After the rightfully diplomatic D Day commemoration, another event to remember is the war crime at Oradour. If you are reading this today, June 10, it is exactly 70 years ago that German troops heading north to repel the landings took time out to gather up all the villagers of innocent little French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. They put the women and kids in the church and the men in barns, there to grenade and machine gun to death 642 of them, loot the village and leave it in flames.
The village remains and will forever as the SS left it…
I recommend http://www.oradour.info/general/introd01.htm from whence this photograph is one of many
How extraordinary! I have a very old cutting right beside me that I rooted out of many such only the other day on this very village and this very circumstance.
It’s a sad story not told enough in the Anglo-Saxon world. Nearly 500 non combatants who never lived past that Saturday 70 years ago today. I have added the village/museum/memorial, call it what you will, to my bucket list.
Unbearably sad. You’ll now see I’ve re-blogged it on First Night History.
Reblogged this on First Night History.
But then again, six million in the camps and 30 million and some all up. Nevertheless I would not want those scenes in the church or the barns to be my “long, last moments” to quote Lucinda Williams
Sometimes, though, it’s the small tragedies that illuminate the whole.
Interesting (pop culture note) that Mel Gibson made the Brits do something similar to a bunch of innocent colonists in a church in his dumb movie The Patriot. By making atrocities commonplace he lessens the shock and horror of when these sick things really happen.
You can only imagine — I can only imagine — what it must have been like inside that church for those minutes, with the already dead and the screaming, dismembered, disembowelled soon to be so. Not a lone gunman, nor a nutty husband and wife team; not a vengeful employee, not a agonised teenager with in need of inpatient mental care, but a bunch of men, some with kids of their own who went along with the order, presumably under threat of something similar happening to them if they refused.