Four days after the Normandy landings, a company of the SS Division Das Reich, moving north through the Limousin, entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane on a Saturday afternoon and ordered everyone to the fairground for an identity check. The men were divided into groups and shut in barns; the women and children, 452 of them, were locked in the church. The men were shot in the legs and the barns set alight. The church was set alight with an incendiary device, and those who tried the windows were shot. Six hundred and forty-two people died. One woman survived the church by climbing through a window behind the altar.

The village had no connection to the reprisal it was apparently meant to be. After the war Charles de Gaulle ordered that it never be rebuilt: the burnt walls, the tram lines, the rusted cars and the sewing machines were left where they stood, and a new Oradour was built alongside. The ruin is now a national memorial that anyone can walk through. The trial in 1953 convicted twenty-one men, fourteen of them French conscripts from Alsace, and the amnesty that followed reopened a wound in France that took decades to close.

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