Oradour-sur-Glane massacre

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On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France was destroyed when 642 civilians, including non-combatant men, women, and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. The execution was retribution in the form of collective punishment for Resistance activity in the area, including the capture and subsequent execution of Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, the 3rd Battalion commander of 4th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment, and a close friend of the 1st battalion commander of the same regiment, Waffen-SS Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, who an informant incorrectly claimed had been burned alive in front of an audience. Both of them were battalion commanders in the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. The Germans murdered everyone they found in the village at the time, as well as people brought in from the surrounding area. The death toll includes people who were merely passing by in the village at the time of the SS company's...

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