Day 37 - Le village de Oradour-sur-Glane 🇫🇷

The village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
Today there are two villages with the name of Oradour-sur-Glane. The modern one, bustling with life and ,the one next door, the empty one. 😞
The original village was destroyed on the 10th of June 1944, four days after the D-Day landings, when 643 of its inhabitants, including 247 children, were massacred by a company of troops belonging to the 2nd SS Panzer Division, a unit of the military forces of Nazi Germany in World War II. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, but on the orders of French president Charles de Gaulle, the original has been maintained as a permanent memorial. There is a  very good museum located beside the historic site and a underground mausoleum next to the grave yard.
 Its a somber place to visit. The museum has parties of school kids going round it, trying to emphasise the importance of remembrance; most are paying attention but you always get one or two at the back. All the ruined buildings have plaques with either the name of the family that lived there or the buildings purpose in the village. 
     There are rusty, burnt out cars in remains of garages, wash sinks in kitchen areas with remains of water hand pumps and the odd sewing machine laid on the ground in the middle of rooms. In the street the concrete poles (like telegraph poles) still stand with rusty overhead cables that once provided electricity to the little tram line that ran thru the village. Its a place stopped in time.  And why? Two German officers had been captured by the French Resistance and handed over to the French Army, alive. (The day before, the local Germany garrison had arrested 27 Resistance fighters and shot them on the spot). The Germans wanted to make a statement, retaliation for their officers being  captured. That was it. A few of them, not many, appeared in front of the war trials that followed after the war.
Wikipedia will give you more if  you want it and there are plenty of photos of the cars and ruines on the net but I wasn't in the mood to snap loads of pics. It was a place tho we are glad we went too, spent most of the day there, then trundled along to another CCP site for the night.

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