From the series: “Rectifications to the history of our times – Der Große Wendig” Article 236, page 86, Volume 2, Published 2007 by Grabert Verlag, 72006, Tübingen, Postfach 1629
The Case of Oradour
Oradour-sur-Glane is a French village 23 km (about 14 miles) North-West of Limoge, which earned a sad significance during the Second World War. In Meyer’s Lexicon (Encyclopaedia) (1) it says: “…on 10th June 1944 burned to ashes by SS-Troops under pretence for revenge for guerrilla-activity; nearly all (about 600) inhabitants were murdered in the process.“ This statement, causing a totally wrong impression, shows how little one should trust Encyclopaedias, if political statements about the Second World War are concerned.
Oradour, like the nearby situated Tulle (2), has become symbol for alleged crimes of the Arms-SS, just as Lidice (3) in Czechoslovakia, or Marzabotto (4) in Italy. All these places have in common, that the enemy war propaganda at the time was adopted without examination of the true facts and therefore grossly distorted into the German historiography of the re-educators.
The established facts today are presented in terse form: On July 6th 1944 the Allied had landed in Normandy. The expected invasion had begun. On June 8th 1944 the 2nd SS-tank-division “Das Reich” received marching orders at the place of the new line-up in Southern France to secure at first on their way to the invasion front the heavily by guerrillas (5) occupied area around Limoges. On June 9th 1944 heavy fighting in the by guerrillas occupied Tulle resulted (6), after inhuman cruelties to German soldiers with many murders were discovered.
In the evening of the 9th of June the battalion commander and wearer of the Knights Cross, Sturmbannführer (Assault group leader) Helmut Kämpfe, of the mechanized infantry “Der Führer” of this division, driving alone in his motorcar ahead of his troops, was abducted by guerrillas. The German troop was informed by two Frenchmen the next morning that a high German officer was kept captive by the “Marquisards” (French guerrillas) (5) and was to be publicly executed and burned. There was supposed to exist a guerrilla staff officer, who was fed news by the whole population.
The release of Kämpfe was first tried through amicable ways: “Release of 30 (Marqisards) guerrillas, 40 000 Francs ransom, and personal freedom for the negotiator for the release of Kämpfe”.
Sturmbannführer Diekmann received orders to march to Oradour with his 1. battalion and take with him captured marquisard leaders to exchange them also for Kämpfe if he wasn’t found. The exchange offer was transmitted by a specially for this purpose released Marquisards-leader to his chief, but wasn’t accepted by him.
The Germans encountered resistance in Oradour and found there corpses of several German soldiers. Thereupon the village was occupied and a search of all houses ordered. They found many weapons and munitions. Later Diekmann had the men of the village, who surely were guerrillas, shot, whilst women and children were incarcerated in the church. When the houses were set alight, hidden munitions exploded in many buildings. Either the blaze crossed over to the church, or the stored munition there was ignited by guerrillas. The women and children locked up for their own protection in the church became the victims of the munitions and incendiary devices stored there by the communist guerrilla chief Guingoin from the British airdrops. From French sources 548 victims were reported.
It is significant that bishop Rastoul of the nearby town of Limoges only arrived after three days with his entourage at Oradour-sur-Glane – and remained silent (7). The 71-year-old parish priest, Abbe Chappelle, had and remained vanished (8).
The death of Sturmbannführer Kämpfe through the Marquisards is said to have been extremely gruesome. In any case his way of death has left traces on his skeleton, for which reason the French government refused for a long time to publish Kämpfe’s burial ground and permit his exhumation, as this is prescribed by the Hague land warfare order.
The procedures around Kämpfe’s death are kept secret, “because the episode Kämpfe covers up other facts that nobody wishes to surface anymore.”(9) This memorandum by the reporter Guy Satignon is significant and corresponds with the total veiling by the Standing Higher Military Court in Bordeaux in relation to the so-called “Oradour-Process” of 13th January to 12th March 1953. It was a show trial with great propagandistic expense and many worldwide journalists eight years after the end of the war. It wasn’t a case of the establishment of the truth and administration of justice through an independent and neutral court proceeding, but it was a victor’s court like the revenge justice of Nuremberg.
All accused officers on account of the events in Oradour were set free as not concerned. The accused crew ranks were sentenced, amongst them 13 Alsatian nationals. 42 members of the 3rd Company were sentenced to death in absentia; only an Alsatian and a German were present. All other members of the Company received four to twelve years of forced labour.
Significantly however, it was immediately agreed with the German Federal Government that the adjudicated judgements in the show trial were not allowed to be executed, and all convicted would be soon released on a promise to absolutely remain silent. The German Federal Government committed on their behalf never to question the – demonstrably wrong – allegations of the judgements, and to keep the relative records secrete. In implementation of these agreements all convicted were pardoned by the French side, the process records though to be taken to secrete archives for seven decades. The German side has kept her promise of silence up to this day.
Through this act of pardon the factual position of the judgements is laid down and can’t actually be proceeded with for juristic reasons. This way the alleged German war crime was to remain publicly aware as an infamous action by the Arms-SS, at least for the next decades, until the records will be released by the middle of this century.
After these procedures and this final judgement of a military court, the reader may come to his own conclusion when he reads the statutory declaration by the retired lieutenant-colonel of the Federal Armed Forces, Eberhard Matthes (10). He declared (in slightly abridged form):
“Besides numerous other visits of private and official type before and after, I have been located in Nov. /Dec. 1963 as an officer of the Federal Armed Forces at the French military training area, La Courtine, for some time, and in the summer of 1964 privately with Family in South-West France.
Because all questions, as a former war participant, are for me of interest which stand in connection to coercive measures, hostage executions, and similar, I visited also both times the village Oradour.
At my first visit, Dec. 1963, in German Federal Armed Forces uniform with FAF-Jeep – including a driver – I had the following experience:
2. Straight after my arrival, my Jeep was surrounded and greeted in a most friendly manner by numerous children and mostly older adults.
3. When the older villagers…saw me read in one of the said brochures, some recommended not taking these reports too seriously. There might have many other things taken place than depicted in them. This made me at once understandably suspicious, and I said that it would be bad enough had German soldiers shot in the church set alight by them at women and children or them trying to escape from it.
Clearly unmistakable was the answer that the church really wasn’t set alight by the Germans. On the contrary, the German SS-men – partly under thread to their own lives – had rescued several women and children from the burning church. Two women amongst the crowd surrounding me even confirmed that they themselves had been rescued by German soldiers; otherwise they wouldn’t be standing here now.
4. In the meantime the mayor had arrived, ….who greeted me very friendly: I would be the first German soldier in Uniform who has visited Oradour after the war. He was very pleased about it. He would be politically on the Left, but France would be allied and friendly with Germany today. The past had to be taken as it happened, and one had to take the right lessons from it. Many injustices had occurred during the war. I confronted him immediately with the previous reports by the inhabitants, to which he replied with words to the effect: The Marquisardes had also committed many injustices to the German soldiers at the time, and for that reason none of the accused Germans in the Oradour-process had been condemned to death, and nearly all of the imprisoned had been released very soon afterwards.
5. I still remember a little episode very clearly. In the vicinity of the church ruin an old pram was positioned with a sign saying that this pram with a child in it was burned in the massacre. I think it was the mayor himself, who smiled looking at it, and said that the rest of a pram was found there already at the time. After Oradour had turned into some sort of place of pilgrimage, and the village had to make through the visits some money, such things had to be replaced every few years.
6. My interest in the case of Oradour was now understandably sprightliest aroused. I had an opportunity to converse with French officers. … A high ranking French officer commented on my questions: An essential motive for the German intervention in Oradour in June 1944 had been the fact that just before the village a gutted and still burning German ambulance car (Sanka) had been found. All six occupants must have been burned alive. Driver and co-driver had been chained to the steering wheel. Without doubt the work of the Marquisardes. Behind all this was simultaneously the torturous killing under mysterious circumstances of a higher German officer, who had fallen in the hands of the Marquisards, in the same area and also at the same time. In a reversed case a French troop also had to take compulsory measures, if necessary shooting of hostages, as the conventions of the war laws of nations would have permitted 1939 to 1945. For these reasons there are many French soldiers and/or officers who don’t officially visit Oradour. To his knowledge no official military celebrations take place in Oradour – surely for the same reason.
7. At my second – private – visit in Oradour, Summer 1964, I found a further confirmation of the description up to now, in as much as the stall owner, resp. the sales man (also an elderly gentleman) … spoke in relation to my pointing out the brochures: “There would be quite a number of witnesses who knew exactly what had happened in reality then in 1944. They haven’t been heard in the process, either not at all, or had to limit themselves to unimportant statements. The accused Germans hadn’t been condemned to death, but only received prison sentences and were soon set free. Otherwise some of the witnesses would have without doubt ‘told all’ and described the real connections”.
The Tragedy of Oradour was therefore triggered off by communist Marquisards (11). The revenge tactics by the Germans were justified, even though performed arbitrarily by Diekmann (12). The guilt for the death of the women and children is carried first in line by the Marquisards who had used the church as a munitions dump and didn’t tell the Germans about it when the catastrophe was obvious. Otherwise the women and children would surely not have perished. Especially members of the SS had saved women and children, instead of mowing them down, shooting through the church windows, or throwing hand grenades into the church (13). The regimental commander of Diekmann, standard leader (Standartenführer) Stadler, was shocked about the reports of the events at Oradour. He asked for a court martial investigation of Diekmann. Before they reached a verdict, Diekmann was killed in the Normandy.
The accusation for a war crime by the Arms-SS and its men had therefore no base in this case. For inner-political reasons – in consideration for the guilty communists – the French court had to pronounce a verdict at the time.
It is a special disgrace when the German media take up the case, after nearly half a century and the discovery of the real connections, to falsify the war history at the expense of Germany one-sidedly from the view of the communist guerrillas (who had the death of more than 100 000 “collaborators” on their conscience):
On the 8th of March 1988 the (TV station) ARD showed the TV-film “The elimination of Oradour”. It was a “concentrated action” by the journalists Lea Rosch, the Stern-editor Günter Schwarberg, the GDR-justice department (!), the ARD and further press agents. The in an East-Berlin prison incarcerated SS-Obersturmführer (first lieutenant) Heinz Barth was interrogated in a second show trial and naturally – after 44 years – sentenced for the second time by every trick in the book. The meanwhile discovered truth about the events at the time was not mentioned, but instead evil lies were dished up.
The daring exploit of a truthful reconstruction of the true events was experienced in the past years by the French natural scientist and teacher Vincent Reynouard, when he was able to not only clarify the events through interviews with the last still living eye witnesses, but also by applying natural-scientific and pyro-technical scales to the still existing relics of the “museum village” Oradour.
Reynouard established in his “material investigation” of the church ruin that straight away several official statements couldn’t stand up to natural-scientific tests. This way the supposedly preserved vault in the church tower was clearly restored, since one wanted to hide that it was destroyed by an explosion and not by arson. In the whole of the church, by the ruling doctrine, incendiary devices and fire boosters were supposed to have caused infernal temperatures, so that at some places human ash was found at a hight of one meter – without bones. Inexplicable is the fact that an only 6 mm thick confessional stayed untouched, even though a molten metal pram stood in front of it, from which one could assume a temperature of a few hundred degrees. These and other evidences are so unmasking that his book “The Truth about Oradour” (14) has been banned in France, it’s author has been dragged in front of a court, dismissed from his duty as a teacher, and was sentenced for “approval of a war crime”. He had to emigrate to Belgium with his family.
Please also reac The Waffen-SS: Innocent at Oradour
Annotations
1 Meyers Große Handlexikon A-Z (Meyers Great Condensed Lexicon A-Z), Mannheim-Wien-Zürich 1989
2 Tulle, Town South of Limoges with intense guerrilla activity at the time.
3 Lidice, Czech village near Kladno, which was destroyed 1947 after the assassination of Reichsprotektor Heydrich for support of guerrillas, and whose male population was partly shot. This was not against the law of nations.
4 Inge Archer Scholl wrote about Oradour in the Evangelical Commentaries in November 1985 „Oradour in Italien“ (Oradour in Italy), und translocated with it the untruth from France to Italy.
5 Guerrilla = Partisan (French for Party member), franctireur behind the back of the enemy operating, also Maquisard (French from Corsican - Maquis ‚bush forest‘): resistance fighter of the French Resistance of the Second World War fighting in the underground against German troops.
6 About the events in Tulle see Contribution No 237, „Das Massaker von Tulle“
7 Pierre Moreau, „Was die Steine schreien“(What the Stones scream) – Local appointed time in the church of Oradour for the clarification of a war crime, in ‚Deutsche Monatshefte’ (German Monthlies), Nr. 8, 1985, p. 16
8 Ibidem
9 Herbert Taege, ‚Wo ist Kain? Enthüllungen zum Komplex Tulle und Oradour‘ (Where is Cain? Revealments to the complex Tulle und Oradour) Askania, Lindhorst 1981 p. 227
10 Herbert Taege, Ibidem, ps. 504 ff.
11 (New research with confirmation of the presented) Neuer Forschungen mit Bestätigung des Dargelegten: Herbert Taege, ‚Wo ist Abel? Weitere Enthüllungen und Dokumente zum Kompex Tulle und Oradour‘ (Where is Abel? Further Revealments and Documents to the complex Tulle and Oradour) Askania, Lindhorst 1985; Herbert Taege, ‚Der Fall Oradour sur-Glane‘ (The case of Oradour sur-Glane), Sondernummer (Special No.) 12 der Askania-Studiensammlung für Zeitgeschichte und Jugendforschung (of the Askania-Study collection for history of time and youth research), Askania, Lindhorst 1991
12 He was covered by the (legalised by the law of nations) Bandenkampfbefehl (Mobs Fighting Order) of 3. January 1944 (the so-called ‚Sperrer-Befehl‘) and the order of the day by the Commander-in-Chief West of the 8. June 1944. They were correct according to the Haager Landkriegsordnung (Hague Land War Orders) of the 10. October 1907 and the Genfer Konvention (Geneva Conventions) of the 27. July 1929
13 La Libre Belgique 30. January 1953, alleged this erroneously.
14 Vincent Reynourds „Die Wahrheit über Oradour. Was Geschah am 10. Juni 1944 wirklich? Rekonstruktion und Forschungsbericht eines Franzosen“, (The Truth about Oradour. What really occurred on the 10th of June 1944? Reconstruction and research report by a Frenchman), Druffel, Stegen 2005