The Story of Oradour-sur-Glane
The story of the Massacre, as told by
Robert Mackness
In 1988, Robin Mackness, a businessman
living in Oxfordshire, England, wrote a book called "Massacre
at Oradour" in which he describes a bizarre incident that
took place in 1982: he was asked by a colleague on the board
of directors of a Swiss bank to contact one of the bank's clients
and then deliver a package, which the client would give to him,
to a third party. The package contained about half a million
dollars in gold bullion which the bank's client, a Jew who had
been a member of the French resistance, had stolen from a German
military truck during an ambush near Oradour-sur-Glane on the
night of 9 June 1944. The client was using the code name of Raoul,
but Mackness later learned that he had been born Raphael Denowicz
in 1923 in Leipzig, Germany.
Raoul told Mackness that his father had
owned a jewelry business and that "from 1930 onwards his
father was steadily moving money, with the help of his suppliers
in Antwerp, out of Germany and into Zurich." To escape persecution
in Nazi Germany, the family moved to Alsace, then a part of France,
and changed the family name to Denis. (Ironically, one of the
buildings where the Oradour massacre took place was the Denis
Wine and Spirits storehouse.) Mackness wrote that "His father
also arranged for his money to be moved from German-speaking
Zurich to French-speaking Geneva, such now was his hatred for
anything German." Raoul was now asking Mackness to get involved
in a plan to move gold from France to Switzerland, which was
not unusual for someone with his family history.
Mackness learned that, on 9 June 1944,
Raoul had stolen 30 boxes of gold bars from a German military
vehicle, after all but one of the SS soldiers in the convoy had
been killed in an ambush, along with all the Resistance fighters
except for him. The one SS soldier, who had managed to escape,
reported the ambush to his superior officer. The next day, the
SS found the charred bodies, which Raoul had doused with gasoline
siphoned from the trucks, and set on fire after burying the 30
boxes of gold by the side of the road. The bodies of the Resistance
men were burned beyond recognition and the SS officer in charge,
Otto Dickmann, apparently did not know that there were Frenchmen
among the dead. (Mackness spells the name Dickmann, although
the correct spelling is Diekmann and his first name was Adolf,
according to former SS officer Otto Weidinger.)
According to Mackness, as told to him
by Raoul, the theft of the gold provided the motive for Dickmann
to go to Oradour-sur-Glane, which was only four kilometers from
where the looted truck was found. According to Raoul, Major Dickmann
and his superior officer, Brigadier General Heinz Lammerding,
had been systematically stealing Nazi gold for their private
"pension fund." At the time of the ambush, they were
secretly transporting the gold in a heavily guarded truck which
contained important military records. Raoul had discovered the
gold by chance after the ambush.
Ironically, according to former German
SS soldiers, there was a similar ambush near Oradour-sur-Glane
on 9 June 1944, when an ambulance was set on fire, burning 4
wounded soldiers alive, along with the driver and another man
in the passenger seat, who were both chained to the steering
wheel.
On the day that the SS soldiers destroyed
Oradour-sur-Glane, the Allied invasion of Europe had just taken
place four days earlier on 6 June 1944. The Waffen-SS Das Reich
division was desperate to get to Normandy to join in the battle,
but they were being delayed by acts of sabotage carried out by
the French resistance. Yet, according to Mackness, the first
priority of Lammerding and Dickmann had been to transport their
stolen gold to a safe place. After the gold was stolen, Dickmann
conferred with Lammerding, and then took time out from fighting
the war to search for it, according to Mackness. Not finding
the precious gold, Dickmann had then taken revenge on the innocent
civilians of Oradour-sur-Glane. To make sure that no one would
ever know why he had come to Oradour, Dickmann had subsequently
murdered the two French police officers that had accompanied
him as translators during the interrogation of the townspeople,
according to Mackness. However, according to some of the survivors,
many of the SS soldiers spoke excellent French since one third
of the company consisted of soldiers from the French province
of Alsace.
Unfortunately, Mackness was arrested
by customs officials before he could deliver the gold for Raoul.
He was told that he had been betrayed by one of the participants,
who had "denounced" him to customs. Mackness refused
to divulge the names of the other people involved and subsequently
served 22 months in a French prison. While he was in prison,
Mackness researched the subject of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
and became convinced that Raoul's story about the gold was the
only reasonable explanation for the complete mystery of why the
SS had picked the innocent village of Oradour-sur-Glane to destroy.
According to Mackness, there are 9 unanswered
questions about the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane which have
finally been explained by the story of the stolen gold.
1. It has never been explained why Dickmann
took the road that he did, which brought him to the site of the
remains of the ambushed SS convoy. Dickmann's route from Saint-Junien
on 10 June 1944 was in the opposite direction of Oradour. He
took this route in order to find the ambush site because this
was the route that had been taken by the convoy carrying the
hidden gold.
2. There is no good explanation for why
Dickmann, a battalion commander, was at Oradour-sur-Glane. Captain
Otto Kahn could have handled a reprisal without a higher ranking
officer being present. Raoul's story of the stolen gold gave
Dickmann a motive for going to Oradour. The only other explanation
that has ever been offered was that Dickmann was concerned about
the kidnapping of his good friend, Sturmbannführer Helmut
Kämpfe, and was personally looking for him.
3. It is known that Dickmann was talking
constantly on the radio in his car from the time that he left
Saint-Junien on the 10th of June. Mackness thinks that Dickmann
was radioing back and forth to find out whether or not Kämpfe
had been found yet, but more importantly, he was trying to find
out what had happened to the truck with the gold stashed among
the military records.
4. The fourth mystery is why the SS soldiers
herded all the inhabitants, who lived within three kilometers
to the south of the town, into Oradour, but not the people who
lived north, west or east of the town. It is also a mystery why
the SS didn't just shoot the villagers where they stood, instead
of taking the trouble to transport them into Oradour to kill
them. The site of the ambush was south of Oradour, so all the
inhabitants in that vicinity were suspects in the theft of the
gold. According to Mackness, the SS loaded some of the villagers
onto trucks and then marched the rest of them on foot to Oradour-sur-Glane.
The villagers looked back to see their homes and all their possessions
going up in flames.
5. Why the SS picked Oradour-sur-Glane
to destroy in reprisal for the ambush of the SS convoy, or the
kidnapping of Kämpfe, is the fifth mystery. Although nearby
Saint-Junien was a hotbed of Resistance activity, the inhabitants
of Oradour were totally neutral.
6. The sixth mystery is why the SS didn't
just machine-gun the assembled townspeople in the village square,
instead of locking the women and children in the church and the
men in several buildings. According to Mackness, the assembled
townspeople were told by Dickmann that weapons and other prohibited
merchandise had been reported in the village. The women were
told that they were being taken to the church, where it would
be safer for them, while a search was conducted for the weapons.
After the women had been marched away, the men were told that
they would be held inside the buildings while the search was
conducted. Dickmann's search for the gold provided a motive for
locking up the townspeople.
7. No one has been able to explain why
the men were deliberately shot in the legs. This was so consistently
done that it appeared that the soldiers had been ordered to shoot
low. Mackness wrote that it made no sense to wound innocent civilians,
only to burn them alive moments later. Mackness thinks that Dickmann
intended to interrogate the wounded men in an attempt to find
the gold, but his soldiers had set fire to one of the barns before
they were ordered to do so.
8. The biggest mystery of the Oradour-sur-Glane
massacre is why the SS had boarded a tram which arrived in the
middle of the destruction of the town and had ordered all the
passengers who lived in Oradour to get off, while ordering the
others to return to Limoges on the tram. If Oradour had been
selected at random for reprisal, as many people think, then it
made no sense to segregate the passengers who lived in Oradour
and order them off the tram. Mackness thinks that Dickmann intended
to interrogate these inhabitants about the location of the stolen
gold. However, these 22 townspeople, who had just returned from
Limoges, were allowed to escape by the Alsatian SS soldiers who
had been ordered to guard them. These same Alsatian SS soldiers
had earlier set fire to the Laudy barn before being ordered to
do so, according to Mackness, and they were not being allowed
any further participation in the reprisal action at the barns.
Mackness mentions "two teenage sisters,
and their young brother, all Jewish, who had finally been driven
from their hiding place in a basement by the heat of the flames."
Mackness wrote that the trio were allowed to escape by an Alsatian
SS soldier who "told them to get out of Oradour as fast
as they could." According to Mackness, this same Alsatian
soldier had given a stolen bicycle to a young girl who was on
the tram that arrived during the destruction of the village,
so that she could make a faster getaway.
9. The last mystery concerns two cars
which were seen racing through Oradour-sur-Veyrac, a few miles
down the Limoges road from Oradour-sur-Glane, later that day.
The only car in the SS convoy that left Saint-Junien that morning
was Dickmann's car. So where did the other car come from? Mackness
thinks it might have been the doctor's car, which was then returned
to Oradour-sur-Glane, where it still stands today.
Mackness's story contains yet another
mystery: If Dickmann and Lammerding had been stealing Nazi gold,
they would have wanted to keep this a secret at all cost. The
penalty for an SS man who stole anything, but especially something
that technically belonged to the Reich, was summary execution.
Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, had made that very clear
in several speeches. But how did Dickmann and Lammerding hope
to keep their secret with so many SS soldiers involved in the
search? If the soldiers had found the gold in their house-to-house
search, and if they had turned it in to their superior officer,
how would Dickmann have then managed to keep the gold for himself
and his accomplice, Brigadier General Lammerding? If Dickmann
and Lammerding had tried to cash in gold bars bearing the stamp
of the German Reich, how would they have managed to escape arrest
for grand theft?
Since the stolen gold was not found by
the SS in Oradour-sur-Glane that day, Mackness did not address
this last mystery. He claims that Raoul told him that he had
returned to the site of the ambush at a later time. He had dug
up the 30 boxes of gold, but had only spent a small amount to
start a business. He had managed to keep the rest of the gold
hidden somewhere until 1982 when he finally decided to move it
out of France into Switzerland. To move the gold, which he had
kept hidden for 38 years, Raoul had first confided in the director
of his bank and had then involved a man who was a complete stranger
to him in this risky project which was a violation of the laws
of both France and Switzerland.
Mackness waited until everyone who could
corroborate his story was dead and then wrote his book.
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