Martyred Village; Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane

Jane Martin (Author photograph) Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. xvii, [3], 300 pages. Front endpaper map. Minor DJ soiling. Illustrations (26 b&w photos). Abbreviations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. In June 1944, Nazi troops in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane massacred more than 600 men, women and children and torched the town. Today, the town's ruins remain as a national monument, yet the meaning of what happened there has changed over time, as the French have struggled to come to terms with the legacy of WWII. Farmer, a history professor at the University of Iowa, published a version of this book in French four years ago; her firsthand knowledge of the site and survivors of the massacre give the book an emotional punch. Farmer starts with an account of the town's destruction, then describes how Oradour became the premier symbol of French innocence destroyed by Nazi brutality. By the 1950s, however, when 21 soldiers who participated in the massacre were put on trial and ultimately pardoned, the war years no longer appeared so black and white. Of the 21 soldiers, 14 were French from Alsace, and unlike surviving citizens of Oradour, the French government was more concerned with forgetting collaborators than with memorializing victims. Farmer has a fine eye for irony, pointing out "the enormous difficulty and expense of trying to maintain a ruin in a ruined state." The book does a fine job of summarizing France's postwar political infighting, the best moments are more personal: interviews with people who describe growing up in the tragic shadow of the old town, descriptions of the present-day ruins and meditations on the nature of memory. Among German crimes of the Second World War, the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town in the rolling farm country of the Limousin. Soldiers marched the men to nearby barns, lined them up, and shot them. They then locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire. Residents who had been away for the day returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation. In 1946 the French State expropriated and preserved the entire ruins of Oradour. The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms and shops became France's village martyr, set up as a monument to French suffering under the German occupation. Today, the village is a tourist destination, complete with maps and guidebooks. In this first full-scale study of the destruction of Oradour and its remembrance over the half century since the war, Sarah Farmer investigates the prominence of the massacre in French understanding of the national experience under German domination. Through interviews with survivors and village officials, as well as extensive archival research, she pieces together a fascinating history of both a shattering event and its memorial afterlife. Complemented by haunting photographs of the site, Farmer's eloquent dissection of France's national memory addresses the personal and private ways in which, through remembrance, people try to come to terms with enormous loss. Martyred Village will have implications for the study of the history and sociology of memory, testimonies about remembrances of war and the Holocaust, and postmodern concerns with the presentation of the past. Condition: Very good / Very good.

Keywords: War Crimes, Oradour-sur-Glane, Massacre, War Memorial, German Occupation, Survivors, Oral History, Trial, Collaborators, Desourteaux, Monument, French Resistance

ISBN: 0520211863

[Book #85147]

Price: $50.00

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