Image: SilanocUPDATE (Thursday Oct 22): two pupils aged 14 and 15, suspected of taking money from the killer, are among seven people 'mis en examen', as close as it gets in French law to being formally charged, with complicity in a terrorist attack. Among the adults are individuals accused of involvement in the online denunciation of Samuel Paty that may have led directly to his murder ...
It is not uncommon for me to reproduce here the work I have done forThe National and successive editors have kindly given approval. It is less common for me to post straightforward news stories I've written, not least because knowledge about the events such reports cover tends to develop, often rapidly, and what is initially believed to be true sometimes turns out to be less so, or not at all. The gruesome Islamist murder of a teacher in the Parisian banlieue is a reasonable exception because some of the emerging detail, about how the killer prepared and achieved his despicable mission, should be seen as widely as possible.
I have long believed that among the entirely sensible responses to terrorism should be the immediate arrest of anyone who had contact with the perpetrator/s. Yes, me included if for some reason I'd interviewed or otherwise met him/her/them. Innocents can be excluded quite quickly. This has happened following the Paris attack and what a shame the killer did not survive to see what he brought on his family, friends and associates ...
By the early evening of Saturday June 10, 1944, the bold fighting men of a Waffen SS unit were able to start relaxing after their day's work.
No fewer than 642 French civilians had been slaughtered in Oradour-sur-Glane, a village set in lush Limousin countryside. The victims included 247 women and 205 children, among them little Désirée Machefer (pictured above), who were herded into the parish church and either burned alive or shot - or both.
Job done, the Germans must have been thinking as they embarked on a night of celebration, singing heartily and sinking copious amounts of plundered wine from the remaining houses not already set on fire. Those buildings could await their turn next morning when the hungover Nazi soldiers would complete the task of turning a bustling village into a charred and ghostly testament to a monstrous war crime.
In the 50 years I have been visiting and, at times, living in France, I have often thought of going to Oradour to pay my own insignificant respects to the martyred village. Only this month, breaking a long journey from the Mediterranean coast to London, did I finally get round to it.
I have nothing much new to say about the massacre. What happened that day - at the end of a week in which Allied forces landed on Normandy beaches and, so much more mundanely, my mother had her 30th birthday - is an essential part of the history of warfare in general and the Second World War in particular and is therefore well documented.
Of the officers responsible for the slaughter, one (Gen Heinz Lammerding, who had also ordered the hanging of 99 Resistants the day before 113km away in Tulle), avoided trial altogether, except in absence, and resumed a prosperous business career in Dusseldof. Another, Major Adolf Dickmann, described as a bloodthirsty drunkard, was killed in action in Normandy later the same month.
And, as a rare survivor, Robert Hébras, recalls in his slim volume, 10 June 1944: The Tragedy Hour by Hour, a third, Lt Heinz Barth, finally brought to trial in East Germany in 1983, insisted it was a completely normal act.
No, he is said in other accounts to have added, he had no regrets; "in wartime, one acts harshly and with means available".
He was jailed for life but released after 14 years, on account of age, health and having finally "expressed remorse", and lived for a further 10 years.
There are, of course, people of the far right in France, Britain, Germany, the United States and elsewhere who struggle to find fault with the Nazis and their evil acts, to the point in some cases of feeling the wrong side won the war. They occasionally pop up in Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National despite her attempts to detoxify its rotten image; her father, Jean-Marie, founder of the party as the Front National, has infamously dismissed the Nazi occupation as relatively benign and the death camps as a mere detail of war.
In August, one or more persons preceded my own visit to the impressive memorial centre adjacent to the preserved remnants of the old village, now a neighbour of the new Oradour that has developed since the war. But the mission not to pay homage.
He, she or they proceeded to daub the exterior wall, changing the word "martyr" to "menteur" - liar - and asking when the real "truth" would be told*, adding for good measure the name of a much-convicted Nazi apologist, Vincent Reynouard.
We do not know yet who was responsible. It could ,in theory, have been the work of anti-Nazis but why would anyone see a need to demonise demons?
To be fair, Mme Le Pen was among those quick to condemn the desecration.
Beneath grey skies and amid incessant rain, my wife and I walked, mostly in silence as requested, around the blackened streets.
Signs denote where once could be found schools, the baker's shop, a Renault garage, several cafes with some also offering hairdressing, a couturier, a dentist's surgery, the workshops of the blacksmith and wheelwright and so on.
Almost at the end of the walk, but before heading for the cemetery, we arrived at the shell of the church and wandered inside in awe, noting the confessional box where two children were found shot dead after surviving the fire, the altar and a plaque commemorating Oradour's 1914-18 war dead.
My consoeur Anna Pukas James, writing at Facebook after I had posted photographs and the two videos seen below, recalled her own visit a few years ago: "A haunting - and haunted - place." Dave Eyre, another Facebook friend, said it was "most moving places I have ever visited".
As for us, it was a bleak reminder, not of collective German guilt but of man's capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man, woman and child. not a death factory in the sense that Auschwitz was but, because of the calculated destruction in a single day of a large village and all or most who inhabited it, even more disturbing.
I am glad I went but, even 76 years on from the awful event, aware that I shall never forget what I saw there.
* A German version of the 'truth' of the tragedy of Oradour appears at this link and purports to show that the church was set on fire when explosives stored there were detonated by a civilian, possibly a Maquis Resistant and possibly not even French but intent on heaping blame on wholly innocent Nazis (save for the admitted murder of men in Oradour they failed to separate from activists). I am unaware of any evidence that any trace of Resistance or Maquis arms and explosives was found in the village)
Try as I might, I could not persuade Maitre Lucie Simon, the lawyer for 'Youssef', the hero of the latest attack on Charlie Hebdo, to talk at any length to me, let alone put me in touch with her client.
His actions merited a wider world audience. Me Simon put the phone down (later explaining that she had tried three times being doing so to make it clear she did not wish to speak to me). Happy to report we're friends again - 'don't take it personally,' she tells me ... and after a lifetime of having uncommunicative people slam the phone down, I don't.
This is likely to be my last piece for The National from France before my big return to quarantine in the UK next week. When I say I cannot wait to be back, I mean back in France in early 2021 if our government of clowns (copyright Joe Biden) hasn't destroyed all foreign travel by then ...
A 25-year-old Pakistani immigrant has been charged with the attempted murder of two journalists stabbed outside the former offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in an attack underlining a rising terrorism threat in France.
He allegedly made two reconnaissance visits in the days leading up to last Friday's attack in Paris but had no idea Charlie Hebdo had moved premises after the 2015 massacre of 12 people, including journalists, cartoonists and a Muslim police officer.
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