The Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
On this day · 10 June 1944
Four days after D-Day, an SS company wiped out a French village and left its ruins standing as evidence.
On June 10, 1944, four days after the D-Day landings, troops of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” massacred 642 people at Oradour-sur-Glane, a village in central France — nearly its entire population — then burned the place to the ground.
The SS herded the men into barns and the women and children into the church before opening fire and setting both alight. Among the dead were 205 children. There was no military justification; the unit was moving north toward the Normandy front and turned on the village in reprisal.
The ruins were never rebuilt — they were left exactly as the SS left them.
In 1946 the French government decided Oradour would stand untouched as a national memorial, its scorched walls, rusting cars, and empty streets frozen in 1944. Today the village martyr remains one of Europe’s most haunting Second World War sites, visited by hundreds of thousands each year.
Sources & references
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