Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane by Sarah Farmer

From the Publisher

Among German crimes of the Second World War, the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town in the rolling farm country of the Limousin. Soldiers marched the men to nearby barns, lined them up, and shot them. They then locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire. Residents who had been away for the day returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation.
In 1946 the French State expropriated and preserved the entire ruins of Oradour. The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms and shops became France's village martyr, set up as a monument to French suffering under the German occupation. Today, the village is a tourist destination, complete with maps and guidebooks.
In this first full-scale study of the destruction of Oradour and its remembrance over the half century since the war, Sarah Farmer investigates the prominence of the massacre in French understanding of the national experience under German domination. Through interviews with survivors and village officials, as well as extensive archival research, she pieces together a fascinating history of both a shattering event and its memorial afterlife.
Complemented by haunting photographs of the site, Farmer's eloquent dissection of France's national memory addresses the personal and private ways in which, through remembrance, people try to come to terms with enormous loss. Martyred Village will have implications for the study of the history and sociology of memory,testimonies about remembrances of war and the Holocaust, and postmodern concerns with the presentation of the past.

New York Times Book Review - Alan Riding

The town wanted to be a symbol; instead, it became a mirror of France's long, painful and divisive struggle to come to terms with itself after the war....[Farmer] also throws light on debates that continue...about France's role in sending 78,000 Jews to Nazi death camps....[H]istorians cannot agree on why Oradour was eliminated, but culprits continue to be found to suit political needs.

The New York Times Book Review - Alan Riding

The town wanted to be a symbol; instead, it became a mirror of France's long, painful and divisive struggle to come to terms with itself after the war....[Farmer] also throws light on debates that continue...about France's role in sending 78,000 Jews to Nazi death camps....[H]istorians cannot agree on why Oradour was eliminated, but culprits continue to be found to suit political needs.

London Review of Books

Sarah Farmer's account of Oradour's destruction is muted.

What People Are Saying

Tony Judt
A timely book on an important subject....Farmer's study of the village rests on careful research and personal observation and contact; her study of the massacre and its troubled place in modern French commemoration fits well into a burgeoning literature on memory and mourning. -- Author of The Burden of Responsibility

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THE MASSACRE

    The ruins of the town of Oradour-sur-Glane lie twenty-two kilometers northwest of Limoges in the Limousin region of west central France. Made up of the departments of the Creuse, the Corrèze, and the Haute-Vienne, the Limousin is, for the most part, rural, poor, and sparsely populated. The upland country of the Limousin is, for many of the French, a backward area one passes through on the way between the Paris region and the south. The region has never been prosperous and has produced few of the cultural riches that attract outsiders. The appeal of the Limousin is in its verdant fields, rolling landscape, and a way of life that is slow to change.

    Some three hundred thousand people a year turn off the main highway and make their way along smaller country roads of the Haute-Vienne to reach the crumbling vestiges of the village martyr. Almost all (89 percent) of the visitors are French, usually stopping off on their way to or from vacation. Of the foreigners, 53 percent are English and 40 percent Dutch, many of whom continue south to vacation in the Dordogne. A third of the yearly visitors come in August.

    On the warm days of August, throngs of families with young children, groups of friends, and couples stroll down the main street, peering into the gutted houses and filing in and out of the church where the women and children of Oradour were closed in and burned to death. The rusted tramlines running through the town, the handsome carved stone lettering on the facade of the old post office, the gaping shopfronts, and the plaques that list the names and professions of the people who once lived here conjure up a vitality of rural life that has vanished from the France of today, a time when the streets of Oradour were full of activity.

Before its destruction, Oradour was a bourg: a compact market town, set between the wild hills of the Monts de Blond and the valley of the Vienne, that served a large surrounding agricultural community. The census of 1936, the last taken before the war, indicates that 330 people lived in the town proper--most of them artisans and shopkeepers. The local notables (a notary, two doctors, a pharmacist, a postal receiver, and a priest) also resided in the bourg. The rest of the commune's 1,574 residents were spread out in the fifty-three hamlets and small farms that lay clustered around the town.

    Greater social contrasts existed within the bourg than in the countryside. In town there were a few bourgeois families that, over generations, had accumulated power and material security. The Desourteaux family, for example, had family members in the professions and commerce. Dr. Paul Desourteaux ran a medical practice with his son Jacques and lived in an imposing stone house on the main street--the rue Emile Desourteaux, named after his grandfather who had been mayor from 1892 to 1906. His three other sons, Hubert, Paul, Etienne, were, respectively, proprietor of a garage, a grocer, and the secretary in the mayor's office.

    In the interwar period, Oradour was also a lively center of sociability. There were numerous cafes, three musical clubs, a soccer team, and two veterans' associations from the Great War. On Sundays, clubs from Limoges would come by tram to spend the day on the banks of the Glane, where they organized fishing contests. Commercial and social connections created a tightly knit extended community. Local farmers came into Oradour to conduct all manner of business. Their wives ventured into town less frequently but could be seen on the semimonthly market days going to the local grocer, or sometimes stopping at the fabric shop of Monsieur Dupic in the main street. The commune's elementary schools were in town, so many children from outlying hamlets walked into Oradour to go to school. In 1944, 64 boys and 106 girls from the commune were enrolled in Oradour's schools. The smallest children attended the nursery school.

    In the early summer of 1944, Oradour-sur-Glane was a prosperous, tranquil haven, largely protected from the deprivations of war. The biggest disturbance to family life was the absence of men who had been drafted to work in Germany or were still prisoners of war after being captured during the short campaign of 1939-1940. All in all, people lived well here; there was no shortage of food and the German occupation of Limoges seemed far away. When asked in 1988 if in Oradour one had had the feeling of being at war, a survivor of the massacre, Marcel Darthout, responded: "Not that much. Yes and no, but in general not that much. One eats well in the country. One finds what one wants. One finds poultry. Then bread, that's a big problem. We got bread that wasn't very good, but one managed to find white flour. It wasn't bad. It was a very agreeable life." The Germans occupied the southern part of France starting in November 1942. Their presence was less obtrusive there than in Paris and the cities of the north. Today, people of Oradour claim that until the massacre no German, at least none in uniform, had been seen in wartime Oradour.

    During the war, banking on the relative isolation of the spot, many well-to-do residents of Limoges stored their cars in barns in Oradour to hide them from the Germans. One resident of Oradour, recalling his family's perceptions at the time, captured the prevailing mood: "Really, we sort of thought that we were--that we weren't part of the war. We thought that we wouldn't be concerned by the war--anyway, not a lot...."

    The apparent safety and obvious comfort of Oradour had already attracted refugees. In 1939, twenty-six Spanish loyalists fleeing the civil war settled in Oradour. The Second World War brought more outsiders: in September 1939, the French government evacuated 380,000 residents--for the most part women, children, and young people--from the department of the Bas-Rhin in Alsace and sent them to the Limousin, Dordogne, Perigord, and the Charente. Oradour was designated to host residents of the town of Schiltigheim, an industrial suburb of Strasbourg.

For the Alsatians, as well as residents of "the interior," this encounter proved difficult. Eighty percent of the Alsatians did not speak French. They were often viewed with suspicion and disdain by their hosts, who, imitating the Alsatian word for "yes," referred to them as les ya-ya. In addition, Alsace was a devoutly Catholic region in which, alone among the regions of France, religious instruction was offered in school. (When Alsace rejoined France in 1918, after having been annexed by Germany in 1871, it was allowed to keep the religious instruction in schools that the French parliament had abolished in 1905.) When Alsatian refugees sought religious instruction for their children, it did not sit well in the radical, secular, leftist regions of the Limousin and Perigord.

    Fleeing the German advance in May 1940, millions of French and Belgians poured into southern France. The Haute-Vienne received the fourth largest number of refugees of any department. One month later, eighty-four expellees came to Oradour from the Lorraine towns of Charly and Montois-Flauville near Metz. By 1943, approximately one hundred refugees from the different areas of France had settled in the community. In addition to the Lorrains, women and children from the Paris region, Montpellier, and Avignon boarded with local families or rented rooms in Oradour's hotels and inns. Some of these refugees had been born in eastern Europe and were probably Jewish. It is difficult to know exactly how many people resided in the town of Oradour on the eve of the massacre. The commune as a whole counted at least 1,664 residents.

    Oradour also received local visitors. Five trams a day ran in each direction from Limoges to St-Junien, with a stop in Oradour. The trip from Limoges to Oradour took a little over an hour. On Saturdays during the war years, residents of Limoges came by tram to provision themselves with meat and other items that were in short supply in the city. The Limogeauds often made the trip into a day's outing, spending the morning shopping and then taking the afternoon to picnic or fish on the banks of Glane, which passed under a bridge at the southern entrance to the town.

    Arriving at Oradour from Limoges, the tram stopped before the bridge at the edge of town. This was the stop for the hamlets of Les Bordes, Le Mas du Puy, and Laplaud. The tram then continued across the bridge and up the main road, passing, on the left, the impressive village church with its twelfth-century romanesque vaulted chancel and fifteenth-century nave and side chapels. The Church had progressively lost ground in the region since the French Revolution, but Oradour once was an important local religious center; the name is believed to derive from the Limousin word ouradour, which comes from the Latin oratorium, or place of prayer. Ouradours were generally rudimentary square chapels at the intersection of important roads.

    A small marketplace and the Café/Hôtel Milord faced the church. A few yards up, the road to the hamlet of Les Bordes branched off to the right. On its journey up the main road, the tram passed shops, barns, a garage, workshops, private dwellings, the girls' school, and the entrance to the large marketplace. Across the street from this marketplace stood the house of Dr. Paul Desourteaux, the wartime mayor of Oradour. As the tram approached the north end of town, it stopped at the little station next to the post office and across from the town hall before continuing out of Oradour toward Javerdat and the small city of St-Junien, thirteen kilometers to the southwest.

10 June 1944

Saturdays were often busy in Oradour and this one--four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy--was no exception. Saturday afternoon was a time for running errands, getting a haircut at the Café Duchêne, or chatting with neighbors. For the young men who often took a few hours to socialize in town on Saturday, there was the added attraction of the afternoon distribution of the tobacco ration. On this Saturday, school attendance was good because a medical check was scheduled for the afternoon.

    At approximately two o'clock the midday calm was shattered by the appearance of German troops at the southeastern entrance to the village. The soldiers quickly blocked the entrances to Oradour. Sentinels fanned out and encircled the town and some of the neighboring farms. These 120 soldiers were members of the Der Führer regiment of the Waffen SS tank division Das Reich, which had been sent toward Limoges a few days before to fight the Resistance. As soldiers went from house to house, the Germans sent the town crier through the streets to call the population to assemble in the central marketplace. Meanwhile, soldiers in armored cars rounded up men working in nearby farms and fields.

    According to survivors' accounts, most of Oradour's inhabitants obeyed the orders, believing they had nothing more to fear than a routine check of identity papers. Some, mostly men who feared being deported to Germany, concealed themselves in barns, attics, and basements. Martial Brissaud, for example, a nineteen-year-old whose family lived at the western edge of town, hid in the attic while the Germans searched the house. Later he sneaked into the garden, where he lay flat on the ground until he could escape to the woods beyond town.

    The SS soldiers moved quickly through town, hunting people out of their houses and driving them toward the market square. When soldiers came to the makeshift school for refugee children from the Lorraine, eight-year-old Roger Godfrin fled out the back door of the school building. He hid for a while in a field of tall grass and then ran on toward the Glane. Though shot at by German soldiers, he made it across the river to safety. He was the only schoolchild in Oradour to survive. One other little boy survived, André Pinède, who was not attending school.

    Within an hour the Germans had gathered the townspeople in the marketplace. Dr. Jacques Desourteaux, who had been out on a house call in a neighboring hamlet, was stopped as he drove back into town and ordered to join the crowd. At about three o'clock, the soldiers separated the women and children from the crowd, herded them to the church, and shut them in. Speaking through an interpreter, an officer addressed the 200 to 250 men remaining in the square. He announced that the SS knew of a cache of arms and munitions at Oradour and demanded that all those who possessed guns step forward. When nothing came of this, the officer turned to the mayor, Paul Desourteaux, and instructed him to designate hostages from among the townspeople. The mayor refused, offering himself and his sons instead. After taking Desourteaux back to the town hall for discussion, the Germans apparently changed their minds about singling out captives. Mayor Desourteaux returned to the crowd, and the officer announced that his men were going to search the town.

    Following a signal from the commander, the SS soldiers then divided the men into groups and hustled them off to various barns and garages around the marketplace. The only ones to survive what was about to happen were six young men from the group of sixty-two shut into the Laudy barn. While the men stood in the barn, talking nervously among themselves, an SS solider set up a machine gun on a tripod. Other soldiers stood guard. They waited. Then, from outside, came the sound of a detonation: the signal to fire. Someone shouted a command, and bullets mowed down the Frenchmen. Soldiers came forward to give a coup de grâce to those who might still be alive. The Germans then covered the bodies with straw, kindling, and phosphorous and set fire to the building. The six who survived had been standing near the front of the group; they were protected by the bodies that fell on them. One, Marcel Darthout, described the moment: "We felt the bullets, which brought me down. I dove ... everyone was on top of me. And they were still firing. And there was shouting. And crying. I had a friend who was lying on top of me and who was moaning. And then it was over. No more shots. And they came at us, stepping on us. And with a rifle they finished us off. They finished off the buddy who was on top of me. I felt it when he died."

    As smoke filled the barn, the survivors groped their way through a small door that led into another barn. Three of them hid in the loft, the others behind a woodpile. When that refuge was set on fire, they crawled outdoors and surreptitiously worked their way over walls and gardens toward the edge of town. Only five made it: Pierre-Henri Poutaraud was killed on the way by a sentinel. By seven in the evening the others had reached safety. Behind them, Oradour burned. In the late afternoon the SS soldiers had gone through the streets pillaging houses and shops, systematically setting Oradour on fire and shooting people forced out of hiding by the flames.

    While the Germans were killing the men of Oradour, the women had been locked in the church. At approximately five o'clock, two soldiers came in and placed a large chest on the altar. They retreated, laying out a long fuse, which they lit before shutting the door. Moments later the chest exploded, releasing clouds of suffocating smoke and blowing out some of the church windows. In the ensuing chaos, the soldiers opened the door and sprayed the group with gunfire. They piled flammable material on some of the bodies, set a bonfire with the church pews, and abandoned the building.

    Only one person managed to save herself from the conflagration. Marguerite Rouffanche, a forty-seven-year-old woman, had been part of a group that pushed back into the sacristy in search of fresh air. As the church burned, she crawled behind the altar and found a stool used for lighting candles. She managed to climb up and out the window. She dropped three meters to the ground below. Looking up, Madame Rouffanche saw that she had been followed by a young woman with a baby. The young woman handed down her baby before jumping, but all three were caught in a hail of machine-gun fire. Mother and child were killed; wounded, Madame Rouffanche was able to crawl into the garden of the presbytery, where she hid among rows of peas.

    In the early evening of 10 June, the Germans stopped the last tram from Limoges as it approached Oradour. SS soldiers forced twenty-two residents of the commune of Oradour to step off the tram before sending it back to Limoges. The passengers were held for two hours and then released with no explanation. Terrified, they took refuge in nearby hamlets or spent the night in the woods.

    On the morning of 11 June, all that remained of Oradour was a smoldering mass of burnt farms, shops, and houses. Six hundred forty-two people had died. The losses included 393 people living in Oradour (longtime residents and 84 refugees), 167 people from the villages and hamlets of the commune, 33 people from Limoges, and 25 others from different parts of the Haute-Vienne. Roughly 80 residents of Oradour survived in one way or another: the men from the Laudy barn, Roger Godfrin, Marguerite Rouffanche, 28 who hid from the roundup and managed to escape the encircled town, and approximately 36 others who happened to be away for the day, like the butcher Desvignes, who had gone to the market in St-Victurnien, and the postman, Gabriel Senon, who had been out on his rounds. Twelve other men were away as prisoners of war, working in Germany as part of Vichy's compulsory labor service, the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO); or enrolled in the chantiers de jeunesse, Vichy's youth camps.

    The massacre blighted outlying areas as well. The hamlets remained physically intact, but they lost their young children who had been in the school at Oradour. The village of Le Mas du Puy is typical. Of the forty-four people recorded in the census of 1936 as living in this settlement, fourteen died in Oradour, among them four mothers and eight children between the ages of five and ten. The mothers, concerned that their children had not come home from school, had gone to town looking for them. They died with them in the church.

    News of a disaster in Oradour spread quickly in the immediate vicinity. Albert Valade, a fourteen-year-old boy at the time, had been tending his uncle's cows outside of town on the afternoon of 10 June. As he stood in a small green field cut by the Glane in the late afternoon, something dark floated to the ground and caught his eye. It was a burned page of paper on which he could read the words of the catechism.

    André Desourteaux, the twenty-year-old grandson of the mayor, worked for the postal service in Limoges during the week. On the weekends he would return home to Oradour, where his parents ran a grocery store in the rue Emile Desourteaux. On Sunday morning, 11 June, Desourteaux took his bicycle on the train as far as St-Victurnien and then rode toward Oradour. As he entered the town, he encountered his friend Martial Brissaud, who told him that everyone was dead. Desourteaux had lost his parents, two sisters, three uncles, and both grandfathers.

    That day, survivors of the massacre and peasants from outlying villages came into Oradour, on foot and by bicycle, to search the burning village for relatives and friends. Madame Rouffanche was discovered, wounded but alive, lying behind the church. Smoke from the burning town could be seen as far away as St-Victurnien, Limoges, and Bellac.

    The terror was not yet over. In the early hours of Monday a group of German soldiers, possibly sent from Limoges, entered the ruined village and set about burying bodies. They hastily dug shallow graves behind barns, next to the church, and in various gardens throughout the village. They removed some half-burned corpses from the church. They piled bodies in the basement and covered them with debris and the twisted remains of baby carriages. After a few hours, unable to dispose completely of the mass of bodies, they withdrew from Oradour--now a city of the dead.