The day after the wedding of Jean-François and Elisa I took a train from Chateauroux, a town in the dead center of France, to Limoges, 120 kilometers to the south and west. From there it is only another 20 kilometers to Oradour-sur-Glane. Several of the wedding guests knew of this village but none had visited it. Certainly, there is no need to hurry to Oradour. It is enough to know it is there; after that, like a telephone number safely recorded on paper—or a face preserved on film—it can be forgotten.
The sign at the gate admonishes SOUVIENS-TOI: REMEMBER. Beyond the gate you can see the ruined walls of a few houses. Propped against one of these, a large sign admonishes SILENCE. Rusty tram lines follow the main road as it curves up into the village. The sky is scored by tram and telegraph wires, powerless to transmit. A small sign on one of the posts warns: DEFENSE ABSOLUT DE TOUCHER—DANGER DE MORT.
For fifty years the whole village has been in ruins. Skeletal walls. Rubble-strewn rooms. Rusting girders. Gaping windows. Some walls have remained relatively intact but there are no ceilings or floors. This is small consolation: the vertical may last better than the horizontal, but it will always lose out in the end.
Every house looks the same but there are usually some details to remind you that this was a butcher’s, this was a home, this was a shop. The things people used: at the Café Chez Marie there are rusted scales, pots and pans hanging on the wall. In another house there is an old sewing machine. A rusted bedstead. The remains of a tiled floor. A bucket. Bicycle frames. On the wall of the garage is a red advertising sign for HUILES—RENAULT. In the market square is the rusted hull of a car.
The sky gets in everywhere. Framed by broken walls, it sits in the middle of rooms, pours in through collapsed roofs, stares out of window frames. Shades of gray. Smoke-drift clouds. In the distance are the lungs of winter trees that have long outgrown the village. Birds perch in them, wade through the damp air.
There is a consistency to the ruins because they all date from the same day. The elements have worked equally on all buildings, but within each house there are gradations of ruination. The relative longevity of building materials: glass and cloth are always the first to go; walls become clumps of brick and then rubble; metal—bicycle frames, saws, water pumps, railings—turns rapidly to rust but it endures, after a fashion. Eventually everything becomes rust or rubble. Ultimately it becomes part of the landscape. Walls are turning green with moss. Rubble is becoming soiled. Which is why, from a distance, the ruins already seem to be merging into the surrounding countryside. One kind of time stopped here on an afternoon in 1944, but a different, slower kind—which sculpts hills and silts rivers—has taken over.
It was at 2:15 p.m. on June 10, 1944, when the trucks and half-tracks of a contingent of the Der F¼hrer regiment of the 2nd SS (Das Reich) Panzer Division rolled into Oradour. Transferred from the Eastern Front, they were en route to Normandy to reinforce the German defenses against the Allied invasion. The journey had to be made by road because the French rail network had been severely damaged by Allied bombing and sabotage. Continued resistance action inflicted few casualties on the battle-hardened Das Reich, but the cumulative effect of this campaign of harassment led to all-important delays in the division’s progress through France. To counter these “terrorist acts,” the Germans wasted still more time (strategically speaking) attempting to subdue the population by a series of ruthless reprisals. At Tulle, some sixty kilometers south of Limoges, ninety-nine civilians were hanged from lampposts in retaliation for the résistants’ assault and brief liberation of the town.
Why the SS should have hit Oradour is more difficult, if not impossible, to establish. Theories abound, but the most likely explanation is the one offered by Max Hastings in his book Das Reich. Information reached Major Otto Dickmann (who commanded a battalion of the Der F¼hrer regiment) that maquisards were either hiding in the village or, at least, using it as a hiding place for weapons. Whether this rumor was true or false was irrelevant: it provided Dickmann with the pretext to unleash his troops and make of Oradour an example that would spread terror throughout the region of the Limousin.
Refugees had almost doubled the village’s normal population to 650 in June 1944. Within half an hour of arriving the SS herded everyone into the market square. Women and children were then taken to the church, the men to five separate sites in the village. At about 3:30 p.m. the Germans embarked on the systematic slaughter of everyone in the village, firing machine guns, throwing grenades, and setting fire to the church that held the women and children. By 5:00 p.m. the whole village was ablaze. Only five men and one woman escaped.
When the SS pulled out the following morning they left in their wake over 640 dead in the smoldering ruins of the village. Over the following days, charred bodies were recovered and buried in the cemetery at the far edge of the shattered village. The ruins were left as we find them today.
With its busy jumble of graves, the cemetery looks like any other in provincial France. On many of the headstones there are photos of the dead. Husbands and wives. Young and old. Smiling. Dressed for weddings or christenings in their Sunday best. On one headstone, designed to look like the pages of an open book and arranged around a photograph, the inscription reads:
A La Memoire De Notre Fille Cherie
Bernadette Cordeau
Brullée Par Les Allemands
Le 10 Juin 1944
Dans le 16e Année
Regrets Eternels
Who was she? She was someone who looked like this.
A few days earlier I had looked at another photograph that showed a line of ten dirty, disheveled men in overcoats. They were prisoners of war, obviously, and most looked as if they had been beaten. The caption explained that they were SS troopers who had been identified by Wermacht soldiers as guilty of war crimes. They are humble and defiant, resigned, exhausted… The more accurately you try to pin down their expressions, however, the more difficult it becomes. You peer into their faces as if you are listening to depositions in court. You strain your eyes looking at this photograph, trying to ascertain innocence or guilt, but the only thing it proves—the only thing any photograph ever proves—is what it shows: these men looked like this.
You can walk around the village in twenty minutes. It is doubtful if anyone stays more than an hour, but to understand these ruins properly it is necessary to read them quite carefully. Oradour is not just a monument to German brutality, nor to the apocalyptic destruction of the Second World War. The question “Why Oradour?” is twofold, referring not simply to why the village became the target of such ferocity but also to why the French have memorialized this place in this way. The two answers are linked, for Oradour weaves together two almost contradictory strands of meaning.
Between the cemetery and the ruins, stone steps take you down into a dimly lit crypt. Dozens of domestic items salvaged from the ashes of Oradour are diligently preserved here: Fragments of ration books and letters. Penknives. Scissors. Bowls and spoons. Spectacles. A mechanical pencil. Glasses and bottles, melted in the fire, twisted. Watches, clock faces without hands: bits and pieces of dead time. These display cases put you in mind of both archaeological museums and certain Holocaust museum-memorials where odd possessions of the victims are cherished and preserved. Memorials to a nation’s military dead are stark, unadorned: these personal effects emphasize that the dead of Oradour were not soldiers but innocent victims.
This is a crucial component of the meaning of Oradour: there was no justification for the massacre; there were, in fact, no maquisards or arms hidden here. (When the SS announced that any arms must be declared, one man stepped forward and said, “I have a six-millimeter carbine which has authorization from the council.” The German replied, “That’s of no interest to us.”) The villagers of Oradour were simply people going about their business. They had played no part in sabotage or “terrorist acts.” This means that the massacre at Oradour is exempt from controversy—for the presence of even one maquisard would have implicated the village in its fate.
Faced with “terrorist acts,” the Germans often established a reprisal ratio, declaring, for example, that for every German soldier injured by résistants, ten civilians would be killed. But however it is reckoned, the essence of a reprisal is that it must be so far in excess of the original offense as to annihilate the possibility of counterretaliation. By its nature, then, the reprisal is always consuming the logic, the arithmetic, that engendered it. The result will inevitably be an act of violence that defies understanding or calculation: a massacre.
From the point of view of the SS, events in Oradour were the consequence of an accumulation of frustration and delay occasioned by acts of resistance elsewhere. The innocent victims of Oradour, however, were simply engulfed by a volcanic eruption of violence.
But it is not enough for the dead of Oradour to be simply victims. If this were the case then they would be symbols of the fall of France, of capitulation, of defeat. They have to be not simply victims but martyrs. This is where the second strand of meaning comes into effect, a strand represented by a plaque, near the exit from the crypt, that reads: MORTS POUR LA FRANCE.
Since the arbitrary choice of victims is part of the logic of reprisal, any victims of German violence were implicated in the overall campaign of resistance. The passivity and innocence of the people of Oradour in no way preclude them from the history and memorialization of the struggle of France to liberate itself from Nazi occupation. Indeed, thanks to the logic of reprisal, the passive victim becomes an active component in the myth of French resistance.
In this way Oradour is exempted from the whole vexed question of resistance-collaboration and the ideological turmoil surrounding it. At the wedding reception the day before my visit to Oradour I sat next to a Frenchman who remembered his father and uncle arguing about a second uncle who was alleged to have collaborated with the Germans. The father was a Communist and had been active in the resistance; his brother, the uncle with whom he was arguing, had concentrated on his business and the well-being of his family, hardly concerning himself with the war. Arguments like this have raged in France for the last fifty years. In Oradour all shades of opinion were subsumed and united by the tragedy of June 10, 1944. It is not just time that stopped; the whole aggrieved discussion is arrested and resolved by the massacre and its memorialization.
One of the few things to have survived the fire of June 1944 is a roll of honor dedicated
A NOS MORTS GLORIEUX
GUERRE 1914–18
Located in the church where the women and children were later burned, it is inscribed with the names of one hundred men from Oradour. Memorials like this are found in every French village. Similar memorials can be seen throughout Britain, but the war had been fought on French soil and, in both absolute terms and relative to its population, France suffered far more heavily than Britain. Over a million and a half Frenchmen lost their lives, more than 160,000 of them in the ten-month battle of Verdun. It had been General Falkenhayn’s intention to “bleed the French white” at Verdun, and though France emerged victorious from the war, it was a victory all but indistinguishable from defeat. The ashen memory of the carnage of the First World War, especially of the meat grinder of Verdun, lay behind France’s surrender in the first months of the Second. For the next four years France crouched under the German occupation.
Whatever the practical achievements of the resistance in June 1944, its chief contribution was, in Max Hastings’s words, “towards the restoration of the soul of France.” Like all monuments, the ruins at Oradour were intended not simply to preserve the past but to address the future. To that extent they are like a bid at prophecy, an attempt to call into being. And what is called into being by these ruins is—in a final paradoxical resolution—the moment when this process of restoration is complete. Only then can they be forgotten.
1994