The French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
June 2004.
Exactly sixty years after its destruction by
the German Army during World War II.
Photo: 11 June 2004.
Source: Own work.
Author: User:Dna-Dennis
(Wikimedia Commons)
Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopædia,
unless stated otherwise.
On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne, in Nazi-occupied France, was destroyed when 643 civilians, including non-combatant men, women, and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS Company as collective punishment for Resistance activity in the area, including the kidnapping and subsequent execution of Waffen SS Sturmbannfuhrer Helmut Kämpfe, who was burned alive in front of an audience. Kämpfe was a highly-decorated Commander in 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich.[3]
The Germans murdered all people they found in the village at the time, as well as people brought in from the surrounding area.[4] The death toll includes people who were merely passing by in the village at the time of the SS company’s arrival.
Men were brought into barns and sheds where they were shot in the legs and doused with gasoline before the barns were set on fire.
English: Oradour-sur-Glane.
Français: Oradour-sur-Glane est le nom d’une petite ville
du Limousin, à 22 kilomètres au nord-ouest de Limoges,
où une unité de Waffen SS massacra, le 10 juin 1944,
642 hommes, femmes, et enfants.
Photo: 22 August 2017.
Source: Own work.
Author: Davdavlhu
(Wikimedia Commons)
Remember Oradour-sur-Glane.
A Tour Of The Village.
Available on YouTube
All in all, 643 individuals are recorded to have been murdered. The death toll includes seventeen Spanish citizens, eight Italians, and three Poles.[7][8][6]
Six people escaped the massacre.[9] The last living survivor, Robert Hébras, known for his activism for reconciliation between France, Germany, and Austria, died on 11 February 2023, aged 97.[10][11]
He was eighteen years old at the time of the massacre.
English: Watches found at Oradour-sur-Glane.
Some have been stopped by the heat of the fires.
They mark the last hour of these men.
16:00 hrs – 17:00 hrs.
Français: Collection de montres
conservées à Oradour-sur-Glane.
Deutsch: Uhrensammlung am Erinnerungsort
Oradour in Frankreich.
Photo: 1994.
Author: Arno Gisinger
(Wikimedia Commons)
Oradour-sur-Glane.
“Stories From The Survivors”.
Available on YouTube
HERE
President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of the old village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.
English: Lidice, Czechoslovakia,
(now The Czech Republic, or, Czechia).
The destroyed village.
Deutsch: Tschechoslowakei, Lidice (Liditz).
Der Ort nach der Zerstörung.
Date: June 1942.
Source: German Federal Archives
Collection: German Federal Archives
Photographer: Unknown.
(Wikimedia Commons)
The Destruction Of Lidice.
Nazi Footage.
Available on YouTube
“Memorial to Lidice”.
Available on YouTube
It has gained historical attention as one of the most documented instances of German war crimes during the Second World War, particularly given the deliberate killing of children.
In reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the Late-Spring of 1942,[2] all 173 men from the village, who were over fifteen years of age, were executed on 10 June 1942.[3]
English: A monument to children taken for
“re-education” after the extermination of the village of Lidice. “Re-education” took place in the gas chamber of the
Chlemno Concentration Camp, Poland.
Čeština: Pomník dětem odvezeným na převýchovu po vyhlazení obce Lidice. "Převýchova" proběhla ve zplynovávacím autě koncentračního tábora Chlemno.
Date: 2009.
Source: Own work.
Author: Cybermud
(Wikimedia Commons)
Out of a total 503 inhabitants, 307 women and children were sent to a makeshift detention centre in a Kladno school.
Of these, 184 women and eighty-eight children were deported to Concentration Camps; seven children, who were considered racially suitable and, thus, eligible for Germanisation, were handed over to SS families, and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp, where they were gassed to death.[3][4]
Men massacred in the village of Lidice, 10 June 1942.
Picture taken by a German soldier and kept by Gestapo.
Downloaded from
(Lidice Memorial).
Purpose of use: To illustrate crime for which the subject
of the Article was executed by hanging.
Replaceable: Impossible.
(Wikipedia)
Marie Šupíková (Q95401481) was a survivor of the
Lidice massacre. One of the children kidnapped from
Lidice, here she testifies at the RuSHA trial.
Photo: 30 October 1947.
Source: https://collections.ushmm.org/
Author: Unknown.
(Wikimedia Commons)
The following paragraph is from
Marie Šupíková, née Doležalová (22 August 1932 – 22 March 2021), was a Czechoslovak survivor of the Lidice massacre.[1][2] After World War II, she testified, together with another Lidice child, Maria Hafnová, during Court Proceedings in the RuSHA trial, one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials.[3]
Approximately 340 people from Lidice were murdered in the German reprisal (192 men, sixty women and eighty-eight children).
After the War ended, only 143 women and seventeen children returned.[3][6][7][8][9]
The Memorial to the murdered children.
A Bronze Sculpture, by Marie Uchytilova,
in Lidice, Czech Republic.
Photo: 31 January 2020.
Source: Own work.
Author: Ashley Pomeroy
(Wikimedia Commons)
The history has been depicted in multiple forms of media since the end of the conflict. Examples include the internationally-known drama film “Operation Daybreak” and the Bohuslav Martinů composed orchestral work “Memorial to Lidice”.
In socio-political and legal terms, the event is known as a notable example of a “genocidal massacre”, which describes an act of mass killing against a specific community of victims done in step of a larger and more violent campaign enacting hatred against broader groups. This is a part of the larger topic of genocide studies.[1]
