I remembered reading about this village years ago and couldn't remember the name until now.

Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed by the Germans for no known reason and 642 people were killed. The entired village has been left "as is" as a memorial.

Loads of pictures in the gallery, should give some realisitic references for mappers and modellers.

http://www.oradour.info/

http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/2327/or6980037sj.jpg

Great stuff, nice find.

I was about to post some other reference stuff. Wouldn't it be best if we could have a sticky and merge all threads?

I've been there last summer, and it's really breathtaking :s it's great that they left the wartorn village intact, but if you get into the history of it, it's cruel.. What happend to these people there shows how <3<3<3<3 war is.. The houses there have little plates on them with the names of people who lived there + picture..

Wow, really impressing! Great reference stuff :dog:

If thats in france then it was destroyed as a revenge for resistance fighters blowing something up, they herded the entire village into the town church and set it on fire, I think 2 people survived from the entire town and they escaped just as the germans arrived. There has been alot of debate that the germans destroyed the wrong town due to alot of towns having similar names in the area.

Well.

There are 2 Oradours in that area, one near the river Glâne and one that's just named Oradour.
The village of Oradour had resistance fighters that did heavy assaults on german outposts, so the german commanding officers ordered SS-troops to terminate that village as an example for all the surround towns that they shouldn't mess with the german army.

The SS-troops that got the orders pulled to the nearest Oradour, but it was the wrong village.. They entered Oradour sur Glâne and ordered all the people to gather at the towns square.. The people didn't have any clue what was going on, because they never really saw the war raging. The SS-troops devided the villagers, and brought them to different places, all the women and childeren to the church and all the men to the old barn. There they were held captive for about an hour, when all of the sudden 3 smoke grenades were tossed in the church.. They let the people suffer for a few minutes and then started shooting through the church doors to kill anyone that was still alive.. But quite a few people survived that massacre, so the SS decided to burn down the church. They set up different machineguns to cover all the doors and windows so they could kill anyone that tried to escape.
During all that, the men in the barn were slaughtered by 4-5 soldiers and their rifles. 6 men got away, but got killed later that day (after the party, read below)

When the night fell, the SS soldiers held a party in the village, getting drunk and singing etcetc.. They returned to the barn to kill anyone that might have survived. Next day they burned down the whole village and moved on.


During that day, a few men were on a tram heading to the nearby city of Limoges, when they returned they saw their beloved village laying in ruins.. A child and woman also survived the slaughter itself.. The child ran away when the orders were given to gather at the square, the woman survived the church massacre by climbing to the highest window in the church (one that the germans didn't check because it was too high and they thought nobody could reach it).. She broke 'something' during that fall and dragged her body to safety.


Edit: these are some of the survivors: http://www.oradour.info/images/oldorad6.htm

Edit2: the commanding officer of this raid got sentenced to life-long enprisonment somewhere in the 80's.. As far as I know, he commited suicide because he couldn't handle being punished as a "great SS commanding officer"

I have pictures I took when I went to Ste Mere Eglise, altho obvously the town is modernised, the church and town center is the same layout. I'll try and find them if it's any help to anyone.

If only the official maps were war torn. =(

wow props to you man, AWSOME find.
this helps those mappers that lack in the imagination dep. :D

wow, it sickens me to read the list of the victims, if mois means months in french, how can you kill a 1 month or 2 month old baby, goddamn those nazis, and good find, very interesting stuff.

edit: i just saw that they killed a 12 day old baby, wow, thats really sad.

mois does mean month, and as bad as this is going to sound, I wish I could give 10 oradour sur glane for 1 auschwitz. There were the true horrors. Oradour sur Glane, by its scale and stupidity, represents only a larger occurence of every day warfare then.

Originally posted by fess
I have pictures I took when I went to Ste Mere Eglise, altho obvously the town is modernised, the church and town center is the same layout. I'll try and find them if it's any help to anyone.

I have been there also. The church there is where a US para was supposed to have snagged his parachute on the church and spent most of D-Day hangin there pretending to be dead if I remember right. When I was there, they had a dummy hanging by a parachute.

Really people dont know if this really happened (many say its just a myth), but they included it in the film, "The Longest Day".

I thought I read somewhere that it's a myth (german troops stationed in st mere eglise said that they never saw a paratrooper (dead or alive) hanging on the church..