EN IMAGES – Il y a 70 ans, le controversé procès du massacre d’Oradour-sur-Glane s’ouvrait à Bordeaux
Two regions, Limousin and Alsace, face to face, a long wait of immense disappointment for the victims of the massacre and a shame never washed away for the In spite of us condemned at the end of this catastrophic trial at the military court of Bordeaux. This is perhaps how we can summarize, 70 years later, this complex trial of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre which took place from January 12 to February 11, 1953. This Thursday, France Bleu returns to the controversy that reigned over the trial of the perpetrators of the massacre of 643 civilians in the martyred village of Haute-Vienne.
“This trial is that of Hitlerism”
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“Since June 10, 1944, Oradour has become a name in history” said the voice of French News January 12, 1953 in cinemas in France. At the time, eight years after the end of the Second World War, Oradour-sur-Glane was the archetype of the massacres of civilian populations committed in times of war. “This trial is that of Hitlerism, which led men to commit crimes like that of Oradour” launches the president of the court at the opening of the trial. With five weeks of hearings, 60 witnesses, including survivors of the tragedy, and 19 defendants, this trial is one of the most important of the post-war period. It is held after the vote of a law tailored to judge the perpetrators of the massacre (the text introduced collective responsibility for all those who had participated in war crimes).
Despite us among the accused
How can we lock women and children of a village in a church to burn them? Methodically shoot all the men in barns? Set fire to, loot, destroy the village? To return, the day after the massacre, to systematically eliminate the bodies by fire and the mass grave? To answer these questions, the military court of Bordeaux has to face him 19 defendants, soldiers of the Waffen SS Das Reich. Among them, 13 In spite of us, forcibly enrolled in this armed branch of the Nazi forces. Supported ardently by the Alsatian population, they did not cease, with their lawyers, to ask not to be judged at the same time as the other SS implicated.
A contested judgment
The tension is high during these five weeks of hearing, not only in the precincts of the military court, but also outside. Even before the judgment is known, demonstrations are organized by the victims in Bordeaux and in the Limousin, and by the defenders of the Despite-us in Alsace. And when the military tribunal announces its decision, neither side finds its account. The only German warrant officer present at the trial and a young Alsatian who had joined the Waffen SS were sentenced to death. The thirteen In spite of us are sentenced to sentences varying between six and eight years in prison or hard labor. Six Germans were sentenced to ten to twelve years in prison or forced labor, the seventh was acquitted. Forty-two other SS men from the Das Reich Division were sentenced to death in absentia.
A few days later, the condemned Alsatians will finally be granted amnesty in the name of national reconciliation. For more than twenty years in Oradour-sur-Glane, in reaction to this amnesty, the National Association of Martyrs’ Families refused to invite the authorities to the commemorations of the massacre of June 10, 1944. The remains of the victims were even grouped together, not in the monument offered by the State, but in an ossuary built on the initiative of the association.