Location: Haute-Vienne department, Limousin region Map
Please don't take any souvenirs out of respect for those who lived here
Oradour-sur-Glane is a French commune located in the Haute-Vienne
department, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. Its inhabitants are called
Radounauds or Radounaux (very little used form).
The name of
Oradour-sur-Glane remains attached to the massacre of its population by the
SS Das Reich division on June 10, 1944. The small town is today divided into
two entities, whose center of memory constitutes in a way the link: the old
village, preserved in ruins, which bears witness to the suffering inflicted
on the inhabitants and people passing through this small town, and the new
village, rebuilt a few hundred meters further on.
Oradour is a priory of Romanesque architecture, property of an abbey, its seigniory is ecclesiastical. The fortified bell tower bears witness to this confusion of military and ecclesiastical functions. In 1264, the parish of Oratorio supra Glanant had as lord the chapter of canons of Saint-Junien, a very old abbey.
At the start of the 20th century, the village of Oradour was
modernized with, in particular, the arrival of electricity and the
construction of a tramway line for the Haute-Vienne departmental
railways, which connected it to Limoges, a distance from about twenty
kilometers to the southeast. The 1936 census reported a population of
1,574 souls. In addition to all its shops, Oradour has a municipal
harmony, a fishing company and three schools.
Oradour-sur-Glane
was then a small, active and ordinary Limousin town, with its shops,
café-hotels, shopkeepers and craftsmen. She lived mainly from
agriculture until the crisis in the sector, which slowly depopulated the
countryside. There are indeed only two farms left in 1944 in the town.
Start of World War II
In 1940, the war mobilized 168 men from the
commune, 113 of whom returned to the village after the Armistice.
Despite the immediate proximity of resistance groups and the
reception of Lorraine refugees expelled from Charly-Oradour, a Moselle
village named after the war in tribute to the victims, 39 of whom came
from this small village, the place was relatively spared by the war
until massacre. The population, as in most of France, after adhering to
the ideas and the person of Marshal Pétain, issued increasingly virulent
criticism of the collaborationist policy, firmly awaiting an Allied
victory. Residents of Oradour are part of the FFI maquis, others of an
escape line of Allied pilots.
The perpetrators of the massacre belong to the 3rd Company of the 1st
Panzergrenadier Battalion, commanded by Sturmbannführer (Commander)
Adolf Diekmann, of the 4th SS-Panzer-Regiment Der Führer, of the 2nd
SS-Panzer-Division Das Reich.
This division was based especially
in the southwest in order to fight against the maquisards galvanized by
the Allied landing in Normandy. Constantly harassed in their progress by
the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), they responded with bloody
reprisals.
On June 9, 1944, in Tulle, liberated two days before
by the Resistance, 99 men were hanged.
On June 10, 1944, after
the arrival of the Germans in the town of Oradour-sur-Glane, the rural
guard informed the inhabitants that they must all gather, without any
exception and without delay, on the Place du Champ- de-Foire located
inside the village, with their papers, for identity verification.
The SS enter all the houses, and, under the threat of their weapons,
force everyone, even the sick, to go to the place of assembly. One by
one or in groups, led and watched by SS men, the villagers gradually
gathered on the Champ-de-Foire. The Germans will also look for
inhabitants of neighboring hamlets. Cultivators must abandon their
current works. Several people who do not obey orders are killed on the
spot.
The Germans separate the population into two groups: on the
one hand the women and children, on the other the men.
The men are taken, grouped and distributed in six different well-chosen places, with few openings so as not to escape: barns, courtyards, sheds, where they are machine-gunned, then the bodies are covered with fagots and bales of straw which the SS set fire to. According to some survivors, the SS shoot low and in the legs of their victims; the fire is lit on wounded but still alive men. The statement of Robert Hébras, one of the six survivors, establishes that they were still talking; some, slightly wounded, were able to escape, most of the others were certainly burned alive.
The group taken and locked in the church includes all the women and
children of the village. Soldiers place in the nave, near the choir, a
kind of rather bulky box from which protrude cords which they leave
lying on the floor. These cords having been lit, the fire is
communicated to the machine, which contains an asphyxiating gas (it was
the planned solution) and explodes by mistake; a black, thick and
suffocating smoke emerges. A shooting breaks out in the church; then
straw, fagots, chairs from the church are thrown pell-mell over the
bodies lying on the slabs of the ground. The SS then set it on fire.
Debris 1.20 m high covered the bodies.
Only one woman survived
the carnage: Marguerite Rouffanche, née Thurmeaux. His testimony
constitutes all that it is possible to know of the drama. She lost her
husband, son, two daughters and seven-month-old grandson in the
killings.
The choir of the church comprising three openings, in
an instinct of survival, Marguerite Rouffanche goes to the largest, the
one in the middle, and with the help of a stepladder which was used to
light the candles, she manages to reach. The window being broken, she
throws herself through the opening. After a jump of three meters, she
lands at the foot of the church on a thicket and she is wounded by an SS
while fleeing towards a nearby garden. Hidden among rows of peas, it was
not delivered until around 5 p.m. the next day.
The SS again inspect the houses of the town; there they kill all the
inhabitants who had been able to escape their first search, in
particular those whose physical condition had prevented them from going
to the meeting place. This is how the rescue teams found the burnt
bodies of a few impotent old people in various houses.
A special
correspondent of the FFI, present in Oradour in the very first days
after the killing, indicates that the charred remains of five people
were collected in a baker's oven: the father, the mother and their three
children.
A well containing many corpses is discovered in a farm:
too decomposed to be identified, they will be left behind.
In
total, at least 643 people were massacred on that day.
The cemetery of Oradour-sur-Glane, Cimetière d'Oradour-sur-Glane in
French, is located between the ruined village, declared a historic
monument after the Oradour massacre in 1946, and the new site built
between 1947 and 1953. With the exception of one building, the so-called
Maison d'Oradour, it is the only infrastructure facility in the town
that survived being destroyed by the Waffen SS on June 10, 1944
unscathed and is still functional today.
Due to the many visitors
who count the ruined village and the Center de la mémoire, which opened
in 1999, the cemetery of the small community is one of the most visited
in France. It usually marks the end of the visit to the ruined village.
In the municipal area, there are controlled designations of origin (AOC) for butter (Beurre Charentes-Poitou, Beurre des Charentes and Beurre des deux Sevres) and protected geographical indications (IGP) for veal (Veau du Limousin), lamb (Agneau du Limousin and Agneau du Poitou). -Charentes), pork (Porc du Limousin), ham (Jambon de Bayonne) and wine (Haute-Vienne blanc, rosé or rouge).
The climate that characterizes the town is qualified,
in 2010, as "altered oceanic climate", according to the typology of the
climates of France which then has eight major types of climates in
mainland France. In 2020, the town comes out of the same type of climate
in the classification established by Météo-France, which now only
counts, at first glance, five main types of climates in mainland France.
It is a transition zone between the oceanic climate, the mountain
climate and the semi-continental climate. The temperature differences
between winter and summer increase with the distance from the sea.
Rainfall is lower than at the seaside, except near the reliefs.
The climate parameters used to establish the 2010 typology include six
variables for temperature and eight for precipitation, the values of
which correspond to monthly data on the 1971-2000 normal. The seven main
variables characterizing the municipality are presented in the box
below.