Preservation of a massacre: Oradour-sur-Glane

Preservation of a Massacre: Oradour-sur-Glane, France

I spent much of my childhood visiting the sites of battle. This wasn’t because of any unhealthy obsession on my part (though obsessions can doubtless be inculcated) but because my father was a career army officer, and my mother’s father also. They had both served in the Second World War, which in the 50s and 60s was very close in recent history (although to the mind of a child growing up in peaceful England, or even in army quarters in relatively peaceful Germany, it was an incomprehensible distance away).

So many a holiday was passed gazing, with interest or boredom, at bits of landscape which had once hosted bloody encounters. There was the featureless field on the banks of the Rhine, which, my father assured us sceptical family, after puzzling over an old wartime map, was the very spot where the British army (with him in charge of the bridging equipment) had launched its successful crossing in March 1945. There was the rather more dramatic remains of the railway bridge at Remagen, also on the Rhine, which the US 9^th Armored Division, commanded by my grandfather, had earlier seized in an unexpected coup, thus materially shortening the war in Western Europe.

These were places of bravery, sacrifice and success (from “our” perspective). Later, there were trips to war cemeteries, where death is sombrely ritualised. My last such visit was a few years ago, to Ypres.  Its memorial, the Menin Gate, with its countless chiselled names of the dead, is solemnly overwhelming.

But this is war to an extent sanitised of blood and suffering. The dead are mythologised in a nation’s martial and/or religious memory.

France is a country of war memorials, where the mixture of solemnity and remembrance is brought to a pitch, from the great memorials of the First World War to the sorrowful Spirit of France presiding over the memorials prominent in even the smallest villages.

It is also a country of harder images. There are the many small remembrances of the sites of reprisal executions during the Occupation, where the details of resistance fighters or hostages “tues par les Allemands”  are recorded.

France is also where at least one shocking atrocity is remembered without the usual mediation of rituals in stone. I speak of the former village of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges.

On 10^th June 1944, shortly after the D-Day landings in Normandy, the SS armoured division “Das Reich” was on the move northwards towards the new battlefields. For reasons which have remained unclear (but which certainly had much to do with successful Resistance  operations against the division’s progress), one unit of the division  (a company) fell on Oradour.

Under the pretext of an identity check, the SS rounded up all who were present in the village, men, women and children. The men were separated and divided into groups, which were held at gunpoint at various locations. The women and young children, including babies, were herded into the church.

On a signal, the men were simultaneously mown down by machine guns, the wounded dispatched and the bodies set on fire.  Shortly afterwards the church was set alight. Those who tried to escape the smoke and flames were shot down

Four men or older boys survived somehow. Only one woman escaped the church pyre. The massacred totalled 642.

The SS then looted the village, camped there for the night and left the next morning, with every building ablaze behind them.

General de Gaulle decided to preserve the ruins – the corpse of the village – pretty much as the SS had left it. A wall was built round the edge; an open-roofed tomb. (In the 1950s a new village was built next to the old, following the latter’s street plan.)

Outside the wall, there is modern Visitor Centre. Otherwise, the site is like the infamous Stopped clock of Hiroshima. On 10^th June 1945, Oradour and its people abruptly came to an end, by bullets and by fire. What one sees is more or less the scene on 11^th June.

The village is, or was, a sizeable place. It is, or was, like many hundreds of French villages are today  - had it survived there would be not much difference in the appearance of the centre between now and the 1940s. Telegraph poles and wires are there; the road surfaces are familiar; there were schools, shops of the usual sort and a garage. The main difference one notices are the tramlines: there was a service to Limoges (its disappearance perhaps a retrograde step).

This familiarity has mainly to be rebuilt in the imagination. The place is in ruins, down to the skeletons of the villagers’ cars and agricultural machinery. Small plaques mark the various places of execution. The church is roofless from the immolating fire.

The official theme is that no-one should forget the brutality which humans are capable of in some circumstances. Oradour is not a place where heroism and sacrifice are celebrated. It is a monument to murder.

Some would say that is unnecessary to put oneself in the way of horror at such a place. It is possible to acknowledge the fact of past and recent atrocities without visiting the places where they occurred. This is all true. Also, one can be overcome with a certain numbness once crimes reach the scale of those committed by the Nazis. But Oradour, being such a typical French village, especially brings home the vulnerability of peaceful civilised life, whether it be to the savagery of nature, as at Pompeii (another “stopped” town), or to the savagery of fellow humans.

September 2015