Today we visited the sight of one of the absolute horrors of the 2nd World War. On 10 June 1944, a German SS unit entered the small town of Oradour, rounded up 700 men, women and children, and murdered them in the most horrific way. Men were machine gunned to death at seven different sites around the town, and the children and women were locked in the church, and the church set on fire.

The town was subsequently ransacked, set on fire, and buildings smashed . And the day following the murders, the Germans buried all the remains of the bodies in mass graves, so that when the relatives of the dead exhumed the bodies, they were unable to identify the remains and bury their relatives individually.

The story of what happened that day came from six people who survived the horror. Four men who escaped from one of the barns, one woman who managed to escape from a church window, and a child refugee who ran away from the school because he had come across the brutality of the Germans before (there were also several people who did not go to the forced round-up, and escaped out of the village before the killings started). The survivors said that around 2pm on the 10th June 1944, the Germans surrounded the town, sounded the village drum to summons the inhabitants to the village green. Once on the green, the inhabitants were divided: women and children in one side, and men on the other. The men were then led to three barns, two garages, a warehouse and a hangar . At 4pm, an explosion in the village signalled the start of the massacre. The SS fired machine guns at the men in all the seven sites until they stopped moving, then covered their bodies with straw and hay, and set them alight. Anyone still alive at that stage was burned to death.

At the same time, two Germans entered the church and placed a container on the floor. They then left and locked the church door. The container then exploded sending acrid smoke and fumes into the air. As the women and children tried to escape through the church windows, the Germans machine gunned them. After a while, the Germans opened the church doors, and fired into the crowd of women and children. Once they ran out of ammunition, they piled up the pews and chairs, and set them alight.

They then methodically ransacked all the houses and shops in the town, and set them on fire.

The survivors said that the Germans celebrated all night, eating the food and drinking the alcohol stolen from the houses . In the morning they buried the dead in mass graves.

It is a very sobering experience to visit the monument and the remains of the town. The remains of the town have been kept completely untouched so that the world can see what happened. The museum has photos of many of the murdered people, and provides details of their lives. The ruins are unbelievable - it looks like a bushfire has swept through the town, with roofs missing, cars burnt, walls razed. Yet this atrocity was deliberate, perpetrated on people who were not part of the war.

It is still not clear why the massacre occurred. The Germans have provided many reasons, eg saying that the wrong Oradour was attacked (Oradour-sur-Vayres was close by, and was an important centre of the French resistance), or that they saw arms in one of the garages so returned to kill the inhabitants, or that German soldiers had been killed there. There was a war crimes trial in 1953 but only 21 of the 65 participants identified appeared, and no officers. But it sounds like the trial was an absolute farce with most of the defendants unable to remember anything (!) and none of them were apparently moved, or showed any compassion towards the relatives of the victims when the atrocities were related to the court. Some of the defendants received quite light prison sentences, but many of the French Alsace people who helped the Germans commit the massacre were pardoned. Political shenanigans are so sickening!

We came away glad that we had been to the memorial site, but sad that these types of atrocities have happened since WWII (eg in Bosnia, Serbia, Vietnam, and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan although not always to the same scale). What is it that brings out such sickening behaviour in people?