photo by b3tarev3

The village looks almost the same today as it did on the afternoon of 10 June 1944. Burnt-out cars still sit in the street. Sewing machines and bed frames rust inside roofless houses.

France chose never to clean it up. The ruins were left exactly as the SS troops abandoned them.

Before the war, Oradour-sur-Glane was an ordinary farming village in central France, about 15 miles from Limoges. Around 350 people lived there, and refugees had swelled the number.

It had done nothing. There was no fighting nearby and no resistance activity in the village.

On 10 June 1944, four days after the D-Day landings, a company of SS soldiers surrounded it. They ordered everyone to gather in the village square, saying they needed to check identity papers.

Then they separated the men from the women and children. In a few hours, 642 people were dead, and the soldiers burned the village to the ground.

Among the victims were 205 children. Only a handful of people escaped.

The German officer in charge claimed it was revenge for the kidnapping of an SS commander in another town. Historians have never found any link between that and Oradour.

After the war, the survivors and the French government faced a choice. Rebuild, or leave it.

In 1946, Charles de Gaulle decided the ruins should stand permanently as a memorial. A completely new village was built next door instead.

French schoolchildren still visit in large numbers. A sign at the entrance carries a single instruction: Remember.

Walk the main street past the tram tracks and the shells of the shops, and read the small signs marking where people died. Visit the church, the hardest place in the village to stand. Stop first at the memorial centre, where personal belongings recovered from the ruins are displayed, including watches stopped at the hour it happened.