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Saturday, December 10, 2011

Oradour-sur-Glane: The Village Massacred in WW2 and Preserved Since Then

On 10 June 1944, at around 2 PM, four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, approximately 150 Waffen-SS soldiers entered the tranquil village of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Limosin region of south central France. For no apparent reason, Hitler's elite troops destroyed every building in this peaceful village and brutally murdered a total of 642 innocent men, women and children, a tragedy which has gone down in history as one of the worst war crimes committed by the German army in World War II.
A new village of Oradour-sur-Glane was built after the war, at the northwest of the site of the massacre, where ruined remnants of the former village still stand as a memorial to the dead and a representative of similar sites and events. Its museum includes items recovered from the burned-out buildings: watches stopped at the time their owners were burned alive, glasses melted from the intense heat, and various personal items and money.

oradour-sur-glane

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