Many travellers to France come for the sun, food and wine, but there another attraction is also the vast history.
France has also been caught in the middle of two world wars which has left her with many scars and some unimaginable stories of horror and hardship.
One such story is that of the massacre of 642 Men, Women and children in the small and typical French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
Back in 1944 the village folk of Oradour-sur-Glane had mostly escaped the ravages of war and continued about their business as normally as they could.
On the 10th of June 1944 however, life changed in the most dramatic way for the villagers as men from the Der Führer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen SS Panzer Division Das Reich drove in using a thinly veiled story of a possible harbouring of Resistance fighters hidden in the houses of the village.
It was a story that had no foundation but enough to give the officers of 2nd Waffen SS Panzer Division their reason to ransack the village.
Initially the officers insisted on an identity check but changed their story to an arms and explosives search and decided that they should separate the women and children form the menfolk.
The women and children were ordered to the Catholic church where the German soldiers were ordered to kill the occupants. Incendiaries and smoke devices were set off and coupled with machine guns the Germans massacred 99 percent of the villages women and children.
The Mens folk were herded into the village garage and one of the barns and also massacred by the Germans.
On that fateful day 642 Men, Women and Children were killed. Oradour-sur-Glane is now a memorial to the village and the villagers who died there. Whilst a new town has grown a few kilometres away the original has been preserved as it was the day the Village died.
It is very much worth a visit. It will remind you as it did me the reasons the war against the Germans was necessary and that much bloodshed across Europe paved the way for mine and your freedoms of today.
There are many sites that attempt to explain this disastrous event. I do not claim any is more accurate that the other. There are many different accounts of what happened and why (although a lot seems to remain unexplainable).
This site seems to give a good account but if you would like to delve into this subject further then I would suggest a Google, MSN or AOL search and collate your findings.
It is a very sobering subject but a small example of sacrifice and suffering of the French people during German occupation
Oradour is a fair drive from us here at Jean Blanc. If you are driving down then a visit on route is probably the best idea allowing 2-3 hours minimum for your stay.
There is a spacious visitors centre and museaum with the old village a short walk away.
Oradour-sur-Glane is in the Haute-Vienne region of France and is located about 12 miles West of Limoges on the D9 but for more detailed directions and advice on what to expect, click here.
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