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Oradour
Sur
Glane
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On 10 June 1944, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in the Nazi-occupied France was destroyed, when 642 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by a Nazi Waffen-SS company.
A new village was built nearby after the war, but French president Charles de Gaulle ordered the original maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.
The men were split into four groups whilst the women and children were herded into the church. At 4pm a grenade was exploded to signal the start of the massacre: the men were machine gunned, whilst the Church was razed with incendiary devices: women who escaped were machine gunned also.
It is still unclear what inspired the massacre on this scale.
We visited in October 2016
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