France’s President François Hollande and his German counterpart Joachim Gauck paid a landmark visit to the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane on Wednesday, where 642 people were killed in 1944 by Nazi troops, in one of the worst massacres on French soil during World War II, reports FRANCE 24.
Today, the village, in the central Limousin region, is a ghost town where the ruins from the war have been preserved as a memorial to the victims, thanks to state funding.
Gauck’s visit was the first of a German leader, a decision praised by Hollande.
“You have made the choice (to visit the site), it honours you, and at the same time it forces us, once the past has been acknowledged, to go boldly into preparing the future,” Hollande said at a joint press conference on Tuesday.
The Oradour massacre, as it is known, remains a touchy subject that has left a deep scar in France.
At 2pm on June 10, 1944, close to 200 German soldiers of the SS “Das Reich” division surrounded the village and rounded up its population on one of the main squares in what residents thought it was a routine identity check.
The men were separated into six groups and moved to different barns while women and children were gathered in a church. Within minutes, the men were all shot and burnt to death. The German army then set fire to the church and mowed down the women and children as they tried to escape the burning building.
In all, 642 people were killed, including 246 women and 207 children. Only six people survived.
Historians say it is still unclear as to why the small and tranquil village was targeted. It was not known as a stronghold for the resistance, but was on the path of SS troops making their way to Normandy on a mission to wipe out resistant fighters.
“While this could seem like an outburst of uncontrolled violence, it was in fact carried out methodically and perfectly controlled,” said historian Jean-Luc Leleu from the University of Caen.
Until this year, the event was only mentioned twice by a German leader: ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder, once in 2000 in Berlin, and in 2004 in Caen.
For a long time, “it was a taboo, nobody talked about it,” said Claude Milord, 61, head of the Association for families of victims which has 405 members today and who lost about 20 relatives to the massacre.
“[Gauck’s visit] is a major event,” he added. And while a few survivors were reluctant at the idea, “everyone here is now preparing to welcome the German president.”
Milord compared today's visit to the historic handshake between former president François Mitterand and ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl in a memorial service for fallen soldiers at Verdun in 1984.
Gauck told reporters on Tuesday he had accepted the invitation to visit the site with “a mixture of gratitude and humility,”
“The Germany that I have the honour of representing is a different Germany from the one that haunts their memories,” he added, referring to Oradour’s surviving population.
Read more of this report from FRANCE 24.