In his memories, Oradour lived on as the place it had been before June 10, 1944, when German troops of the Second Waffen-SS Panzer Division entered the village and killed 642 men, women and children in one of the worst civilian massacres in Western Europe during World War II.at the time of the attack and withstood a spray of bullets buried under the corpses of his neighbors.
It was a Saturday, and for all the deprivations of the war, the mood in Oradour was light. Four days earlier, the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy in the D-Day invasion.British historian Robert Pike “We fell upon one … another,” he continued. “I found myself under bodies. Soldiers finished off the dying with a coup de grâce. I didn’t move or speak. Blood was flowing on to me. Then they covered us with anything which could burn and set it alight. When the flame got close to me, I had no choice: either I was to be burned alive or I would try to flee.”
According to another theory, the French Maquis, as the resistance fighters were known, provoked the attack by storing arms in Oradour’s church. That story, in Pike’s view, is “complete nonsense.” Mr. Hébras, for his part, regarded it as a “crime gratuit,” a gratuitous crime, and one that drove him to join the resistance. “In a way the Resistance came to save me,” Pike quoted him as saying. “I did not have a home to go to,” he said. “I wanted revenge.”
Three decades later, Mr. Hébras testified in what was then East Germany against Heinz Barth, an SS sergeant who had participated in the massacre at Oradour. Barth was convicted in 1983 and received a life sentence but was released in 1997 because of his failing health. He died in 2007.In recent decades, Mr. Hébras devoted himself to honoring the dead of Oradour.
Putin is today emulating Nazi atrocities such as these against French civilians in WWII with his own Russian army's mass rape, torture and murder of Ukrainian civilians.
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