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Massacre at Oradour
A True and Wholly Engrossing Tale of High Finance and Treachery in Which the Secret of a Wartime Tragedy is Revealed Through a Contemporary Drama.
On 10th June 1944, four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, the inhabitants of a remote village in South West France were rounded up by a company of SS soldiers and all but a handful were shot or burnt to death - 642 in total.
The atrocity and its particularly disturbing details have never been adequately explained until now. In 1982 Robin Mackness met the one man left alive who held the knowledge which made terrible sense of the massacre. Five further years of thorough investigations convinced the author that he had discovered the true secret of Oradour. It cost him twenty-one months in prison and much else besides.
On 10th June 1944, four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, the inhabitants of a remote village in South West France were rounded up by a company of SS soldiers and all but a handful were shot or burnt to death - 642 in total.
The atrocity and its particularly disturbing details have never been adequately explained until now. In 1982 Robin Mackness met the one man left alive who held the knowledge which made terrible sense of the massacre. Five further years of thorough investigations convinced the author that he had discovered the true secret of Oradour. It cost him twenty-one months in prison and much else besides.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published March 7, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 29, 2017
If you are looking for a simple book on the Oradour Atrocity committed by the SS in France in 1944, this may not be the one. This is really Robin Mackness relating his own story of getting involved in a French/Swiss Tax/Custom Episode.... and then making his case that it is related to the Massacre. Mackness makes a good case, but I found his desire to write a thriller/whodunit got in the way of my desire to read a history book. I think it falls short on both ends- but just a bit- others may differ. I do think this a fine book for almost any age reader, although those younger than ten may find the finance/business talk in the first chapter soporific. Those who stay may find a pay off and agree with the author's case for an explanation of the thoroughness of the SS Search of the village and for the rage of those in command. WWII Enthusiasts/Gamers/Modellers will probably like it- with tons of fodder for Scenarios and Dioramas. There are even good supporting maps and pictures.
January 7, 2015
Ever feel as if you got snookered by a book’s cover? That’s how I felt with Robin Mackness’s Massacre at Oradour. The cover image shows civilians getting shot down by soldiers so I assumed I was getting a straightforward account of the SS Das Reich division’s obliteration of the French village of Oradour in June, 1944. So why was I reading a 1980s French Connection, with Nazi gold substituted for dope?
It turns out, in this author’s version, there’s more to Oradour. It was the incidents along the French-Swiss border in the nineteen-eighties that revealed the mystery. Mystery? What mystery? Didn’t we already know what happened and why?
I probably wouldn’t have picked up the book except for something I’d seen in the paper just a few days before. In December, 2014, an eighty-nine year old German, Werner Christukat, was to go on trial for having participated in the massacre. The case was tossed out of court (and is being appealed.) That Christukat, a private in Das Reich, was at Oradour at the time of the massacre is indisputable, but how involved had he actually been in the atrocities?
Christukat was charged with 25 counts of murder and hundreds of lesser charges. Had he been one of the machine gunners who, after the men of the village had been herded into barns, sprayed them in the legs with bullets so they couldn’t run away when the barns were set on fire? Had he tossed a flaming rag into the gasoline-soaked church where the women and children were collected and burned alive? The court ruled that Christukat couldn’t get a fair trial 70 years after his alleged crimes and while I applaud the vigilance of the men and women who have dedicated their lives to hunting down the Nazis, it’s hard to argue with the court’s decision. Even Nazis deserve a fair trial.
The massacre piece of the book is pretty straightforward, if horrific ─ it’s June, 1944, just days after D-Day and with Das Reich hurrying toward Normandy, their progress is slowed by the French resistance. Bridges are blown, roads are littered with cow dung that might conceal explosives, and axle oil is drained from tanks and replaced with an abrasive paste. (Two of the three maquisards sabotaging the tanks were teenage girls, ages sixteen and fourteen.) Das Reich was supposed to have been conveyed west on trains but with all the destruction, it turns into a slog and when an SS officer is kidnapped, the Germans decide it’s time to wipe out a village, to tamp down the resistance so the division can get on with its business.
Ourador, it would seem, had the ill-luck to have been chosen randomly.
Not randomly, according to Mackness, which brings us back to the 1980s.
The French Nationale des Enquetes Douanieres (DNED) is charged with dealing with smugglers and in the area of France bordering Switzerland, DNED often goes after the illegal stashing of French money in Switzerland. DNED seems to have had (and hopefully no longer has,) an outrageous autonomy. Theirs is a dirty job but it’s profitable and with so much money otherwise eluding the taxman, DNED is allowed to operate pretty much how it chooses. Nobody’s going to look too closely at their methods and those methods are monstrous - lies, extortion, brutality, and with the DNED getting a cut of whatever money is confiscated.
Here’s how Agent Reynard, the villain of this story-appended-to-a-story, operates:
There’s some French citizens who live along the border and who are allowed to work but not to live in Switzerland. They’re called Frontaliers and travel back and forth every day. They’re vulnerable to Reynard’s machinations, especially those who work in Swiss banking and he cunningly spins his webs around them. (Reynard, despite the name, is more spider than fox.) He threatens to arrest and imprison Frontaliers for ridiculously trivial offenses and they have to decide - refuse to cooperate and risk imprisonment, or cooperate and lose their Swiss careers. What’s a Frontalier to do? Squeal, usually, because if they provide useful information, Reynard will leave them alone, leaving them free, that is, to loathe themselves.
One of Reynard’s big fish (or maybe a medium fish, and the author of the book,) turns out to be a somewhat gullible Englishman and it’s Reynard’s pursuit, and ruthless treatment of the Englishman that puts him (the Englishman) on a convoluted path toward the truth of Oradour.
Was I convinced this version of what happened is correct? Does it matter, or change anything, if the SS destroyed the village for reasons other than what was alleged?
There were some moments of doubt in the author’s presentation. A gang of resistance fighters, not more than boys, wipes out a convoy of SS. The SS soldiers of 1944 were not the crack troops of 40-42, the latter having been mostly lost in Russia, but the soldiers escorting the gold were hand-picked, some of the best men available and a gang of inexperienced kids wipes them out?
It’s possible.
One man survives on each side of the ambush, a German soldier who we last see running down the road, and a maquisard who suddenly finds himself with a pirate’s treasure. How the maquisard manages to get away with the gold and still have it, mostly unspent, in the 1980s (back to the Englishman) seems a bit stretched. Could it have happened? Sure, but if you were the Germans or anyone else and your gold convoy got ambushed and you arrived at the charred remains the next morning and in force, and the gold was gone, wouldn’t you take a real good look around before you went off to search the nearest village? And if the gold was hastily buried right there by the wreckage, might a careful search have uncovered it? Maybe. And if you were the only surviving maquisard would you take the gold to town? Especially if it wasn’t your town? And besides, gold is heavy. (Thirty crates the size of shoe boxes, total weight, half a ton.) Wouldn’t the woods or a farm be a better place to hide it? And it seemed, from the author’s own account, as if the Germans, once arriving in Oradour, were more intent on massacring the population than on retrieving their gold. If you think it’s hidden in the village, shouldn’t you ask questions first and shoot later? Sure, time was of the essence, those Allied troops were pouring onto the beaches, but still…
The author, a high-finance entrepreneur until his encounter with Reynard, proves himself to be something else as well - a very capable writer. He takes two stories and weaves them seamlessly together and as chagrined as I was when I got more than the story of the massacre, the additional story is entirely compelling and is, in a way, the more shocking of the two. No, the DNED is not the SS, but shouldn’t we hold a 1980s French bureaucracy to a higher standard than the SS?
If two good stories inside the covers of a single, oddly satisfying book aren’t enough, there’s a third story here, the life and times of a courageous resistance fighter, told in flashbacks. He’s the surviving maquisard and is the link between the events of 1942 and those of 1982. His story, before, during and after the war, is both harrowing and tragic. (He’s Jewish.) One wonders how he managed to go on, with all that was done to him and to his family. And if we don’t believe the story he related to the Englishman is true, we can at least hope he really did get away with the Nazis’ gold. It doesn’t make up for all he lost but it’s at least something.
It turns out, in this author’s version, there’s more to Oradour. It was the incidents along the French-Swiss border in the nineteen-eighties that revealed the mystery. Mystery? What mystery? Didn’t we already know what happened and why?
I probably wouldn’t have picked up the book except for something I’d seen in the paper just a few days before. In December, 2014, an eighty-nine year old German, Werner Christukat, was to go on trial for having participated in the massacre. The case was tossed out of court (and is being appealed.) That Christukat, a private in Das Reich, was at Oradour at the time of the massacre is indisputable, but how involved had he actually been in the atrocities?
Christukat was charged with 25 counts of murder and hundreds of lesser charges. Had he been one of the machine gunners who, after the men of the village had been herded into barns, sprayed them in the legs with bullets so they couldn’t run away when the barns were set on fire? Had he tossed a flaming rag into the gasoline-soaked church where the women and children were collected and burned alive? The court ruled that Christukat couldn’t get a fair trial 70 years after his alleged crimes and while I applaud the vigilance of the men and women who have dedicated their lives to hunting down the Nazis, it’s hard to argue with the court’s decision. Even Nazis deserve a fair trial.
The massacre piece of the book is pretty straightforward, if horrific ─ it’s June, 1944, just days after D-Day and with Das Reich hurrying toward Normandy, their progress is slowed by the French resistance. Bridges are blown, roads are littered with cow dung that might conceal explosives, and axle oil is drained from tanks and replaced with an abrasive paste. (Two of the three maquisards sabotaging the tanks were teenage girls, ages sixteen and fourteen.) Das Reich was supposed to have been conveyed west on trains but with all the destruction, it turns into a slog and when an SS officer is kidnapped, the Germans decide it’s time to wipe out a village, to tamp down the resistance so the division can get on with its business.
Ourador, it would seem, had the ill-luck to have been chosen randomly.
Not randomly, according to Mackness, which brings us back to the 1980s.
The French Nationale des Enquetes Douanieres (DNED) is charged with dealing with smugglers and in the area of France bordering Switzerland, DNED often goes after the illegal stashing of French money in Switzerland. DNED seems to have had (and hopefully no longer has,) an outrageous autonomy. Theirs is a dirty job but it’s profitable and with so much money otherwise eluding the taxman, DNED is allowed to operate pretty much how it chooses. Nobody’s going to look too closely at their methods and those methods are monstrous - lies, extortion, brutality, and with the DNED getting a cut of whatever money is confiscated.
Here’s how Agent Reynard, the villain of this story-appended-to-a-story, operates:
There’s some French citizens who live along the border and who are allowed to work but not to live in Switzerland. They’re called Frontaliers and travel back and forth every day. They’re vulnerable to Reynard’s machinations, especially those who work in Swiss banking and he cunningly spins his webs around them. (Reynard, despite the name, is more spider than fox.) He threatens to arrest and imprison Frontaliers for ridiculously trivial offenses and they have to decide - refuse to cooperate and risk imprisonment, or cooperate and lose their Swiss careers. What’s a Frontalier to do? Squeal, usually, because if they provide useful information, Reynard will leave them alone, leaving them free, that is, to loathe themselves.
One of Reynard’s big fish (or maybe a medium fish, and the author of the book,) turns out to be a somewhat gullible Englishman and it’s Reynard’s pursuit, and ruthless treatment of the Englishman that puts him (the Englishman) on a convoluted path toward the truth of Oradour.
Was I convinced this version of what happened is correct? Does it matter, or change anything, if the SS destroyed the village for reasons other than what was alleged?
There were some moments of doubt in the author’s presentation. A gang of resistance fighters, not more than boys, wipes out a convoy of SS. The SS soldiers of 1944 were not the crack troops of 40-42, the latter having been mostly lost in Russia, but the soldiers escorting the gold were hand-picked, some of the best men available and a gang of inexperienced kids wipes them out?
It’s possible.
One man survives on each side of the ambush, a German soldier who we last see running down the road, and a maquisard who suddenly finds himself with a pirate’s treasure. How the maquisard manages to get away with the gold and still have it, mostly unspent, in the 1980s (back to the Englishman) seems a bit stretched. Could it have happened? Sure, but if you were the Germans or anyone else and your gold convoy got ambushed and you arrived at the charred remains the next morning and in force, and the gold was gone, wouldn’t you take a real good look around before you went off to search the nearest village? And if the gold was hastily buried right there by the wreckage, might a careful search have uncovered it? Maybe. And if you were the only surviving maquisard would you take the gold to town? Especially if it wasn’t your town? And besides, gold is heavy. (Thirty crates the size of shoe boxes, total weight, half a ton.) Wouldn’t the woods or a farm be a better place to hide it? And it seemed, from the author’s own account, as if the Germans, once arriving in Oradour, were more intent on massacring the population than on retrieving their gold. If you think it’s hidden in the village, shouldn’t you ask questions first and shoot later? Sure, time was of the essence, those Allied troops were pouring onto the beaches, but still…
The author, a high-finance entrepreneur until his encounter with Reynard, proves himself to be something else as well - a very capable writer. He takes two stories and weaves them seamlessly together and as chagrined as I was when I got more than the story of the massacre, the additional story is entirely compelling and is, in a way, the more shocking of the two. No, the DNED is not the SS, but shouldn’t we hold a 1980s French bureaucracy to a higher standard than the SS?
If two good stories inside the covers of a single, oddly satisfying book aren’t enough, there’s a third story here, the life and times of a courageous resistance fighter, told in flashbacks. He’s the surviving maquisard and is the link between the events of 1942 and those of 1982. His story, before, during and after the war, is both harrowing and tragic. (He’s Jewish.) One wonders how he managed to go on, with all that was done to him and to his family. And if we don’t believe the story he related to the Englishman is true, we can at least hope he really did get away with the Nazis’ gold. It doesn’t make up for all he lost but it’s at least something.
November 9, 2015
Or is the French word for gold, so Oradour must have been connected to gold, surely?
My parents-in-law visited Oradour-sur-Glane in the 1980s and came back telling us of the impression it had made upon them. I suspect my mother-in-law may have given me this book and it has been languishing on my bookshelves ever since. Finally, after a trip to Bordeaux, I've been reading a couple of books set in south-west France and, coming up to Remembrance Day (November 11th), decided to read it at last.
After so many years of being aware of the bare bones of the massacre and destruction of a whole French village by the SS in 1944, that was what I was expecting to find as the focus of this book, especialy as the edition I have is actually Oradour: Massacre and Aftermath. Not that I wanted to read blow-by-blow accounts of the massacre itself, but this book spends inordinate amounts of time discussing anything but the massacre and its aftermath. On the contrary, it spends perhaps two thirds of the book dwelling on the story of how the author, Robin Mackness, was arrested for transporting gold ingots from one side of France to the other, from where they are to be smuggled into Switzerland. While he was serving a jail term of 21 months, he studied the events in Oradour and put together his own theories about why the massacre happened.
Mackness's story hinges upon the fact that the gold had been stolen from a secret SS transport by a young Jewish man who was working for the Resistance, then hidden until he was an old man, only using a fraction of it to set up his business after the war. According to Mackness, the man, now nearing the end of his life, wanted to transport his gold to a safe place in Switzerland and in the process, Mackness was caught and prosecuted. The link between Oradour and the gold? According to the mysterious ex-Resistance man, the massacre at Oradour had been partly in retaliation for an ambush on the transport carrying the gold, partly due to the kidnapping of a German Major.
I have to say I'm sceptical. There is absolutely no documentary evidence for any connection of the gold with Oradour. As an employee of a bank, Mackness refused to reveal any of his contacts, hence his extended prison sentence. It seems to me he wasn't at all averse to some dodgy financial dealing. After studying law at Cambridge, he introduced the continental quilt to the UK as owner of Slumberland and proudly claims in his mini-biography in the front of the book that he went on "to make and lose at least three fortunes", then worked in finance in Switzerland, home of secret bank accounts.
Robin Mackness reminds me of Jeffrey Archer, another businessman-turned-author who spent time in prison. Perhaps that time in prison gave Mackness the chance to think up this conspiracy theory of a book, so reminiscent in style to The Da Vinci Code and the original holy grail conspiracy, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I wonder if Mackness wrote anything else? Why yes, surprise, surprise, he has co-written another historical conspiracy theory type of book with gold at the heart of it, Web of Gold: The Secret History of a Sacred Treasure: "Positing that the treasure of the Jews was brought to France after the Visigoth sack of Rome, the authors explore the Middle Ages and Renaissance profusion of secret societies, and suggest that they were established to protect this hidden wealth, which remains a political power in the 1990s." The only review on Goodreads says "Interesting historical summary of the possible locations of the treasures of Solomon's Temple & the Templars presented in a readable, open ended manner." Jewish gold, Nazi gold, the gold of the Templars? The stuff of dreams for someone with a vivid imagination. Strange how he didn't publish his book until everyone who could corroborate his story about the origins of the gold he was transporting was dead. How very convenient!
Having said this, I did enjoy reading this book and there was some interesting information about the occupation of France. For example, the Valence area was full of refugees from the Spanish Civil War and Alsace, because the Alsace region had been turned over to Germany in 1940 when the French government capitulated.
"In most of rural France, the locals ignored the Germans as they had ignored all forms of authority for generations. A traditonal distrust of authority in general was deeply ingrained in the people of the countryside.... the war was seen as the capital's problem.
This attitude suited the Germans. As the demands on the Russian Front grew greater, so the quality of garrison troops left in France deteriorated. The elderly and often infirm men who manned these garrisons were more interested in maintaining an undemanding status quo than in exacting cringing obedience. There were whole areas of rural France where the Germans never visited, and these parts of the countryside were scarcely touched by the war until 1943." (p.93-94)
Statistics that made me think:
"By May 1944, seventeen procent of young Frenchmen had been deported, many never to return. Many others chose to take to the hills and live rough rather than risk STO [Service de Travail Obligitoire - forced labour]." (p.94)
"A quarter of all the arms dropped into France during the war before D-Day were dropped in May 1944." (p.101)
The Resistance had just massacred many SS when taking over Tulle. The town was immediately recaptured & in retribution a round figure of 99 civilians were hung (until there was no rope left!) & 101 were deported to Germany. (p. 125) The German policy was to take a hard line against terrorists and advocated mass deportation and reprisals at a ratio of three to one for every German wounded and ten to one for every German killed. (p. 187)
And finally, the numbers killed at Oradour( gold or no gold):
642 people: 245 women, 207 children and 190 men
For a thorough discussion of what happened that day, with eye-witness accounts from 2 of only 5 people who, by a miracle, survived, I recommend this website: http://www.39-45war.com/oradour.html
My parents-in-law visited Oradour-sur-Glane in the 1980s and came back telling us of the impression it had made upon them. I suspect my mother-in-law may have given me this book and it has been languishing on my bookshelves ever since. Finally, after a trip to Bordeaux, I've been reading a couple of books set in south-west France and, coming up to Remembrance Day (November 11th), decided to read it at last.
After so many years of being aware of the bare bones of the massacre and destruction of a whole French village by the SS in 1944, that was what I was expecting to find as the focus of this book, especialy as the edition I have is actually Oradour: Massacre and Aftermath. Not that I wanted to read blow-by-blow accounts of the massacre itself, but this book spends inordinate amounts of time discussing anything but the massacre and its aftermath. On the contrary, it spends perhaps two thirds of the book dwelling on the story of how the author, Robin Mackness, was arrested for transporting gold ingots from one side of France to the other, from where they are to be smuggled into Switzerland. While he was serving a jail term of 21 months, he studied the events in Oradour and put together his own theories about why the massacre happened.
Mackness's story hinges upon the fact that the gold had been stolen from a secret SS transport by a young Jewish man who was working for the Resistance, then hidden until he was an old man, only using a fraction of it to set up his business after the war. According to Mackness, the man, now nearing the end of his life, wanted to transport his gold to a safe place in Switzerland and in the process, Mackness was caught and prosecuted. The link between Oradour and the gold? According to the mysterious ex-Resistance man, the massacre at Oradour had been partly in retaliation for an ambush on the transport carrying the gold, partly due to the kidnapping of a German Major.
I have to say I'm sceptical. There is absolutely no documentary evidence for any connection of the gold with Oradour. As an employee of a bank, Mackness refused to reveal any of his contacts, hence his extended prison sentence. It seems to me he wasn't at all averse to some dodgy financial dealing. After studying law at Cambridge, he introduced the continental quilt to the UK as owner of Slumberland and proudly claims in his mini-biography in the front of the book that he went on "to make and lose at least three fortunes", then worked in finance in Switzerland, home of secret bank accounts.
Robin Mackness reminds me of Jeffrey Archer, another businessman-turned-author who spent time in prison. Perhaps that time in prison gave Mackness the chance to think up this conspiracy theory of a book, so reminiscent in style to The Da Vinci Code and the original holy grail conspiracy, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I wonder if Mackness wrote anything else? Why yes, surprise, surprise, he has co-written another historical conspiracy theory type of book with gold at the heart of it, Web of Gold: The Secret History of a Sacred Treasure: "Positing that the treasure of the Jews was brought to France after the Visigoth sack of Rome, the authors explore the Middle Ages and Renaissance profusion of secret societies, and suggest that they were established to protect this hidden wealth, which remains a political power in the 1990s." The only review on Goodreads says "Interesting historical summary of the possible locations of the treasures of Solomon's Temple & the Templars presented in a readable, open ended manner." Jewish gold, Nazi gold, the gold of the Templars? The stuff of dreams for someone with a vivid imagination. Strange how he didn't publish his book until everyone who could corroborate his story about the origins of the gold he was transporting was dead. How very convenient!
Having said this, I did enjoy reading this book and there was some interesting information about the occupation of France. For example, the Valence area was full of refugees from the Spanish Civil War and Alsace, because the Alsace region had been turned over to Germany in 1940 when the French government capitulated.
"In most of rural France, the locals ignored the Germans as they had ignored all forms of authority for generations. A traditonal distrust of authority in general was deeply ingrained in the people of the countryside.... the war was seen as the capital's problem.
This attitude suited the Germans. As the demands on the Russian Front grew greater, so the quality of garrison troops left in France deteriorated. The elderly and often infirm men who manned these garrisons were more interested in maintaining an undemanding status quo than in exacting cringing obedience. There were whole areas of rural France where the Germans never visited, and these parts of the countryside were scarcely touched by the war until 1943." (p.93-94)
Statistics that made me think:
"By May 1944, seventeen procent of young Frenchmen had been deported, many never to return. Many others chose to take to the hills and live rough rather than risk STO [Service de Travail Obligitoire - forced labour]." (p.94)
"A quarter of all the arms dropped into France during the war before D-Day were dropped in May 1944." (p.101)
The Resistance had just massacred many SS when taking over Tulle. The town was immediately recaptured & in retribution a round figure of 99 civilians were hung (until there was no rope left!) & 101 were deported to Germany. (p. 125) The German policy was to take a hard line against terrorists and advocated mass deportation and reprisals at a ratio of three to one for every German wounded and ten to one for every German killed. (p. 187)
And finally, the numbers killed at Oradour( gold or no gold):
642 people: 245 women, 207 children and 190 men
For a thorough discussion of what happened that day, with eye-witness accounts from 2 of only 5 people who, by a miracle, survived, I recommend this website: http://www.39-45war.com/oradour.html
August 8, 2024
This was an interesting story about a confusing period of French history. According to the thesis, Three top German SS soldiers are stealing gold from the French for after the war. Resistance blows up the convoy and discovers the gold. The only resistance survivor hides the gold for himself. Furious SS officers massacre a village so they can search their homes for the missing gold. No other plausible explanation seemingly exists for why the Germans would have uncharacteristically done this to a sleep village. Unfortunately anyone who can corroborate the gold heist isn't talking and we may never know. But survivor families aren't buying it and French government doesn't wanna talk about it. So it remains a theory - one possible explanation for the Massacre at Ouradour.
April 11, 2020
Een apart verhaal. Waar je niet verwacht wat er gebeurd en je ook niet kan geloven dat het echt is gebeurd. Niet alle vragen zijn beantwoord maar je kan begrijpen dat er altijd vragen open blijft.
January 24, 2018
Poorly written, but still an interesting story, possible explanation for the horrible massacre at Oradour sur Glâne. Mackness waited till all those in a place to know were dead before publishing this. Further investigation needed.
December 11, 2019
Complete fantasy, how M.R.D. Foot "endorsed" it I'll never know. Mackness even gets the name of the principal participant wrong calling Adolf Diekmann, Otto Dickmann. Avoid this book if you are seriously interested or researching into the massacre.
December 22, 2022
An easy thriller-ish read which I'm sure brought a lot of renewed attention to this WW2 atrocity in the 1980s. With the basis on an anonymous oral history it is hard to give this theory too much credence despite the veracity, especially with the lure of a Nazi gold story.
April 25, 2021
Interessante kijk op de mogelijke reden achter de slachtpartij in Oradour
March 9, 2023
Intriguing and compelling. Contributive.
February 17, 2014
In 2011, my wife and I visited Oradour-sur-Glane. It has a small but nice museum through which you must travel in order to see the burned out village. While volunteering at our local library, I "discovered" a different book on the story. When I ordered the other book online, ORADOUR: Massacre and Aftermath by ROBIN MACKNESS (ISBN 978-1448208395, trade paperback, $14.99) was also recommended so I ordered it as well. When the two books arrived, I decided to read this first, as it seemed more accessible.
I was not disappointed. It's nonfiction that reads like a spy vs spy novel. Some critics have called it fiction. Why was this seemingly innocent village of Oradour-sur-Glane destroyed 4 days after the invasion of France in June 1944? Apparently this was a village that had been untouched by WWII and virtually unvisited by German troops during the 5 years since the War broke out. This town was no hotbed of Resistance activity. Why kill nearly 650 citizens who had done nothing wrong except to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Mackness tells a tale of two different periods in France, 1944 and 1982-4, that are equally scary for diverse reasons. In both instances, gold was the main instigator. Isn't it always? Names were changed by the author to protect his sources from retribution by French authorities. I believe Mackness' theory as outlandish as it may seem. My advice is to read it and form your own opinion. In any case go visit the museum and village.
GO! BUY! READ!
I was not disappointed. It's nonfiction that reads like a spy vs spy novel. Some critics have called it fiction. Why was this seemingly innocent village of Oradour-sur-Glane destroyed 4 days after the invasion of France in June 1944? Apparently this was a village that had been untouched by WWII and virtually unvisited by German troops during the 5 years since the War broke out. This town was no hotbed of Resistance activity. Why kill nearly 650 citizens who had done nothing wrong except to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Mackness tells a tale of two different periods in France, 1944 and 1982-4, that are equally scary for diverse reasons. In both instances, gold was the main instigator. Isn't it always? Names were changed by the author to protect his sources from retribution by French authorities. I believe Mackness' theory as outlandish as it may seem. My advice is to read it and form your own opinion. In any case go visit the museum and village.
GO! BUY! READ!
August 7, 2014
What motivated the Infamous Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
when ALL German Troops were supposed to be beating it up North
to deal with the Surprise Attack of D-Day ??
Not losing valuable time in some idyllic backwater, into which barely a single German had set foot during the Entire Occupation of France, suddenly murdering 642 civilians mainly children and women, destroying and looting but taking ...nothing !!
Well, easily answered if you look at our Present World
and work your way backwards in most areas
with a Cynical Frame of Mind tossed in for a Reality Check!!
One would think that the last thing on the minds of Members of Adolph's Fan Club when their World looked very close to being annihilated would be their Superannuation Fund.
WRONG...and yet wrong AGAIN !!!!
It's a convoluted tale beginning in the 1980's;
and if banking is not your favourite topic,
you may find that it can have a very Human Face,
and be as sordid as any old melodrama.
A better than Agatha Christie Whodunnit, really!
And Robin Mackness, the book's author,
found himself propelled out of the Usual Role of Innocent Bystander
and taking an unenviable Personal Role in a Situation
that had Deep Roots into Wartime France
and the grisly events at Oradour-sur-Glane.
This is NOT, I repeat, NOT A NOVEL.
That "Truth is stranger than fiction" adage pops into view.
Try IT !
April 8, 2011
This non-fiction exploration of the historic events at Oradour starts out with a conversation about the French people and Swiss bank accounts. I wondered what it had to do with the massacre. Then the author ties it all together for the reader. It is a sad and amazingly frustrating account as to why an entire village including all of the children were murdered in cold blood. Guess what - it's all about money. Why didn't I think of that? Good story and I'm sure that there is even more to it. I'll keep researching this event.
April 5, 2015
This book was painfully boring to read until the last third of the book. I stopped reading it for about a month and finally forced myself to finish.
For a book that is supposed to be about the incident at Oradour, most of the book focuses on the financial business between France and Switzerland.
The author spent nearly 2 years in prison, but he speaks little about that time. I would've been curious to know more.
For a book that is supposed to be about the incident at Oradour, most of the book focuses on the financial business between France and Switzerland.
The author spent nearly 2 years in prison, but he speaks little about that time. I would've been curious to know more.
August 3, 2011
not much of a book, a bit borring...did not need to read this.
July 31, 2011
bog til hurtig læsning
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