June 10, 1944

[The Annoyed Man]

I actually meant to post this yesterday, but I had meetings and the day kind of got away from me. June 10 is a day little known outside of France, commemorating a savage Nazi atrocity at Oradour-sur-Glane—which translates as "Oradour on the Glane river." (WEBSITE)

Oradour-sur-Glane is actually but one of 3 or 4 small towns in the same general part of France with the name of "Oradour." To distinguish them one from the other, their names include their geographical location. In fact, on the day that we went to visit the memorial there in August of 2005, we inadvertently drove to the wrong Oradour first, Oradour-Fanais, which was about 30 km from the one we were looking for, and which actually plays a small role in the story of the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane.

That turned out to be an interesting trip in its own right. We were obviously strangers as we wandered around the main square of this sleepy little town of Oradour-Fanais, looking for signs of what we had seen in pictures, and not finding anything. We were accosted by a very nice man who turned out to be the mayor, who asked us if he could be of assistance. When we told him what we were looking for, he told us we had the wrong town and invited us into the city hall where they had a large map of the region. He showed us how we had gotten off track, and how to find what we had come for, but we also had a very nice conversation about WW2, and the role his own town played in it.

This entire region of France was the primary hotbed of Resistance activity—called the "Maquis"—during the German occupation, and his town had played its part. He told us about their little town cemetery which contained the graves of the 7 downed crewmen of a Canadian Lancaster bomber which had been shot down nearby. Maquis fighters recovered the bodies and hid them from the Nazis who came looking for prisoners. When they had gone, the Maquis buried them as if they had been local residents in the village cemetery. Those graves are held in great reverence to this day in that village. They are highly cognizant that a crew of young men from another country paid the ultimate sacrifice to help make them free from the bootheel of Nazi oppression, and in the city hall, there are tributes to that sacrifice.

[sidebar]
I want to take a moment to say that we make fun of the French, and I see it all too often on this board, and it is true that French leadership has often been feckless and failed to take the defense of their nation very seriously. But that said, there millions of French people who actually had to live under the grinding oppression of a savage invader, and large numbers of those people are still alive today to remember that oppression. We here in the United States have never had to endure that. Even the British in Revolutionary War times were not as savage as the Third Reich. It is easy to make fun of "surrender monkeys," etc., but talk is cheap, and personally, I find such talk distubing—particularly since I personally know of much more valiant sacrifice and risk taking by the common French citizen during that occupation. We laugh from a position of strength, never having had to live alongside neighboring nations with superior militaries and expansionist dreams. Those French people who remember that ordeal tend to treat Americans with a great deal of respect, and they continue to express to this day the gratitude they feel to Americans who visit, for the sacrifices made by our fathers and grandfathers. They remember, when all too often our own countrymen don't.
[/sidebar]

June 6, 1944, as most of us know, was D-Day at Normandy. In support of the landings, the Maquis stepped up its activities, and even in districts that were hundreds of kilometers away, they responded by blowing up Nazi military infrastructure and attacking other Nazi targets, and blowing up re-supply trains headed to the front in Normandy. In one such attack, the Maquis from Oradour-Fanais (where the Canadian bomber crew is buried) had blown up a train, and captured and killed a cadre of SS officers. The SS decided to retaliate. They knew that the resistance fighters had come from a town called "Oradour," but not which one. Local SS might not have even been aware that there was more than one town bearing that name.

So early on the morning of June 10, SS troops marched into the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. They rounded up every single person they could find—man, woman, or child. They separated the men and the older boys from the women and small children. The men and boys were clustered into small groups throughout the town, backed against walls, and machine-gunned. The women and children were herded into the town's church, machine-gunned in their legs so they could not run and escape, and the church was burned down with them inside of it. The SS killed 642 non-combatant people that day, and then they burned the town down. There were only a few survivors.

A few of the residents escaped because they had jobs in other towns that began early, and they had already left Oradour for their jobs. One young boy was in a crowd of men who were machine-gunned in the courtyard behind a mechanic's garage. Their bodies fell on top of him, and he lay there until late in the day, with their corpses still piled on top of him. When it was starting to get dark, he crawled out of there, thinking the Germans had left, and he fled out the front door of the building only to find himself face to face with a small group of Germans who were standing right outside the door. One of them told him, "Leave now while you can," and let him go. He ran off into the darkness. A teenaged girl was able to leap from one of the windows of the burning church, on a side of the building where there were no troops, and she landed on a slope beneath the window, breaking her leg in the fall, but she was able to escape. The total number of survivors who were actually in the town that day numbers about half a dozen.

When one visits Oradour-sur-Glane today, there are actually two towns separated by a highway. After the town was destroyed in the atrocity and the war ended, the French government decided that, rather than rebuild it in its original location, they would leave it as a monument to what happened there, and they rebuilt the entire town across the highway from the old one. Access to the old town is through an underground museum which crosses underneath the highway. The museum documents the savagery of the Nazi occupation, and the heroism of the Maquis, and it also documents what life was like in Oradour-sur-Glane before the war and the occupation.

One of the museum exhibits that has always stayed with me is a set of captured instructional memos to local SS officers issued by the SS high command in Berlin. These were memos, complete with illustrations, on how to dig a mass grave with the optimum angle of the sides of the pit so that the bodies of people shot at the pit's edge would most efficiently roll to the bottom of the pit. The insanity of documenting on paper such savagery, as if it were everyday business, and completely institutionalizing it in a faceless bureaucracy as if it were nothing more than instructions on how to fill out a 1040 form has chilled my blood to this day.

I actually don't have a problem with argumentum ad hitlerum because sometimes that is a valid argument. It is only invalid to those people who cannot conceive that humanity ever does such things to itself. Tell that to the Rwandans. They'll just think you're naive. And they would be correct. But while I have no problem with the legitimate use of argumentum ad hitlerum, I have a HUGE problem with people who blithely use the world "Nazi" in a way that cheapens or lessens its meaning. When you call someone a Nazi, you're piling onto their shoulders the legacy of all of the unimaginable evil of the real Nazi regime. That is a serious charge, and one had better be able to back it up with fact, else you wind up looking like an uneducated fool, not to be taken seriously.

On exiting the cool darkness of the museum, one goes up a ramp into the sunshine, and is immediately confronted with the blasted ruins of what was once a thriving town in which real people lived. The effect is startling. If you have a Facebook account and have "friended" me, you'll see a photo album of mine called "France-Oradour sur Glane." (LINKEY). These pictures only begin to document the effect of walking into this ruined town. You cannot walk through this town and not have an appreciation for the absolute savagery of Nazi oppression. There is a sign upon entering the town asking visitors to not speak in loud voices and to treat this place as if it were sacred ground. Everywhere you look, there is evidence of what transpired there that day.

We often talk, fittingly so, about the sacrifices made by Allied and particularly American troops who stormed ashore at Normandy (and Anzio, and Iwo, and so on and so on). But sometimes that talk sounds just a bit like we were rescuing ungrateful people from their own sloth and cowardice, and that they paid no sacrificial costs of their own. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are fond of quoting the apocryphal words of Admiral Yamamoto that any invasion of the U.S. would fail because there would be "a rifle behind every blade of grass." Is that really true any longer? People forget that while the French have never really had as strong of a gun culture we have had throughout our history, they do have a gun culture, and gun ownership—particularly of rifles and shotguns of hunting type—was not that uncommon throughout the French countryside in the 1940s. Even as an 18 year old tourist in 1971, I remember that most of the households in the small village where my grandparents owned a country home owned some kind of long gun—even if it was a bit of an antique.

So what happened to the French? Why wasn't there a rifle behind every blade of grass? What happened to them was their government. Their government refused to invest in a strong land military force. Being still an imperial nation at the time, with colonies around the world, the French navy was still at the time one of the finest in the world. But the tools of gunboat diplomacy were essentially worthless in a land war. Their government thought they could negotiate with state sponsored terrorists, and by the time an invasion became a reality, it was too late to bulk up and repel the invaders.

Those invaders rolled across ground that was still healing from the trench warfare of just 22 years earlier. The French casualty rate in WW1 was 75%. They suffered 1,385,000 killed, and 4,266,000 wounded in that war, both in France itself and its territories in that war, and a large percentage of them were civilians. This, in a nation approximately the size of Texas, which had a 1936 population of around 41,500,000. In 1946, ten years later, their population was around 40,500,000—down over a million. In WW2, France alone would suffer 217,600 military deaths, and 350,000 civilian deaths, or 1.35% of her total population. To put things in perspective, contrast that with the United States, which had a population at that time of about 131,000,000 during the war and suffered 416,800 military and 1,700 civilian deaths. War has devastated France in a way most Americans cannot comprehend, and the numbers are staggering. We should not be so quick to mock their suffering.

The French, like most countries, mourned their dead, built their civic monuments to their bravery, rebuilt their cities, and moved on. Sometimes, just like here in the U.S., "moving on" includes becoming willfully ignorant about their past, and losing a sense of gratitude for what they have today, and forgetting the price paid for having it. But Oradour-sur-Glane stands as a separate kind of monument. It removes the abstraction of war from one's gaze, and forces the viewer to confront it in a visceral fashion. The bodies have been buried and the blood has long since dried and been washed away by the rains, and reverent docents make sure that the streets are clean and the trash is picked up; but the signs of what troops of Der Führer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division, Das Reich did on that bloody day still linger. Like the signs on all the walls say, "never forget." And never lose sight of the larger meaning and of the bestiality of which otherwise normal human beings are capable of descending into.

Later that week, we also visited a monument to a world gone by, probably never to return. It was a graveyard at Chasseneuil-sur-Bonnieure (LINKEY), dedicated to the dead of the Maquis who were killed fighting the Germans in that region during the war. There are about 2,500 resistance fighters buried there. It's sort of a small scale "Arlington" for them. There is something unique about it—which is also photo-documented in one of my Facebook albums—and that is that the dead consist of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all buried side by side. They were farmers, shopkeepers, business owners, teachers, communists, and conservatives, all buried side by side, having died in a common cause, and sharing the common title of Patriot. It was nearly as remarkable an experience as that of visiting Oradour-sur-Glane.

If you ever get yourself to France, you really owe it to yourself to visit these memorials.

[bnc]

I saw a show on this a couple of years ago, probably on the History Channel. I didn't remember the name of the town or much else, but the part about the church came back to mind instantly.

[pnctar]

Thank you for sharing TAM. That is very moving and so true, just like the Pol's. Poland was our main source of "intel" about Germany and their cost was just as great. Yet, maybe that's why we joke about our allies. For most, humor is the best outlet ....