Survivor Of World War II Nazi Massacre Dies, While Neo-Nazis Threaten American Jews
With threats of new anti-Semitic violence in the air, the last survivor of the worst but one of the lesser known atrocities committed by the Nazis in France during World War II, has died.
The N.Y. Times reported on Feb. 25 the death of Robert Hebras, 97, the last survivor of a massacre in 1944 when members of an SS Panzer division killed almost everyone in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Mr. Hebras died on Feb. 11 in a hospital in Saint-Junien, not far from Oradour.
Whether a callous and cruel coincidence or not, authorities in New York and Chicago and watchdog groups warned that Feb. 25, the day Mr. Hebras’s death was reported, was a day that neo-Nazi extremist groups claimed to be targeting Jewish people in a “National Day of Hate.” There were no “credible threats,” but police and watchdog groups were “actively monitoring” the situation, authorities said. Several white supremacist groups have coordinated the “Day of Hate” on the messaging app Telegram, researchers said.
Mr. Hébras was 19, when on June 10, 1944, soldiers from the Second SS Panzer Division, known as Das Reich, rolled into Oradour, in west central France, and slaughtered the entire village, including 643 men, non-combatant women and children, as collective punishment for resistance activity in the area.
An officer in the Waffen SS who orchestrated the massacre said it was in retaliation to the kidnapping and killing of a fellow SS officer named Helmut Kämpfe by the French Resistance or the Maquis, in nearby Tulle. Tulle was the scene of another Nazi massacre just two days earlier. The Maquis were rural guerrilla bands of French and Belgian Resistance fighters. They had an estimated 25,000 to 40,000 members in autumn of 1943 and around 100,000 members in June 1944.
The Germans killed everyone they found in the village at the time, including six non-residents who happened to be bicycling through the village when the SS unit arrived. Men were brought into barns and sheds where they were shot in the legs and doused with gasoline before the barns were set on fire. Women and children were herded into a church that was set on fire; those who tried to escape through the windows were machine gunned. Mr. Hébras survived under the bodies of victims.
Mr. Hébras, like others in the barn where he had been confined, dropped to the floor where he was hit by gunfire, suffering serious wounds. He escaped through burning buildings and into the countryside, narrowly avoiding hostile soldiers. He was one of only a handful of survivors. His mother and two of his sisters were killed.
Mr. Hébras was born on June 29, 1925, in Oradour. His father, Jean, a veteran of World War I, led a team in charge of upkeep of the local tramway and made extra money delivering telegrams. His mother, Marie, took in sewing. After the war, Mr. Hébras opened a car dealership in a newly built village near the ruins. In 1953 he testified at the trial of 21 men accused of participating in the killing. All but one were convicted but few stayed in jail very long.
He testified again 30 years later when Heinz Barth, a former Waffen-SS officer who had been among the commanders at the massacre, was convicted of war crimes. Barth was sentenced to life in prison but was released in 1997 because of ill health; he lived another 10 years.
Barth was the only SS officer involved in the Oradour massacre. During his 1983 trial, Barth testified that he personally shot roughly 12 to 15 times into the crowd that had been ordered to a courtyard. He confirmed that the massacre of 642 civilians, including more than 200 children, had no military objective.
The Waffen-SS was the combat branch of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel (SS) organization, which was a major paramilitary organization under the Nazi Party and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II. The Waffen-SS included Germans along with volunteers and conscripts from both occupied and unoccupied lands.
Barth was found guilty by an East German court in 1983 but in 1991, he was awarded a “war victim” pension by the reunified German government. He he was released in 1997 and died in 2007. The controversial war victim pensions led to changes in German law regarding war or disability pensions for World War II war criminals.
The 1983 East German court also found that Barth participated, as a member of security police battalion, in execution of 92 Czech civilians during martial law in summer of 1942 in Klatovy and Pardubice. He was also one of those who, in June 1942, shot 32 citizens of Ležáky.
Barth claimed he was only following orders, and said he would have been court-martialed had he not obeyed. Barth had been living under a false name in communist East Germany, working as a decorator and running a grocery store, when his identity emerged in 1981 and he was imprisoned.
He was released in 1997 reportedly in consideration of his age and health and for having “expressed remorse.” When released, Barth said he felt guilty, but that he had “paid long enough.”
Heinz Lammerding was commander of the SS Panzer Division Das Reich that committed the Tulle and the Oradour-sur-Glane massacres. In 1953, Lammerding was convicted of ordering two massacres in 1944, at Tulle and at Oradour-sur-Glane. He was sentenced to death in absentia but was never extradited from West Germany and was never sentenced by a German court. West Germany claimed that Lammerding had already served a prison sentence for war crimes and was not subject to extradition. Lammerding died in 1971 from cancer. At his funeral were more than 200 former SS personnel.
A military tribunal heard charges on Jan. 12,1952, against 65 of the 200 or SS men who had been involved. Only 21 were present, as many were in West Germany and East Germany, which would not extradite them. Seven were German citizens, but 14 were Alsatians, French nationals whose home region had been occupied by Germany in 1940 and later integrated into the German Reich. All but one of the Alsatians claimed to have been forced to join the Waffen-SS.
The N.Y. Times reported on from Paris on Feb. 13, 1953, after the sentences were announced, that “the church bells of France’s Germanic province of Alsace rang out tonight in protest against the conviction by a military tribunal in Bordeaux of thirteen Alsatians for participation in the destruction of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane and the massacre of 642 of its inhabitants on June 10, 1944.”
“The reaction in Alsace was quick and violent to the news of the ‘insulting’ verdict. Deputies, Senators,mayors and city councilors and newspaper editors argued that no Alsation could be made responsible for the actions of any German military unit in which he was forced to serve,” the Times reported.
A total of 20 defendants were found guilty but uproar in Alsace pressed the French parliament to grant amnesty for all the convicted Alasations. By 1958, all of the German defendants had also been released.
To stifle public outrage and to keep the Vichy government from going over to the Allies, the German Army Commander-in-Chief in the West ordered a criminal investigation of the massacre. The German Army High Command claimed that the men of the village died during the fight, the fight had been initiated from the village and that the women and children had taken refuge inside the church and died after an explosion from an nearby insurgent ammunition supply dump that ignited the inside of the church.
The Oradour-sur-Glane was one of a number of massacres perpetrated by the Nazis in reprisals for activities of the French resistance.
The Tulle massacre was completed the day before the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane by the same 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. On June 9, 1944, the Nazis arrested all men between the ages of 16 and 60, and ordered 120 of the prisoners to be hanged, of whom 99 were actually hanged. In the days that followed, 149 men were sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where 101 died. In total, the actions claimed the lives of 213 civilian residents of Tulle.
The Maillé Massacre on Aug. 25, 1944, claimed refers 124 of the 500 residents, including 48 children. In less than four hours, entire families were slaughtered by the Waffen SS, whose soldiers were only 16 and 17 years old.
Gustave Schlüter, commander of the German control post at Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine, mobilized his men and two train-mounted artillery pieces to begin the onslaught. Schlüter was condemned in absentia in Bordeaux in 1953, yet he died peacefully at his home in Germany in 1965.