Oradour-sur-Glane

▪ France

      village, Haute-Vienne département, Limousin région, south-central France. It is located 14 miles (23 km) northwest of Limoges.

      Oradour-sur-Glane was the site of a particularly brutal atrocity during World War II. The entire village was destroyed, and its inhabitants were killed by German troops on June 10, 1944, exactly two years after a similar fate had befallen the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice.

      In reprisal for Resistance attacks, an SS detachment of 200 men routed all 652 inhabitants from their homes and into the village square. A search for hidden explosives and an identity check were announced, and the people were herded off—the men into barns, and the women and children into the church. The troops then barred the doors of the barns and the church, and with dynamite and incendiary devices they set fire to the entire village. Anyone not suffocated or burned to death was killed by machine-gun fire and grenades, except for 10 people who somehow survived the fire and feigned death until the SS had departed.

      The death toll was 642: 245 women and 207 children in the church and 190 men in the barns. Postwar efforts to bring the SS men to trial were hampered by the difficulty of locating and identifying the Germans, many of whom had been subsequently killed in action, and by legal complications. Finally, in 1953, 21 of the 200 SS men were brought to trial. All but one were convicted; five of them received terms of imprisonment and two were executed.

      The gutted, abandoned village was left unreconstructed; its ruins serve as a memorial to the victims. A new village, with a strikingly modern church, was built nearby. Pop. (1999) 2,025.

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