The President of the Republic went to Haute-Vienne in the Village Martyr d’Oradour-sur-Glane in order to revive the memory of the 643 residents massacred on June 10, 1944 by the SS Das Reich division but also to put Guard against political speeches manipulating history.
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“To think about the future, we must not forget about the past.” After focusing on the problems of rurality, Monday, January 24, in the hollow, in order to break his image of “cities president” , Emmanuel Macron continued his trip to Haute-Vienne, Tuesday, placing this second day under the sign of the memorial policy. With the visit of a high place of memory of the Second World War, Oradour-sur-Glane, to pay tribute to the victims of this village Martyr du Limousin, where a unit of the Waffen SS Massacra, June 10, 1944, 643 inhabitants . Either the largest massacre of civilians committed in France by the German armies, during this conflict. “The massacre no longer have us to think of them. As a result, a responsibility is incumbent upon us: make them live in our brief, in our stories, to hold the latter thread which attaches them to us, who attaches them to the world” , highlighted the head of state.
Of the six survivors, only one is still alive: Robert Hebras, today 96 years old, to which Emmanuel Macron has given the commander’s badges of the National Order of Merit, after a GERE deposit in front of the Tomb of martyrs. In front of the monument to the dead, the two men exchange a few words in a low voice. The head of state takes in his arms warmly this man to the frail silhouette, born in 1925 and who was only 19 when he suddenly discovered the horror. The emotion is palpable. A sort of cooling complicity between these two men, who have already met twice before, in April and June 2017.
“Never forget. Never”
Since 1953, Robert Hebras has ceased to testify to remind the memory of the victims of Nazi barbarism. “This responsibility, never have stopped assuming it. This moral duty, you have accomplished it tirelessly”, congratulated Macron, recalling the course of this native of Oradour-sur-Glane , who worked as a mechanic in Limoges, after the war. “In just a few hours, the entire village was destroyed, so many lives were mowed,” recalled the tenant of the Elysee. That day, only four days after the landing in Normandy, the SS Das Reich division brought together men in the barns of this village located about twenty kilometers from Limoges, and had shot them. They then grouped women and children in the church before putting it fire, “transforming this holy place into hell”, according to the words of the head of state. Robert Hebras loses his mother, Marie, and his two sisters, Georgette and Denise. It manages to escape miraculously, succeeding to protect themselves from the balls and the fire, before extirping from the barn where the SS had piled him with other men of the village.
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